Valuing Applicants’ Creative Sensibilities
Helen Vendler, a former member of the Faculty Standing Committee
on Admissions, wrote this essay for us. She reminds us to be alert to
those candidates whose creative sensibilities would be valuable assets
to a Harvard class and to the cultural life of our communities for
decades to come. We hope you will find this piece as enlightening
as our Committee does.
Valuing the Creative and Reflective
Anyone who has seen application folders knows the talents of our
potential undergraduates, as well as the difficulties overcome by many of them.
And anyone who teaches our undergraduates, as I have done for almost
thirty years, knows the delight of encountering them. Each of us has
responded warmly to many sorts of undergraduates: I’ve encountered
the top Eagle Scout in the country, a violinist who is now part of a young
professional quartet, a student who backpacked solo through Tierra del
Fuego, and other memorable writers, pre-meds, theater devotees,
Lampoon contributors on their way to Hollywood, and more.
They have come from both private and public schools and from foreign countries.
We hear from all sides about “leadership,” “service,” “scientific passion,”
and various other desirable qualities that bring about change in the world.
Fields receiving the most media attention (economics, biology,
psychology, occasionally history) occupy the public mind more than fields—
perhaps more influential in the long run—in the humanities: poetry,
philosophy, foreign languages, drama. Auden famously said—after seeing
the Spanish Civil War—
that “poetry makes nothing happen.” And it doesn’t, when the “something”
desired is the end of hostilities, a government coup, an airlift, or an election
victory. But those “somethings” are narrowly conceived. The cultural
resonance of Greek epic and tragic roles—Achilles, Oedipus, Antigone—
and the crises of consciousness they embody—have been felt long after
the culture that gave them birth has disappeared. Gandhi’s thought
has penetrated far beyond his own country, beyond his own century.
Music makes nothing happen, either, in the world of reportable events
(which is the media world); but the permanence of Beethoven in
revolutionary consciousness has not been shaken. We would know
less of New England without Emily Dickinson’s “seeing New Englandly,”
as she put it. Books
are still considering Lincoln’s speeches—the Gettysburg Address,
the Second Inaugural—long after the events that prompted them vanished
into the past. Nobody would remember the siege of Troy if Homer had not
sung it, or Guernica if Picasso had not painted it. The Harlem Renaissance
would not have occurred as it did without the stimulus of Alain Locke,
Harvard’s first Rhodes Scholar. Modern philosophy of mind would not exist
as it does without the rigors of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations,
nor would our idea of women’s rights without Woolf’s claim for a room of
her own.
We are eager to harbor the next Homer, the next Kant, or the next Dickinson.
There is no reason why we shouldn’t expect such a student to spend his
or her university years with us. Emerson did; Wallace Stevens did;
Robert Frost did; Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery and Fairfield Porter
and Adrienne Rich did; and had universities harbored women in residence
when Dickinson came of age, she might have been glad to be here. She and
Woolf could be the writers they were because their fathers had extensive
private libraries; women without such resources were deprived of the chance
to be all they could be. It is important to recall that the makers of culture
last longer in public memory than members of Parliament, representatives
and senators; they modify the mind of their century more, in general,
than elected officials. They make the reputation of a country. Michelangelo
outlasts the Medici and the Popes in our idea of Italy; and, as
one French poet said, “le buste/ Survit à la cité”: art outlives the cities
that gave it birth.
In the future, will the United States be remembered with admiration?
Will we be thanked for our stock market and its investors? For our wars
and their consequences? For our depletion of natural resources? For our failure
at criminal rehabilitation? Certainly not. Future cultures will certainly be grateful
to us for many aspects of scientific discovery, and for our progress (such as
it has been) in more humane laws. We can be proud of those of our graduates
who have gone out in the world as devoted investigators of the natural world,
or as just judges, or as ministers to the marginalized. But science, the law,
and even ethics are moving fields, constantly surpassing themselves.
To future generations our medicine will seem primitive, our laws backward,
even our ethical convictions narrow.
“I tried each thing; only some were immortal and free,” wrote our graduate
John Ashbery. He decided on the immortal and free things, art and thought,
and became a notable poet. Most art, past or present, does not have the
stamina to last; but many of our graduates, like the ones mentioned above,
have produced a level of art above the transient. The critical question for
Harvard is not whether we are admitting a large number of future doctors
and scientists and lawyers and businessmen (even future philanthropists):
we are. The question is whether we can attract as many as possible
of the future Emersons and Dickinsons. How would we identify them?
What should we ask them in interviews? How would we make them
want to come to us?
The truth is that many future poets, novelists, and screenwriters are not
likely to be straight-A students, either in high school or in college.
The arts through which they will discover themselves prize creativity,
originality, and intensity above academic performance; they value
introspection above extroversion, insight above rote learning.
