"In a December interview with the
campus newspaper, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana was given the chance to
offer a word of advice to seniors.
"Don't gratuitously drop the
H-bomb," Khurana said.
The H-bomb, for those unaware of
lingo from the most famous Ivy League school, is the thermonuclear act of
saying aloud that one attends or attended Harvard. The process of explaining to
someone not from Harvard that you went to Harvard is complicated, students at
Harvard will tell you, repeatedly.
For years Ivy Leaguers have been
conspicuously obtuse about where they went to school. But the H-bomb
conversation is at an all-time high.
The odds of admission to Harvard are
at historic lows and the Supreme Court is poised to weigh in this month on
whether Harvard's affirmative-action program is constitutional. The
high-profile trial that preceded the High Court case shed light on Harvard's
opaque selection process, including evidence that children of donors, offspring
of alumni, as well as socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants get special
consideration by the admissions office.
The revelations moved Massachusetts
lawmakers to recently introducean act proposing to tax the endowments of
schools which consider an applicant's legacy status or employ early-decision
admission, which tends to benefit students from well-off families.
The 0.2% surcharge would cost
Harvard about $100 million a year and would fund the state's community
colleges. The bill is set for a committee hearing in the Massachusetts
legislature this month.
It's no surprise that Harvard
officials are grappling with the challenges of marketing their brand.
"The H-bomb phenomenon is
something that Harvard alumni speak about pretty regularly . . . they're always
a little careful how they introduce that credential into a conversation,"
Brian Kenny, chief marketing and communications officer for Harvard Business
School, said on a higher-education marketing podcast last year, in an episode
called in part, "Confronting the 'H-Bomb."
"Because the Harvard brand,
although it's well known and well respected in most circles, it's also viewed
negatively -- people think about it as an elitist brand," he said.
Students are right to weigh their
words carefully before dropping the H-bomb, says Michael Sandel, a Harvard
professor and author of the book "The Tyranny of Merit." "We
have converted universities into sorting machines," he says.
Many, including some at Harvard,
find the conversation cringey. "OK, first off, calm down. You're half as
important as you think you are and twice as obnoxious," a Harvard student
and opinion columnist wrote in the school newspaper in a piece entitled,
"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." (Now graduated,
the student says no one seems to care where he went to school.)
The first mention of the term
"H-bomb" appeared in The Crimson in 1990 when Kenneth Katz, then a
Harvard sophomore, wrote a column lamenting "the conversational
disaster" stemming from the question, "Where do you go to
college?" Katz felt that off-campus, students were seen as smart and
perhaps a bit snooty.
Dr. Katz, now 51 and a Bay Area
dermatologist, says he doesn't think much about having gone to Harvard because
so much time has elapsed since he left, including attending Harvard Medical
School.
"Do you know what they call
that?" he says, referring to students who attended both Harvard College
and Harvard Medical School. "Preparation H. It's the same vein, somewhat
self-deprecating and somewhat self-aggrandizing at the same time."
The term H-bomb is well-mocked
around Harvard's campus.
"If you've lived in Boston or
Cambridge, you're familiar with the phrase 'dropping the H-Bomb,'" noted
the Biglaw Investor newsletter in March 2023. "It's when a Harvard student
lets it slip that he's going to Harvard."
In December, the Crimson included
the H-Bomb in "The (Un) Official Harvard Dictionary."
"Should you say 'a school
outside of Boston' and hope they don't probe further? Or should you drop the
H-bomb?" it asked.
The authors said their survey found
that 77% of students come right out and tell people they attend Harvard when
asked, 16% answer indirectly and some lie altogether and give the name of a
different school. Respondents described reactions including "Hinge date in
Scotland took a picture of my ID to show his friends."
Athena Ye, who grew up in a small
city in Illinois, graduated from Harvard last month.
"I don't want to sound too
haughty. So I'll say it with kind of a down tone instead of going up and
sounding really excited," she says. "I try to say it in a way that
makes it, to me at least, seem less intimidating."
Luke Richey grew up in a town with
1000 residents in rural Virginia and now studies computer science at Harvard.
The politics in his home county are conservative and he worries people will
associate his choice of school with the elitism they dislike.
When he drops the H-Bomb he is
mindful to add that his parents are schoolteachers and his public high school didn't
offer Advanced Placement classes but had several classes in agriculture.
"I'm just trying to paint a
complete picture," he says." [1]
