My HPR Education

Several weeks ago, a columnist for The Harvard Crimson announced that he’s sick of hearing other students blather on about their political opinions. “It requires a truly astonishing degree of presumptuousness,” Dhruv Singhal wrote, “for someone to believe that their particular insights on the appropriate balance between the cause of social justice and the prudence of free market economics ought to be, let alone is, of interest to anyone other than themselves.” Reading this diatribe, I had mixed feelings. There is undoubtedly value in intellectual humility; that’s true at any age but especially at this one. Why should anyone care what we think, when most of us haven’t had jobs, or credit card bills, or children?
The Harvard Political Review presumes that students’ conclusions are at least somewhat interesting and relevant to other people—mainly other students. But I don’t think that the main purpose of this magazine is to provide political analysis to a waiting world. The HPR’s purpose is not primarily to educate our readers, though that would be a happy byproduct of publishing a magazine, but to educate ourselves. My four years with the HPR have been a continuing education, and not just in politics.
The first lesson I learned was that it can never hurt to ask. The HPR’s bread-and-butter articles—the news analyses that appear in the Covers, U.S., and World sections—require interviewing people much more knowledgeable and important than we are. In my first couple articles for the magazine, I resisted this requirement; I recall that one of my articles relied on only one interview. I thought as Singhal does: Why should anyone listen to my questions and contribute to my little article?
I got over those doubts—partly by failing to correct people who assumed I was a Kennedy School student, and partly by growing more confident that I actually had questions worth answering. Singhal would have us wait until some magical moment at which we become People Worth Talking To. But the process of becoming such a person is gradual.
Another lesson I learned from the HPR is that, if students are audacious enough to publish their work, they had better be prepared to defend it. Several times, we have had interviewees contact us and complain that we misrepresented their views. Sometimes we were totally in the wrong; sometimes not. It’s important to understand these experiences as educational, in addition to embarrassing. In Singhal’s view, student political expression is inherently arrogant and unproductive, but I think that these interactions were both humbling and helpful.
A final lesson arises from the fact that, believe it or not, sometimes people will actually like what students have written. In the Internet age, you can’t just put ideas out there without considering what will happen if they’re taken seriously. We learned this lesson last fall, when we published our report on the federal budget. We vaguely hoped that this project would get some mainstream attention, but it was still a shock to learn that we’d been invited to appear on Fox News. Rather than worrying about whether we deserve to be listened to, the more relevant issue for the student writer is how to react when we are, in fact, listened to. While I understand the impulse to wonder whether a mere college student has anything worthwhile to say about politics, the right response to that concern is to find something worthwhile to say, not to refrain from saying anything.
For most of us, our interest in politics began at a very young age; our first political expressions were no more profound than “My parents are Democrats/Republicans, so I am, too.” Since then, we’ve seen the Bush-Gore recount, September 11th, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 election, and health care reform. We have learned some things along the way, as all politically engaged citizens have. But it’s been a process—there were no sudden revelations that transformed us from political neophytes to first-class wonks. If students don’t talk to each other about politics, that learning process will be stunted, and apathy and ignorance can take hold. Surely a little presumption is a fair price to pay to avoid that fate.
Sam Barr ‘11 is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus.