Harvard's Role In Perpetuation Of Class-Exploitation

The following article is an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Jonathan Kozol '58. The book, entitled Enemies of Revolution, will be published next year. Kozol, the author of Free Schools and Death at an Early Age, will speak tomorrow night at Currier House, 7:30 p.m. The speech is sponsored by Phillips Brooks House.

"When I was at Harvard..., I never questioned the fact the university not only had its own police force, but was buying up property...only in certain areas of Cambridge and not buying up property where the professors lived or where the wealthier people in Cambridge lived. I never questioned that. I just thought it was part of the legitimate needs of a university--to have land, to put buildings on that land, so that people like me could learn... I never asked, what people are being educated...for what reason, by whom...at whose expense?" --Robert Coles

Harvard today is built on blood and nourished by injustice. This has not changed. It has not lessened, but with the passage of years and with the escalation of our corporate predations, it has steadily increased. Each privileged young man of Harvard College who proceeds each afternoon across the ivy-covered lanes of the Yard, or sits down in the pleasant, sheltered stacks to pore into a work of Chaucer or to explicate Rimbaud or Beaudelaire, is living his life and building his career upon the ruined hopes and broken dreams of other people every bit his human equal, yet who--for reason of no greater sin than non-possession of the proper ticket of admission--will never be able to live as he now lives, stroll as he strolls through ivy-covered lanes, across diagonals of ancient stone between the sheltered space of shaded court yards and old red brick, Georgian walls.

There are ten times 4000 students in the black and Spanish ghetto-neighborhoods of Boston, Cleveland, New York and Chicago who would for certain be effective competition for the men and women who are now enrolled in colleges like this, but who will never have the chance to stand or struggle, perish or prevail, all for no other reason of exclusion but the accident of color, cash and birth. Those, however, who partake of opportunities like these cannot confront the dangerous idea that what they recognize as their participation is someone else's cold and inexplicable exclusion. The scholar trains himself, therefore, to live as if this were not so: as if there were no causative connections, here to there, this side to that. He needs to believe that he is here by his intrinsic merit and his own hard work, battling out the odds in a free field of open, honest, unencumbered competition.

Three myths

This, then, is the university version of the high-school myth of "NO CONNECTIONS." It functions well: both to sedate the lives and to protect the conscience of the university-population from all knowledge, memory or recognition of the pain, the anguish and the devastation of those tens of thousand who live just beyond their reach and past their recognition. The fine, wood-panelled dining-hall on Quincy Street cleans the surface of the scholar's conscience with the polish of good manners, decent bearings, and appropriate understatement of his discontent. Clean silver, cool sherbet, slivers of lime and fabric of seer-sucker, ladies and gentlemen slender and adept: they learn to be the managers of their own self-introspection and self-accusation. Should they become intolerably disturbed, someone in the Mental Health Department of the pre-paid medical plan will tell them that their guilt is of neurotic origin and ought not be given opportunity to distress them. Guilt, in any case, they will be told, is not "productive." Skull of infant, blood and bone, the desperation of young mothers in the back-street clinic of the Boston slums: it does not go with sherbet and seersucker.

There is a second myth which functions also in the upper echelons of Faculty and pupils. This myth is the Fiction of Hard Work: "proper pay for quite unusual extremes of toil, labor and responsibility." The student learns to think, incant, believe (so also do his teachers, tutors, Deans) that intellectual work is, in itself, exceptionally oppressive, burdensome or overwhelming. There is, indeed, a quite pervasive myth that labors like these are possibly more difficult, more burdensome, and more exacting, than the less-rewarded work of physical day labor. University professors really do believe that this is difficult work. They say not only this (i.e., that they are working "hard") but even that they are working harder than most other people do.

It is difficult to know how this conclusion is arrived at: by what criteria the scholar measures work, exhaustion, anguish, weariness or physical endeavor. The truth, of course, is different from that which these scholars advertise. Millions of poor people--black, poor-white and Spanish-speaking--work longer hours, at lower pay, in far less comfortable conditions, at labor many, many times less pleasant, return each night to homes far less congenial, in neighborhoods which are less pleasant and secure, finding their nourishment in food less wholesome, going to sleep at last to dreams less hopeful, waking again to lives far less rewarding.

The father of one boy I know works as a janitor in an office complex. He works for ten, sometimes for fifteen hours, every day. His work is in an unseen "second basement" underneath the "regular" sub-basement of the tallest skyscraper in Boston. He works so many deep and sunless meters underneath the level of the lobby floor, that he is even underneath the level of the turnpike that runs underneath the building. I talk with him often in the evening hours after he returns from work: coated with dirt and broken with exhaustion. This man, 56 years old, now in his sixteenth year of uninterrupted labor for one corporation, takes home seventy-four dollars every week. He lives beside, and almost underneath the elevated railroad in the poorest block of the South End. He eats left-over cold-cuts, bread and pastries brought home from the corporation cafeteria, drinks (when he has cash to drink at all) the cheapest red wine. He receives no health insurance and no benefits for overtime. He gets two weeks of paid vacation every year--is forced, however, to work at Christmas, New Year and Thanksgiving.

