Fifteen Minutes Magazine: Oct. 2022

FIFTEEN MINUTES

FM CHAIRS

Maliya V. Ellis ’ 23-24

THE MAGAZINE OF THE HARVARD CRIMSON EDITORS’ NOTE

Sophia S. Liang ’ 23

EDITORS-AT-LARGE

Josie F. Abugov ’22-’23

Saima S. Iqbal ’23

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Mila G. Barry ’25

Rebecca E.J. Cadenhead ’23-’24

Sarah W. Faber ’24

Io Y. Gilman ’25

Michal Goldstein ’25

Tess C. Kelley ’23

Amber H. Levis ’25

Akila V. Muthukumar ’23

Kaitlyn Tsai ’25

Benjy Wall-Feng ’25

Harrison R. T. Ward ’23

Maya M. F. Wilson ’24

Meimei Xu ’24

Dina R. Zeldin ’25

FM DESIGN EXECS

Michael Hu ’ 25

Sophia Salamanca ’ 25

Sophia C. Scott ’ 25

FM PHOTO EXEC

Joey Huang ’24

PRESIDENT

Raquel Coronell Uribe ’ 22-23

MANAGING EDITOR

Jasper G. Goodman ’ 23

BUSINESS MANAGER

Amy X. Zhou ’23

COVER DESIGN

Sophia Salamanca ’ 25

Dear Reader,

The year was 1992. The Cold War had just ended. Clinton defeated the incumbent Bush. And Fifteen Minutes Magazine came kicking and screaming into the world.

The editors of The Crimson’s former magazine, The What Is To Be Done, called the inception of FM “a sad, sad day.” “When the Berlin Wall fell, we knew it was just a matter of time,” said Steven J. Newman ’92.

But hey, we managed to outlive them — we rang in our 30th birthday this year and we’re still going strong, 33 volumes later.*

Our first glossy of the semester is grounded by a scrutiny composed of a reported introduction and six gorgeous introspections. MGB, MMN, AZW, KSG, MX, SS, and REJC came together from across The Crimson’s boards to rewrite the rules of the college application essay. They critique the tropes of the “resilience narrative” and heroic redemption arc, which pressure students to write as though they’ve single-handedly overcome systemic harms for the gratification of admissions officers. Then, they turn to their own Harvard admissions essays to reflect on the pressures that influenced what they wrote — and did not write — the first time around, and they finally share the longer, messier, and more truthful stories.

We hope you enjoy their honest, unwavering prose, as well as the rest of the wonderful articles in this issue. Whether this is your first time picking up FM or you’ve stuck around for decades, here’s cheers to many more milestones ahead! We’re 30, flirty, and thriving indeed … though if you ask us, we don’t look a day over 29.

Sincerely,

SSL & MVE

*“Why are you on your 33rd volume in our 30th year?” you might ask. Great question. We have no idea.

Dina R. Zeldin

Sophia N. Downs

Olivia G. Oldham

Mila G. Barry, Rebecca E. J. Cadenhead, Kate S. Griem, Mariah M. Norman, Shanivi Srikonda, Andy Z. Wang, & Meimei Xu

Jade Lozada 29

Harrison R. T. Ward

Jem K. Williams 30

Peter L. Laskin

One Night at the SEC

It was late on a Thursday and I was out of breath on a Bluebike, cruising across Weeks Bridge toward the Science and Engineering Complex. A night of sneaking around, looking for trouble in Harvard’s Allston bastion lay ahead of me.

The $1 billion, eight-story, 500,000-square-foot building, coldly abbreviated as SEC or “ess-ee-sea,” opened its doors to lectures and labs for the first time in the fall of 2021. Since its inception, it has been lauded for its energy-efficient features, its collaborative design, and its ultramodern amenities. As with the rest of Harvard’s developments in Allston, it has also drawn criticism for moving into existing neighborhoods. As students settled into its classrooms, offices, labs and makerspaces, rumors blossomed that some of them began to ditch the commute to and from Cambridge, instead creating a residence for themselves in the building.

It’s too convenient not to. Apparently, there are showers in the basement (true), a giant warehouse where you could skateboard (true, though I didn’t try), Peloton bikes (on the fifth floor, facing a glass wall), and pods for napping (I found benches instead). I jumped at the idea of spending a night there — partly for the meme, partly for the lure of experiential reporting, and partly to feel more connected to the colossal construction I only ever visit for math class. It seemed a good opportunity to hit up as much of this cornucopia as I could. Plus, I thought being inside one of the focal points of scientific innovation would activate a deeper level of my brain, allowing me to fly through all the homework I hadn’t finished earlier in the week.

Trader Joe’s in Allston, just up the road from the SEC, is a familiar stop on my commute to class, and tonight was no different. I picked up grub — tomatoes, dried mango, and microwavable mac and cheese — in an attempt to make the industrial interior where I would be staying more homely. I imagined the other shoppers were hurrying home

after a late night in the lab; the cashier said at this time of day, there were only stragglers.

Prior to this, I had only ever seen the SEC in the mornings when I arrived for class, squinting against the sunlight reflecting on its glass edifice and bouncing across its metal exoskeleton. At night, it has an eerie glow instead. No one batted an eye when I strolled in at a quarter past nine. I settled my groceries into the fridge of an open-concept kitchenette in the basement. Feeling slightly more comfortable — ah yes, my $1 billion home — I posted up in a study room.

Over the next few hours, I worked on my pset. Around me, loose phrases of conversations and squeaks from shoes on clean tiles echoed through the atrium and down to the lower level where I was camped. The plaque on the glass of my study nook held a dedication to someone’s physics professor. This struck me as oddly quaint. In many of its design choices, the SEC nods to the history of engineering at Harvard; the beech saplings on the lawn are the same species as the ones that stand outside Pierce Hall, the former SEAS headquarters in Cambridge.

As part of its commitment to simulating storiedness, the SEC commissioned a kinetic art installation that hangs at the main entrance. The installation compiles digital silhouettes of every person who’s walked past, playing and replaying all the interactions it has observed since it was first plugged in, using tiny rotating tiles as pixels. On my first visit, the sudden whoosh of clicking and clacking tiles took me by surprise as I walked past. Tonight, though the SEC stood empty, I still heard the tiles click into shapes of people passing in and out, ad infinitum.

Eventually, the only other sound was the whir of air conditioners as the building heaved in anticipation of the next morning, when PIs and professors would trickle in. I wondered if anyone could smell the fake cheese of my dinner wafting.

