The Harvard Spectator/Reunion
Caldwell, Christopher
I recently went to a field day at my tenth Harvard reunion, where the classes congregate in a row of tents lined up chronologically by class. A walk from, say, the '88 tent to the '33 tent is a walk...
...Three quarters (87 percent of women) believe Anita Hill more than Clarence Thomas...
...Maybe that puts us in too good a light For every write-up like the ones above there are two that mention "parenting" as "an experience I highly recommend" or "a satisfying challenge for me" or "a real growing experience for me" (me, me, me...
...But you know what...
...Sixty-eight, of course, the hippie class, is a tempting target, given their tendency to talk like free spirits and act like snobs, tightwads, and prudes...
...A kind word for the class's political opinions would be schizophrenic...
...But here's the old arrogance again: 81 percent describe their "political and cultural opinions and beliefs" as "more sophisticated than mainstream America's...
...Most favor term limits...
...Atheism plummeted to a bare 18 percent...
...Half have lost a friend to AIDS, and the class report is filled with HIV-positives...
...As Linda Greenhouse suggests elsewhere in her '68 report, someone should have put that question to the parents...
...In many ways we were the lees of the sixties crowd...
...still over the horizon...
...Fortunately for us, our survey included no questions that would have measured arrogance, such as "Are you a better person in the eyes of God than your parents...
...In the last ten years, the blessings of marriage and motherhood overshadow all the rest...
...Only one in ten' has a net worth under $100,000...
...A third are atheists...
...It's also a good way of gauging how successive generations measure up to one another...
...Such appraisals always verge on tendentiousness, but they can be tested empirically against the surveys each reunion class mails out...
...Perhaps I flatter my classmates, but it seems that something left us a bit less insufferable than our predecessors...
...So many in this generation regularly faulted those of us who went to school in the 1980s for lacking "empathy" and "idealism" that it is hard to suppress one's mirth at the news that the Harvard respondents to the Class of '68 survey are 1 percent black (and Radcliffe '68 is zero percent black...
...Some highlights: The Class of '68 had its twenty-fifth reunion this year...
...I think the experience of having children . . . has proven to us the wisdom of the traditional Christian morality that we espoused—sometimes blatantly—when at Harvard...
...I am so grateful to have spent my college years in that interregnum that I cannot speak of it without sentimentality...
...None of it really mattered...
...Yet by a 56-44 percentage, those in my class identified with the generation before us more than the generation after...
...Fully a quarter of the class are millionaires...
...The Class of '78 has a more detailed survey, particularly on politics (compiled by Karen Falkenstein Green '78, chief of staff for Massachusetts Governor William Weld '66...
...The next week I lost my job . . . The next day, our car was stolen in Oakland...
...We got to college in 1979, the peak year for marijuana use on campus, and dabbled in drugs, only to discover on graduating that there was a War on Them...
...That only 3-4 percent describe themselves as homosexual seems a particular embarrassment for New York Times journalist Linda Greenhouse '68, who introduced the survey ("gay and Lesbian members of the class are almost certainly underrepresented...
...These autobiographical sketches from my class report aren't wholly atypical: In March, I returned to San Francisco and gave birth to our first child...
...men don't, 56-37...
...Eighty-six percent give less than a tenth of their income to charity...
...Christopher Caldwell...
...Among women, 91 percent voted for Clinton, and 30 percent have had abortions...
...Only 71 percent of us voted for Clinton (and a mere 84 percent of women...
...yet in response to the question "In order to reduce the federal deficit, Congress should first . . ." 68 percent say "reduce spending," while only 23 percent say "raise taxes...
...We arrived at Harvard with guitars, and graduated into a world of personal computers...
...In a telling show of arrogance, 68 percent said their "personal development" was greater than that of their same-gender parent, while only 6 percent said it was less—a pretty uncharitable assessment of the generation that not only survived the Depression and fought World War II, but even put these little snobs through college...
...In retrospect, the first half of the 1980s may have been the heyday of classical liberalism in this country—with taxes dropping and the Scylla and Charybdis of strident moralism and p.c...
...At times the shocking intolerance of the College toward those who share my conservative leanings makes me unwilling to express any gratitude for the institution and to support it financially...
...Only 1 percent smoke a pack a day or more, and fewer than half have three drinks a week...
...A fifth of the men are lawyers and a fifth doctors...
...Over 50 percent of alums respond, so you wind up with some figures that are of considerable—if hardly infallible—statistical significance...
...We entered with the sexual revolution going full-bore, ran into herpes in college, and soon realized that that wasn't the half of it...
...My wife] and I are highly religiously active, and moderately politically active...
...A walk from, say, the '88 tent to the '33 tent is a walk from what you were to what you will become...
...The class is split on whether political correctness is "the new McCarthyism" or "positive" (women like it 52-31...
...One in five makes over $300,000 a year...
...Who drove down the curve...
...But it served a gracious purpose by placing [my future wife] and me in Thayer North in the fall of 1979, and that is sufficient to rekindle in me an affectionate, if strained, regard for the greatest place of learning on Earth...
...ow, my class: Between 1968 N and 1983, Harvardians moved far to what passes here for the right...
...Average number of sex partners took a steep dive to fifteen, from a high of nineteen in the Class of '78...
Vol. 26 • September 1993 • No. 9
