Harvard Rules (34 page)

In his ongoing chess match with Larry Summers, Skip Gates appeared to have checkmated his opponent. Yet, as was generally the case with Gates, he had guided the situation so that both sides could claim victory. If you played along with Gates, everyone won.

But though the game appeared to be resolved, it was, in fact, far from over.

A
t about three o'clock in the afternoon of December 6, 2002, a junior in Winthrop House named Marian Smith sat down at her computer to e-mail a friend. A striking young woman, the child of a Dutch father and Somali mother, Smith had curly dark hair, cocoa-colored skin, and laughing, sparkling eyes. She was a well-liked and successful student. Concentrating in anthropology, Smith spoke six languages, but she was also known for her edgy sense of style, dressing in haute couture or in cast-off clothing she found at the Salvation Army. From outward appearances, the nineteen-year-old Smith had everything going for her.

But something was wrong. In the e-mail that she wrote to her friend, another student, Smith confessed that she intended to kill herself. She wasn't bluffing. Soon after hitting the
SEND
button, she apparently consumed a lethal combination of alcohol and drugs. Less than an hour later, her friend read the e-mail. Quickly contacting the Harvard police, she rushed to Smith's room, but it was too late. The officers, who arrived just before four o'clock, could not save Smith.

Suicide is not an unknown phenomenon on the Harvard campus. Though the university is loath to disclose numbers, Harvard loses a student to suicide a little more than once a year. Because of scarce data on college suicides, it's very hard to make comparisons, but the suicide rate at Harvard appears to be higher than that of most universities. A 2001
Boston Globe
survey found that, of twelve universities studied, MIT had by far the highest suicide rate, with eleven student suicides since 1990, or about 10.2 per 100,000 students. Harvard came in second, with fifteen suicides since 1990, for a rate of 7.4 suicides per 100,000. (Harvard's enrollment is considerably larger than MIT's, which is why its percentage was lower even though its number of suicides was higher.) By contrast, the University of Michigan, with a student body of nearly forty thousand a year, had a rate of just 2.5 per 100,000. And of course some students at Harvard try to kill themselves but don't succeed (sometimes because they don't want to). Between January 2000 and January 2004, the Harvard police responded to fourteen attempted suicides.

Mental health problems are a challenge for any university, but just how big a challenge is very hard to assess. First, today's greater awareness of mental health issues can make them seem more abundant than in past decades. Whether a college culture can contribute to depression is also difficult to pin down; the average age at which depression first strikes its sufferers is the late teens, which also happens to be the age at which most people go to college. And because of better early diagnosis and treatment, more young people with mental illness are attending college than in previous eras. While colleges benefit from their talents, they also become partly responsible for treating their illnesses. And the terrorist attacks of 9/11 contributed to student depression and anxiety; the world had suddenly become a more stressful place.

Part of the difficulty of determining the scope of Harvard's suicide problem is that the issue is rarely discussed there. Student suicides are, of course, lamented, and the university devotes considerable resources to mental health care. But suicides are also generally accepted as a tragic but inevitable reality. That's because Harvard has long had a sink-or-swim culture. If you are capable enough to get in, the theory goes, you don't need a lot of helping hands once you're there. It's a university stocked with overachievers used to toiling, often in solitude, for their own advancement. The university's advising systems have long been a focus of student complaint; most authority figures at Harvard are either too busy, too important, too self-important, or some combination of all three to spend much time talking to students about their course of study or personal problems. Indeed, from one perspective, the existence of other people lagging behind is merely an indicator of one's own success, proof that, in the race of life at the world's top university, you are pulling ahead. Some students are bound to fall by the wayside.

For their part, people who are struggling don't feel encouraged to ask for help. Intentionally or not, Harvard fosters an environment of rugged individualism in which students feel pressure to cover up perceived or actual weaknesses. It's no coincidence that for years one of the suggested readings for entering freshmen was Ralph Waldo Emerson's prescriptive essay “Self-Reliance.”

Only rarely does a death on campus force members of the community to look inward and question themselves. In 1995, a young Ethiopian woman named Sinedu Tadesse murdered her Dunster House roommate, a Vietnamese immigrant named Trang Phuong Ho, by stabbing her forty-five times. As a visiting friend ran screaming for help, Tadesse hanged herself in the bathroom with a noose that she had made beforehand. The incident was so horrific—and, because of both women's immigrant backgrounds, so symbolically charged—that it prompted national headlines. While shocked students tried to figure out what could have gone so wrong, the Harvard administration's response was to try to squelch public discussion of the murder-suicide. University officials refused to disclose basic information, discouraged students and family members from talking to the press, and stonewalled even the most legitimate reporters. It was impossible to judge if they were concerned more with protecting the students or the university.

The 1995 murder-suicide was so bizarre it was almost easy to consider the episode a horrible fluke. The death of Marian Smith, however, seemed to crystallize student concerns about mental health. Because, although Harvard has some things in common with other universities when it comes to dealing with mental health, the university also faces distinctive problems that stem directly from its competitive, achievement-oriented culture—pressures that some thought Larry Summers' vision of the university would only exacerbate. Marian Smith's suicide raised issues of increasing concern to many students and some faculty members as Summers' grip on Harvard began to tighten.

In March 2003, a survey by Harvard's University Health Services found that “nearly half of the Harvard College student body felt depressed during the last academic year and almost ten percent of the undergraduates reported that they had considered suicide,” according to the
Crimson.
That prompted the paper to undertake a four-part series on Harvard's “mental health crisis.” Its conclusion? The high demand for mental health care, along with its high cost, had led to a dangerously inadequate “assembly-line approach” to student mental health. As a consequence, “some students' conditions…spiral out of control as they fall through the cracks in the system.” Explained 2003 class marshal Krishnan Subrahmanian, “There are a lot of unhappy people here. You become so involved with what you're doing that you never stop and take care of yourself. Harvard students rarely sit back. In a world where everyone is running that fast, who's going to stop and say, ‘How are you doing?'”

In fact, the trouble begins before students even start at Harvard College. Just the pressure to get in puts them under enormous strain. Today's students don't win acceptance to Harvard merely because their fathers are alumni or they did reasonably well at boarding school; with some 20,000 applicants for roughly 1,600 spots, the competition is so great that aspirants must begin their preparations at earlier and earlier ages. If Harvard wanted to, it could probably fill its classes with only high school valedictorians with perfect scores of 1600 on their SATs. Harvard accepts about two thousand people annually (and the percentage of accepted students who choose to go to Harvard, the “yield rate,” is the country's highest); in the 2001–2002 school year, the university received applications from 3,100 high school valedictorians.

Grades alone are not enough. Applicants to Harvard must also be world-class musicians, science prodigies, and star athletes who travel around the world when they're not volunteering at their local hospital, running their student government, or starting their own corporations. “I have the distinct feeling that they've been preparing for their applications since they were nine years old,” said one Harvard alumna who interviews prospective applicants for the college. “It's a little sick.”

It can certainly make them sick after they get to campus. For many entering students, Harvard is a holy grail toward which they've been striving for most of their self-conscious lives. But when they arrive in Cambridge, several things can shake their faith, not just in the university, but in themselves. They may find that although they were far and away the best student in their high school in Indiana or Missouri or Texas, they are now surrounded by classmates who seem (and often are) far more intelligent and more prepared. “A lot of people have the feeling that ‘Everyone at Harvard is smarter than I am,'” said Rohit Chopra, a 2004 graduate who was the Undergraduate Council president during his junior and senior years. “There's a culture of, ‘I need to be the best at something or I'm a loser.' But it's very hard to be the best at something here.”

FAS dean Bill Kirby tried to address that concern in a speech to incoming freshmen in September of 2003. “Some of you may worry that you're here by mistake; that you cannot do the work; or that you were admitted despite what you wrote on your admissions essay,” he said. “I know that this is an unfounded anxiety. I know it because Harvard has the best admissions staff in the business. We simply do not make mistakes. You will prove that to us in four years' time.”