The contrast between this bleak, unglamorous and ill-rewarded work, and the familiar pattern of low-pressure, easeful intellection which is both expected and most frequently enjoyed by academic people is no simple matter for the conscience of an ethical intellectual to handle. Harvard people, therefore, need to lie, first to themselves, then to one another, in order that they may keep on with their routine lives without remorse. If they did not, they could not possibly explain the ease, delight and satisfaction of their own well-fed existence, and the relative penury of those who sweep the basement floors, and clean the toilet bowls, and set the tables in the dining hall. It is for this reason that the Myth of Intellectual Hard Work ("higher endeavor," "more noble, more exacting, less forgiving aspiration") has to be fostered, advertised, believed, by those who are the beneficiaries of the Common Room.

There is a third point which, like the preceding two, is an extension of one of the basic myths of public education. It is the myth of free and unmanipulated options. The university-extension of this grade-school self-deceit is the idea which liberal jargon calls "the open market of ideas." Intellectuals from Harvard, Yale and M.I.T. write often--and with considerable alarm--of those within the Rebel Left who seek to undermine, subvert, destroy the so-called "open conflict" of competitive ideas which universities pretend to be. Even in those sub-sections of the major universities--Law, Medicine and Business Colleges, for example--where straightforward economic self-perpetuation of the upper class seems to an outsider to hold sway as an unquestioned Gospel, great efforts still are made to propagate the fiction of true ethical and intellectual freedom.

"Free expression," "open market of ideas," words of this kind are stated and re-stated in the publications and the speeches of such men as Handlin, Hook, and Nathan Glazer, with all the zeal, reiteration and hypnosis of the most expensive media-promotion. There is, however, one essential item absent from the standard presentation: Intellectual license is not serious, solid or substantial--certainly it is formidably circumscribed in implication--if, prior to words and long preceding deeds, our yearnings themselves are in such firm constraint that we no longer even wish to do that which, if we could wish it in large numbers, colleges and universities would then assuredly forbid.

It is not necessary for this social order--as John Kenneth Galbraith has observed--to withhold from its students many forms of Free Expression. The greater numbers have already handed in their most important forms of liberty long years before: those forms that have to do with hopes and wants, wishes and dreams, ethics and aspirations.

Nations which do not know how to get to the roots must settle for the branches. Thus, in nations that our textbooks call totalitarian, strict controls obtain concerning press and TV, intellectual discussion and public debate. These societies are like bad gardeners who spend whole days out in the hot sun pruning bushes, doing their best to cut down hopeless growths of undesired ideologies, because they do not yet have skillful means for poisoning the soil.

Professors at Harvard, with few notable exceptions, are granted the theoretical right to advocate rebellion, to develop, and reflect on Marxist ideologies, or to argue for an end to private ownership of land, homes, factories and means of transportation. In much the same sense, editors at Time or Newsweek or The New York Times are free to view the Cuban Revolution as a positive step forward for mankind. It is a deep and clever North American deception to allow professor, scholar, editor alike, to say that they please when we know well that what they please is what we like. The bulls, once surgically restrained, receive all barnyard privileges. Harvard professors, in the aftermath of proper preparation, are allowed their civil liberties.

To many pupils, and to a certain number of professors too, the views I hold in this respect will seem not only lacking in conventional politeness but lacking also in substantial precedent. The first is true: the second is an error. The same ideas have been expressed in every generation for a hundred years. Emerson, Upton Sinclair, and Charles Sumner, all at one time or other, spoke directly of the hypocritical and self-serving character of Harvard College.

Sumner, firebrand senator from Massachusetts who took to the U.S. Senate floor to launch a direct onslaught on slave-holders, was judged unfit to be professor at the Harvard Law School. He recognized the reason and described it clearly in a letter to his brother: "I am too much...reformer...to be trusted."

Emerson had some memorable words to speak in this regard. Harvard scholars, he wrote in 1861, have no voice in Harvard College: "State Street votes them down on every ballot." Everything is permitted in the university, he said, so long as it adorns the elegance and privilege of Boston. That which implies an ethical provocation is not given voice. Generosity of thought within this university, he said, has a bad name: "The youths come out decrepit citizens."

Misnamed buildings

When will we see these strong and lucid statements carved out in granite on the portals of that building which still bears his name yet stands in hypocritical defiance of most decent values that he represented? When, for that matter, will the Harvard-Radcliffe students have the will or courage to demand that buildings named for arrogant and loveless members of the ruling-class--Loeb, Lowell and Lamont--be named instead for those, such as that great and gentle Harvard drop-out named Pete Seeger, who had the brains to quit before his heart was dead and soul was cold? When, too, will we see buildings named for brave and rebel women such as Helen Keller in the Radcliffe Quad? Is it not time to rediscover use of chisel upon granite, use of hammer upon stone?