Dina R. Zeldin

Ultimately, I gave up on my homework. Overtaken by SEC wanderlust, I began to explore, starting in the basement until I made my way to the sixth floor. Even though I was simply walking through the halls, the ceiling — an exposed web of metal pipes — made me feel as if I was a woefully ignorant car mechanic in the underbelly of a machine. I am not an engineer, so I don’t know what flows through the pipes, nor why, nor how, and seeing so many woven together was discomfiting. My dad had tried to explain these things: why the car battery could be charged just by driving far; why the dryer doesn’t work when it snows; why plugging in everything at once would blow the fuse. The SEC’s exposed pipes forces you to ask these questions, to realize that engineering abounds. Its persistence feels like mockery — I prefer to be ignorant to these inner workings.

The SEC is unimaginably endless. There are countless little study rooms and lab benches and kitchenettes built at oblique angles. I stumbled into a library, one lonely plant bed, and a meditation room. Just when I thought I was alone, I ran into a tired grad student struggling against a printer. Almost all the doors have a scanner on them, and I swiped at each, hoping more Easter eggs awaited. This strategy did not get me very far. When the mystery was unresolved, I told myself there’s probably nothing there anyway. Most parts feel barely used, a new-car smell still faint on the paint. It feels like a too-large apartment. In a few years’ time, perhaps the SEC will become the dynamic space it hopes to be. All the features beckon us to come and stay, work, 3D-print something useless, soak in the sun through the windows, exercise and shower,

warm up a frozen meal, and wake up to a BoardPlus breakfast. It’s not quite settled yet. At dusk, when I headed back on the bike, there were no rats scampering until I got to the Square. No one was there to leave crumbs out for them.

Luckily, time is one thing that the SEC has plenty of. Certified for its sustainability by the International Living Future Institute and the U.S. Green Building Council, the building is also armed to stand the test of climate change, with special systems to manage stormwater and mitigate power outages. A pamphlet online advertises that it could outlast a 100-year-long rainstorm. I won’t be returning to the SEC for any more schoolnight shenanigans — but if the skies ever open up to a biblical storm, you’ll know where to find me.

The futuristic, $1 billion Science and Engineering Complex has everything you’d need to survive — theoretically, of course. Photo by Dina R. Zeldin.

The Northern Lights Visit Cambridge

Borealis, an art installation that served as the centerpiece of this year’s Cambridge Science Festival, simulates Northern Lights by projecting light beams onto mist. Photos by Meimei Xu.

Sophia N. Downs

Hidden around a corner just beyond the Kendall T stop lies a string of lights, food trucks, and a gentle mill of people. A mist hangs above — colors come and go, like clouds rolling before a storm. First swirling green, now overlaid with pink, then rapidly moving toward a vanishing point.

Welcome to “Borealis,” the art installation that served as the centerpiece of this year’s Cambridge Science Festival — a weeklong celebration of science, technology, engineering, art, and math.

Designed by self-described “artivist” Dan Acher, Borealis “brings the experience of the Northern Lights to cities the world over,” according to its website. The installation, which was on exhibit from Oct. 6-9, features light beams projecting onto mist, creating an aurora-like effect, while a musical composition by Guillaume Desbois establishes a soothing atmosphere. Acher designed Borealis to create spaces for people to connect, to explore issues of climate change, and to connect art with technology. Borealis has traveled to 12 countries since its debut in 2016.

Cambridge Science Festival director Brooke W. Ciardelli had been following Acher’s work, and Borealis in particular, for some time. When she began planning this year’s festival, she immediately thought of bringing the installation to Cambridge for its first stint in the United States.

She notes that Borealis departs from the festival’s past programming.

“Another goal of the festival this year was

to try to situate the programming more directly at the intersection of science and art. I would say in past festivals, it tackled science,” she says. “We wanted to make the art side of the equation more robust.”

Ciardelli also felt this year’s festival needed something to pull the community together after the isolation brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. She and her team wanted an installation “that was healing and in some way that was larger than life, and that [was] filled with a sense of wonder,” she says.

For Ciardelli, hosting an exhibition like Borealis is more important now than ever. “Such deep-seated fear [is] manifesting itself in hate and division, and it’s a tough time for us as human beings right now,” she says. “We just need to find the pure wonder of humanity, the environment, and community.”

The wonder is evident on faces throughout the soft hum of people at the festival. College students sit on parking blocks or the curb; children lay on the concrete; couples wander slowly with arms around each other. The accompanying music is meditative — the sort of sounds you hear at the end of a yoga class.

“Initially I was underwhelmed,” says Tyagaraja Ramaswamy, a Cambridge resident, and his feelings were echoed by other visitors. Borealis does not seem to wow visitors by its shock value, but instead soothes those who linger. When asked to describe their impressions, friends Anna Stringham and Emma Garner respond in unison: “very zen.”

While large events like festivals tend to be actionoriented, Ciardelli hopes that Borealis encourages visitors to “simply be and exist in a common space with people.” When asked if she has a takeaway, Borealis visitor Grace Liu says that the light and the swirls remind us to “grasp what you can have right away, because it never is there forever.” Her friend Violet McCauluy, however, pauses for a moment before asking, “Should I take away something?”

Borealis simply asks viewers to focus on the present moment. The art installation juxtaposes a moment of peace amidst a bustling city, a pseudonatural phenomenon fenced in by half-lit high rises. When watching and listening to Borealis, there’s no other agenda. No errands to run, no work to do. It’s simply about connecting with the here and now — the people with you, the place where you are.

Perhaps, as McCauluy implies, there’s nothing specific to take away from Borealis. Just a sense of wonder.

Amid Mounting ClimateDanehyThreats, Park's Miyawaki Forest Puts Down Roots

Olivia G. Oldham

On an afternoon in late September, Danehy Park has the calm of an open plain. Joggers and dog walkers amble; a few teenagers lounge by the track. Commercial sprawl adjoins the west side of the park; the east is lined by one of the wealthier neighborhoods of already-wealthy Cambridge; and to the south sit mixed-income affordable housing apartments.

In the center of the park, Maya Dutta is tending to the park’s 4,300-square-foot Miyawaki forest, which turned a year old on Sept. 25. Dutta is bubbly and

prone to rhapsodizing about the plants, some of which have already outgrown her — though, she points out, “I’m not that tall — I’m 5-foot-2.” She works for Biodiversity for a Livable Climate, a Cambridge-based nonprofit that advocates for biodiversity as a solution to the climate crisis. She is project manager for the Danehy Park Miyawaki Forest, a collaboration between the nonprofit, the city of Cambridge, and a Swiss forestry organization called SUGi Project.

If you decided to dig a hole 100 feet into the ground below the Miyawaki forest, a certain

history would emerge. At the very bottom of that hole would be glacial bedrock, hundreds of thousands of years old. Just above it, you’d see a deep divot into a layer of clay, excavated by the New England Brick Company between 1847 and 1952. In the 19th century, according to the Cambridge Historical Commission, North Cambridge was dotted with “muddy claypits, smoky kilns, and vast drying sheds”; the New England Brick Company advertised a “Harvard”style brick, burnished and waterstruck like those in the Yard. Once construction and brick production

Danehy Park in North Cambridge is home to one of the region’s first Miyawaki Forests, a method of reforesting which uses native plants to build a resilient ecosystem. Photos by Julian J. Giordano.

in Cambridge slowed, the site became an industrial landfill. Fifty years worth of household refuse fills a thick layer beneath the surface of the park.

