[The Montana Professor 17.2, Spring 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Harry R. Lewis
New York: Public Affairs, 2006
305 pp., $26.00 hc
George M. Dennison
President & Prof. of History
UM-Missoula
Harry Lewis knows Harvard well after more than four decades as student, faculty member, and administrator with the University. Having observed change first-hand during those years, he argues that the more things change, the more they stay the same. From the late 19th century when President Charles William Elliot disestablished the traditional required curriculum, Harvard has become the paradigmatic modern university. Dedicated to research and the pursuit of money and status, serving as a magnet attracting the best and the brightest students to match the outstanding faculty, Harvard follows a management strategy designed to achieve its goals by allowing students to study what they choose and the faculty to teach what they want, apparently oblivious to an unresolved tension that results. Ranging broadly over the history of what he considers America's premier University, Lewis offers a scathing critique of the blend of incremental decisions and mission drift allowing the market to control the academy.
His central thesis holds that "Universities have lost the sense that their educational mission is to transform teenagers, whose lives have been structured by their families and their high schools, into adults with the learning and wisdom to take responsibility for their own lives and for civil society" (xiv). In brief, Lewis believes that universities once had a "single, overarching mission" to which all activities conformed. However, he also understands that "Universities are complicated places...," serving "constituencies that have conflicting agendas" (1). Nonetheless, he argues that institutional failure of mission occurs because "Universities lack confidence that they know what they are doing." His conclusion, he insists, reflects his experience in dealing with the resultant problems as Dean of Harvard College during the late 1990s.
As the quotations in the last paragraph indicate, Lewis treats the "University" as an entity with a will of its own. From time to time, the agency behind the University, deciding its action and direction, appears as the president, the faculty, the Board of Overseers, or the College. This strategy suits a polemic purpose, but leaves the reader nonplussed about whom to blame for failings. Who governs the University? Lewis spends precious little time with such mundane details, but assigns responsibility for specific actions to the agency of the moment.
The chosen strategy allows him to speak in generalities about the University and its actions, as in these comments.
Universities have only a weak and superficial grasp of the scope of their educational mission for undergraduates. They are often puzzled about what they should teach, and are uncertain, even unprincipled, in their responses to educational problems. Two main forces combine to produce these troubling circumstances--competition and consumerism. (7)
The reader catches the thrust of such comments but gains no insight about causation or how to address the identified problems or deficiencies.
Lewis argues in the introductory section that unbridled and rampant competition for bright students, outstanding faculty, research funding, and endowments explains University actions, reinforced by uncontrolled consumerism. Similarly, professors compete for positions, tenure, promotions, research funding, inventions, the brightest graduate students, and occasionally even bright undergraduate students. Students follow the example and compete for admission to the best schools and the most lucrative employment after graduation. The excessive emphasis on graduate education and research has narrowed faculty effort, "lessening the concern for students' hearts and souls in favor of almost exclusive interest in their minds," thus presenting major difficulties for the new waves of students on campus in the wake of the emphasis on diversity (8-9). The new students, encouraged by their parents who pay at least part of the bills, do not share the perspective of the faculty, that college should prepare "professional academics." Instead, students and their parents view college as the "gateway to a secure future." In fact, Lewis argues, students, parents, and faculty indulge truncated and distorted visions of the purpose of a "liberal education," no longer understanding it as the means to free "young people...from the presumptions and prejudices" of their upbringing through "the power of ideas" (9-10). Despite the rhetorical flourish, Lewis demonstrates in subsequent historical analysis that this idyllic vision of undergraduate education has long since become obsolete or dysfunctional, if indeed it ever existed.
In any event, Lewis describes the conditions within the University which he considers both cause and effect. The faculty teaches courses reflecting their increasingly narrow specializations to enhance their research interests, and the students study what they want without direction (11-12). When students complain, the administration hires "more student support staff" and offers more amenities, effectively transforming the University into "a daycare center for college students" and further undermining any possible development of a sense of responsibility among students (13-14, 162). The administrators never impose "on the professors, . . . [the virtual] free agents in the competitive market," but relax any lingering curricular "requirements" to allow "students...[to] do what they want" in the resultant risk-free environment (17-18). By design, the curriculum matches the interests and aspirations of the faculty and the students, and not "even the...advisers...[can] give a rationale for" its incoherence. In Lewis's view, the resultant tension created by the divergent perspectives and aspirations of the faculty and students "will cause a rupture" in time, if not resolved (17).
He argues convincingly that this unfortunate situation resulted from the tremendous success of America's research universities in the 20th century, but (as discussed below) makes no use of the insight (17-19, 71-72). Led by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton--presumably in that order--the universities have "become research institutions" as well as "meritocracies." While "the students are not soulless,...their university is," and no longer ministers to the developmental needs of the students (18). He worries that the "loss of purpose...is not inconsequential," since these institutions "set" the "standard...for...[and] drive all of American higher education, on which...our future depends" (18). Whether the reader accepts the claim of institutional leadership, the analysis of deficiencies in undergraduate education--the actual focus of Lewis's discussion--indicates the time has come "to ask whether...institutions [of higher education] are doing the job the nation wants them to do" (19).
In two chapters following the introduction, Lewis traces the unforeseen consequences of Eliot's introduction of the elective system and graduate education at Harvard in the late 19th century. This intended reform led inexorably, in his view, to the farcical reform effort launched by President Lawrence H. Summers in 2002 (21-72). By 1900, the inevitable outcome manifested its denouement in the disappearance of virtually all curricular requirements. Subsequent attempts to repair the damage and restore coherence all failed, even the "General Education for a Free Society" in 1945, the famous Harvard Red Book that resulted from "as thorough and idealistic a...curricular study as...ever occurred and...may ever occur" (52). The Summers fiasco ended in a proposal still under consideration that eliminates all but the freshman writing and language requirements, neither of which assure competency, and values "all knowledge...equally" if "a Harvard professor is teaching it" (59-72, at 72). Hard words to describe a dire situation, but warranted, he believes, by history.
