Harvard dropouts, 40 years later
July 25th, 2010 at 7:20 pm ETI’m coming up on my 25th college reunion, which means that for a quarter of a century, four or six or however many times a year, I’ve been getting Harvard Magazine out of the mailbox, flipping to the class notes in the back, looking for names I recognize in the classes from the eighties, and throwing the magazine in the garbage. Oh, the routine’s changed a little over the years — nowadays, I throw it in the recycle pile — but the substance is the same.
No, no, kidding, kidding! Class notes may be the raison d’etre of an alumni magazine, but I do flip through every issue of Harvard Magazine, and I usually end up looking through some of the features. Unlike your typical alumni-office house organ, HM is editorially independent, and the editorial staff put out a thoughtful product, which reads a little like The Atlantic with a bit less politics and foreign affairs and a bit more science.
This month the editors graced us with something exceptional: “Dropouts,” a feature in which they tracked down three people who dropped out of the class of 1969, at a turbulent time and each for his or her own reasons, and reported on their lives. It’s not entirely surprising that people who had the means and the mojo to make their way to Harvard managed to build thoughtful and interesting lives despite not staying around for the degree — one of the things that struck me when I was there was that it seemed a lot harder to get into the place than to get through it. But it’s still interesting to read about how they did it, each in his or her own way.
As someone who’s had a career path that is in many ways nontraditional, who walks a narrow line between careerism and self-directedness, and who is periodically saddled with doubts originating on both sides of the line — would I benefit, on balance, if I were more conventionally career-oriented? Should I chuck it all and go move to [place of the moment]? — I find stories like these reassuring. These people stepped off the straight-and-narrow, but still wound up okay. They still have the same kinds of doubts that I have — which is part of why the stories are reassuring. They wonder about how things would have been different if they’d made different choices — as I do. And yet they’re content in their uncertainty, knowing that the lives they ended up with are blessed with good fortune and love and self-actualization and other things worth having.
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Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