In 1971, the landfill was closed, sealed, and used as a staging ground for the extension of the MBTA Red Line through Alewife. In 1988, the city began to establish a park on the site. One of the first of its kind in New England, the “recycled” park was opened to the public in 1990; in the 22 years since, Danehy has maintained its status as the largest public park in Cambridge.

The “pocket” forest is designed according to the principles of the late Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, who recommended

densely planting species native to their region. When planted alone, trees can’t build rich networks with other plant life; Dutta points to a solitary leafless maple several yards away as an example. But in tandem with other plants — and with a few years of maintenance following planting — hearty systems emerge. While the City Forestry department aims for a 90 percent survival rate among its trees, the Danehy Park Forest has only lost two percent of its plants in the last year, according to Andrew Putnam, the city’s superintendent of forestry. As the forest grows and the landfill’s waste inevitably permeates the barrier above it, the soil will help break down the refuse, adding its

own layer of history to the patch of land.

Before that industrial waste was introduced, before the Brick Company, the Massachussett and Pawtucket peoples were the stewards of this land. They actively managed robust forests and closely studied the properties of local plants. The project of “reforesting,” as it is often called, is fraught; a “return” to forestry often neglects the long history of Indigenous care for Northeastern land. In an attempt to address this, the forest’s planners collaborated with local tribe members and Marylee Jones of the Yakama Nation to ensure that Danehy’s Miyawaki forest features a variety of native plants. Dutta hopes that

as these projects expand, more Indigenous people will have central roles in the nurseries that supply these plants.

On this particular day, Dutta is measuring the heights of the forest’s trees. She is unsurprised to find they are shorter than projected the year before. As Dutta says, “The particular heat and dryness of this summer was not predicted.” Cambridge has endured a drought since midJune; since July 21, it has stayed at a “critical” level. Putnam says that through the summer, all of the city’s water trucks were watering 12 hours a day and sometimes even through the night “to try to get through the worst of it,” he says. The forest also suffered,

partly because the irrigation system in Danehy Park broke in late August. Yet only a few weeks after the heat wave subsided, the trees now appear sprightly and green.

Dutta imagines that forests like this one will become more crucial as the climate crisis intensifies. Miyawaki forests can be as small as 1,000 square feet or, as Dutta puts it, the size of six parking spots. “Take your parking lot, depave six parking spaces and turn it from hot, congested asphalt that doesn’t support anything [...] into something living,” she says.

In cities like Cambridge, urban heat islands will become more prevalent as global temperatures rise: Areas without much plant

life become hotter, demand more energy use, and concentrate air pollutants. These areas, Dutta adds, tend to be clustered in poorer neighborhoods. A few parking spots’ worth of forest could, simply put, make these neighborhoods more livable.

As we circle the forest, Dutta says that one of her favorite parts is how it sounds: alive and buzzing. Dragonflies and monarch butterflies flutter overhead. Sumac, chokeberry, and elderberry grow in the underbrush. In November, a smaller Miyawaki forest will be planted in Green-Rose Heritage Park. The next summer, too, is projected to be hotter than the last. Will this young forest have time to grow?

REWRITING OUR HARVARD ADMISSIONS ESSAYS

In this series of introspections, six Crimson editors revisit the essays that got them into Harvard. Design by Sophia Salamanca.

Introduction

BY MILA G. BARRY

With autumn leaves and brisk morning air comes the start of college applications season. As deadlines loom, high school seniors feverishly refine resumes, triple-check transcripts, prepare for interviews, and of course, draft the all-important personal statement. Hunched over laptops or notebooks in classrooms, bedrooms, and libraries, they grapple with the challenge of condensing their strongest selves into 650 words. College essay prompts frequently ask applicants to reflect on the question of who am I? Yet with the looming pressure to gain admittance into increasingly selective elite institutions, who do I have to be? can feel like an equally significant query.

This was certainly true for Emi F. Nietfeld ’15, a former Crimson Magazine and Blog editor who recently published a memoir called “Acceptance” which traces her journey to Harvard College. The Harvard application process, Nietfeld writes, required her to “cash in on [her] sorrows,” to recount the mental illness and homelessness she experienced while growing up and present herself as hurt but resilient — and, most importantly, as not too broken to be unfit for the Ivy League.

The summer before her senior year of high school, Nietfeld ran out of places to stay and wrote her personal statement at the local library. “I tried to write these essays where I showed admissions committees that I was stronger for having been in foster care and being homeless, and then at the end of the day, I was still sleeping in my car,” she recalls. “I felt enormous pressure to act as if I had already overcome the stuff that was very much still ongoing.” In her memoir, Nietfeld rejects what she calls the “gospel of grit” cliché and, more generally, the trope of individual redemption arcs within broader systems of harm.

Her skepticism is part of a growing discourse surrounding narratives of resilience in the university admissions landscape. Just this year, for example, the Rhodes Trust rewrote the essay prompts for its fellowship, stating that over the past 10 to 15 years, applicants’ essays have been disproportionately “focused on ‘overcoming’ obstacles or trauma, or on a heroic narrative of problem-solving.”

Of course, reframing challenges as moments of

growth can be a valuable tool in establishing a sense of strength and personal autonomy. Resilience in and of itself is not the item under scrutiny. Rather, critics of the “resilience narrative” are specifically referring to stories in which students feel pressure to appear as if they have overcome harms far beyond their control in order to appeal to a particular audience

In other words, when students write about adversities such as mental illness, financial hardship, or discrimation based on race, gender, or sexuality, they may feel the need to inauthentically present themselves at the end of a triumphant story arc, as having already fully risen above a systemic challenge.

“There’s so many compounding pressures and structures designed to disempower students from lived experience and from the cultural context that they’re in,” says author Joan N. Kane ’00, a faculty member in Harvard’s English Department as well as the Tufts Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora. “It’s exhausting to feel that students have to have a sense of upward mobility in their narratives.”

For the past few semesters, Kane has taught a creative writing workshop called “Before and Beyond the (Imaginary White) Reader” to help Harvard students think about the relationship between themselves and their audience.

She characterizes the pressure to present as having conquered structural inequalities as “an act of encouraging one’s self-erasure.” According to her, the expectation to do so comes both from a long American literary tradition — the pull-yourself-upby-your-bootstraps hero genre — as well as a more recent trend in publication, the marketability of a success story.

