Harvard's End
Harvard has been on my mind as I write, mainly because of two provocative new books that arrived by mail almost together. The first, by Harry R. Lewis, is Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education. Lewis holds a prestigious chair at Harvard, and was dean of Harvard College between 1995 and 2003.
Perhaps he became so deeply involved with undergraduate education at first because his specialty—computer science—is of so much interest to undergraduates. He taught Bill Gates, but it doesn’t seem that he needed to teach him very much.
Missing Vision
Professor Lewis is so devastatingly frank that I wonder what his former colleagues are saying about his book. The problem with Harvard, he writes, is not with the range of courses offered, or even their quality. A Harvard student can take any number of courses from distinguished scholars, some of whom are even dedicated to teaching undergraduates as well as possible.
The problem is that Harvard has no vision of what an undergraduate education is for, beyond preparation for admission to graduate school. When the faculty last tried to reform the curriculum, they settled for an aimless plan that they hoped would pacify students while avoiding turf wars among themselves.
The college provides psychological counseling for the troubled, and does its best to protect its students from assault or rape, “but security and therapy are the limits of its ambitions. Harvard articulates no ideals about what it means to be a good person, as opposed to a well person.”
Here Lewis identifies an element that is missing in more places than Harvard College. What does it mean to be a good person, and why should anyone even want to be a good person, as opposed to a successful person? I wonder if Bill Gates ever thinks that Harvard might have failed him, or if he ever wishes that he had attended a college with more soul, if less prestige.
I doubt that anyone has been appointed to any major university professorship in my lifetime for writing a book on What It Means to Be a Good Person, and Why You Should Want to Be One. Harvard did have at least one world-famous philosopher in the 1970s, John Rawls, but he produced A Theory of Justice, not a theory of goodness. That book was a fine text for dissection in law schools, but of no use for teaching the young how they might learn to be good.
I once telephoned Rawls at his office to ask him where the ghostly characters in his famous “original position”—who are charged with -selecting the principles of justice on which a civil society could be established—might look for a principle of goodness. The great philosopher took my call and spoke to me very courteously, but to my main question could only reply that he hadn’t thought about it much and didn’t know the answer, except that it wasn’t religion.
Spiritual Flowers
Kelly Monroe Kullberg’s Finding God Beyond Harvard: The Quest for Veritas provides an equally critical but more hopeful description of the spiritual desert at Harvard. The charming Mrs. Kullberg never came close to being a Harvard professor or dean, but she seems to have had a powerful effect on the place by planting spiritual flowers, first at Harvard, and then in other academic deserts throughout the nation.
Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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