Politics was in the air freshman year, though in retrospect it seemed like an almost quaint kind of politics, preoccupied with arguments that hadn’t changed much since the 1980s. I volunteered for Al Gore’s campaign that fall, chauffeuring guests around Boston during the run-up to the presidential debate there, but the sense among many students was that Bush and Gore were barely distinguishable on domestic policy: center-left versus center-right. The biggest campaign-related excitement was the arrival of riot police on the outskirts of the debate site to contend with Green Party protesters who were marching and chanting, “Let Ralph [Nader] debate.” When Bush ultimately prevailed in the Supreme Court and claimed the presidency, it still felt like little would change from the Clinton era.
National politics seemed sleepy compared to the scene on campus itself. In April 2001, a student group called the Progressive Student Labor Movement took over the offices of the university’s president, demanding a living wage for Harvard janitors and food workers. That spring, a daily diversion on the way to class was to see which national figure—Cornel West or Ted Kennedy one day, John Kerry or Robert Reich another—had turned up in the Yard to encourage the protesters.
Striding past the protesters and the politicians addressing them, on my way to a “Pizza and Politics” session with a journalist like Matt Bai or a governor like Howard Dean, I did not guess that the students poised to have the greatest near-term impact were not the social justice warriors at the protests, nor the more buttoned-up types I would find at the Institute of Politics, but a few mostly apolitical geeks who were quietly at work in Kirkland House, the dorm across the street, cooking up a virtual version of the paper face books that Harvard would distribute on move-in day.
We knew, of course, that the new century would herald great technological change. So much ink has been spilled on the flood of tech’s arrival that it is hard to say much about it that isn’t repetitive. But even now, looking back, the swiftness of it is stupefying. In that fall of 2000, my freshman dorm room had a “cordless” phone linked to a wired base, from which I could dial a 1-800 number to use a long-distance calling card and then reach home in South Bend. One year later, I returned to campus with a Sprint flip phone whose monochrome display let you see the number that was calling you, and which remarkably charged the same no matter what area code you were calling. One more year passed, and I had in my pocket a tiny (as was the fashion then) T68i phone by Ericsson with a 101-by-80 pixel display boasting 256 colors. What most excited me about it, as a tech fan, was that it could connect to a computer, with a new technology called Bluetooth, and download your address book without you having to key in every name with the numeric keypad. A year after that, I began to see the occasional professional around town with her face glued to a BlackBerry, which could be used to read email. What could possibly be so compelling, I thought, on that little screen?
The front end of Harvard’s own website, as of September 2000, was about one page long, and was all text except the Harvard logo and a rotating campus news photo the size of a postage stamp. To check email, you would open up a Telnet window and use a program called PINE to bring up an interface that resembled an Atari game. By 2002, the Harvard Crimson had occasion to run a story on the remarkable fact that newly arrived freshmen were checking their email almost exclusively by webmail.
As part of a side job for the IOP, I was entrusted in the fall of 2002 with an expensive digital camera, which I used to take photographs of visiting speakers like Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic and Senator Kennedy. By the following year, as Serbia reeled from Djindjic’s assassination, most students had a digital camera of their own. Junior year I got a camcorder for Christmas, and brought it to campus to take video footage of dorm life—by senior year, to the great amusement of friends, I could edit it on my own laptop and burn it to a DVD. (YouTube would not exist for another year.)
“Social media” wasn’t a term of art yet, though we did notice it beginning to emerge around us even before Mark Zuckerberg changed the way all of us relate to the Internet and to each other. There was MySpace, and something called Friendster, and a few others that I never got around to signing up for. For a brief period, online social networking seemed like it might be a fad. It was intriguing, but could meet the same fate as the short-lived Kozmo.com, a within-the-hour retail delivery service that was popular on campus during my freshman year but arrived fifteen years too soon. But something did feel different about that February of 2004 when the creation of thefacebook.com ricocheted around campus, and we came to view it as part of Harvard, like the Crimson or the Square. It became indispensable for checking on your friends and exchanging gossip, and began to overtake AOL Instant Messenger and even compete with email. (Texting was still sporadic, since you generally had to pay by the text.) Suddenly you could look up who was friends with whom—and who was seeing whom.
In the privacy of my room, out of what I told myself was curiosity, I could even search which users were men whose profiles said they were interested in men. Still years away from facing the reality of my own sexual orientation, I had no practical use for the information, but I was impressed that some of my classmates had no reservations about putting it online in this way. Only today can I imagine the comedy of traveling back in time to tap my twenty-one-year-old self on the shoulder and explain to him that one day he would use a Facebook-connected app on a phone to be introduced to his future husband.
ACADEMICALLY, IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to decide that I should major in Harvard’s program in History and Literature. Plenty of subjects had been interesting in school, but it was literature that had captured not just my mind but also my emotions. I had wanted to explore it deeply ever since reading Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” in Mr. Wylie’s sixth-grade English class at Stanley Clark School. At twelve years old, it felt like sudden enlightenment when we learned that this poem wasn’t just about two roads in a forest but about the choices we make in life. Once I’d figured out what a metaphor was, I saw them on every page of text. I wanted to read every great author, maybe even become a novelist. And doing History and Literature together meant that I could also study pretty much anything that had a past—ideas, politics, foreign countries, and global affairs.
I decided to focus on American studies, bolstered by my good fortune of landing a freshman seminar with Sacvan Bercovitch. As English professors go, he was famous; my father made it clear to me that studying with him was a big deal. Bercovitch had deeply impacted American studies by pointing out all the ways in which modern America owed its culture to the influence of the early Puritans.
Until then, I had considered the Puritan years to be the most boring period in all of American history, full of dour and interminable sermons by the likes of Cotton Mather. But to Bercovitch, the Puritans were the key to American identity. His seminal book The American Jeremiad described a distinctly American form of rhetoric that goes back to Puritan sermons and persists in our culture even now: a way of castigating society for failing to live up to its sacred covenant, while reinforcing the sense of promise in what we could become.
The threads of influence are easy to find, if you know what to look for. Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy each used the same phrase, “city upon a hill,” to describe America’s destiny among nations. In doing so, they used imagery that traces back to John Winthrop and the sermon he gave using that same phrase almost four hundred years ago, aboard the ship that would bring him and his followers to America. Bercovitch explained how Winthrop’s image of America as a beacon of virtue would become the basis for an American exceptionalism that helps define our country to this day.