Rooting for Harvard against Trump

I’m from rural central Maine, and I graduated from Harvard in 2021. I felt deeply out of place for much of my time at Harvard, both socially and politically. In other words: I have seen what is rotten in higher education. I’ll tell you about it. And I’ll tell you why I still firmly believe that there should be no top-down control of university policy by the federal government.

I spent my childhood running around a barnyard. My grandparents are dairy farmers, so home smells like silage and manure. There was the dead cow pile, out behind the last barn, where the turkey vultures circled. There was the manure pit, scary and forbidden. I’d seen a cow’s body dragged out of it once, my parents’ way of warning me of what would happen if I went too close to its edge. There was the calving barn, where I watched calves slide, slick and black, from their mothers into a tangle on the floor.

I went to a public consolidated school — eight small towns’ worth of kids. One of my middle school classmates had a persistent round wound on her arm. It was the size and shape of a cigarette butt. Another was always hungry. I brought him an extra peanut butter sandwich every day for years. A third was caught fingering a girl under the table in the sixth grade. By the eighth grade, he had dropped out of school and was dealing drugs. In high school, classmates flew Confederate flags off the back of their pickup trucks, right next to their gun racks.

My high school had a little bit of everything else, too, save racial diversity. There was the occasional liberal, there were a few high achievers, and there were some rich kids, relatively speaking.

I worked really hard and I got really lucky. “You have a good head on your shoulders,” read the note my grandparents wrote me when I told them I’d gotten into Harvard. “Keep thinking for yourself.”

I’m sure I rolled my eyes. I was a typical 17-year-old. Self-righteous, arrogant, chafing at the edges of her small town. It was 2016. I was ready to get out of central Maine and go somewhere I’d fit in.

But by the end of my first day at Harvard, instead of basking in the glow of my accomplishment and building new friendships with brilliant peers and frolicking through the historic campus like I’d imagined, I was holed up in a decidedly unglamorous public bathroom, crying. Everybody else seemed to know one another and where things were, what to do, how to dress, how to act.

The rest of my freshman year didn’t go much better. Everybody else had done amazing stuff — interned for senators, started a nonprofit, published scientific research — while I had just been “well rounded.” Everybody else had friends, while I had none. There was a particular clique of private school kids in my freshman writing class that I followed like a TV show. They were so cool. So shiny. They became a “blocking group.” Translation: They roomed together after freshman year, codifying their cliques. The boys were “punching” final clubs. Translation: They were rushing Harvard’s version of fraternities. The girls were going to final club parties. I wanted so badly to be a part of what they had.

After move-out at the end of my first year, I cleaned dorms, a disgusting but high-paying week-long gig. Students leave a lot of stuff behind: TVs, jackets, unopened boxes of condoms (hope springs eternal!). I stood there in my rubber gloves and grubby sweatpants, vacuum backpack digging into my shoulders, and marveled at all the private school flags pinned up over beds. Choate. Groton. Phillips Exeter.

Then I worked the reunions. There was a day care for the kids of alumni, who wore tiny tie-dyed Harvard T-shirts.

There was a pipeline to Harvard, I thought, and I had not been in it. Bitterly, I pulled myself further out. That summer, I returned to Maine and became a whitewater rafting guide. I got the tannest I’d ever been. I let my accent thicken. I started saying “f—in’” about every third word.

I believed I didn’t fit in at Harvard because I wasn’t rich and/or a legacy and/or a private school grad. My issue, I thought, was social. But over time, I began to realize it was also political. I started telling this joke: “I thought I was far left until I got to Harvard. And then I realized — Mom, Dad? I think I’m a Republican.”

When I was a junior, COVID brought my alienation into stark relief. In Cambridge, I was screamed at for pulling down my mask while out for a run along the Charles. At home in Maine, mask-wearing was a sign of weakness — as turn signals appear to be to Massachusetts drivers. Lockdowns in rural America felt bizarre and unnecessary, and they ran counter to Maine’s libertarian-leaning ethos.

It was the first time my politics had come into direct conflict with the politics of my peers. I took refuge in journalism, writing a sympathetic piece about rural COVID vaccine hesitancy. I suggested that pushing a COVID vaccine early would increase anti-vax sentiment, thus harming public health over the long term.

But as time passed, I realized my social and political alienation were one and the same. Here’s a moment that clarified this for me: In recalling the day after Trump won his first term as president, a friend said, “We had a half day at school, and in the morning, everybody just sat together and cried.” I looked at him, baffled. Most of my high school classmates’ parents had voted for Trump, so the air at my high school following his win was neutral to celebratory. But other people took the day off? Like, in mourning? I remember telling my parents the story and laughing so hard I was nearly in tears. “Is that not,” I said to them, “the most private school, San Francisco thing you’ve ever heard?”

I understood why folks had voted for Donald Trump. I was frustrated by COVID lockdowns. I was able to summon arguments against gun control. Why was I so outnumbered at Harvard?

My perspective did not make sense to my classmates, because most of them had no concept of where or how I had grown up. Just 10 percent of Harvard freshmen in my class came from rural areas. One in 11 Harvard students comes from the same 21 high schools. When a person attends a private school where 10 of their classmates will also attend Harvard, their college experience is a continuation of their high school experience. Their ability to navigate is incomparably better than that of someone like me, who had never set foot in elite social spaces. And they will have a very different set of political beliefs. They will often prioritize the current coastal elite liberal issues — such as DEI, at the risk of using a term so buzzy it has lost all meaning.

I could stop here, say that rural America is outnumbered and outgunned at Harvard. That I was outnumbered and outgunned. This “us against them” narrative, the one I read between the lines of that note my grandparents wrote to me, is tempting — and it’s the one the Trump administration is selling. But it’s neither true nor useful.

For one thing, Harvard is no longer a homogenous hive mind of young, monied white men. It is, genuinely, diverse. My roommate was from Iran. My best friend was a Black man from rural Pennsylvania. As a white rural (read: redneck) middle-class American woman, I was more of an outsider than some, less of an outsider than others.

For another, it’s not clear who Harvard’s political insiders are. Sure, voices on the far left tend to be louder. But they’ve also been punished. There are plenty of socialists on campus, but as Professor Steven Pinker mentioned in a recent New York Times piece, half of graduates go on to work in finance, consulting, or technology.

In other words, when the Trump administration demands “viewpoint diversity” and decries the “woke” culture at Harvard, it either misunderstands the reality at the school or is intentionally flattening the narrative in a bid to achieve its own goals.

The latter seems likely. Which brings me to the most important point, and the reason I am so proud my alma mater has held its ground against the Trump administration: Even if Harvard were simply a bastion of far-leftism, which it is not, were the Trump administration to enforce “viewpoint diversity” at Harvard, it would simply be replacing one political monoculture with another. The administration does not hope to foster real debate and intellectual exchange. It intends to establish the dominance of Trump-style Republican values at Harvard and other elite institutions. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And — worse — the new boss is operating under a broader plan to strangle other centers of power in America so that it can operate unchecked. Policing thought and discourse, at universities and elsewhere, is a clear step toward authoritarianism.

Yes, some things are “rotten” within elite university culture. But there is enormous potential, too. A bunch of bright, driven, different kids can — and do! — have thoughtful, productive discourse. As frustrated as I was by my time at Harvard, it broadened my perspective, helped me understand myself and the world, and made me a more empathetic person.

But making that productive discourse more common is a problem for Harvard and its student body to tackle. I hear they’re pretty smart. I think they can do it.