THE UNDERGRADUATE The first year Retreat and Experience, or FYRE, is a two-year pilot, a pre-orientation program designed to help students from “historically marginalized communities” Who Belongs transition to Harvard. It caters mainly to first-generation and low-income students, assisting them as they navigate the dizzy- at Harvard? ing array of acronyms on campus: BCS, OIE, OCS, CAMHS, FAO. There are icebreakers and academic panels, hip-hop yoga and si- by catherine zhang ’19 lent discos. All of the slippery, intangible “skills” that Harvard’s upper-middle-class he harry elkins widener centuries-old eliteness that, until recent majority takes for granted, which its mem- Memorial Library houses 3.5 mil- years, didn’t accommodate individuals like bers believe makes them uniquely deserving lion books and 400 million docu- me. Walking by, you see crowds of excit- of success, are covered: how to cold-email ments in its cavernous limestone ed Asian tourists peering inside—and al- professors, request a tutor, or seek mental- Tchambers. It is the largest university reposito- though I know my public-radio tote bag, health care. As are the struggles that the ma- ry of books and manuscripts in the world, and white Birkenstocks, philosophy books, and jority doesn’t seem to face. Students ask how it sits in the middle of Harvard Yard, where Harvard ID will allow me to float through to get along with roommates whose Canada it serves as the sweeping backdrop for thou- the entrance freely, the wry symbolism feels Goose jackets may cost more than their own sands of starry-eyed tourist Instagrams and heavy at a time when Harvard is being sued entire financial contribution toward attend- glossy brochure photos. Widener functions for supposedly anti-Asian admissions poli- ing the College, or how to grapple with “sur- synecdochally, a grand, imposing metaphor cies. But at the beginning of this school year vivor’s guilt,” like how to eat full meals in for one of the most powerful brands in the I found myself walking there with a lanky the dining halls knowing that their families world. It is the centerpiece of the University, Leverett junior named Ben, trailed by 10 back home don’t have food. the axis around which Harvard grinds and wide-eyed first-years who chattered anima- FYRE is the result of years of concentrat- whirs, churning out computational problem tedly about whether to take Economics 10. ed activism by first-gen students. Blueprint- sets, completed bleary-eyed at 3 a.m., or scrib- Together Ben and I led our kids up the stair- ing for a pre-orientation program began bled annotations on the Frankfurt School, case of Widener, past the murals painted by when Primus (originally the First Genera- piled on top of secluded carrels: dog-eared John Singer Sargent, into the Loker Reading tion Student Union, FGSU) was founded in relics that’ll remind us, when we’ve made it, Room. There, the new University president, 2013. Two years later, Savannah N. Fritz ’17 that once we doubted we could. Larry Bacow, and the dean of the College, faced “resistance” from Dean Khurana, as For the past three years, I’ve avoided it. Rakesh Khurana, welcomed our kids, the she told The Harvard Crimson, when she pro- Its magnificence recalls an old Harvard, a inaugural class of FYRE, to Harvard. posed an eight-day “Freshman Enrichment Program” that she developed with the help of a $3,000 planning grant from the Undergraduate Council. But the efforts and rejections con- tinued: last year, Khurana and the administration were the subject of widespread anger (harvard- mag.com/firstgen-17) when they rejected another bridge program for first-gen and low-income students—a “First Year Insti- tute” proposed by Katie Steele, then of the Freshman Dean’s Of- fice (now senior director for stu- dent engagement and leadership in the Dean of Students’ Office), and modeled on Fritz’s initial proposal. But finally, after months of exhaustion and unpaid labor by student advocates, a program materialized—and was recorded by the Harvard Gazette photogra- phers hovering around our first- 30 January - February 2019 Illustration by Michael Parkin/ Folio Art Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 JOHN HARVARD'S JOURNAL years as they unwrapped new books that pendent thinking and bravery. “Asianness” exceeded its utility. In college, the people had been recommended personally for them was so tightly circumscribed in the suburbs around me were unlikely to make these by professors. On stage, President Bacow of Dallas that the only way I knew how to be mistakes. The majority of my close friends slipped a FYRE T-shirt over his button- my own person was to disavow the