<p>When my Ds considered Harvard, I had some trepidation because I thought it could be intimidating. I’d heard about the supposed lack of “undergrad focus” and envisioned a place with a stifling sense of elitism. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. The campus, faculty, and staff have been exceptionally welcoming and accommodating. Our whole family has found the culture of the College to be very undergrad-focused, diverse in every imaginable way, and whatever the adjectives are that would be the opposite of haughty and stuffy. The girls have had many one-on-one sessions with profs - even some of the stars - including home cookouts. Their residential college experiences have been outstanding. D1’s live-in Faculty House Master in her residential college made the Time 100 list last year as one of the world’s 100 most influential people. D1 adored him and used to house-sit his dog. She graduated last spring, but she and he are still active Facebook friends. </p>
<p>The fact that all the students are amazing at something tends to inject a certain dose of humility into nearly everyone. Our Ds have friends from very humble as well as wealthy backgrounds, from just about every region of the nation and the world. We go up to the campus and take them and their friends out to dinner; I feel really fortunate to have the experience of being in a setting like that surrounded by such interesting, funny, witty, charming, dazzling young people. Growing up in a small town, our Ds yearned to meet friends like the ones they now have, and didn’t know if they’d ever have this kind of opportunity. It’s exceeded their wildest dreams. </p>
<p>The three campus life distinctives at Harvard, IMO, are the diversity, the level and intensity of extracurricular involvement, and the almost unbelievable degree to which the College will facilitate student-initiated projects. You’ll find that half the gospel choir is not African-American - there are white students, Hispanic students, students in turbans, yarmulkes, etc. They all clap and sway while they sing spirituals, the Jewish kids and the Asian kids and the Arab kids all embracing the gospel choir culture as their own. As a Southerner from a culture in which black and white Georgians tend to live parallel but non-intersecting lives, it made me cry the first time I saw it. The Harvard break-dance troupe is majority Asian. The South Asian student annual production includes students from all races and nationalities. Everyone is involved on campus and all seem to support one another’s activities and performances. Music and theatre are not only well-attended, but often reach a professional touring-production quality. And there is no limit in proposing a program of audacious reach. Our older D went to China a few years ago to teach in a program for outstanding Chinese HS students. Students from all across the country applied and those selected came to Shanghai for a two-week, live-in symposium, all taught by Harvard undergrads. When I asked D1 which department sponsored the program, she looked at me with disdain and said no department was in charge of it - the students were. The College had only evaluated the students’ proposal and provided the funding for everything but instructor airfare!</p>
<p>My wife and I graduated from Wake Forest - a good school that I love, which had only 2,900 undergrads when we attended in the '70s. The undergraduate focus at Harvard is way, way beyond anything that was available to us at Wake.</p>
<p>Here’s my analysis on what’s sometimes perceived and reported as negativity from Harvard students (gleaned from asking H students). I think it’s three-fold; in order of least to most substantial sources:</p>
<p>1) H students tend to be analytical and critique things. It’s one of the ways that they got to H.</p>
<p>2) H students are less likely to view their campus through rose-colored glasses. Most of the rest of us chose our college because we fell in love with some aspect of it - the campus was pretty, the sports teams were top-ranked, the student tour guide was hot, etc. Some H students fell in love with the school; many others made less emotional decisions to choose H because they didn’t want to go through life having wondered what it would have been like to have gone to H. They’re typically willing to offer candid assessments - good and bad - that aren’t based on infatuation.</p>
<p>3) (I believe this is the big one.) H is the only school in America that has no aspirational peer institution that it’s trying to catch. Georgia Tech and Emory students will tell you that their school is tops, or else they fear they’ll fall behind the other in your opinion. I have a college guide in which students describe their school in exactly five words - the Yale student description is “So much better than Harvard.” When you want to catch the school that’s just ahead of you, you grumble in private and praise publicly. H students, perhaps uniquely in American higher ed, are comfortable telling it like it is, good and bad about their university, secure in the knowledge that after whatever praise or criticism they share, H will still be the standard-bearer among universities.</p>