What’s Right with Harvard

My ties to Harvard are, thankfully, many. They have given me a sense of this place over 30 years, and from a variety of perspectives. I have been a Harvard graduate student, a member of its Faculty, department chair, center director, and now dean.

I think I have some capacity to address a question that very few people seem to be asking these days, but which seems fitting for Commencement Day: What is right with Harvard?

It is not a question we ask ourselves often. To be sure, once in a while we suspect that we are doing something right. We do have a stunning number of superlative applicants to the College, each year more qualified than the last. We do recruit to the Faculty so many of the world’s most notable scholars, who come here in unmatched numbers. Harvard’s prestige beyond Cambridge seems to grow, even in years when we contest, vocally and publicly, with each other about our own workings. Yet the broad attitude of students and faculty often seems one of edgy anxiety.

Nor is this a question asked by those consumed with a vision—one doubtless seen in every generation—of a lost “golden age” of Harvard, when Giants roamed the faculty landscape; when Tradition was honored; when, we are told, the place had Soul; when, in short, Harvard was Harvard.

It does not take much reading of our history, however, to stem the tide of nostalgia. Seen in a global context, our College began as a small, regional effort, in a cultural backwater of Europe, in the waning years of the Great Ming dynasty. Harvard became a significant American university by emulating German structures and practices in the 19th century. It assumed, with others, a position of national leadership by the middle of the 20th century. Only in the last half-century, and particularly over the course of the past several decades, has our external reputation set us as a place apart, as perhaps the most recognized name in higher education around the globe, and often the standard by which others are measured. Like it or not, we must face the fact that we are very likely in Harvard’s golden age.

I worry about this whenever I am asked by deans and presidents of leading foreign universities to define (and sometimes to help them to adopt) a “Harvard education.” When colleagues from several Asian countries have asked how best they could import our Core Curriculum, I felt compelled to tell them of all its strengths. But I also share with them our several proposals to replace it.

This is at the heart of what’s right with Harvard. We don’t celebrate Harvard’s strengths so much as worry about its weaknesses. We understand, collectively, that no place stays strong by standing still.

Thus, Harvard is not a place conspicuously bathed in “school spirit.” We are trying hard now to improve undergraduate life in and beyond the classroom. But if we had as our goal that students know the words to the football songs, or even “Fair Harvard” (the University hymn is one bridge too far), we’d be in trouble. The real spirit of undergraduate life can be found in our students’ restless pursuit of excellence and innovation, in hundreds of different and not always intersecting ways—from the seminar room to the laboratory to the cramped, creative corridors where students stay up all night to put this newspaper to bed.

Thus it is right about Harvard that our admissions office acts as if each year were its first. It aims to ensure that every class is as or more qualified academically, creative artistically, diverse in economic and gender and ethnic terms, than its predecessors. And after every admission season of high anxiety, we witness its success: the Class of 2010 will now have the opportunity to prove, over the next four years, that it can bear comparison with the great Class of 2006. Meanwhile, the admissions office has started to worry about the Class of 2011.

And thus there is no one defining “Harvard education.” The last century has seen a multiplicity of experiments: from a free elective system, from one of concentration and constraint, to the structures of General Education and Core, to our most recent recommendations to give the extraordinary students we admit to this place considerably greater agency in shaping their own education. Each generation has both the freedom and responsibility to define a Harvard education for its time.

As I look back on my four years as dean, I feel proud of our capacity for change and growth even in the most stressful times. For the first time in three decades we have examined all realms of the undergraduate educational experience, knowing that we can do better. Many initiatives are well underway—in science education, in international study, in concentrations and secondary fields, and in the courses that may well define the next generation of general education.

In order to better teach our students and to engage in new areas of research, our tenured and tenure-track faculty have grown from 635 to more than 710 members in the past four years. This represents the most explosive growth in the past 35 years. And we will continue to expand to a faculty of 750 by 2010.

The physical embodiments of our academic ambitions are now rising across the campus. We have invested heavily and necessarily in the structures to house the arts and the sciences, to be home to the theaters, laboratories, classrooms, athletic facilities, and social spaces that will help to define Harvard in the first part of this century.

We have been able to do all this because this is anything but a complacent place. Harvard may seem a tough institution to love, but it does inspire loyalty. Countless times—whether in debate about the curriculum, or attempts to imagine the Allston campus, or discussions about leadership—I have heard this sentiment: “What is best for Harvard?” Ours is an institution of numerous interests, strong wills, and the potential to fracture into self-interested fiefdoms. But it turns out that institutional loyalty, without false sentimentality, is real here, and that our members, even under the greatest duress, put the welfare of Harvard above their own.



Archibald MacLeish, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor at Harvard, spoke at Commencement in 1955. He said, “The rock on which the greatest universities are founded is the rock of change, the recognition of the fact of change, and Harvard has not forgotten, nor has it ceased in its actions, to affirm, that the future will be won by those who are capable of creating the future, not by those who undertake to defend the present as it is.”

May ours long be a self-critical, never self-satisfied, community. This is what is right with Harvard.



William C. Kirby is the Geisinger Professor of History and dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.