Matt Damon is the latest in
the long line of Crimson quitters to make it big.

BY SHOSHANA BERGER
Having been ousted from Carnegie Mellon after my freshman year, I've become a slavering fan of Matt Damon, the Harvard dropout whose "Good Will Hunting" exonerates all smart fuck-ups. In one of the more memorable scenes in the movie, Damon plays an autodidact from the wrong side of the tracks who trounces a sneering Harvard upperclassman by talking circles around his rote academic blather. "You're getting an education for $150,000 that you could be getting for $1.50 in overdue library fees," Hunting snipes (at which point I let out a howl of delight that startled my date).

Much has been made (by both Damon and the press) of the fact that he conceived his script at Harvard, then dropped out to become Hollywood's newest golden boy. Deftly imitating his own art, Damon managed to turn what was at base a hackneyed Dickensian formula into a roman à clef, writing his way right out of Harvard and onto the cover of Vanity Fair. He's the latest proof that it takes smarts to get into Harvard, but it takes genius to drop out.

Until Damon came along, Bill Gates was the Harvard dropout poster boy. "He made an individual choice that seems to have worked out for him," says Joe Wrinn, director of the Harvard news office. When asked how the administration would feel about re-admitting Gates, Wrinn conjectured, "If he wanted to come back, I think they'd talk to him about it. He might someday want to come back and take an art class to get away from it all." Hey, if Sylvester Stallone can paint, there's hope for Bill.

Other famous Harvard Houdinis are: poets Robert Lowell, who left Harvard in 1937, after the literary board of the Advocate rejected him; Robert Frost; Ogden Nash; Wallace Stevens, who left in 1900 because he was more interested in local pawn shops than economics; and entrepreneurs/eccentrics Howard Hughes, Edwin Land (the inventor of Polaroid, who personally holds more than 500 patents) and William Randolph Hearst, who was kicked out after he sent each of his professors a chamber pot with their names emblazoned on the inside (so clever!).

And R. Buckminster Fuller, who in 1912 left during midterms to take a dancer and the entire chorus of her show out to dinner, was readmitted, then dropped out again; writers Eugene O'Neill and William Burroughs; the BBC's very own Alistair Cooke; James B. Connolly, the first American Olympic gold medalist, who left Harvard in a huff in 1896 after being refused permission to leave school to compete; pop stars Gram Parsons, Bonnie Raitt (who, regretfully, was not influenced by classmate Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads), Dean Wareham (lo-fi god of Luna and Galaxie 500) and Pete Seeger, who returned two years ago to receive the Harvard Arts Medal. Seeger apparently charmed the crowd by teasing that he "was tempted to accept on behalf of all Harvard dropouts, " then led them in a rousing, sing-along version of "Where Have all the Flowers Gone?"

The most recent addition to the list is James Murdoch, the sweet-faced scion of Rupert's media empire. Knowing that he'd never make Swing magazine's 1997 list of the most powerful people in America under 30 if he stayed in the Yard, Murdoch promptly pulled out, founded a hip-hop label called Rawkus Entertainment and became a vice president of daddy's company. That he spent any time at Harvard at all is "a sign that our selection process is impeccable," says Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III. Said "selection" process presumably being: white, rich, son of mogul. Admitted!

Unsurprisingly, Epps' smarmy response is the usual party line. When asked why dropouts get so much attention, Harvard magazine managing editor Christopher Reed says it's because "graduates are so ubiquitous." But that doesn't really cut it. The real reason we dote on them is the same reason we still love President Clinton after all of his shenanigans and why Apple's chutzpah-driven "Think Different" campaign works better than any Microsoft pitch ever will. Crimson quitters are part of the great American mythos of rebellion, spiritual heirs to literary dropouts like Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, lighting out for unschooled territory before their creative juices get zapped.

So somebody should tell Matt Damon to stop all this drivel about being "totally unemployable" after dropping out of school. "The only reason we wrote it ["Good Will Hunting"] was to get jobs!" he said in a recent interview with the Crimson, Harvard's student newspaper. "I felt like I had given up college, and all these great experiences, and all my friends that had graduated -- I had missed out on a lot and here I was back at square one, living in L.A." Sniff, pass the tissues. Now that Damon (and "Good Will Hunting" co-writer Ben Affleck) have been nominated for an Academy Award for best original screenplay, let's all pray he'll have the good sense to stand up and be counted among those Harvard students who had the good will to leave.
SALON | March 2, 1998

Shoshana Berger has written for Spin, Wired and the New York Times Magazine.