Harvard is a host of contradictions. Before the pandemic, students strode freely down historic corridors of brick and marble — buildings that have survived since the American Revolution — often cupping a steaming Blue Bottle latte in their hands. Even today, constricted to Zoom, a lecture by a world-renowned scholar may still convince a young Harvardian that they are touching veritas itself.
At the same time, however, a small yet mighty inquiry may worm its way into the Harvard student’s mind: Does this education foster genuine, forward-thinking change? Often, undergraduates may struggle with the realization that their academic lives reflect echo-chambers of intellectual thought, only serving to lengthen oppression’s enduring shadow.
For many students, these questions have magnified this past year. During an era of pandemic and intensified inequality, historic elections and racism, American institutions of higher education have both politicized and de-politicized themselves in diverse and dynamic ways. As recipients of the world’s most privileged education, Harvard undergraduates have been forced to reconcile with the promise and cynicism of their personal and political legacies.
Below, five undergraduates reflect on how they understand their education to be political — and the various methods they have used to strengthen their political agency in a system of both promise and privilege.
Menat Bahnasy ’22: Politics Looks Different for Everyone
The personal is already the political, according to Menat Bahnasy ’22. Bahnasy is the incoming president of the Institute of Politics, and she recognizes that an action as simple as merely existing can be a political act.
“Politics are personal for everyone in some capacity,” Bahnasy said. “Your own identity, your own existence, can be political to people, can be political in different states, scenarios, really anything at all. For a lot of folks, every part of you is political in some way.” More so than classes and specific involvements, she argues, being political is achieved through one’s “identity and who you are.”
This includes your political opinions. “Whether you’re in a partisan group or not, I think that there are a lot of ways that you can make something political,” Bahnasy said, “in the sense that it is your argument or opinion about something.” According to Bahnasy, there are two disparate understandings of what is political. The former, more conventional interpretation is government-oriented, usually having to do with domestic and international relations. Its less understood counterpart, she argues, includes anything that an individual feels strongly about — especially opinions that others may dissent against.
Action matters, too. Bahnasy suggested making the most of curricular opportunities to amplify personal opinion, in order to make that stance known to others. And beyond the classroom, she added that extracurricular involvement could easily ignite political involvement, no matter the title the group holds.
“There’s a spectrum,” Bahnasy said. “Where you want to land on it can be decided by you. Sometimes though, it’s just who you are, and you don’t have that choice. I think it comes down to these two definitions of what ‘political’ means. For some people, it’s a little bit more inherent to who they are.”
Otto Barenberg ’22: Choose Your Concentration Wisely
When asked what makes a Harvard education political, Otto Barenberg ’22 first stressed the importance of naming the privileges — and institutional agenda — of a Harvard experience. “A Harvard education is premised on privilege and elitism,” he said. “It’s an education based on the idea that you can take a select few talented minds from across the country and the world, and craft them into the next elite.” Recognizing that the college maintained an “upper crust” to a sort of “intellectual aristocracy,” he reasoned, was critical when attempting to understand what it meant to pursue a political education at an institution like Harvard.
This understanding was one reason why Barenberg declared Social Studies as his concentration. Social Studies — a Harvard-unique concentration founded in 1960 that synthesizes multiple disciplines including history, political science, economics, sociology and anthropology —is a top contender for students interested in a political education. “In Social Studies,” Barenberg said, “you find a lot of individuals who are politically minded, and who — at the same time — want to reject all of its mainstream assumptions about what it means to be engaged politically.” The concentration, he argued, demands more than simply crafting policies and creating systems of power that benefit a select few.
Authentic political change, to Barenberg, is about “fundamentally transforming systems of power,” an area of study he feels his concentration has provided exceptional tools to understand. “It’s a concentration in which you really come to understand the roots of social power, and the historical contingencies that have led up to this moment. You realize the arbitrariness at the core of a lot of our social systems. And that’s a valuable thing, the notion that we made this. We made this economic system that advantages a select few … that disadvantages individuals because of a variety of characteristics they have no control over. And because we created this system, we have the capacity to unmake it, too.”
What Barenberg appreciates so much about Social Studies is the fact that it exemplified a political education that concerns itself with action. “Knowledge should be action-guiding,” he said. “It should point towards some kind of purposeful social project. We shouldn’t merely just be observers; we should be active in our politics.”