Beyond the world of books and publishing, sociologists have contributed to this discourse. Central to the resilience narrative is confidence in meritocracy that does not account for systemic harms. Even more important is the idea that resilience is a personal trait, rather than a response based on the community resources a person has available to help them bounce back.

“People don’t learn to think of themselves as part of a web of resources that are provided very unequally to people,” explains Professor Michèle Lamont, who teaches in Harvard’s Sociology and African and African American Studies departments and researches social change, inequality, and mechanisms of identity. “These factors coming together teach

students to maximize what they think of as their resiliency: their ability to really focus and be hyperperformative, which disconnects them from others, and asserting control becomes really central to their lives.”

This teaching of hyperperformativity often begins young. “Students get socialized from a very early age to be able to apply to these schools, either by their parents or by their mentors,” Lamont says. “[They] know that if they want to get in, they have to develop very early on the type of experiences or attributes that will be valued by the university.”

But beyond the impact that this pressure to perform has on individual students, resiliency stories also affect the general cultural attitude toward elite institutions.

“This narrative of overcoming is especially dangerous because it’s used to justify certain institutions having all of this power,” Nietfeld says. “It’s used to justify being in such an unequal world.” She argues that iconizing Ivy League grit stories implies that upward mobility is equally accessible to all those who are hardworking and that institutions like Harvard are solving issues of structural inequality, rather than perpetuating them. The reality is that the majority of students who enter the gates of Harvard come from privileged backgrounds, and most people, regardless of merit or resilience, will never attend this institution or benefit from the advantages it offers.

When it comes to the students who have already gotten into Harvard, though, Kane hopes they can learn to resist the expectation to write resilience narratives; her

workshop focuses on liberating students from the internal authorial voices that confine them.

“I find that people really start writing when they stop doing a kind of explanation and building a world for a white reader to inhabit,” she says. “It’s not just a question of craft, but it’s a question of proximity to one’s audience. As a writer, you’re constantly working with these modulations of power dynamics with your own voice and your work.”

For Nietfeld, this type of ongoing process has undergirded the writing of her memoir, which aims in part to set straight the incomplete narrative she put forth in her college essay.

“I felt that the experience of having to take my life story and twist it into this narrative that would be considered acceptable [to colleges] was so dehumanizing that it left me wondering who I was,” she said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette last month. “After I graduated from Harvard and was working at Google, I couldn’t stop thinking about both the things that happened in high school and the experience of packaging them. I started writing this book as an attempt to understand those really complicated years.”

Inspired by Nietfeld, writers from across The Harvard Crimson have been reflecting on their own college admissions journeys. In this series of introspections, they’re turning back to their Common Application essays and revealing the details that they concealed, exaggerated, or oversimplified in the pursuit of a tidy character arc. They discuss the pressures they experienced, the doubts they encountered, and

the parts of themselves they left behind the first time around — with the hopes of telling a more complicated, more complete, and more authentic story.

A Manufactured Metamorphosis

BY MARIAH M. NORMAN

“Spongebob Squarepants. Season Two, Episode

Twenty-Five: Wormy.”

That was the first line in the essay I used to apply to every college on my list. What followed was an uplifting tale of discovery, self-assuredness and triumph over the racism I endured at my high school, told through an adorable anecdote about overcoming a fear of butterflies (that I never actually had). The girl who wrote it was scared, lost, and confused. I’d like to use this essay as my chance to tell the truth.

I grew up in a predominantly white, conservative suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. My public high school was well-resourced and the largest in the state, with almost 3,500 students — but only 4 percent of them were Black. During my freshman year of high school, a Snapchat video of a white boy spewing racial slurs to a Black classmate went viral in my town. During my sophomore year, I overheard my teammate on the track team tell her friends that Black people were only good at the sport because they had so much practice running from the cops.

During my junior year, I began working on creating an Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for my school district. At 16 years old, I found myself bustling from

panel to panel, speaking with teachers across the state about “inclusive excellence,” the “power of diversity,” and every other buzzword and catchy phrase I could think of. I wrote letters, formed teams, and taught an “antibias” curriculum to hundreds of people. In the beginning, I couldn’t be more proud of the work I was doing.

By senior year, after I’d discovered more radical ideas through Black visionaries like

minimum, but I was preaching like it’d be the final step. Diversity alone is not, and never will be, justice. But I was in too deep with this persona I’d created. One step out of line, one bold idea not palatable for white audiences, and it could all be taken away. Quite frankly, I didn’t care about being my district’s poster child anymore. But now there were younger Black girls looking up to me, a whole community — small but mighty — expecting me to represent

better for some other Black girl. I told myself that the loneliness, the pain, the inner turmoil — it’d all be worth it for her.

When it came time to write my college application essays, I knew what admissions officers did and did not want to hear about. They did not want to hear about the time you sprained your knee before a big soccer game. They did want to hear about the death of a loved one — but only if it was sudden, tragic, and character-

Designs by Meimei Xu.

from the suburbs.

But when I stopped to think about it, I realized just how much the very essence of a college essay compels your barely 18-yearold self to wrap up one of your deepest struggles into a neat bow and serve it on a platter to a panel of judgemental strangers. It asks you to recall a time you overcame something, but not to focus too much on that “something.” It forces you to lie in order to tie up loose ends that are still fraying years later.

For me, it meant spinning a time that ripped me from my true self into a bold declaration of growth and self-discovery. I reduced an entire lifetime of grappling with

I realized pretty quickly that Harvard actually needs us much more than we need it. Specifically, Harvard needs me. But not in the way I felt a sense of responsibility for the young Black girls in my community. Someone else can be the first or only one to look like me in various places on campus — I am perfectly content being the second, fifth, tenth, or preferably hundredth.

You won’t see me speaking about whatever “inclusive excellence” is ever again. In fact, Harvard needs me precisely because I refuse to do so. With the time, energy, and self-assuredness I’ve gained by protecting myself from any more exploitative emotional labor, I am

one of my many new forms. And I’m not really in a rush to get there.

Taking the Bait

BY ANDY Z. WANG

In my senior year of high school, the Common Application demanded that I craft an elevator pitch to sell my future. What values do you stand for? What will you bring to our school? Why should we take you and not the 40,000 other people applying here? At the time, I had no conscious reason behind anything I did; my motivations were often secrets even to myself.

so I began repeating the same racist jokes in order to fit in. Once I entered high school, I embarked on a journey of selfdiscovery and found out I could be popular by not only refusing to reinforce Asian stereotypes but by participating in extracurriculars that deliberately subverted them — such as the notoriously cool activity of debate. I concluded that I could do whatever I wanted in life, without my ethnicity defining me, and all was well.

Re-reading it five years later, I cringe. ***

My “Asian-ness” wasn’t really a concept that I was aware of until my middle school years, when classmates asked me if I could see with my eyes “barely open.” Suddenly, my entire identity was devalued into a single punchline.

