Harvard Harvard Harvard Harvard Harvard

but don't forget Harvard

Mr. Harvard himself, via Wikimedia Commons, which was sorely lacking in images of statues of Mr. Community College.

Long ago, in a country not that far away, I was applying to grad school. I’d been given the I’ve since learned incorrect advice to contact individual professors at schools I’d applied to, who worked in the area that interested me. While this may have been what got me into the grad school I went to, or why I didn’t get into most of the others, none of that is the point of this story. No, it’s that one of the profs had a book on EXACTLY what I was interested in, and I told them as much, and they were basically like, yes, that was my old topic, I have not cared about that in years, I do this other thing now, and I felt like an idiot. It had not yet occurred to me, at 22, that people could be so ancient as to have more than one project in them.

I think of that meeting with the late-great prof in question (btw that school most certainly did not admit me) whenever the topic of privilege comes up. It’s my thing! Except it’s not. The book was published in early 2017, which in publishing terms means it is from more like 2015-2016, but also building on stuff from a good bit earlier. It has been yeah a while since I found this the most compelling topic of all.

I used to be faintly annoyed when I saw someone tweet out, like it’s their own epiphany, that privilege acknowledgements are annoying and accomplish nothing, but now I’m more at a loss when something privilege-y comes up in the news and people do turn to me for insights. I care about these things, but also I don’t? It’s relevant to what I work on these days in very roundabout and theoretical ways, but I also live in Canada can think of so so so so so many things more interesting than exactly which ambitious youths get to wear which Ivy-logo’d sweatshirts. Let the Americans in America sort this out for themselves.

But then Nicholas Kristof wrote that column. And I was sucked riiiight back in.