The Sad State of Arts at Harvard

Today I found the Commencement issue of the Harvard Gazette in my mailbox. It has been two years since I graduated and I've changed a lot, but I can't say that the Gazette has. I don't suppose Harvard is much different either--which is a pity. Anyway, reading President Bok's speech set me thinking again about the old hot house on the Charles, set me thinking enough to try and put down a few suggestions for improvements.

I should start by admitting that I don't recall Cambridge with particular affection. I miss the orange juice and the wonderful libraries and a few paintings in the Fogg and I certainly miss the New England countryside. But as an experience, as a way to pass four years. Harvard is over-estimated. It is no doubt the greatest university in the world in many respects, and certainly extraordinarily efficient at grinding out hard-working professionals. But at a basic human level Harvard is sadly devoid of charm or style. Students there are mostly uptight, immature and inarticulate.

This social deficiency is one of the causes, or perhaps one of the results, of what I now see as Harvard's main problem; the steady decline of the humanities as a part of undergraduate education. Harvard's claim to provide a liberal education is very much open to question, when the picture of European culture that the average student acquires is so shallow, so edited, anthologized and interpreted as to be almost meaningless. From this comes a disorder and low morale among those committed to the humanities that is in contrast with the discipline and order of the scientific camp. The real cause of the decline no doubt lies well beyond Harvard, in the steady evolution of America away from Europe and the apparently terminal crisis of European culture, and it will not be reversed by changes in teaching policy. But even allowing for those larger forces, I don't think Harvard does a very good job of presenting the non-scientific culture of Europe to its undergraduates.

In what follows I shall refer mainly to artistic culture and what is required to understand it. Similar, and even more serious criticisms could be made concerning the treatment given to Intellectual History and other elements of European culture.

Regarding student practice of the creative arts at Harvard, the less said the better. Apart from the very competent student orchestras who provide an audible museum of long-dead and mostly romantic composers, the picture is dismal. I attended a number of undergraduate theatricals and they were all terrible. The Lampoon and the Advocate are significantly worse than even most English university papers (and they are pretty bad!). Journalism on the other hand, which requires a mentality antithetical to that of the creative artist, flourishes. The Carpenter Center has made a noble attempt to get the visual arts in by the back door, but it founders because of the usual Harvard problem of trying to do too much in too short a time. If the Carpenter was limited to a solid, rigorous introduction to drawing and painting for undergraduates it could work wonders. But instead students are barraged with courses on everything from design to film-making, many of which have nothing to do with serious art and are only really of value to a student intent on a career in advertising. Most striking is the fact that the general air of amateurism in the arts at Harvard is not reflected in the faculty themselves so much as in the way they are used. Octavio Paz, who must surely rank as one of the handful of great living poets, was teaching a course in Spanish to a half dozen students. Fitzgerald, one of the few extant experts on epic poetry, taught one student Homer and Dante. Paul Rotterdam, one of the few significant contemporary painters who even dain teach, had eight students in his course: of which perhaps two were seriously considering careers as painters. These are just a few examples from my years at Harvard. They represent a shocking waste of resources.

I will not go into a detailed criticism of the arts since Harvard's weaknesses are well known, and, I believe, generally accepted. Harvard has always maintained that the creative arts as a full-time occupation do not belong within a university. In this it conforms to universities in other parts of the world. If Harvard also excluded other professions, Law, Medicine, Business, etc., then there would be some justification for excluding artists. But, on the contrary, the professional schools have an enormous impact on undergraduates: in my years in Cambridge, it was an impact that far outweighed the 'liberal arts' tradition of the college. At the present time Harvard is caught in a paradoxical situation. It has admitted the necessity of practice in the creative arts as a complement to their academic study. But it has tried to work that practice into the curriculum in a very half-baked way that satisfies nobody. If Harvard was really committed to the arts, and thus to the humanities as a living tradition, it would establish at least one school of fine art, be it theater or painting or music, slap bang in the middle of the college campus. I expect I will have a long white beard and be drinking ambrosia long before it happens!

Another major element that a student requires in his study of the humanities is history. Without a good solid chronological framework it is hopeless to try to understand the history of Italian painting or French literature or any other aspect of European culture. Americans are notorious in Europe for having no sense of history. This means that they do not grow up, as an Italian does, bombarded with dates and monuments and biographies. Every Italian town is a patchwork of architectural styles that children learn to identify. They are spoon-fea Church history, the history of the communist party, the history of the resistance, they memorize long lists of names and dates, and finally in high school they study both Italian and European history with great thoroughness. As a result the interaction between a society and its culture is something that they have a basic instinct for. Americans, when they start to study European culture have no historical foundation at all on which to build. This is a fundamental problem which Harvard ignores almost completely. Again it is paradoxical that such a brilliant department--which makes Harvard one of the best places in the world to study history, at least as a graduate student--should transmit so little of its wealth to non-specialists. However, apart from the institutional problems of trying to do everything in no-time flat, the very scholarly brilliance of the departments must bear a good deal of the blame.