I literally cannot remember this happening. I’ve certainly experienced my fair share of microaggressions over the years, but there was no singular moment of reckoning when I realized that I was not, as I had assumed for my entire life, white. My essay tutors had told me to “show and not tell,” because simply making reference to my feelings of notbelonging meant that they could be disputed. I was also advised to “amplify the stakes” — to supplant everyday, incremental change with dramatic, transformative moments. Hence my epiphany.

I very much made it clear that I was a “cool Asian” who made fun of his own heritage. I cracked jokes that I knew would receive laughter: my natural ease at math, my dexterity with chopsticks, and my affinity for computers.

As I crafted my essay, I was acutely aware that many other

Asian American students would be applying to similarly selective universities. I felt that I had to differentiate myself by sharing my journey of growing comfortable with my identity through my use of humor, which I saw as a unique angle. Looking back, I have no idea why I chose these examples to demonstrate my forced attempt to assimilate. They obscure the more subtle ways in which I tried to alter my identity — my trying to rid myself of my spiky hair, the undercurrents of tension with my parents, and my tendency to gravitate toward the popular white kids.

Finally, I didn’t feel the need to make lowbrow jokes about my identity anymore and decided to put my comedic rhetorical skills to better use by exploring the art of public speaking. The transition wasn’t difficult at all.

While the limitations of a college essay allow for dramatic segues, the transition was, in reality, not that dramatic — but it was incredibly difficult. I struggled for years to convince myself that my opinions were worth verbalizing and that public speaking was worth my time. To this day, I’m still unlearning previously harmful behaviors and gaining a deeper understanding of my identity.

Instead of being uncomfortable with my identity as an AsianAmerican, I quickly realized that my other talents and aspirations could define me more than the color of my skin.

I hate that my essay somehow concluded with “yay, colorblindness!” Although my mentors throughout high school told me that their identity was inseparable from how others

viewed them, my essay ignored this central tenet of their advice. The interests that I’d thought were subverting stereotypes actually came from my internalized racism; that is, I felt that I had to do the most “un-Asian” things to be comfortable in my own skin — and appeal to admissions officers. ***

I’ve never shown this essay to my immigrant parents.

I was determined to keep it a secret from them, perhaps out of fear of criticism, perhaps because I suspected they would post it all over WeChat. But five years later, I now know the primary reason why I hid it: shame. In an attempt to raise the stakes of my essay, I portrayed my struggles with identity — although real — as an all-encompassing aspect of my personhood. Similarly, the essay’s neat and satisfactory resolution demonstrated my growth to the fullest extent possible but hid the questions of belonging I continued to deal with on a daily basis. Reality lies somewhere between the poles of intense conflict and peaceful denouement. ***

Early last fall, I made the decision to request a copy of my admissions file. Among the curt shorthand markings and numerical ratings, one comment stood out to me: my personal essay was thoughtful, and above all, honest.

On some level, I was proud that my essay had fulfilled its original intent: someone whose job it was to debunk nonsensical narratives had allowed my story to filter through. I had been marked as “honest.” But this comment has grown ever more unsettling to me in the year since.

College admissions for selective institutions have no longer become a competition of test grades or grade point averages, but a race to the bottom to demonstrate prodigious authenticity.

Candidates must argue that their lived experiences are unique. For students of marginalized backgrounds, the college admissions essay poses racial equity as a possible individual accomplishment to write about. The questions to answer become: What did you learn from your oppression, and how has that built character? Can you write about it eloquently?

The system that was initially designed to allow college applicants who have been historically overlooked to share their experiences has become a system that rewards selfmarketing and hyperbole. And in my own quest to craft an honest narrative that would buy me admission, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker.

Revelations in Rebuilding

BY KATE S. GRIEM

In August 2020, the end of the summer before my senior year, I laid sprawled out on my bed next to an empty pint of ice cream, filling out a college survey for my counseling office. Most questions were routine — simply asking about my classes, leadership positions, awards. But the final one gave me pause. If you would like to share, please let us know how you have been impacted by the events of this spring and summer.

By that point, I didn’t have

much energy left for filters. I embarked on a 600-word rant, replete with profanity, explaining how most every aspect of my identity had been gutted — some perfect storm of Covid, my parents’ divorce, moving twice to two new apartments, Zoom school flattening my life to two dimensions, floods of disillusionment about academia and politics, and a new and puzzling struggle to get out of bed in the morning.

My counselor’s response, an interruption of my panic-ramble a few weeks later about how I’d never find a topic for my Common App essay? “Kate. Stop. Your answer to the last question on the survey — that was it.”

I was shocked, and more than a little intrigued. What I’d intended as an outpouring of vulnerability, she’d seen as an ability to overcome adversity. I turned the rant into an essay about having my family and identity upended and finding solace in volunteer work at a food pantry. I closed with my revelation that “the most beautiful parts of my life will be contained in rebuilding” and submitted the essay to Harvard.

It has since become clear that my survey response wasn’t me trying to draft my college essay; it was a cry for help. If I’d told Harvard the full story, my essay might have ended something like this: I have taken to lying on my back on the kitchen floor at 2 a.m. I habitually sit on the floor of the

shower to figure out if or how water mixes with air. I feel like the world is falling apart around me. Thank you for your consideration.

I was dealing with two serious

and purpose. My essay became the place where I could wrangle all that mess into a compelling figure: the girl who did everything. She was a biracial three-season athlete with perfect grades who ran the newspaper and got elected class president and wanted to save the world, and to top it all off her parents

were getting divorced and moving during a pandemic and damn it, she wasn’t falling apart, she was having revelations. She wasn’t not me, but she wasn’t quite me either.

My acceptance letter seemed

advocacy, and journalism groups on campus. Which left only a few small problems. I was having hours of near-unmanageable chest pain every day; I’d end nights out with friends entirely dissociated, obsessed with how dust flakes patterned themselves on the nearest wall; and the air around my skin seemed to hold as much resistance as water.

I knew, on some level, that I wasn’t okay. But I was terrified of what might happen if I stopped walking down the path I’d laid out in my essay: its tidy ending would fall apart, and it would become abundantly clear that I didn’t know shit about rebuilding. Would Harvard recognize me without that narrative? Would I?

okay, that I needed help — to start rebuilding for real.

What rebuilding really looks like, most of the time, is the colorcoded pill box by my bed and the printout of anxiety strategies in the drawer beneath it. It looks boring and self-centered and unproductive. It’s not something that would impress an admissions officer — or my 17-year-old self. It is simply what I need to do to survive.

But it has, indeed, been beautiful at other times: the sheer awe at the whisper of world-wind I feel in my chest while reading Rousseau, or the crisscross pattern I make dripping balsamic glaze over a salad, or the warm rain pouring down my neck when I bike back to my dorm late at night.

for my first week. It was probably the universe trying to send me a sign (YOU! YES, YOU!! YOU ARE NOT OKAY!), but I was too concussed to hear her anyway.

