Yo Yo Ma's view on Harvard

GiggitusMaximus
Sun, 04 Jan 2009 23:32:09 +0000

I was reading an old article about Yo Yo Ma and he mentioned his unhappiness at Harvard. I just thought it was interesting and that people would like to know his feelings of the school.

“I have three questions for you,” he said suddenly. People were crowded around, wanting his attention, and instead he was interviewing me.

Sure.

“Are you glad you went to Harvard?”

(He gets right to the point, doesn’t he?)

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, a little surprised. “It makes a good conversation piece now and then.”

“Did you like it?”

“No. Are you kidding? No.”

Ma was touching me again. “You felt isolated there? Alone? Abandoned?”

The wine and cheese party is swirling around the two of us, lost in our own private vortex. This is a conversation I haven’t had with anyone in 30 years.

The truth is, everyone I knew felt isolated, alone and abandoned at Harvard. All four of my roommates from a five-person suite freshman year left and never returned.

I took him by the lapel. “Hey, you seem to have turned out OK.”

But Ma was serious. He hated his time there as as much as I did. Harvard is many things, but it’s not much of a teaching institution. It’s not nourishing by any stretch. It has its good side, and that’s almost entirely about the other people you suffer through with.

I can’t believe Yo Yo Ma still worries about this, though I do. There is something deeply wrong with the kind of university education we both got: aggressively shallow, lacking in substance, big on pretense, though good on a resume. As enthusiastic symphony patrons tried to snag his attention for photo ops, Ma spoke quietly to me about his own desire that young students pursue an education based on passion, rather than one based on status. I told him my own son went to Oregon State—not a casual choice in our family, but a happy one — where he got a fabulous education in a caring community. A little embarrassed, Ma said his own two children went to Harvard. “But it was their choice…”

I politely pulled away, but Ma grabbed me for the third question.

“And if you had it to do all over again?”

No, I said. I wouldn’t go there again. I would go somewhere smaller. Some place that values teaching.

“Reed,” he said.

“Santa Cruz,” I countered.

“Or Williams,” he said. “If you wanted to be in the East.”