Despite these high ideals, Barenberg recognizes the everyday difficulties of staying true to one’s political education, especially in Harvard’s climate. “The task of reformulating, changing our social structures to make them more equitable seems so daunting that at times, it’s understandable that peers in college decide to pursue what may seem to be the safer, easier or more well-trodden paths of going into established industries that pay well,” he said.
Such student choices may stem from a personal need to support one’s family, or, for others, from less sincere motivations. Regardless though, in terms of Harvard’s general culture, Barenberg still believes that “not enough attention is paid to the social ramifications of going to those careers and the effects of the systems to which you contribute.”
Zeynep Bromberg ’24: Define Your Own Success
Zeynep Bromberg ’24 checks the news every day, always staying informed about current events. Yet, she strays away from discussions surrounding politics. “Whenever I found myself in political spaces — particularly in high school — I would feel very uncomfortable.”
The origin of this discomfort did not stem from a lack of confidence in personal values, but rather the attitudes of her peers when initiating — and in some cases, commanding — these discussions. “I’ve always been surrounded by people who love to play devil’s advocate, or love to show how smart they are when it comes to those sorts of things. Especially as a girl in political spaces, I think I got turned off from it when I was young, which is probably not for the best.”
Bromberg has found other pathways to political involvement besides heated debates, particularly through classes. Her senior year of high school, Bromberg took an unforgettable elective about New York City history with an emphasis on urban planning, social growth and progress. “It was just a really, really great class,” she praised. The curriculum explained how urban planning could be a double-edged sword: while it had the capacity to create beautiful spaces, wielded by an oppressive hand, it could easily become an archetype for generational inequality.
“I was like, this is it, “ Bromberg said. “Urban planning is what I am going to do. This is going to change lives.”
Meanwhile, the pandemic was not only a reality check that allowed Bromberg to situate her academic passions in a social progress-oriented perspective, but also a critical period for introspection, a quiet and intentional few months where the then-high school senior took a moment to ask herself the big questions.
“I spent a lot of time thinking about what it is that I like about myself, how I want to interact with the world, what it means for me to be ambitious and what my school is,” she said. Bromberg also admitted it was a welcome time to reflect on how her previous relationship to school had been “super unhealthy.”
When she arrived at Harvard, Bromberg was considerably changed. Despite giving her all to her courses and extracurriculars, her demeanor is one of ease. Amidst the mad dash for winter internships and spring semester scheduling, the first-year seems at peace with herself and her future.
“A lot of people here have an image of themselves,” she said. “They interpret success in a certain sort of way. My thought process has been to think of success as happiness. I don’t really know what’s gonna make me happy. It could just be getting married and having kids. … Or, that won’t be satisfying for me and I’ll become President. I don’t know! You know, it’ll work itself out.”
Bromberg’s challenge to conventional norms of success — and her courage to provide herself the time, space, and trust to navigate Harvard with an open mind — are political practices unto themselves. Ritualizing self-care and celebrating self-worth are habits that many undergraduates — especially in a social and intellectual ecosystem such as Harvard — may find worlds more difficult than a rigorous lecture on comparative government or a foreign policy extracurricular.
Anicia Miller ’24: STEM Can Be Political, Too
When Anicia Miller ’24 began her Harvard experience, she was struck by the degree of political activism among her peers. Whether it was the student email lists that bombarded her with petitions to sign or online events featuring political figures offered by the day, Miller experienced Harvard’s culture to be rooted in political activism, one that was more prominent than its collegiate counterparts.
“For me, that’s been really eye-opening,” Miller said. Coming from a STEM-focused background, the freshman admitted it took some time to adjust. Ultimately, her first year has allowed her to embrace political involvement on a deeper, more personal level. “It was so out there, you couldn’t miss it. Why not just participate in it?”
Miller also mentioned the historic nature of 2020, a year that has been shaped by pandemic, protests, and a transition of presidential power. “I think that also has something to do with it,” she continued, “because we have seen a shift in our entire society towards being more politically engaged.”
Some areas of study are more obviously political than others, and for Miller — an aspiring biomedical engineer — this was the first time she began drawing parallels between her passion for STEM and its relation to politics. In particular, she noted concentration’s strong relation to health policy.