Besides, I had a mission to accomplish: gather a blueprint of high school Kate and implant it onto Harvard. I excelled in upperlevel classes, rationed my time meticulously between service,

In February 2022, my chest pain reached a crisis point. By pure serendipity, I found a psychiatrist within walking distance of my dorm. Our first session was two hours long; by the end, she’d diagnosed me with major depression and generalized anxiety disorder and called in my first round of medication to CVS. I don’t remember ever feeling so transparent or raw or fragile — or so cared for. It was as though she’d touched my shoulder and it’s okay. I see how hard you’ve been trying, but I also see that it’s not working anymore. Just sit for a while. Rest. What’s the worst that could happen? ***

The moment I started to get better was also the moment I let go of the identity I thought legitimized my place here. It took acknowledging that all my so-called revelatory rebuilding had been part of my mess — admitting that I actually wasn’t

I think I might be rebuilding for a while.

Personal Statement

BY MEIMEI XU

In the fall of my senior year of high school, I visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice — a memorial for those who died from racial terror lynchings in the United States. There, I interviewed nearly a dozen visitors for my senior independent study on the remembrance of lynching, an offshoot of a research assistant project I started in sophomore year.

Walking deeper and deeper into the belly of the memorial, underneath the hundreds of hanging steel beams representing each county where lynchings had been documented, I felt a heaviness in my chest. It felt sacred. Visitors described coming to the 18

was a gross mischaracterization of who I was.

Writing about my research seemed like the best solution to these problems. As I completed the rest of my application, my father often told me that this essay topic would distinguish me from other Asian applicants. I now know for certain that it did; in my admissions file, both readers made note of my project.

But it wasn’t just an essay topic. The history was horrifying to research, and the photos documenting it were horrifying to see. The ramifications of lynching still live with us today. Though the

memorial represents a step toward public reckoning, this history of racial violence is the foundation of our current justice system.

Inside the Common App, however, all of that was condensed into the tiny story of me and my one-day trip to this memorial. In running from my own turmoil, sometimes I feel I co-opted the historical trauma of another group of people for the sake of a college application. I didn’t do the work of funding, creating, and protecting such a memorial in the deep South; the legacies of this history were not mine to adopt. Yet, at the time, these were my genuine academic interests. I don’t know if I could have written about something else, nor do I know in retrospect how I could have revised the piece. It made me deeply uncomfortable to center myself in this history, yet the college essay practically required

how the various states and homes I’ve lived in have impacted me. In addition to writing about moving forward, I did end up writing about looking back. And as I look back on that essay now, I look into a past farther in time than just my childhood — a past larger than just myself.

Histories are complicated, and especially at a place like Harvard, they are not spotless. Harvard’s role in colonialism ranges from direct colonization in Southeast Asia — where Harvard administrators and affiliates helped establish a colonial education system based on imperialism — to indirect colonialism through scholarship, like Louis Agassiz’s work into polygenism that aimed to separate, segregate, and rank different races, which furthered colonialist rationale.

My admission to Harvard follows painful histories like these — histories that directly impacted

down, impacted my ancestors and extended family in ways that may have eventually contributed to my parents’ immigrating to America. The opportunities stripped from a homeland once so full of promise, the desire to achieve the American Dream as it was packaged and advertised around the world — these are likely a large part of why I am here in America, here at Harvard.

Prior to receiving my acceptance letter, I wasn’t aware of these complicated histories. After all, it’s not like they’re front and center on the admissions brochures. But after coming to Harvard, I took classes on colonialism and its legacy that forced me to reorient myself in the larger cacophony of time, space, and history. However, the irony is not lost on me: I’m learning about colonial histories at an institution that contributed to it.

I must now contend with

eating disorders. Others wrote about feeling ostracized because of their ethnicity or sexuality. One wrote about almost becoming a parapalegic, and another wrote about the death of his father, which had only occurred a few weeks before. It was a sudden, shocking death, which he seemed to sublimate far better (or, depending on your perspective, more poorly) than I could have; when I asked him how he was, he told me that at least now he had something to write about for college. The basic strategy, I learned, was to highlight the worst parts of your life to distract admissions officers from the reality that, on the whole, you are very privileged.

I wrote about being mixedrace. This takes up very little of my mental energy today; I eventually realized that in the United States, there is hardly any practical difference between being half-black or fully black. It was more important to me then. I wrote about my hair, which I’d straightened for years out of a combination of ignorance and race-shame but had recently decided to let revert to its natural state. The basic arc of the essay was thus: I once hated myself, or was made to hate myself, because of my racial identity. I felt out of place. Wearing my hair curly was symbolic of my personal growth; I had overcome that self-hatred. I’ve been trying to figure out why I landed on this topic. I vaguely remember starting multiple different essays; I think I tried to write about my love of outer space, and maybe about my relationship to the outdoors. Though I did think a lot about race at the time, it didn’t really

consume me, and I didn’t feel that my race had significantly impacted my own life. This topic was among the more dramatic ones I could have chosen, even if I wasn’t sure it reflected my own thoughts and feelings, which was perhaps the point. I wanted to appeal to admissions officers in the way that my classmates were — by writing about our trauma — without really exposing myself.

Essentially, I understood on some level that the level of meaning in this particular essay topic would appear greater to the white people who read it than it would to me. By that point in my life, I’d already observed how the white people I knew had reacted to “The Help,” a book I found trite, or “Precious,” a movie I found grotesque. A desire to understand racism, I knew (but probably couldn’t have verbalized at the time), masked a powerful appetite for entertainment derived from suffering. This is an old impulse, of course. It is always betrayed by its affinity for made-up scenarios which have nothing to do with the reality of black America.

Looking back at the actual essay, none of the content was particularly outrageous — my instinct, which I think I was right about, was really about how it would be interpreted. I wrote about two girls in my year — one black, one white — having an argument about what my race was. I wrote about a crossing guard in my town who told my (white) grandfather that my parents shouldn’t be together. Everything that I wrote was true, and it did impact my self-esteem. I genuinely did come to the moment of self-acceptance I wrote about. What I didn’t say, and what white

admissions officers and guidance counselors seemed to miss, was that choosing to write about racism in my Common App essay didn’t mean that the experience of racism had defined my entire life.

I am a very privileged person, but oddly enough, this essay seemed to conceal that fact from others. I showed it to my guidance counselor and she cried. I sat across from her, a little uncomfortable, trying to figure out what exactly about what I’d written was so sad. “It’s so horrible,” she said, fighting back tears, “that people like you have to go through this.”

