Walking around Cambridge, it is impossible to say where Harvard University begins and ends. The town is full of the redbrick, white framed Georgian buildings that so distinguish Harvard architecture. These dignified walls and buildings line the edges of Harvard square, a tourist hub and central pulse of transportation. They extend outward, down the forked web of avenues to the 9 graduate schools connected to the University- schools of medicine, dentistry, divinity, law, business, design, education, public health, and government. It is unmistakably a center of learning, with a graduate student population double the size of its undergraduate students. I do not mean to rhapsodize the university for its grandeur and prestige, or even to place it at the center of the Cantabrigian universe. In fact, I have not yet developed any particular intimacy, or personal bias for the institution, apart from the fact that I am just entering its divinity program. I am but a stranger in a foreign land.
And yet, here my imagination soars. The trail of brick and elegant door pediments draws me deeper and deeper into the notion that this is, indeed, a little kingdom, which I like to call Harvardom.
In Harvardom, all of the citizens are carrying backpacks or book bags. They are in the business of studying, researching, or just becoming smarter. Most of them are not from here, but have traveled oceans and lands to accent the air with their curious sounding voices. It is a very international scene, this Harvardom. I once ran into a Belgian, British, and Israeli student along a 10-minute stroll to class.
But among this unpredictable diversity, one thing is for certain. Everyone walks with purpose. Whether they are pursuing degrees in sustainable landscape design for mega structures, or combining Chinese acupuncture with Western medicine, or completing their foundational study in Jewish theology before entering rabbinical seminary, all eyes glint with ambition and focus. All are determined to braid their eclectic set of interests into a driven, nothing can hold me down, resolve. Which is not to say that they are robotic or impersonal. It’s just that along these quaint, winding streets, they have found some raison d’être, and those who will push them to become everything they have ever wanted to be. And I wonder how these narrow roads and wrought-iron gateways could ever contain them? Is it not too quaint, too sweet and small to hold such personalities?
I am sure that’s exactly what Mother England thought of her little Puritan colonies. And yet. This little kingdom, of brick and cobble, has birthed an epicenter of learning to which the world now flocks. Oh Harvardom…
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