Harvard as Grief Counselor
Posted on April 19th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 12 Comments »
Since when has it become the role of the university to make its students feel better when something bad happens?
The Crimson reports that some students are frustrated with the University for not publicly expressing its sympathy for the Virginia Tech victims and their families.
The Universityâs decision not to issue a letter immediately following the events left some students critical of the approach. Harvard officials yesterday posted a statement of sympathy online and announced a service to remember the victims at 10 p.m. tonight in Memorial Church.
…UC Representative Jon T. Staff V â10 criticized the administrationâs approach.
âHarvard certainly hasnât done enough to respond to the tragedies that have happened in Virginia over the past week,â he said. âIt is the responsibility of the administration to send some sort of message to the Harvard community and the Virginia Tech community about what happened.â
Um….why? Other than the fact that Harvard and Virginia Tech are both universities, Harvard has no connection to what happened. Why does the Harvard “community” need a statement that “Harvard” is sad? Of course people are sad. But Harvard is not Oprah; its job is not to hold its students’ hands and make them feel better. Nor, frankly, would the Virginia Tech community give a damn if Harvard sends them “some sort of message.”
This episode suggests two things. First is how completely modern students have embraced the concept of in loco parentis, in which the university is supposed to play the role of parent to today’s youth.
This infantilizing relationship between university and student, so challenged by students of the 1960s and 1970s, has come back in full force. It is only challenged when students lament alcohol restrictions during The Game. Now they want the University to give them a hanky. You can’t have it both ways.
The second lesson of this episode is that it is a display in the narcissism of the young. What is so singular about this tragedy that the university must publicly nurse its charges through their grief? The fact that the gunman killed (primarily) students. Yet yesterday 171 Iraquis were killed in a car bomb explosion in Baghdad. Do any Harvard undergrads care? Where, as Bob Dole once said, is the outrage?
12 Responses
4/19/2007 8:39 am
“What is so singular about this tragedy that the university must publicly nurse its charges through their grief”
Because, unlike Baghdad, they see it could happen to them. I’m not sure they should be criticized for this. Sitting in a classroom taking intro French or German, or advanced engineering, when a gunman bursts in and shoots everybody-having shot two people in a dorm-is an instantly, viscerally, & traumatic epiphany for any college student, or teacher. Massacres in Baghdad, or even McDonald’s, wouldn’t have quite the same impact. College is meant to be a unique, special time of one’s life: our culture has raised us this way (it’s not nearly so true of other countries). Did you read Rick Levin’s brief statement from Yale? That seems a small, modest but significant show of support Harvard could equally have done.
4/19/2007 8:49 am
So they care because this could happen to them, whereas they don’t give a damn about Baghdad because it’s far away. But that’s okay?
4/19/2007 8:58 am
No, it’s not OK. But being human, they will naturally-viscerally-respond to one event more than the other.
And getting back to the University responding institutionally-it’s easier to see what they can do for Virginia Tech, than for Iraq or Iraqis.
4/19/2007 9:24 am
If the University acts because the students care more about something here at home than abroad, then isn’t it, in fact, endorsing that self-involvement? Is that the appropriate conduct of a global university?
You know, if Harvard had a blogâan ombudsman-like thingâthere might actually be a place where these issues could be discussed.
Or perhaps if Drew Faust had a blog…
4/19/2007 9:31 am
I’m mostly with you, Richard, but I also think eadw has made a stronger case.
I reconcile those two opinions through my belief that the school should IN GENERAL have a much lower bar for communicating with its students collectively. The convenience of e-mail means the cost of writing a letter to the entire student body is incredibly low — it only costs whatever Dick Gross’s time to do so is worth. He seems to tend to think it’s worth more than the community-enhancing value of expressing leadership, solidarity, and a sense of shared enterprise in a consistent fashion.
If Gross wrote a letter to the student body once a week, he could have a paragraph about people’s feelings in response to VA Tech within it, and satisfy both eadw and you. He could also be clear about the fact that the issue is feeling, and that that matters to a community even when it’s not particularly rational — if he can write clearly enough to draw a distinction like that there’s no danger either of infantilizing or of neglecting students, who are, after all, at a complex stage in their development as human beings.
How about it, Dick Gross? Got twenty minutes a week to share your voice with the student body in your charge?
Standing Eagle+
4/19/2007 9:38 am
Standing Eagle,
That seems a reasonable suggestion, actually.
Richard
Or, of course, he could have a blog on which he posts such announcements, and that way, students could actually respond (without DG’s e-mail inbox being overwhelmed). It’s called…education!
4/19/2007 10:31 am
Yeah, I’m sure Dick Gross’s blog would be every student’s log-on homepage overnight.
Sarcastically,
SE
4/19/2007 10:48 am
SE, I know you’re just being cynical, but I disagree. If Gross’ homepage contained information relevant to student life, I think they would participate.
4/19/2007 10:56 am
I’m not ‘just’ being cynical, though I am perhaps doing that too. I’m expressing a fact. It’s extremely hard to get Harvard students to pay attention on any given day to anything that doesn’t involve them INDIVIDUALLY, and their work. Community issues, even for small communities, are addressed only in open e-mail lists, but more likely nowhere; and even communal e-mail missives involving relatively small student groups to which a student belongs are filtered or deleted unopened with astonishing frequency.
The question for educators becomes: how much of this student apathy toward university community is EFFECT, rather than cause, of ineffective community-building work by academic leaders? And another way of asking that is: Could the school do better at TEACHING good citizenship, on both small and large scales? (I’m assuming that it SHOULD strive to do that well, as part of its mission, although marginally reasonable people could disagree about that.) Answering that question is as important for the intrinsic quality of the school and the life on campus as it is for the nation whose leaders are being graduated every year.
That in turn brings us back to the Patashnick piece, and to Harry Lewis’s book.
Pedagogy doesn’t only happen in the classroom.
Standing Eagle
4/19/2007 4:10 pm
Here’s a dilemma: the Va. tech administration has announced it will award the murdered students posthumous degrees. Many of them, I recall, were freshmen or sophomores-not just seniors a month or so away from graduating. If one were to be hard-hearted about it, one’d have to say these degrees probably shouldn’t be conferred; they weren’t “earned.” But in truth how can you resist or object if that proposal is put before you?
4/19/2007 4:24 pm
I think in the overall scheme of things, that’s not a big deal. This is a time for generosity of spirit….
4/20/2007 5:32 pm
Harvard had a memorial service late last night, so it’s not as if it has done nothing.