December 7, 2003

The homeless, the godless, the gays, the Bushwhacked, the junkie and the teachers make up the fabric around which Harvard glitters like a solitaire

PERSONALLY, I know of at least one “traveller” who, unable to tread the two roads, chose the one “less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.” Today, he is a name in corporate America.

Giving up all his earthly possessions 30 years ago to come to Harvard business school for an MBA, he never went back to Pakistan. Like the American poet Robert Frost, long he stood and “looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth...then took the other...because it was grassy and wanted wear.”

What’s his well-honed secret? “Simple” says he, “remember to stay focused.”

So does Harvard teach you that? “Definitely — during my three decades with various companies, I have been benchmarked twice,” he says, while referring to the strict performance gauge applied each time he was chosen to lead a multi-billion dollar industry. Evaluated, compared, weighed, measured, appraised against the toughest standards that capitalist America lays down for its chief executive officers, he even passed the litmus test many times over — hiring the best and the brightest, not just in America but the world over for his A-team.

But then, everyone who goes to Harvard doesn’t end up a CEO! There would be more chiefs than Indians, if that were to happen.

Hey what about the CEO of America — George W. Bush? He too got an MBA from Harvard Business School, even though his grades were not up to the mark. But papa Bush gave him the push.

Whatever, Harvard is flushed with brilliance. Awashed in crimson ‘H’ in Times Roman, you cannot escape the letter as you orbit the university. Ink-green ivy clinging to the weathered slate casements built 352 years ago magically open the Jewel in the Ivy League crown.

Leaves of autumn fill the air with their weightless gravity and colours simply indescribable. The dazzling sun lights up the vast space in the town called Cambridge in New England.

“Excellent academic record,” says Alberto Alesina, “is the passport to Harvard.” With his professor’s briefcase and lost in thought, I stop the distinguished looking man in a dark suit as he walks across Harvard Yard rustling with leaves of breathtaking beauty. As the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy, here am I talking to the Chairman, Department of Economics.

Courting him assiduously, I jump-start my first question: Apart from an excellent academic record, what’s with the lucky eleven per cent who today get accepted by Ivy League schools in America, so cut throat is the competition.

And the good professor repeats himself: “Excellent academic record!”

Does a degree from Harvard still work the same magic on potential employers, peers, friends as before, I ask.

“Yes and no. Harvard is still Harvard but many other universities are great, too!”

In what way is the Harvard faculty exceptionally brilliant? How is it benchmarked? Who does it?

“We try to hire the best. We search from breath and depth.”

Your former students — what are they doing today? Have most made it to the top, or earmarked for greatness after an Economics degree from Harvard?

“They are almost all academic, some at IMF.”

Did you go to Harvard?

“Yes.”

How did it change your life? What special skills did you possess that led you to the very top of your department here?

“I got my Ph.D at Harvard. I had a good academic record.”

Alberto Alesina’s pithy answers thus begin with “good academic record and end on that note”, as if he couldn’t stress the single most important ingredient enough!

Another teacher, “brilliant and devoted” I would have met perchance straddling across this space, but cancer cut him in the prime of his academic career. At the white, centuries-old chapel, a few steps away, there is not a single dry eye as mourners line past his widow and two young sons. “He was my beloved History teacher, he approved my doctorate thesis recently,” a woman tells me when I ask why is the silence so deathlike. For whom the bells toll?

More epitaphs follows when I meet Peter Coveney, Senior Editor, Oxford University, who has driven all the way from New York to attend “my dear friend’s funeral.” He is happy to describe to a stranger, amidst the dance of death by swirling leaves, the qualities that made his late friend so outstanding in the academic field: “A dogged diligence.”

Life and death at Harvard one experiences in the blink of an eye — move further and the strains of a guitar float by as a band plays its number at Harvard Square and people stand and cheer.

A man carrying a placard with anti-Jewish and Christian slogans shouts slurs against religion. “I don’t believe in God,” says Bob Hartwell, “everybody is a liar — it’s time we forsake religion to lead peaceful lives once again.” His words seem to fall on deaf ears — I notice nobody is particularly interested in Bob’s balk.

What about Muslims? I ask.

Bob the atheist is not too keen on them either, but really couldn’t care less what happens to them. The decibels in his pitch get shriller, still most ignore him.

“Support stop Fascism,” hollers another. Shermin Austin comes to the Square every weekend to display his anti-Bush posters. “Most Harvard students agree with me on the crimes of the Bush regime...I lobbied against the John Poindexter Awareness Office, and contributed to the termination of the Total Information Awareness Programme, in return I have endured constant harassment and death threats.”

Bored with solo shows, I look around for a change of scene. The sight that greets me is not exactly my cup of tea: a gay couple — two Harvard males — locked in a French kiss.

With the latest landmark ruling by Massachusetts’s highest court, these two have the right to marry! America may soon see the thorny issue of same-sex marriage become law, ironically spearheaded by the same state founded by the Bible-clutching Puritans who emigrated in the 16th century from England along with their Christian beliefs.

“After God had carried us safe to New England, provided necessities for our livelihood, rear convenient places for God’s worship and settled the civil government, one of the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, upon death to leave our illiterate ministry to the churches where our present ministers shall lie in the dust” is writ in stone at the main entrance into the college.

At the train station, a woman with broken teeth and swollen ankles is selling a paper called Spare Change. It’s all about the homeless in Cambridge and she sure is a homeless, even if she denies being one. Helen McKenzie is a Brit, waiting for her “boyfriend” to come across, “And then all will be well,” she says while pocketing the dollar I pay for the paper. “Can you pay another dollar,” she begs.

Once inside the subway, I overhear two girls talking: “She was fun until she started taking drugs — she’s half her size now and very sick.” The ‘she’ in question must be their classmate, a junkie.

The best advice Harvard’s class of 2003 got was from Will Ferrell, the comic who mimics George W. Bush with hilarious accuracy. Impersonating Bush, he warned the graduates that the economic downturn would have an impact on their futures.

“The chances of finding a decent job are about as good as finding weapons of mass destruction in the Iraqi desert,” he said. “Slim and none.”

Ferrell broke down when he recalled that he “never got a call back” from Harvard’s admissions office.

“Damn you, Harvard!” he exclaimed in mock rage.

He owes all his wisdom to his “alma mater — the School of Hard Knocks” (school colours: black and blue), and he shares it with the graduates, giving them a taste of the humility they will face after Harvard.

The homeless, the godless, the gays, the Bushwhacked, the junkie, the two teachers — one living and the other dead, make up the fabric around which Harvard glitters like a solitaire, mollycoddled by millions in endowments — $10 billion, the largest ever!

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