Confessions of a Pol In Academia

Perhaps the most unpleasant discovery that a fellow of the Institute of Politics makes about Harvard is that the University is crawling with more politicians--and teeming with more political plots and counterplots--than Washington at its worst. Grubby little schemers sneak and slander to secure tenure for themselves or deprive someone else of it; otherwise normal adults spend long hours trying to squeeze a few more dishonorable dollars out of a grant program to funnel into pet projects; academic wives, a generally bright and attractive strain of the breed, engage in childish games of status and snubbing that would move even the most vulgar and climbing Washington hostess to disgust. For one who accepted a semester at Harvard as a kind of reverse sabbatical--an academic retreat from the pettier aspects of politics--it is all rather sad.

Not all, really, but certainly this particularly seamy side of an institution with a noble history and a more limited but certainly promising future. In the midst of many rather hollow "great men" on the faculty and an even larger number of greasy, grasping nonentities, Harvard still benefits from a perhaps undeservedly high percentage of serious, dedicated teachers and doers. An engrossing 45 minutes spent in conversation with one of the David Riesmans of this world is more than worth the price of many arid hours on the banks of the Charles. And then there are absolutely wrong-headed but scintillating scholars like radical Duncan Kennedy at the Law School. Fellows like Duncan may have got it all backwards philosophically, but they know their subjects and their radicalism has not shorn them of the old-fashioned art of civilized conversation.

As for the students, to paraphrase Dean Swift (who probably never would have managed to secure a tenured post here at Harvard), they are just half a blessing and just half a curse and I wish, my dear friend, they were better or worse. There is great talent, great idealism and even greater decency and good sense slumbering in the breasts of most of the students I have met or worked with during my brief stay. Many students are already mature human beings engaged in useful thought and action, but, to the extent that they are, they are doing so in spite of the current Harvard trend toward sloth, trendiness, pandering to the worst in student demands, and general collapse of will and sense of purpose among many of the people who run the University.

While Harvard is still molding promising undergraduate material into men and women of whom we can all be proud, it is doing so in spite of the general drift toward lower standards and the politically and socially motivated tampering of recent years. Thanks are due to the many students--liberal, conservative, white or black--who still come here to learn and to develop their minds, and to those members of the faculty, at all levels, who still take their teaching roles seriously. My hat is off to both groups; they are the ones who keep Harvard a great institution.

And it undoubtedly is. While I have had to earn my bread as a political writer for most of my adult life, I have always paid for wine and dessert by writing on history, humor and the arts. And Harvard today is still crackling with creative energy as well as being steeped in history. Once you find your way around, it is an unfailing source of treasures, pleasures and surprises...many of them living people. Nor is it possible for the old stones and bricks of Harvard Yard, the dormitories, the classrooms, the libraries and the churches, to have witnessed so much over the generations without absorbing a kind of warmth and life of their own--along with several layers of seemingly ineradicable grime. Just to tread across the Yard, basking in that rich past housing a living tradition that no amount of mismanagement and folly can undo is always a moving sensation, even when one faces the constant peril of beaning at the hands of the student body's countless spastic frisbee hurlers.

Not to mention the dogs, and what dogs they are! If science still needs proof that "dumb" animals are able to communicate with one another, let science come to Harvard Yard. For what other explanation can there be for the scroungy but lovable legion of mutts, thoroughbreds and scarcely recognizable quadrupeds that populate the sacred grove? Word of mouth (or muzzle) is the only possible answer. The canine message seems to have reached every indigent hound in New England: "If you're looking for friends, shelter and stimulating company, Harvard's the place." And, except for their rather cavalier attitude toward the sanctitiy of the sidewalks, it seems to me that it is the dogs, far more than either the students or faculty, who could serve us all as a model for good citezenship and good fellowship. If they occasionally snarl or squabble over a bone, the battle is short and direct and the motive far more pressing than tenure or trendiness. If some of them are not too bright, they make no effort to veil the fact under layers of cant and credentials. And, on the whole, they seem to be the only individuals in Cambridge who really enjoy themselves most of the time. Long life and good times to them; may they always be there, in the Yard, to keep us from losing sight of the obvious and the eternal in our constant grasping for the rarefied and ephemeral!

Perhaps the degree of our satisfaction with a place or an experience is directly dependent on how much we expect to gain from it in the first place. Speaking personally, my semester at Harvard was both enjoyable and satisfying, but I came here with my eyes open, not expecting immortal truths and revelations to fall into my lap every time I shook the academic tree. It is an attitude I heartily commend to all incoming freshmen for, as a sage old British friend once told me, "The only place one is likely to find the Philosopher's Stone is in the gallbladder of a bilious pedant." What I sought during my stay at Harvard was not Veritas (how many of us would recognize that rare commodity even if we did come face to face with it?), but an opportunity to learn a little, teach a little, reflect a little and read, write and converse a lot. I couldn't have chosen a better place, and, for all my cavils about Harvard, I have come to love it in my way and know that once I am back in Washington, I'll miss the old place...especially the dogs.

Aram Bakshian Jr. has been a fellow at the Institute of Politics this semester. He has served as a speechwriter to Presidents Nixon and Ford and written on politics, history and the arts for publications including National Review, The New York Times, National Observer, and Newsday.