Take a student who has never been to Italy, never really seen, let alone looked at Italian art, never read any Italian literature, hasn't the vaguest notion about the mind-bending complexity of Italian history. Don't tell him who Lorenzo de Medici was, or make him read the Florentine historians, but instead make him read Lopez's theory of the relation between economics and culture in the Renaissance. Then make him read what some scholar said about some other scholar's interpretation of Lopez. Then ask him for his opinion about the Renaissance. This is the scenario for a farce, but also the kind of situation which occurs every day of the week at Harvard.

The advances of historical studies in the century are fascinating, but trying to understand them without the facts is absurd. Harvard graduate students trying to wring "arguments" out of undergraduates concerning subjects of which they were almost totally ignorant was something I witnessed on numerous occasions. The worst example. I came across was a Government course that proposed to teach the political economy of France. Italy, Britain and Germany over a period of several centuries in one semester. Since the majority of the students taking the course didn't have a clue about European history, let alone European polities, the result was a shambles. Since this course also fulfilled the comparative politics requirement for government majors. I was left a little less mystified by the ineptitude of American policy in recent years.

All this stems from an obsession with ANALYSIS which is supposed to be the essence of good historical studies. As a result narrative history is simply not taught. In this case the baby has been thrown out and the bath-water kept! The understanding of history does not mean learning a bucketful of scholarly interpretations of "Feudalism" or 'Development.' It requires a basic knowledge of what happened when and where, and this can only come from a sustained study of the sources. Doubtless the latest social scientific wizardry is more exciting than biographic of popes or medieval chronicles, but without the second the first is meaningless.

I need hardly add that a humanist like myself does not consider history a science but an art and views the obsession with theory to the detriment of facts as an attack on true history by outsiders from the scientific camp. And I will leave out of consideration the fact that most students who major in the humanities are not actually required to study any history at all.

These weaknesses in the presentation of European art would not be so serious if it were not for the fact that Harvard partakes of the general, worldwide confusion about art and what to do with it. For the artist his work is an approach to reality that is both different from, and entirely independent of other ways of knowing; science, language and so on. He believes, in the words of Ruskin, "that the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one." I'm sure that a very small classroom would contain all the people at Harvard who share Ruskin's opinion, but without such a conception art is not worth bothering with. I met very few people at Harvard who really cared about art, who sought it out as a first-hand experience rather than accepting passively what was flashed up on the projector or dished out in the anthologies. The guardians of the humanities do little to convince undergraduates of the importance of their subjects, and indeed do not seem very worried. To cite just one example, when a visitor lectures at the Science Center on constipation in worms or some such subject a vast lecture hall is packed, but when a visiting scholar lectures on some aspect of the humanities there are almost never any undergraduates present, the audience being limited to twenty or thirty faculty members or doctoral students and the atmosphere is often one of respectful boredom.

The fact that the humanities are neither vigorously pursued nor defended at Harvard--except as fodder for the Social Science harvester--is compounded by the illusion that art as a mental discipline is less demanding than science. To begin to appreciate 14th century Italian painting requires at least a thousand hours of visiting galleries plus several hundred more of reading and studying; about the same is required to master differential equations. The average Harvard undergraduate when he sees a painting flashed up on the screen no more appreciates it than a non-mathematician understands algebraic topology. The trouble is that he thinks he has taken all that the painting has to give and nobody is likely to disillusion him. Does anybody at Harvard--apart from a handful of experts--ever do more than glance at the early Italian paintings in the Fogg?

European art of the more or less distant past, be it Dante or Giotto, Proust or Mondrian, cannot be properly appreciated without a great deal of study and contemplation. Harvard undergraduates in general do not think the art important enough to be worth the effort and devote most of their time to economics and biology. The faculty do little to convince them they are wrong.

On the Po plain north of Parma stands a shining monument to the Harvard Business School. The largest pasta factory in Italy, it now produces more than a fifth of all the spaghetti eaten here. It is American owned and run according to all the newest methods. All steel and glass, humming machinery, it is a symbol of the new Italy, the post-war industrial revolution that has transformed a rural agricultural-based economy into a modern industrial state. Northern Italians have watched that transformation: the grandparents belong to a rural world, a preindustrial way of life that had continued almost unchanged for centuries and centuries. Their grandchildren are grewing up in a society that is in many aspects indistinguishable from America.

A few weeks ago I went for a bike ride up into the hills with a friend who works in the pasta factory, a man who has mastered the world and mentality of American business. The further one climbs up into the Appenines the less trace there is of modernization, until finally one reaches little villages that have stood since the middle ages. They are as fine an example of balance between man and nature as the pasta factory is of the destruction of that balance. We ate in a little Trattoria where the pasta was made fresh in the kitchen instead of being bought from the factory. And my friend said. "You know the more I see of the world, the more I believe that everything old is beautiful and everything modern is ugly!"

It is no coincidence that most Europeans don't know that Harvard is a university, but think it is simply the Business School. For through the Business School Harvard has had an enormous impact on Europe, speeding up the destruction of the traditional society and culture on which European art depends. It is ironic that as an institution it has done so much to attack what it has always claimed, with flowery rhetoric, to defend.

PHILIP SWAN graduated from Harvard in 1977 and was born in England. Since then he has been living in Italy studying Italian history and art and teaching English in a private school.