The strongest statements are those of Upton Sinclair, published first in 1923. Sinclair had no fanciful illusions in regard to the real function of the universities and colleges. Inevitably, he saved his strongest words and deepest vehemence for Harvard. We are told of Harvard, by its loyal friends, he says, that it is liberal in its educational policies: Is it liberal also in the policies by which it governs its investments? "Do you suppose," he asks, "the votes of...Harvard...are...for policies of justice and democracy in enterprises it exploits?" If you suppose that, he replies, you are naive. The Harvard votes are cast, just as the votes of any other business, for the largest amount of dividends for Harvard.

With the same irreverence, Sinclair looks upon the ideological bias of the university and speaks without much gentleness or kindness of the so-called "open market of ideas." Course-study at Harvard, he observes, is governed by "class-ignorance, class-fear (and) class-repression." Harvard "sets forth statistics" to confirm that it is not a rich man's school. Yet the character of its accepted courses--as much that which is kept out as that which has been retained--reflects the wishes of its Overseers. The revolutionary struggles of the present decade, he observes, are not offered to the students: "They go out ready to believe the falsehoods which are served...to them.

Brave scholars

Time seems to make few changes. Still, in each decade, there are those who stand, speak out, express their indignation with full power and passion. The brave, distinguished Harvard scholars, George Wald, Erik Erikson, and Robert Coles are three such bold exceptions in our time. None, I think, will wish to be identified with all of my own views. There is a certain protocol at Harvard which commands a mild degree of kindness and discretion to one's fellow-members of the Common Room. It is, indeed, this very kindness which at length proves most alarming...

I remember a day, about five years ago, when I returned to Cambridge late one afternoon in May in order to visit with an aging scholar who had been my teacher when I was a senior. I remember that I spoke to him that afternoon about the sense of vested interest Harvard people inevitably feel in the denial or non-recognition of those very disproportions and unequal opportunities for economic self-promotion which they presently exploit and enjoy.

The conversation is still vivid in my mind today: He was polite, relaxed, attentive and unhostile. He nodded, reflected, took off his spectacles, put hand to chin and studied me a while, knocked out his pipe-ash on the round cork knob within the center of a pewter bowl, looked out the window with a weary sense of aging decency, pressed thumb and finger to his brow in old and practiced sense of sorrowful exhaustion. He said to me this: "Of course it's so of course it's not correct. It isn't right for some of us here to have so much, and others have so little. It isn't right. It isn't necessary. We don't need all this surfeit and excess."

He sits and speaks. I listen and I hear. He says he does not need what he now views, possesses, holds, enjoys, depends on; and yet the truth, I think, is that he does. He does need life set up, protected, decorated, ordered in this fashion. He cannot live without it. Nor, to be candid, do I think that he does genuinely believe that the needs he hears of, and the abstract agonies to which his syllables of decency reply, are genuine needs and actual and unquestioned agonies. I do not think that he can dare to give belief to this. I think that, if he did, his whole world would begin to crumble.

He sits here now and looks out into the courtyard. The light of the sun reflects and shivers in the garden window, patterned with small panes behind his desk. The glowing space of light and warmth, along the book shelves and above the desk, summon for me a wealth of English recollections and associations, olden days in ancient places green and golden, many good hours of secure existence. I think of this also: lead-paint plaster, roach-invasion, rat-infestation of those desperate tenement-quarters on the other side of town in which 10,000 black and Puerto Rican families lead their hungry, hot and agonizing lives. I ask myself: Is it for this, for cruelties like these, for disproportions on this scale, that all of his labors, dreams and hours are contrived, exacted and expended? Is it for this that he has given fifty years to the analysis and explication of the work of Mann and Kafka, Auden, Eliot, John Donne?

Gandhi, asked by a close friend what made him the most sad in life, supplied this answer: "the hardness of heart of the well-educated." The genteel and reflective scholar in his sunbathed study does not seem to go with words like hardness, coldness, emptiness of love or barrenness of soul. Gandi perhaps had in his mind a less genteel, and more Imperial prototype. Yet there is a brand of unresponsive Love and of Inert Concern which blesses no more, and damages no less, than straight-forward cynicism. Quiet compassion and relaxed (i.e., controllable) self-accusation are no less evil in their end-results than those more blatant actions of overt destruction executed by the redneck cop, ill-educated soldier, ice-cold corporation-leader. Different in temper, intellectual dispassion and self-exile of this kind is nonetheless the same in faithful service of an unjust social order. Less explicit in form, it is no less brutal in its operation. Covered with ivy and pronounced with low-key, understated intonations, it is no less final in its ultimate exactions.

Copyright 1973 by Jonathan Kozol.

When will the Harvard-Radcliffe students have the will or the courage to demand that buildings named for arrogant and loveless members of the ruling-class-Loeb, Lowell, and Lamont-be named instead for those who had the brains to quit before their hearts were dead and their souls cold?