Harvard Revisited

The past year was intended mainly for reading and writing. But since the library turned out to be weak in those areas I wanted to work--mainly agriculture and climate--I soon realized that whatever of value I could do here that could not be done as well out in the hinterlands would consist largely of auditing lectures, and discussing them with the lecturers. In this way I gathered a great deal of information, and many impressions of how a Harvard education today compares with one acquired two decades ago when I was an undergraduate here, and with the educations offered at the several other colleges and universities where I have studied and taught in the meantime.

In presenting these comparisons below it seems imperative that they be expressed in the context of the larger society around the university, where increasing street crime, drug use, family dissolution, political corruption, and general anti-intellectualism have so drastically escalated since the 1950's as to threaten the foundations of both the university and the entire society which nourishes it. A Harvard education may be conceded superior over others in the nation, but still may not deserve objectively high marks unless it is facing these social diseases constructively. On this score I find much room for doubt, but not in the terms accustomed to be used by critics of the political left, to which I nevertheless belong.

The General Education system set up by President Conant about 1950, contrary to some facile assumptions, has made very few echoes in the curricula of other universities. This renders the Harvard experience that much more distinctive, however, and connects its evaluation that much more closely with that of Gen Ed. The program is hard to duplicate largely because it is hard to find faculty talented enough to sweep over broad interdisciplinary areas of thought all by themselves; even within single disciplines many faculty prefer to cop out of teaching introductory courses, and avoid the challenge of comprehensive generalization.

The only real "general education" I've seen at close range outside of Harvard was the scheme at the University of Kansas, which represents a kind of adaptation of the Chicago "great books" tradition. At Kansas, a uniform list of readings from at least 60 Western authors, ranging in time from Plato to C. P. Snow, is read and discussed in small groups by every sophomore who plans to receive a bachelor's degree. Instead of a lecture of two each week to clarify the material, which for so large a class would create a huge logistical problem, some faculty member or graduate student who specializes on a given author discourses at a weekly meeting of discussion leaders--mostly graduate students from the social sciences, history, or philosophy. In turn it is their job to transmit, by Socratic method in groups of eight or ten, the essense of this lecture and of the readings it deals with.

This seems like a good way to turn an ordinary college into a good one, but would it be of any use at Harvard? It seems obvious that students here should be better off by being able to listen to two or three lectures per hour of discussion, with a world-renowned expert often in the role of lecturer. But it is also obvious that Harvard's system as it has developed over the years does much less to assure that the student will be exposed to a broad spectrum of thought from his intellectual heritage. Since the early 1950s courses have become more numerous, more narrowly specialized, less broadly interdisciplinary. Means of expanding one's horizons beyond required readings, such as the formerly frequent conversations with faculty in House dining halls, have obviously declined in influence. Thus it has become more and more possible for a student to graduate from Harvard not only without having heard John Finley, but even without having any meaningful concept of just what the name Plato--not to mention C. P. Snow with his warning against over-specialization--really stands for.

This situation in itself means that a Harvard education can easily be a narrow one, and in terms of its narrowness, less than ideal preparation for coping with society's problems. But considerable relevance and at least some breadth are provided by a large number of new General Education courses courses designed specifically to deal with those problems. In strong disagreement with Jonathan Kozol's accusation last fall that the Harvard curriculum is unconcerned with "the revolutionary struggles of the present decade," I find in the current list of offerings such relevant titles as "The Energy Crisis," "Models for Control of Man's Physical Environment," "Human Populations and Natural Resources," "Environmental Effects of Power Generation," "Population and Environment in the Urban Setting," "Growth and Process in American Law: the American Indian," "The Health Care Crisis," "War," "The Social Context of Science," and so on--a list which may not include every desirable topic, but which is surely unmatched on any other American campus.

This is not to say that some of these courses are not awkwardly organized and taught. The new concern with resources and ecology, for instance, has caught Harvard with a venerable tradition of relegating the study of unsophisticated subjects like food and soil almost entirely to the land grant colleges. What this situation generally produces is not that the essential information about the earth's challenge to man is not available (though some of it is not), but that the simplicity and straightforwardness with which it is taught, as the Reverend Peter Gomes of Memorial Church recently pointed out, "frequently are understood to be the same as stupidity and naivete" on this campus; there just hasn't been time to cloak all the basics in the accustomed layers of sophistication and obliquity. Obviously, the student at times may come out ahead in such a situation.