A few weeks later, I was talking to an admissions official at an elite liberal arts college, which had specifically invited me to apply for a merit scholarship intended to increase racial diversity in STEM. He was asking me questions which, I realized in retrospect, were going to go in my admissions file. “Do you think you’ve overcome anything particularly significant?”

think, was a willingness to believe that my life had been particularly hard because of my race. This is a trap I probably could have fallen into — my classmates who were writing about unfortunate things certainly seemed to accept, at least for the duration of admissions season, their own victimhood — if I didn’t actually know people whose lives had genuinely been hard. A large part of my family were sharecroppers into the 1970s. Some of my relatives have been lynched; others have been shot. Of course, bad things have happened to me. It’s just that being born black was not one of them. I probably shouldn’t complain too much; I got into Harvard. It’s possible, too, that my interpretation of the reactions to my essay is too cynical, that it underestimates the ability of those reading my essay to understand race (though I somewhat doubt this). Perhaps more disturbingly, it’s also true that I was also at

telling about some habits that I maintain to this day. I wasn’t a writer then, but I am now. Some writers write about themselves; others deliberately avoid it. I am one of the former. I write constantly, almost obsessively, about myself, usually about myself at my worst moments. When something bad happens to me, my first thought is, shit. My second thought is, this will make a great story. Call it a commitment to verité. Except, actually, maybe it’s not — everything I write, though literally true, is filtered and manipulated based on the ends I’d like it to serve. I might trauma plot, but I never trauma dump. I have mixed feelings about this crafted adherence to reality. To be black and write about your race is always to risk exploiting yourself. But if you’re not truly writing about yourself, do you gain some power back? I don’t really know. A few months ago, my mother called me up and asked me to

Indigenous Language Reclamation Efforts Expand at Harvard

This summer, Amy E. Chalán Vacacela ’24 opened the course catalog and clicked straight to the Ethnicity, Migration, Rights offerings. When EMR 151: “Quechua, Indigenous language revitalization and Global Indigeneity” popped up, she recalls, “It was so perfect.”

Chalán is Kichwa from the Saraguro tribe in Ecuador. She is one of nearly 10 million people around the world who speak a dialect of Quechua, the Indigenous language group of the Andes Mountains in South America. Diasporic Quechua-speaking communities like Chalán’s in New York are growing rapidly across the United States. Though Quechua is not as critically endangered as other Indigenous languages, its native speaker base has declined, in part because many associate the language — once spoken in the Inca Empire — with the past.

Professor Américo Mendoza-Mori, a Peruvian scholar of Indigenous language and culture, designed EMR 151 to address that misconception. The course studies contemporary Indigenous issues, from climate change and sovereignty to the complexities of Indigenous identity and its intersections with Latinidad. Although students only learn elementary Quechua, the course examines language as a tool to access Indigenous cultures, traditions of knowledge, and expressions of self.

“The incorporation of philosophies and definitions in Indigenous languages into academia or into global conversations can help make more visible [Indigenous] contributions or those perspectives,”

Mendoza-Mori says.

For example, EMR 151 recently discussed the Quechua term sumak kawsay. “It has been a philosophical term to propose, let’s say, harmony with the environment through collaboration,” Mendoza-Mori says. “In the contemporary world, that perspective helps us reflect on, for example, other traditions that put more emphasis on the individual.”

To enrich the study of these terms and epistemologies, Mendoza-Mori invited Quechua guest speakers, including Nely Huayta, a Quechua linguist; Soledad Secca, a TikTok creator; and Diego Tituaña, a Kichwa diplomat who formerly represented Ecuador in the United Nations. Contrary to the course’s title, which suggests Quechua’s decline, these guests serve as testimony to the current vitality of the global Quechua community.

By incorporating diverse Quechua voices into the course, Mendoza-Mori is also addressing a controversy around the use of the term “revitalization” to describe Indigenous language studies.

Revitalization “has been the scholarly term to refer to initiatives that are trying to make sure that endangered languages don’t die, or that they actually expand,” he says. But from the beginning of the course, Mendoza-Mori and his students have discussed why the term may not accurately portray this class.

“I chose this name because that’s what people might associate with these processes — they go to the term ‘language revitalization,’” Mendoza-Mori

Jade Lozada

says. “At the same time, what do we do with that term in the case of Quechua? Quechua has 10 million speakers. The language is already alive.”

Not only does the idea of “language revitalization” often misrepresent the state of Indigenous languages, it misplaces the responsibility of teaching them in the hands of universities, according to professor Davíd Carrasco.

“The only people who can ‘revitalize’ a language would be the native language speakers themselves, who know the language in its depths and length,” Carrasco, a historian at the Divinity School and director of the Moses Mesoamerican Archive and Research Project, wrote in an email. “Harvard is not going to ‘revitalize’ indigenous languages but rather study, learn, and

perhaps provide some resources to study and learn.”

According to MendozaMori, scholars of Indigenous languages are pushing to use the term “language reclamation” instead. “Language reclamation acknowledges that this process is more of a larger effort by a community to claim its right to speak a language and to set associated goals in response to its community’s needs,” he says.

Rebecca Mendoza Nunziato, an Xicana graduate student at the Divinity School, has herself worked to incorporate Indigenous language into academic spaces under Carrasco’s guidance. In 2021, she co-founded the Mesoamerican Cultural Table to study Nahuatl, a Uto-Aztecan Mexican Indigenous language, with other Indigenous students and interested community

members.

But language study is only a step toward acknowledging the colonial legacy that has kept Indigenous studies from its rightful place in academia, says Mendoza-Mori; once established at universities, the curricula must empower Indigenous communities in “more concrete terms” of “liberation.”

Mendoza Nunziato is looking to expand the Mesoamerican Cultural Table, a shift she says requires reframing ideas of knowledge, self, and community from Western to Indigenous knowledge systems.

“By learning not only grammar, but even individual words or phrases, we gained access to a completely different way of being and becoming,” Mendoza Nunziato says. The members of the Mesoamerican Cultural Table

Students in Professor Mendoza-Mori’s EMR 148 class last spring pose for a picture. Photo courtesy of Américo Mendoza-Mori.

also learn through ceremony, art, and food. ”

To Mendoza Nunziato, classrooms like Mendoza-Mori’s put learning into practice. She visited one of his classes as a guest speaker, and recalls, “it felt like home.”

“Those spaces don’t happen on accident,” she says. “The University can continue to invest in that because the student body is changing, and the things we want to learn and how we want to learn them [are] changing.”

When Chalán first arrived at Harvard as a freshman, she took math and science classes toward a degree in biomedical engineering but quickly realized that her passion lay in ethnic studies.

She now studies Indigeneity as a Social Studies concentrator.

Although Mendoza-Mori’s course will not count toward her concentration, she still describes it as “another step of this really impactful journey.”

“It’s just been able to really inform my sense of self and affirm that I am Indigenous, and I’ve not always felt that way,” she says. “It’s not always been easy to feel proud of being Indigenous.”

