Biking is not allowed in Harvard Yard (“Please walk your wheels”), but many students do it anyway. If I walk through the Yard on a typical day, about four cycles or scooters whiz by. I don’t like this, and when I can, I raise my arm and say “Walk your wheels!” Some riders swear at me, most stay silent, almost all keep riding. I’ve never seen anyone else but me ask a rider to stop.

This upsets me more than you can imagine, and more than I can understand — to the point where I may start going around the Yard to avoid these encounters. I am trying to figure out why I am so upset. Partly it’s a feeling of political hopelessness. If people don’t care enough about social harmony to follow even this easy rule, what hope is there of collaboration to counter the bigger things going wrong in our country? So biking in the Yard becomes a symbol for me of the self-centeredness of all humanity, and of the careerism of Harvard undergraduates, and of paralysis in the Trump era.

Yet I think a bigger part of it is a sense of incomprehension and alienation. I simply cannot get my head inside the pattern of thinking that leads undergraduates to decide to break the rule. These are not troublemakers living on the edge, they are Harvard students, the very definition of society’s winners! What story are they telling themselves? My incomprehension makes me feel aged and remote from them. As another bike speeds by, I feel I am an old man on the way out, being replaced by an alien generation.

[8 November 2025]