Such demonstrations of relevance in the curriculum at least illustrate that at today's Harvard the idea of a gentleman's education as a means of marking him off from the masses and guaranteeing his own future more abundant life, with no reference to wider concerns, is little more than a shriveled relic from some pre-democratic incarnation of our present society--even more shriveled than in the 1950's, I think. Harvard has not adopted the extreme activist view that every course must deal with the latest crises, or that those which do should be managed as base camps for relief expeditions; but it has evinced considerable awareness of a duty to serve society's immediate needs, and of the fact that these needs often simplify into such mundane requirements as food, clothing, shelter, health, and peace.

The root problem is not that strategies to meet such needs are not sought or devised, but that the intellectual tools and personal attitudes offered for the task are insufficient. For most of the past century, Western intellectuals--and this includes most Marxists--have been mired in hyper-skepticism. They have spent too much time throwing out old ideas without replacing them adequately. This situation reflects the influence of positivism, which instead of being maintained as a healthy questioning spirit designed to eliminate foggy metaphysics, has too often been transformed into a worship of the tangible and measurable, and an inordinate suspicion of whatever requires some imagination to be grasped. Despite the fact that many philosophers recognize this distortion, we are still left with a legacy of rashly discarded philosophies and weakly contrived replacements; and our hasty, materialistic, opportunistic way of life provides slight impetus indeed for returning to more solid ground.

In today's university, the positivistic spirit manifests itself largely as a preoccupation with techniques, especially mathematical techniques, at the expense of what for want of a better term we might simply call "philosophy." By this I mean not what philosophers talk about in their classes, so much as any system of rational thought, expressed mainly in ordinary language, which seeks to discover truth beyond what is precisely and mathematically definable, and which helps to explain and interpret knowledge which is so definable. Philosophy in this sense is not subjective; it simply deals with what, by analogy with biological philosophy, might be termed vitalistic knowledge, as opposed to mechanistic knowledge. Even if we take a reductionist approach and assume that vitalistic knowledge is only knowledge which when more fully grasped will assume a mechanistic form, we can still admit that ignoring the vitalistic realm leaves us on a treadmill where no new ideas or even new techniques are available, because only the unknown or imperfectly known can serve as raw material for new knowledge.

The dominance of techniques as opposed to philosophy in this broad sense is consistent with President Bok's complaint that only the professional schools, which are specifically intended to teach techniques, are doing an adequate job at Harvard now. But even they might benefit from additional philosophical input. Is the medical school, for instance, giving adequate attention to the medical philosophy of the school of Cos (where Hippocrates practiced), which emphasized, as today's nutritionists and vitamin therapists do, the harmony of the body with its environment and of its several elements among themselves?...or is it too much mired in the philosophy of the school of Cnidos, which saw medicine as the exorcising of demons (done today by drugs or salpels).

In overemphasizing techniques and exact answers, the academician reveals an unwillingness to go out on a limb. Quantitative problems are usually small problems because data do not exist for the larger ones, unless estimated with gross approximation. For instance, you can solve the logistical problems of a war with systems analysis, but you cannot decide thereby if the war ought to be fought (Vietnam illustrates both points). Even apart from quantification, Harvard is still marked by an alarming degree of personal aloofness from society's problems, which is another form of refusing to go out on a limb. Of course this is all consistent with the normal tendency of human beings who have it made financially to limit themselves to defending their own positions.

This situation is not really apparent to observers out around the nation, where Harvard is viewed primarily as a font of "radical" ideas, as the generator of more Galbraiths and Schlesingers than of Bundys or Moynihans. If you read any of the Nader reports you are likely to be impressed by the large percentage of Harvard students and faculty listed among the researchers. But this sort of genuine concern for the welfare of the underprivileged or unjustly treated has seemed rarer to me as this year has moved along. Even correcting public misinformation seems of slight concern to Harvard faculty. Do the millions in Middle America misunderstand the nature of Communism, or the recent history of the Communist nations? They might correct their views if they get a chance to hear an authority like John Fairbank at a televised Senate hearing, as they did in the midst of the Vietnamese War; but in general, there seems to be little opportunity or desire among Harvard scholars to stoop to the business of popularizing in order to correct public misinformation, or even to find out in any detail what that misinformation is.

The moral dimensions of our nation's woes are now more obvious than in November 1972, and this has led President Bok to call for increased attention to ethics in the curriculum. But not much is likely to develop along these lines if techniques and equations are the only respectable methods and hyper-sophistication the only respectable form.

