Presidents and Puritans

“Be the herald of light, and the bearer of love, till the stock of the Puritans die.” So go the concluding strains of our valedictory anthem, “Fair Harvard,” which echoed earlier this academic year through Tercentary Theatre on the occasion of Drew Gilpin Faust’s inauguration as university president.

On that same afternoon—amidst the gales and intermittent downpour—introductory speaker and University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann ’71, and the new Harvard president herself, seemed careful, however, to distance the incipient Faust era from the prejudices of the Puritan past.

With biting references to the divine mission originally articulated by Harvard’s Puritan forefathers, their putatively misguided attempt to search for “truth” rather than “truths”—as well as the presumption of James Conant, who presided over Harvard in the mid 1900s, to address his letter to his 21st-century successor as “My dear Sir”—Faust appeared to discard the tradition of the university’s founders as unfit according to current standards.

How the religious zealot Cotton Mather—who left Harvard in the early 1700s “after decrying its godlessness”—would smile, however, had he known of President Faust’s latest crusade.

President Faust, along with some hundred-odd college presidents and athletic directors, recently signed a petition demanding that the NCAA ban all alcohol advertisements during college sports broadcasts.

The recent NCAA basketball championship game featured 270 seconds of beer commercials—breaching the self-imposed limit of 120 seconds—and has now forced the moral compasses of higher education to intercede.

Alcohol policies on college campus seldom prove popular among the student populations. Following repeated incidents of dangerous binge drinking and routine hospitalization for alcohol-related concerns, college administrators rightly increase their concern for the well-being of their charges. But as recent events at Harvard have proven, deans prefer to impose liability-proof safeguards—tedious paperwork for registering parties, imperious oversight by entryway proctors, and severely curtailed access to alcohol in general—rather than opt for the more arduous but perhaps more far-seeing approach of encouraging a culture of personal responsibility and maturity. Inevitably, the lawyerly advocates of the “nanny” response prevail.

But Faust’s recent and rather inconspicuous effort to combat dangerous drinking culture points to a larger and less frequently debated problem than the continuous harangue over campus alcohol regulations.

University presidents—including and especially our own—have persistently and prominently expressed concern about students’ well-being when the issue is alcohol consumption. But no similar consensus exists on the question of the ultimate purpose and mission of a university and higher education in general.

For many years now, colleges have contented themselves with cleansing their curricula of politically incorrect presumptions and prejudices—so-called Great Books programs and American civic education, to offer two examples—meanwhile creating preserves, regardless of academic rigor, for the trendy and ideological disciplines like the study of women, gender, and sexuality.

Furthermore, as higher education becomes increasingly accessible, many universities and colleges have markedly turned their attention to offering more “relevant” and “practical” programs, according to the ever- and swiftly-changing employment markets. As college degrees proliferate, awarded in every imaginable field—from the provincial to the obscure—the relative value and meaning of each correspondingly plummets.

College administrators greet such concerns with ambivalence, as long as tuition continues rising skyward and applications continue arriving in great numbers.

The health and security concerns intimately related to alcohol consumption, especially prevalent on American campuses, no doubt merit the attention of college doyens. But it is a relatively easy issue to address: conclusive statistics can be marshaled to indentify the problem and causes.

The issue about the heart and soul, the very meaning of a university education, does not admit of such statistical and sociological precision. College administrators and curricular reviewers have no recourse to incontrovertible scientific proof in guiding and governing their institutions and are thus liable to meet with much resistance if their vision does not align with that of their faculty constituents.

As a result, most colleges have given precedence to “choice” and “freedom” in education to satisfy the diverse demands within the Academy and to demur from supposing it knows better than students themselves in what their university educations should consist. Unsurprisingly, an incoherent academic vision and ever-declining standards—along with ever-inflating grades—are the hallmarks of today’s higher education.

If only President Faust and her fellow bureaucrats showed as much solicitude for students’ minds and soul as they seemingly do for their livers.

Christopher B. Lacaria ’09 is a history concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.