whole. were multiracial—half black, one-eighth down. Watching my first-years at Widen- So I railed against the never-ending race of Hawaiian, all somewhere on the spectrum er, enraptured by this display—the moti- skipping math levels that placed seventh of “progressive”—and thus unlikely also to vating speeches by Dean Khurana outlining graders in pre-calculus, and the SAT prep see this close-minded view of “Asianness” the mission of the College, before they’d centers that constituted their own industry. as constituting me. Even as I’ve begun to become a trite punchline—I remembered There were 1,556 seniors in my graduating realize, since freshman year, how much di- what it was like standing on the steps of class and I wanted to be an individual. versity at Harvard can be cosmetic, I still Widener during my Freshman Convocation, I received my acceptance letter from Har- look around the room at parties, where my intoxicated by the potential of my whole vard in March, despite an SAT score below black roommate is getting sloppy to Katy life ahead of me. 2300 and several Bs, not to mention dozens Perry in a velvet top they borrowed from me, But after the kids shuffled back to Wig- of high-school classmates more disciplined and feel sentimental about the realization, glesworth to sleep or share a few late-night than I. At the time, it was evident to me that albeit temporary, of my post-racial dreams. revelations with friends, I began to worry I was selling my kids a dream of Harvard Harvard wanted personality, and from the it could not live up to. A few days later, I saw my FYRE family featured in the Gazette, warm, chipper note my admissions officer front and center on the page—the face of the diversity statistics, the face of thousands of wrote praising my activism, I undeniably had it. high-school students’ wildest dreams. “Harvard belongs to you,” Khurana had I deserved it. Harvard wanted personality, and The brutal reality is that I still derive most told us. In the moment, we believed him. from the warm, chipper note my admissions of my esteem from being “not like the other officer wrote to me praising my activism, Asians.” Only now, the “other” Asians are Lately, we’ve all been thinking about who I undeniably had it. Anyone who wonders not in my classroom solving calculus prob- Harvard should belong to. A lawsuit against whether they should be here gets reassured lems faster than me. They’re the ones out- the University alleging discrimination against that the masterminds in the admissions of- side of the red-brick confines of Harvard, Asian-American applicants has produced ficedon’t make mistakes—they can detect hid- arguing for a race-blind vision of equality. bruising details about the College’s confiden- den potential; they can whiff out inauthen- The Asian Americans supporting Students tial admissions process, and forced many of ticity. For most of my time in Cambridge, I for Fair Admissions view equality as en- us to reckon with our place here. believed in Harvard’s infallibility. titlement to the privileges, the fullness, of Harvard is a college where a visit from Freshman year was magical, a dazzling whiteness—there’s so much about the law- Colin Kaepernick or the Secretary of En- rotation of things I had never encoun- suit that feels selfish. But it’s easy to criticize ergy is just another event you blow off for tered. In high school I knew only one gay when—as a Harvard senior—this fullness a problem set; where your journalism pro- classmate, but at Harvard all of my male has already been afforded to me. fessor is the former managing editor of The friends had their nails painted and pre- New York Times; and where your section mate ferred the term “queer.” We hung out in One of the first lectures I attended at is an Obama or a Kennedy. To be one of the large groups, sharing greasy scallion pan- Harvard was the introduction to “Money, 5 percent of applicants admitted to Har- cakes on a comically large plush beanbag, Markets, and Morals,” an Ethical Reason- vard is to be catapulted automatically into and screamed along to Carly Rae Jepsen’s ing general-education course taught by Bass the elite. To say that all of this is deserv- EMOTION. I took the T into Chinatown professor of government Michael Sandel. As edly ours because of the choices we made for soup dumplings with a former circus the University’s reigning moral philosopher, before we turned 18—no one, not even the performer who loved European languag- Sandel has been instrumental to projecting international-science-fair champions, can es, and scream-whispered Paramore lyrics the image of a progressive, socially enlight- prove that with certainty.