Yet such unusual students may be, in the long run, the graduates of whom
we will be most proud. Do we have room for the reflective introvert as well as
for the future leader? Will we enjoy the student who manages to do respectably
but not brilliantly in all her subjects but one—but at that one surpasses
all her companions? Will we welcome eagerly the person who has in high school
been completely uninterested in public service or sports—but who may be
the next Wallace Stevens? Can we preach the doctrine of excellence in an art;
the doctrine of intellectual absorption in a field of study; even the doctrine
of unsociability; even the doctrine of indifference to money? (Wittgenstein,
who was rich, gave all his money away as a distraction; Emily Dickinson,
who was rich, appears not to have spent money, personally, on anything except
for an occasional dress, and paper and ink.) Can frugality seem as desirable
to our undergraduates as affluence—provided it is a frugality that nonetheless
allows them enough leisure to think and write? Can we preach a doctrine
of vocation in lieu of the doctrine of competitiveness and worldly achievement?
These are crucial questions for Harvard. But there are also other questions
we need to ask ourselves: Do we value mostly students who resemble us in talent
and personality and choice of interests? Do we remind ourselves to ask,
before conversing with a student with artistic or creative interests,
what sort of questions will reveal the nextT.S. Eliot? (Do we ever ask,
“Who is the poet you have most enjoyed reading?” Eliot would have had
an interesting answer to that.) Do we ask students who have done well
in English which aspects of the English language or a foreign language
they have enjoyed learning about, or what books they have read
that most touched them? Do we ask students who have won prizes in art
whether they ever go to museums? Do we ask in which medium they
have felt themselves freest? Do we inquire whether students have artists
(writers, composers, sculptors) in their family? Do we ask an introverted student
what issues most occupy his mind, or suggest something (justice and injustice
in her high school) for her to discuss? Will we believe a recommendation saying,
“This student is the most gifted writer I have ever taught,” when the student
exhibits, on his transcript, C’s in chemistry and mathematics, and has absolutely
no high-school record of group activity? Can we see ourselves admitting
such a student (which may entail not admitting someone else,who
may have been a valedictorian)?
President Drew Faust’s new initiative in the arts will make Harvard
an immensely attractive place to students with artistic talent of any sort.
It remains for us to identify them when they apply—to make sure
they can do well enough to gain a degree, yes, but not to expect them
to be well-rounded, or to become leaders. Some people in the arts
do of course become leaders (they conduct as well as sing, or found
public-service organizations to increase literacy, or work for the reinstatement
of the arts in schools). But one can’t quite picture Baudelaire pursuing
public service, or Mozart spending time perfecting his mathematics.
We need to be deeply attracted by the one-sided as well as the many-sided.
Some day the world will be glad we were hospitable to future artists.
Of course most of them will not end up as Yo-Yo Ma or Adrienne Rich;
but they will be the people who keep the arts alive in our culture.
“To have great poets,” as Whitman said, “there must be great audiences too.
” The matrix of culture will become impoverished if there are not enough gifted
artists and thinkers produced: and since universities are the main producers
for all the professions, they cannot neglect the professions of art and reflection.
And four years at Harvard can certainly nurture an artist as a
conservatory-education cannot. It remains true that great writers have often
been deeply (if eccentrically) learned, that they have been bilingual or trilingual,
or have had a consuming interest in another art (as Whitman loved vocal music,
as Michelangelo wrote sonnets). At Harvard, writers and artists will encounter
not only the riches of the course catalogue but also numerous others
like themselves; such encounters are a prerequisite for the creation
of self-confidence in an art. It is no accident that many of our writers have come out
of our literary magazine the Advocate, where they found a collective home.
We need comparable student homes for the other arts.
Once we have our potential philosophers, writers, and composers,
how will we prepare them for their passage into the wider society?
Our excellent students are intensely recruited by business and finance
in the fall of their senior year—
sometimes even earlier than that. Humanities organizations
(foundations, schools, government bureaus) do not have the resources
to fly students around the world, or even around the United States, for interviews,
nor do their budgets allow for recruiters and their travel expenses.
Perhaps money could be found to pay for recruiting trips in the early
fall for representatives of humanities organizations. Perhaps we can
find a way to convey to our juniors that there are places to go
other than Wall Street, and great satisfaction to be found when
they follow their own passions, rather than a passion for a high salary.
But if we are to be believed when we inform them of such opportunities,
we need, I think, to mute our praise for achievement and leadership
at least to the extent that we pronounce equal praise
for inner happiness, reflectiveness, and creativity; and we need to
make being actively recruited as available to students of the humanities
as it now is to others.
With a larger supply of creative and reflective admittees on campus,
fellow-students will benefit not only from seeing their style of life
and attending their exhibits or plays or readings, but also from
their intellectual conversation. America will, in the end, be grateful to us
for giving her original philosophers, critics, and artists; and we can
let the world see that just as we prize physicians and scientists and lawyers
and judges and economists, we also are proud of our future philosophers,
novelists, composers, and critics, who, although they must follow
a rather lonely and highly individual path, are also indispensable contributors
to our nation’s history and reputation.
Helen Vendler, Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor
