The Making of a Harvard Education
The Making of a Harvard Education What does all this add up to? Harvard is a part of my identity, but Harvard did not define me. It was rather a necessary experience for my development as a person and a writer. It was just something that had to be for some reason, for both good and ill. I might have been what the world calls happier if I had gone somewhere, anywhere, else. But I would have missed out on an opportunity that simply isn’t available anywhere else. I acquired much of my education there. Eminent professors like Edwin Reischauer, Benjamin Schwartz, Walter Jackson Bate, Mason Hammond and Wendell Clausen, Alfred North, and an inspired set of distribution requirements that enabled me to be an English major while taking courses in Chinese, Japanese, Roman, and German history, Einsteinian physics, Latin poetry and drama (in Latin), art history in overview and in closeup, as well as an extraordinarily comprehensive tutelage in the entire history of English literature (I.e., “...