Of everything I have written at the Independent, I am proudest of the longest and shortest pieces. The longest, a history of the Harvard Graduate Student Union, was probably the most “journalistic” piece I ever produced. The most “Indy” piece, though, was just five words, which I came up with during a late-night mid-pandemic brainstorming session with then-Editor-in-Chief Marissa Garcia ’21. They now form the basis of the Independent’s slogan.
We belong to no one.
Then and now, that autonomy is what I love most about the Independent. I arrived late my freshman year, fleeing the restrictive voice of another campus publication, and fell in love with the atmosphere of freedom. Each of us belonged to different social groups, had different passions, and felt differently about what was important for the campus to know. Each week’s paper — we used to publish every week, if you young ’uns can believe it — reflected our diverse and personal loves and hates.
This has remained true to this day. Throughout the pandemic, the return to campus, a dramatic shift in publication format, and an even more dramatic increase in team size, I have watched the Independent maintain its mission of celebrating writers’ individual voices. It is rare that pieces are edited beyond recognition. Even the Grad Board views its job as supporting the current students’ vision for the paper, an impressive attitude when considered in the context of alumni groups’ infamous conservatism across Harvard and beyond.
And yet, I felt uncomfortable with the direction the paper was taking by the beginning of my senior year. It no longer felt like “my” Indy. The shift to web publishing, the slower print schedule, and even the new styles of illustrations all seemed alien. I continued to write and lead comp meetings, but privately I wondered if I was working for the same paper that had welcomed me as a freshman.
The answer, of course, was no. All things change, and this was a new Indy. My mistake, however, had been assuming that “my” Indy had ever existed in the first place, that part of the Indy had ever been mine to command. The Independent does not belong to anyone, and that, I slowly realized, includes me.
Let me be clear. I am not claiming that the Independent as it stands has no problems, or even that it has no problems not shared by the Independent of four years ago. All organizations have problems, and no change is perfect. That said, the problems I had with the Independent had become divorced from the problems that the Independent was actually, from a rational point of view, having. I was making the assumption that just because something was not how I remembered it being, it was a priori worse because of it. I was driven, in short, by arrogant nostalgia.
It took me a while to come to this realization. During the pandemic, I had spearheaded the initiative to revamp the Indy’s web presence. The site was going to be flashy and modern, use the latest open-source technologies, and look more like a newspaper rather than the my-first-blog aesthetic we had going at the time. I was proud of what I had built, and felt at the time that it would be my lasting gift to the Indy.
Not only was I not involved in the redesign that went live this academic year, I was not even told about it. I simply opened up harvardindependent.com one day and saw that it looked completely different than what I was used to. I was peeved for a moment, but that quickly vanished as I realized how much better, in almost every way, the new site was than the old. It looked more elegant. It ran faster. It was more easily navigable. Keeping my old site around would have indisputably made the paper worse.
Sooner or later, web technology will move on, and this site too will be consigned to the dustbin of tech history. Its creator has no greater claim to fame than I. Neither of our sites prove that the Independent belongs to us. Instead, they prove something far greater: that we belong to the Independent. I now look back on my own site not as an immutable monument but as ephemeral work I did to keep a great organization going. I have no other choice – and, honestly, I wouldn’t want one. This way, I get to be part of something genuinely big, rather than constantly trying to inflate my fundamentally small self. I have found, in the Independent, something more worthy of my pride than I. Thought of this way, being part of the Indy staff is a privilege, and even the smallest thing I did is worth looking back on with calm, unstressed joy. I am, finally, truly happy about what I did here.
To my fellow seniors: congratulations on making it through college! I certainly hope that each of you has found something that you feel this way about, be it a team, a club, or simply the great behemoth of the College itself. As long as your triumphs were in its service, then every one of its triumphs is in some way yours. To the Indy alumni whom I knew as a first-year, sophomore, and junior: thank you for doing the work when it was your turn so that I could have the pleasure of doing it when it was mine. And to the staff of the Harvard Independent: I love you all. You are what makes this paper great. I know you will lead it to wonderful things.
(But, if you fuck it up, remember that I was on staff when we signed the lease on the office. I know where to find you.)
Floreat.
Michael Kielstra ’22 (pmkielstra@college.harvard.edu) wrote for the Independent.