Brains, butts, and boats

People wonder why so many smart people come out of Harvard. It’s not rocket science, says Edward de Bono, it’s because so many smart people go in! Duh. I have a thing for old and famous universities, one I’d perhaps never admit to in public. I’m strangely cowed by alpha-intellect and have been known to sit quietly over lunch with PhD’d acquaintances, too uncertain to open my mouth and contribute anything to the conversation, all the while wishing silently that they might start to talk about something normal, like the state of democracy in Hungary or Coronation Street. I don’t know why this is. I’m far from stupid and yet when I hear the words ‘he went to Yale’ or ‘she went to Harvard’, I seem to lose the power of speech or anything that approaches intelligent conversation.

I’d been to Harvard before – many years ago  – when I was in Cambridge for some meeting or other and I was duly impressed. I went again a few weeks ago and decided that I could spend an entire day, all 24 hours of it, in the Harvard bookstore. I was in heaven. I had forgotten that the campus is accessed by a number of gates, each one bearing the load of someone else’s wisdom. We found the gate that said: ENTER NOW TO GROW IN WISDOM.  We did and I, for one, am none the wiser – perhaps you have to enter repeatedly, unlike Johnston Gate which is closed most of the year. And for good reason – the Crimsons are a superstitious lot apparently because they believe that students should only pass through it twice – when they first arrive as Freshmen and when they graduate. Any other time and it’s bad luck. If it were down to being superstitious, I’d definitely be accepted.

And then there are the lectures and the talks, each designed to make you think. Had I the money to do it all without the weighty responsibility of student loans, I might consider it, presupposing of course that they’d have me anyway. But something has been lost in the years since I was first there. The romantic notions I have of shaping the world over a few beers in a smokey student bar, when idealism  hasn’t yet turn to cynicism and hope is still winning its eternal fight with reality, are gone. Today, Harvard is a tobacco-free zone. Now, I’m not for a minute saying that all intelligent people smoke cigarettes or whacky baccy – but there is a certain O’Toolish charm about the gangly, corduroyed, loafered collegiate that I find particularly endearing (and yes, I know I’m nouning (?) that adjective; I mentioned that I wasn’t stupid, didn’t I 🙂 ).

When the great fathers decided that they could no longer leave the country’s future in the hands of the churches and founded the University back in the 1600s, I wonder if they could have envisaged the PRIMAL SCREAM that would be a mainstay of student life in the twenty-first century.

At the end of every semester, as the clock strikes midnight on the first day of finals, Harvard students strip down to their birthday suits and run laps around Harvard Yard, screaming as loud as they can to relieve that pre-exam tension.

The mind boggles. But hey, whatever floats your boat.

And speaking of boats, our weekend in Boston coincided with the 50th anniversary of the Head of the Charles Regatta. The world’s largest annual two-day regatta, it attracts about 11 000 competitors and 400 000 spectators. It was impressive to see the seniors in action – amazingly fit people who were within an oar’s ripple of inspiring me to do more exercise. I’ve always quite fancied rowing and once tried it in the gym. Mind you, the only way I could keep the rhythm was to incant the Hare Krishna chant and then pull in time. I wonder how that would look on my application form…