Harvard, 25 years later.

John Kim
5 min readOct 25, 2020

The 25th year reunion is one of those milestone events for each graduating class at Harvard College. Those who graduated a few years ahead of me rave about their time at their 25th. I guess by the time people hit their late-40s, they’ve learned to relax and are less inclined to play games of one-upmanship that make Harvard people so insufferable to the rest of the world. The term/virtue “non-anxious presence” gets a lot of airtime these days, and 02138 is the exact opposite of this.

Our reunion was canceled because of CV-19, but I still took several trips down memory lane this past summer and revisited those formative years with the benefit of hindsight. In fact, I’m writing this a few short blocks from my freshman year dorm room. While the city of Cambridge (like everywhere) has undergone mass gentrification, there are enough familiar landmarks to inspire nostalgia.

My years in Cambridge, MA during the 1990s could be accurately described as the “time of my life”. At the same time, my relationship with my alma mater and higher education overall has become increasingly complicated. On the one hand, it surely played a nontrivial role in my professional life as countless doors were and continue to be open due to educational pedigree. To be anything other than grateful would be foolish. Even more importantly, the seeds of my life in the Kingdom of God were sown during these years thanks to the faithful witness of key people and organizations like Intervarsity Christian Fellowship. There was no signature moment or act that I can recall several decades later - nothing that would have been captured on Instagram if it existed back then. It was the consistent and steady demonstration of Kingdom values by a “peculiar people” in contradistinction to worldly norms that got my attention. I understand that makes for a good Intervarsity marketing pitch, but it also happens to be true.

It is precisely because my primary allegiance is to the ways of God that the ways of Harvard and other elite institutions give me pause. The KoG invites everyone to the banquet table, and specifically instructs those with worldly gifts to ultimately use them on behalf of the least of these. While elite institutions pay lip service to such ideals in their copy, their actions appear to go precisely in the opposite direction. From where I sit, the primary objective of elite universities is to continue to be elite and accrue all the benefits therein. In particular, Harvard’s grip on our society’s imagination is quite impressive, and it impacts everything from the primary/secondary schools that precede them, to the halls of business and politics that flow from them. Most businesses and industries regularly experience creative destruction, but elite universities possess fortress-like characteristics. Autos disrupted the horse and buggy, Microsoft disrupted IBM, Facebook is disrupting traditional media, and Amazon disrupted everyone- yet dollars continue to flow from Gates and Zuckerbergs of the world to Harvard and from the Bezoses to Princeton. A well-respected public intellectual recently said to me that capital owners sit at the top of today’s power hierarchy, and I disagreed and placed elite institutions and their reputations at the pinnacle. In 100 years, I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of society will forget the name Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg and the companies that bear their image. But we will probably still view the Ivy League as the ultimate passport to the good life, and perhaps this is why each generation of capital owners seeks to immortalize itself by having university buildings and dormitories with their names attached to them.

In a strange sense, it’s not clear who is to blame. It’s not as though there is some centralized, evil cabal working in the shadows that perpetuates these dynamics. Elite universities exemplify the way of the World/Mammon as discussed countless times in the Scriptures. Grabbing and maintaining power remains the primary modus operandi of the Ivy League, and you do not need a Ph.D. in economics to know that a monopolists’ optimal policy is to restrict access to their product. When I arrived at Harvard Yard in the early 1990s, then President Neil Rudenstine spoke of our class being the brightest, most well-rounded, most diverse class ever and that the quality of the applicant pool was so high that they could have filled 10 freshman classes instead of the 1… if only they had the resources to do so. The Harvard endowment back then was around $5 billion. Today, it is more than 8x that at $42 billion, and yet there are still only ~1,600 students in the freshman class. The conclusion from the math is not too challenging- Harvard is not financial resource constrained in any meaningful sense. But the end result of diluting the brand by having a freshman class of 16,000 would be less prestige, which would result in less donations, and then the financial crunch that 95% of higher ed faces today would be at their doorstep. Harvard doesn’t do “deplorables”.

The institutionalized dysfunction notwithstanding, what made those 4 precious years the time of my life is the quality of people who comprise each graduating class. There is something genuinely impressive about all my classmates, and I would say that academic prowess is the key trait less than 10% of the time. I think some of the dissonance that I feel 25 years later is the sense of simpatico with this outstanding group of people with whom we shared something quite special, and yet the institution that is largely responsible for this shared experience has a modus operandi that is completely at odds with the values I hold dear.

Or maybe this isn’t such a strange feeling after all. I recently conversed with a group of American-Born Chinese folk who articulated a similar sentiment- they feel a tremendous sense of affection and identification with the > 1 billion people of China and yet refer to the actions of the Communist Party of China (CCP) as pure evil. Or perhaps closer to home, I find our two options for POTUS and the systems behind them equally reprehensible, and yet it seems quite easy to find a lot of common ground and affection for my neighbors regardless of who they vote for. I suspect the closer that one gets to the administrative center of a place like Harvard, or an institution like the CCP, or the GOP/Democratic Party, that’s where the trouble resides. For the rest of us, there’s a plausible deniability in understanding our experience for what it is, and we can hold the apparatus that undergirds it at bay.

A good test of where I stand on all this will be in ~10 years when the Little Prince applies to college - will the Ivy League schools be on the docket? Professor James Hunter argued many years ago that Kingdom people must occupy elite spaces with faithful presence, a modern take on the hackneyed Christian line of “being in but not of the world”. From where I sit, most Christians who have followed this advice appear to succumb to the values of Empire, as opposed to behaving like spies and infiltrating from within. It’s easy for me to speak as I do 25 years removed and in the second half of life. How will I internalize all this as a parent of a child that we very much want to fill and subdue the earth? Ask me that question in 10 years.

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John Kim

Formal training: Dismal Science. Vocation: Investor and Pastor. Desire: Kingdom of God