Ethics of course comprises part of philosophy, and of religion. It is here in the overlapping area between philosophy and religion, in fact, that I would look for the key to the limitations of a Harvard education today. The Reverand Peter Gomes thinks the phrase "Godless Harvard" is a myth; but observing from my more secular position I am forced to disagree. It's not such a myth that well over half the seats in local churches, including the one funded by the University and led by Gomes, are regularly empty during worship; or that an instructor can't arouse peals of sympathetic laughter by using the phrase. In listening to hundreds of lectures in over 40 courses this year, I found that only the subject of death rivals religion as an object of student laughter--always in response to the lecturer's deliberate nuances, of course. Very few instructors, if any, take any pains to dispel the dangerous myth, very widespread in radical circles and among students in general, that because those who profess venerable systems do so hypocritically, the values themselves must be held suspect. Thus not only is the classroom devoid of partisan argument on behalf of particular value systems; but even less than at Berkeley or Central Washington or the other state colleges and universities I've been attached to does society's withdrawal from value systems of all kinds, and into a proliferation and legitimization of anarchical intellectual, social, and personal behavior that no common value system endorses.

The highly repetitive recourse in both readings and lectures to what The Crimson's "Confidential Guide" terms the "traditional pantheon" of the social sciences--Marx, Freud, Weber, and Durkheim (one might also add Nietzsche)--illustrates this attitude further. Whatever truths they have to teach, and they certainly offer some, all of these writers to one degree or another made it their special interest, and a matter central to their most influential thinking, to cast doubt on some portion of traditional religion and theology. It may be difficult to ignore such intellectual giants, and even inappropriate in courses devoted to the history of ideas primarily; but one must wonder why so few constructive alternative views have been revived or created since Weber and Durkheim first made their great impact on Harvard's consciousness before World War II.

As one alternative, one might demonstrate to students that nearly all the great creative geniuses of early modern science approached their subject with consciously religious motives; thus one could counter the widespread falsehood that religious faith and scientific progress are somehow incompatible. One might employ in this task the writings of a highly respected 19th-century American scholar, Andrew Dixon White, who made the crucial point that genuine religion often differs from the attitudes of unimaginative and institutionalized theologians.

One could go further, into the works of Arnold Toynbee, unpopular today with professional historians, but in fact a highly perceptive social and political critic, as well as the author of a powerful claim that religious faith provides the chief cultural foundation for civilization. Throughout the horrible years of the still-continuing Indochina War, Toynbee's warning cry for peace has been heard alongside those of the Berrigans and the Quakers and the various experts on Communism who could see that the most damaging and unwelcome intrusion in Southeast Asia was that of Western colonialism. If one looks for the origins of the smug social-Darwinist philosophy held by the LBJ's and the Nixons who perpetrated this war "to save us from the evils of socialism," one finds none other than the Ivy League's (well, Yale's) William Graham Sumner, who probably did as much to push positivistic social science at the expense of religion and the classics as anyone in the history of American education. Considering this contrast, how backward does the religious approach look now?

Of course, one cannot complete the argument that religious faith promotes social and intellectual health unless he can demonstrate the converse, that the onslaught of atheism in our own century has been accompanied by decline on nearly all fronts. The arguments are obvious as regards war and social decay, but very obscure in the matter of scientific progress. Too many still confuse the undoubted technological progress of our times with increments of scientific theory.

The most dogmatically and uncritically-honored theory in science today was published and promoted solely in the 20th century: Einsteinian special relativeity. In happens that Einstein as a boy experienced an "orgy" of revulsion against all traditional religious teachings. During my graduate study of history and philosophy of science, I became convinced that his special theory and all of its claims of evidential support are invalidated by unwarranted assumptions and circular reasoning; but trying to communicate this measage has proven a formidable task. Herbert Dingle, a renegade from the physics establishment, has tried to do so for many years in England; his new book Science at the Crossroads tells an appalling story of intolerant thought-suppression by scientific journals. An even more incisive dissection of the illogicality of special relativity, by University of New Mexico philosopher Melbourne Evans, was published in the Swiss journal Dialectica in 1962: "The Relativity of Simultaneity: a Critical Analysis." (I have placed Evans's article on reserve in Lamont and the Science Center for those who may wish to escape the one-sided presentations by local--and nearly all other--philosophers, physicists, and astronomers.)

Such is only one of many barriers to intellectual and social progress in this century of dwingling altruism, receding horizons of imagination, and increasing protection of vested material interests. The pale humanist condescension towards other-directed ethics that prevails so widely among today's agnostics and atheists cannot really substitute for the great sacrificial devotion to their tasks recognizable in the lives of the social reformers and natural philosophers of past centuries. Kepler, for example, was not only the most profoundly original of the great scientists, but also the closest to being a religious mystic, seeking to justify his faith by finding regularity in the universe. Unless Harvard can teach lessons like this, and like Toynbee's demonstration of the life-giving force of religious ideas in society, its possible rank as the best American university will prove of no ultimate value.

John E. Chappell, Jr. '54 is a fellow at Harvard's Russian Research Center.