Harvard Thinks Big was billed as an “important” event. Its Facebook page was ebullient. Expectations were high. “A dream team of 10 Harvard professors will each talk for 10 minutes about the 1 thing they’re most passionate about…Inspired by TED Talks (Ted.com) and motivated by what makes Harvard great — amazing professors, cutting-edge research, and breakthrough ideas…”
But somehow this doesn’t go far enough. As I walked out of Sanders Theater tonight I thought: Harvard Thinks Big could change this university.
At 8:00pm fourteen hundred students were in line to attend the event. The first speaker, Daniel Gilbert, said that if gay sex was causing global warming “we’d be on the streets in a riot.” Our brains are wired to care about sex and food. (Matthew Kaiser then rejoined, to begin the second presentation, “I’ll just say: gay sex does cause global warming…But only if you do it right.”) At one point, David Malan told us that a phone book four billion pages long could be ripped in half only 32 times. To end the night, Tim McCarthy called America a “protest nation.”
The event was, in every way, exciting and Harvardian. The theater was buzzing and warm. As I sat there I thought (as I often do, but rarely as much as tonight) how lucky I am to go to a school where such an event could happen — could be organized, could be executed, and could be attended, so well.
But at its core the event was subversive. It forced us to confront assumptions we make about the nature of knowledge itself. What makes an idea “big”? Must it compel us, be useful to us, must it matter? Who determines that? The existing practitioners in the discipline or the world? And who should listen? And why? What, Harvard Thinks Big ultimately asks us to grapple with, is the purpose of public discourse in our age and what does Harvard, the university, have to do with it?
Consider the way ideas change and add to other ideas. When Steven Pinker, a psychologist, presented on the decline of world violence over time, one thinks of an earlier presentation, Kaiser’s “Killing the Boy,” on the metaphorical violence embedded in our social notion of boyhood (the boy’s value, he says, derives from his death). Growth Violence. These themes linked to Maria Tartar’s discussion of childrens’ literature, the Little Red Riding Hood, the child seductress, the fallen pray. Red Riding Hood comments, in an ironic way, on Andrew Berry’s discussion of population genetics (growth, seduction, death); and “Killing the Boy” on Glenda Carpio’s declamation on hip hop art (outsiders, violence, boyhood). When Tim McCarthy, the final speaker, called America a nation “obsessed with tomorrows” one thought back to Daniel Gilbert, the first speaker, who explained that our brains are physiologically unable to prepare for our tomorrows.
Violence. Sex. Growth. Hope. These are themes that no one department is equipped to handle alone. Harvard Thinks Big gave us the opportunity to experience knowledge in the round.
More than just a fun night, Harvard Thinks Big was a glimpse at what the university could be — big ideas released from the confines of their disciplines, the biologist’s big ideas mixed with the historian’s, the lit professor’s with the pyschologist’s, theirs with ours, Harvard’s big ideas with the world’s. Louis Menand in his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas, argues that the academy has professionalized the production of knowledge and has turned each discipline into a system dedicated to its own perpetuation, a “self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields.”
Harvard Thinks Big is an indication of what an alternative might be.