Outside her academic study, Miller has also navigated Harvard’s academic and extracurricular offerings with a “overarching goal of helping others.” This includes her pursuit of interests such as ethics, philosophy and sign language on top of her standard science classes. She once engaged herself with a robotics team that focused on developing a device to help reinforce muscle movement for stroke patients. And when volunteering, she chose to find a club that taught young girls the rudiments of engineering.
“[I can] further see how to use my STEM interests — and my political awareness — to bring about change within this community,” Miller added. “That’s something I’ve always been passionate about, but I didn’t really know how to go about it. Now, being a Harvard student, I’m seeing those connections and how I can put those two things together.”
Selket Jewett ’21 : Don’t Only Identify Your Passion, Stay True To It
For as long as she could remember, Selket Jewett ’21 always knew that she wanted to be a teacher. The preference of what subject she would teach seemed to change by the years. If during third grade she had a phenomenal reading teacher, for instance, she was inspired to help students with reading — only to realize the next year that her fourth grade math teacher was the real model to emulate.
In the years leading up to her arrival at Harvard, however, Jewett has not strayed from her conviction that she wants to teach history.
“I’ve pretty much always known that I wanted to be a teacher, but when I was a junior in high school I read a book called Lies My Teacher Told Me which talks about all the ways that popular U.S. history textbooks whitewash and mythologize U.S. history,” Jewett wrote in a statement to the HPR. “After that my friends and I looked a lot closer and found that our textbook was like that. It only had 114 words about the Trail of Tears. From then on I wanted to teach history.”
Hailing from a tiny town — not even a town, she says, according to some — and having grown up on a farm, Jewett said that she had “absolutely no conception of what Harvard was” when she first began her undergraduate journey. “I definitely did not come into college thinking that my education was going to be political or anything like that at all,” she said in an interview.
At first, Jewett took the liberty of testing out certain subjects, leaving her options open. But deep in her heart, this only affirmed that she did not want to let go of her passion for history, and guiding others towards knowledge. “I took different classes to see if there’s other things I wanted to do,” she said. “It turned out … I was learning stuff that made me more excited to do [history].” Rather than expand, Jewett’s course exploration allowed her to further commit to her focus. Today, Jewett has decided to pursue a History concentration.
Jewett now considers the very act of teaching — including teaching history — to be a richly political endeavor. Educating young people regarding national structures of power, diverse systems of human connection and currency, are valuable insights that young people ought to know as they navigate a world that is both rapidly innovating and leaving architectures of inequity unchanged. That sort of perspective, Jewett says, is not an education that was provided to her in high-school. The opportunity to be taught information that is both disruptive and transformative is a remarkable, almost sacred, process. “You’re going to learn stuff, and it’s going to change the way you view the world,” she said. “That has political implications.”
Unlike some students, Jewett’s central challenge has not been to discover what makes her passionate, but rather staying true to her original passion. When individuals hear of her teaching aspirations — whether it is her peers, mentors, or community members at home — they frequently ask her, “Can’t you learn to be a teacher anywhere? Couldn’t you be making way more money doing something else?”
“It’s a kind of powerful pull,” she acknowledged of the pressure to go into professions such as consulting and big tech. Especially with many of her friends committing to these industries long before they toss the cap, Jewett frequently wrestles with questions relating to income, and whether she should be choosing a different career path that rewards her with more immediate, material earnings. Despite the corporate siren song that has enticed many a Harvardian, Jewett has not wavered, and is hopeful that she will continue to remain faithful to her own path.
Perhaps what is most powerful about how Jewett approaches her Harvard experience is that she refuses to let Harvard change who she has always wanted to be. The academic institution is fond of rhetoric that celebrates the “transformative,” but Jewett demands that her true passions do not bend to the winds of elite academia. Rather, she recognizes them as a critical launching point for a returning to what she always believed was valuable, fulfilling, and rewarding. At least for Jewett, her intellectual passion is evidence that one can use a Harvard education as more of a homecoming — a returning to the political influences that have always shaped one’s life — than a leaving of home.
Photo Credit: Menat Bahnasy, Otto Barenberg, Zeynep Bromberg, Anicia Miller, Selket Jewett
Collage Design: Winona Guo
