And four years at Harvard can certainly nurture an artist as a conservatory-education cannot. It remains true that great writers have often been deeply (if eccentrically) learned, that they have been bilingual or trilingual, or have had a consuming interest in another art (as Whitman loved vocal music, as Michelangelo wrote sonnets). At Harvard, writers and artists will encounter not only the riches of the course catalogue but also numerous others like themselves; such encounters are a prerequisite for the creation of self-confidence in an art. It is no accident that many of our writers have come out of our literary magazine the Advocate, where they found a collective home. We need comparable student homes for the other arts.

　　Once we have our potential philosophers, writers, and composers, how will we prepare them for their passage into the wider society? Our excellent students are intensely recruited by business and finance in the fall of their senior year—sometimes even earlier than that. Humanities organizations (foundations, schools, government bureaus) do not have the resources to fly students around the world, or even around the United States, for interviews, nor do their budgets allow for recruiters and their travel expenses. Perhaps money could be found to pay for recruiting trips in the early fall for representatives of humanities organizations. Perhaps we can find a way to convey to our juniors that there are places to go other than Wall Street, and great satisfaction to be found when they follow their own passions, rather than a passion for a high salary. But if we are to be believed when we inform them of such opportunities, we need, I think, to mute our praise for achievement and leadership at least to the extent that we pronounce equal praise for inner happiness, reflectiveness, and creativity; and we need to make being actively recruited as available to students of the humanities as it now is to others.

With a larger supply of creative and reflective admittees on campus, fellow-students will benefit not only from seeing their style of life and attending their exhibits or plays or readings, but also from their intellectual conversation. America will, in the end, be grateful to us for giving her original philosophers, critics, and artists; and we can let the world see that just as we prize physicians and scientists and lawyers and judges and economists, we also are proud of our future philosophers, novelists, composers, and critics, who, although they must follow a rather lonely and highly individual path, are also indispensable contributors to our nation's history and reputation.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Helen Vendler, Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor

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