The competitive nature of life at Harvard alternately energizes and exhausts its students. Undergraduates feel pitted against each other for grades, honors, fellowships, prizes, scholarships, leadership positions in student organizations, and so on. Just as the university as a whole feels a constant, self-imposed pressure to be number one, the best at everything, so do its students. Many feel that they're losing even when they're not. A small but revealing example: A 2003 study by the University Health Service showed that 49 percent of Harvard students had had vaginal sex. Sixty-one percent, however, thought that the average student had slept with two or more people during the past twelve months. In fact, the actual number of students who fit that description was just 23 percent. In other words, the typical Harvard student doesn't have sex very often or with very many people—but is pretty convinced that everyone else does.

“The feeling that everyone else here is doing great is profound,” said Dr. Richard Kadison, Harvard's chief of mental health services. “In surveys, students always say that they think other people are happier, healthier, and getting more sex than they are.” This is probably one reason why seniors throw an annual spring bash called, for obvious reasons, the Last Chance Dance. The 2004 dance took place in a Boston nightclub rented out for the occasion, and on the upper level, couples were tucked way in various nooks and crannies, making out and having sex. Not many people were dancing—instead, everyone was trying to play catch-up.

Harvard students lament that their university lacks a sense of community, by which they mean a supportive and collegial—in both meanings of the word—environment. They appreciate the excellence distilled by Harvard's competitive culture, but they wish that there were another, less divisive way to attain it. A startling number of Harvard students will tell you that they don't like their school. They appreciate it. They respect it. They are thankful for the opportunities it provides them. But they don't
like
Harvard. The atmosphere is just too cold, too isolating. (And so is the climate. Gray and bitterly cold, Boston winters routinely last more than half the school year, adding to the mental health problems on campus.)

Because Harvard students are so impressive, the university has a hard time suggesting that they should sublimate themselves to some communal interest, sacrifice individual accomplishment for the good of a larger group. It would, after all, contradict the sorts of activities that gained them acceptance to Harvard in the first place. “Everyone realizes what you have to do to get into Harvard,” Krishnan Subrahmanian said. “Compassion is not part of that.” Nor is it something you'll find in abundance after you get in. “Being social and humane is completely optional at Harvard,” said 2003 graduate Catherine Bass in a Class Day address to an audience of thousands. “Many of us have gotten through Harvard…alone, desperate, and bitter.” Bass' speech was supposed to be humorous, so the parents on hand laughed nervously. The students, however, laughed knowingly.

For many students who have long carried within them idealized visions of the red-brick university perched on the banks of the Charles, that gap between their expectations and Harvard's reality creates a conundrum. If you've worked and sacrificed to get into Harvard since you were barely old enough to understand what Harvard is, what do you do when you realize that you don't like it?

Some students adapt by changing expectations or finding alternative satisfactions. It's common to hear students say that though they're not fond of the university, they cherish the friendships they've made and value their extracurricular pursuits. Others turn pragmatic, deciding that the point of Harvard is not to enjoy your time there, but simply to acquire skills and make connections for use after graduation. Still others conclude that the reason for their unhappiness couldn't possibly rest with the institution. It must be because, in some mysterious way,
they
have failed,
they
are inadequate. It's these students who may be tempted to emulate Marian Smith.

Student complaints about community often revolve around campus social life. Freshmen, who cannot legally drink alcohol, are on their own. Since they don't become affiliated with the houses until the end of their first year, they have few social connections to upperclassmen. Though students have pushed for one for years, if not decades, there is no student center or pub at which students from all classes and houses can gather. College-wide parties are rare, and some of the ones that do exist betray a longing for a more typical, more
fun
college experience. The recently inaugurated “Harvard State” party, at which participants are invited to “party like you go to a state school,” is sometimes criticized for its snobbish implications. But in truth, Harvard State isn't really a reflection of arrogance, but of envy, longing and maybe even a little insecurity. Sometimes, Harvard students just want to have fun the way they imagine students at other colleges do.