But expanded course offerings are only the beginning of building inclusivity for Indigenous students at Harvard; according to Chalán, the university must build “a decolonial and safe space” that equally values Indigenous knowledge systems.

Mendoza Nunziato agrees that Indigenous inclusion goes far beyond a syllabus. “We need to have people at the table,” she says, in order to “see beyond the scarcity that we’re taught to experience as marginalized people.”

Ultimately, Mendoza-Mori views these efforts to expand Indigenous language and cultural studies as an opportunity to shift power from Western spaces in American higher education.

“Institutions are accepting more diverse student bodies because the population is changing,” he says. “But at the same time, institutions should let themselves be transformed by that.”

Professor Américo Mendoza-Mori, a Peruvian scholar of Indigenous language and culture, teaches EMR 151: “Quechua, Indigenous language revitalization and Global Indigeneity.” Photo courtesy of Américo Mendoza-Mori.

To Be A Frayed Knot of Victory

Jem K. Williams

James Hamlet Bolt Easton, class of 1883, had been a shoe-in for anchor four years in a row. There had been other anchors before him, and there would be anchors after him, but by 1887, Easton — known to be physically imposing even among athletes — had proved his reputation as a straight pipeline to victory for Harvard’s collegiate tug-of-war team.

Though tug-of-war is reserved for summer camps or family reunions today, it used to be a fiercely competitive sport, played at the collegiate and even Olympic levels. An 1887 Crimson article traces its history from its origin with sailors and navy men to its former place in the world of collegiate athletics, referring to the sport as “the most eagerly awaited event on the programme of a college athletic meeting.”

At the time, Harvard’s tug-of-war team was known as “the champion team among colleges,” according to an 1887 article in MIT’s newspaper, and had gone undefeated except for “one blot on their

scutcheon.” On an unsuspecting day in March, the Harvard team’s undefeated record — and Easton’s ego — took a hit from an unlikely challenger: MIT’s ragtag tug-of-war team.

Easton, a law school student — not an unheard of addition to college athletics at the time — was credited with much of the Harvard team’s success during his 1883 to 1887 stint. Hailing from Minnesota, Easton was a Renaissance man of an athlete, lending his skill to the first Harvard lacrosse team and the second Harvard football team. But what he would become most known for was his role as tug-of-war anchor.

In tug-of-war, the anchor stands last in line and secures the rope. The term has also been utilized in other athletic contexts to indicate the fastest or strongest person on a team. According to an 1887 Crimson article, many strategic maneuvers used to gain an advantage in tug-of-war relied on the competence and action of the anchor.

Based on surviving records from Harvard’s archives, the fanaticism associated with the sport’s

In the late 19th century, Harvard’s collegiate tug-of-war team was one of the best in the country. Photo courtesy of Harvard University Archives.

brief success seemed to have been foregrounded by Easton’s contribution. A December 1886 article reprinted from the Boston Herald described a match in New York in which “the Harvards were lying at ease on the plank, Easton alone keeping his hands on the rope.”

By contrast, the team from MIT that Harvard faced in March of 1887 had none of their prestige. Consisting of only four members and 10 pounds underweight, they had assembled at the last minute and entered the competition with only three hours of total practice and training. And they were gearing up to face a team made up of members with recent memories of victories at Mott Haven, the highly spectated New York intercollegiate competition that took place each year.

Perhaps Easton’s cleats failed, perhaps the Harvard team tried some trick maneuver out of

arrogance that cost them the rope, or perhaps they weren’t as good a team as their fans on the Crimson thought they were. It’s not clear what happened in that match, but MIT managed to pull the rope two and half inches to their favor.

In the March 17 edition of its newspaper, an MIT reporter upheld the victory as “the greatest athletic feat which the Institute has ever accomplished.”

The Crimson’s article, published a few days later, took a more matter-of-fact tone: “We sent in four of our strongest men to pull against Technology, and we were fairly beaten.”

Still, the defeat caused contention among sports spectators. The article also makes reference to another previously published opinion, which the March 24 one referred to as “both extremely infantile in his arguments and ungenerous to ward [sic] the ‘Tech’ team.”

It’s not clear whether the Harvard team suffered any personal or public loss of reputation, but by January 1889, only 11 out of 300 freshmen tried out for the team. By 1891, Harvard and many other colleges had ended their tug-of-war teams altogether, presumably due to prolific injuries, contentious results, or an unsustainable smorgasbord of options for athletic participation.

As for Easton, who graduated after the 1887 season, he had driven himself to the point of near death with overwork throughout the course of his college athletic career. After college, his interests shifted as he embraced music, then race horse breeding, and eventually moved south seeking the solace of a different pace, growing citrus and sugar cane in Florida. There he died in 1921, at the age of 62, just a year after the Olympics officially removed tugof-war from its roster.

LEVITY

vHarrison R. T. Ward

Following last year’s controversy, when three Porcellian Club punches were cut for posting their BeReals from inside the club, 14 of this year’s punches are attempting to unionize. Their demands include greater transparency on the punch calendar, improved communication on why punches get cut, and a stipend of $1,400 per month for dry cleaning.

Lead organizer Chase D. Winklevoss ’25 said, “You know, we see all these labor movements on TikTok, and we say to ourselves, we are being exploited just like them. I didn’t spend six years at Groton to do my own dry cleaning.”

His view is shared by many of his fellow PC punches, including Chad D. Winklevoss ’25. “When it comes down to it, we just aren’t willing to be exploited anymore,” he said. “That’s something we do to other people, and my father taught us never to let people treat us the way we treat them.”

The punches’ demands have largely been unacknowledged by the PC’s punch masters. In a statement to The Crimson, James D. Farley IV ’24 and Jack E. Whitehead VI ’23 wrote, “We both come from a long line of union-busting, and we will be

damned if we besmirch our families’ names by letting some sophomores engage in collective bargaining. These kids don’t know the first thing about ‘worker power’ because most of them have never worked a day in their lives. It’s not like they are going to form a picket line.”

Ultimately, the fate of the unionization effort rests with the other 60 PC punches, a famously anti-labor crowd. One punch, who spoke under the condition of anonymity, said, “On the one hand, I am tired of paying for my own dry cleaning. On the other hand, I am morally and philosophically opposed to any structure that would prevent exploitation, so I am really on the fence here.”

In an effort to sell the idea of a union to their fellow punches, Winklevoss added, “We have spoken with our lawyers, and we were sure to stipulate that the union would dissolve at the end of the calendar year — ensuring next year’s class won’t enjoy the same privileges. We would hate not to be able to screw next year’s kids the same way they’re screwing us.”

The results of the union vote are expected by the end of the month.

Photo by Lu Shao.

New AESTHETICS

PETER L. LASKIN

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