The seven remaining chapters probe various aspects of undergraduate life at Harvard, often with brilliant insight, always with fascinating detail and acid dripping sarcasm. In telling commentary illuminated by personal experience, Lewis discusses a range of topics. Grade inflation, he explains, began not just yesterday, or even in the last fifty years but with the introduction of grading (107-24). Student advising, unnecessary with a fixed curriculum and increasingly plagued with problems as universities failed to consider character and breadth of interest in faculty appointments, has today become the domain of peers, graduate assistants, and staff (91-106). His discussion of money on campus ridicules the University's hypocritical emphasis on equality while allowing the wealthy to purchase additional benefits at will (195-212). The analysis of money and athletes excoriates the farcical reliance today on the outmoded Victorian concept of the amateur--originally invented to bar lower class rabble from competing against those of acceptable class and standing--to give the wealthy all the advantages that money can buy while denying the less fortunate one clear means of acquiring some financial help (213-52). He uses the incidence of rape on campus, especially date rape, to demonstrate how the vague and confusing variations on legal definitions have the tendency to persuade the female students that they have no way to protect themselves, thus encouraging even more childlike behavior. Lewis treats them all as symptomatic of the erosion and decay of any unifying purpose or philosophy of higher education (147-94).
This reader, nonetheless, questions Lewis's insistence that the University has lost its way and forgotten its mission. As the history he invokes demonstrates powerfully, no idyllic, periodic, or prototypical model of a university or even of undergraduate education ever existed at Harvard or elsewhere. Since their first appearance, research universities have differed from liberal arts colleges, or teacher preparation colleges, or the subsequent community colleges. Universities have more nearly followed a course of development attributable to the type than lost their way. Similarly, all undergraduate programs have responded to the felt needs and conditions of the time, as Lewis himself shows, and as Derek Bok confirms in his recent book on the failings of undergraduate education./1/ Reformers have sought from time to time to rectify perceived problems, with more or less success.
However, societal changes have had much more to do with the developmental process than departures from or returns to some "overarching" purpose or ideal type. Thus, undergraduate education has taken various forms in response to felt needs, and has become increasingly worldly--if not vocational--thus consumer-oriented and market driven. Over time, increased competition--among the proliferating institutions of diverse types for students and faculty, and among the ever increasing numbers of students for access--intensified the consumerism in response to market pressures. However, despite the fallacy of assuming an idyllic past, and criticizing Harvard essentially for the failure to remain a liberal arts college, Lewis's interpretation of the failed Summers reform effort as the "product" and not the "source" of Harvard's curricular dilemma has merit (257). To buttress his argument, he also takes account of Summers's leadership attributes and style.
Lewis reserves his most critical judgments for the discussion of the recent failure of leadership at Harvard. He states flatly that Lawrence H. Summers failed as a president not because of the resistance of faculty and students to needed change and reform, not because of his confrontation with political correctness at Harvard, but because of his own basic dishonesty, his incompatible personal values and interests, and his inability to articulate a vision inspiring the faculty and students to action (257-63). As Lewis asserts, "Summers presented no imaginative program, envisioned no educational ideal, carried no flaming torch that students or Faculty [sic] wanted to follow" (259). In fact, according to Lewis, Summers treated the faculty and students as "interest groups" bent upon their own separate agendas. Thus, he never understood why the elimination of any curricular requirements failed to satisfy the students. Similarly, he failed utterly to grasp why his one-liner calling for instruction about what it means to achieve greatness did not suffice to move the faculty to curricular reform. Finally, he did not see (79-80, 257-63, esp. 258-59) that his about face to support the establishment of a women's center at Harvard--the first exclusive center on the campus--irritated further rather than mollified the female faculty and supporters outraged by his insensitive and untimely speculation that "intrinsic aptitude" rather than discrimination led to the "small number of female scientists" at Harvard and elsewhere (Lewis explains Summers made the comments to an audience he considered "friendly"). To the end, he misinterpreted the negative reactions or responses of faculty and others to his evasiveness, authoritarian tendencies, and inability or unwillingness to explain his decisions and actions.
In the end, Lewis offers a prescription for change and reform of higher education--perhaps a calculated effort during Harvard's search for a new president (253-68). First, the aspiring leader must offer a moral vision for the University, one that has the inspirational power to focus Harvard on a modern version of the original mission. Rather than providing an educated ministry for the civilization in the wilderness, Harvard--not just because of its preeminent standing among America's research universities, but also because of its moral authority--must educate the people who will fulfill the society's need for moral leadership. Second, this new leader must return Harvard to its original moorings by nurturing young people as they develop a philosophy of life enabling and empowering them to serve as exemplars of the informed, ethical, socially responsible, mature, and autonomous citizens of a democratic society. While most who work in higher education will accept those worthy goals, many will question a vision forcing a choice between education and research, especially for a research university.
In this reviewer's opinion, Lewis offers another in the growing number of polemics about the need for reform in higher education, and his book suffers from many of the same weaknesses as the others. While he writes about "higher education," with most of the discussion centered on his perceptions of the student experience at Harvard, he actually focuses on undergraduate education. He notes in passing that many of the problems with higher education today probably resulted from the single-minded pursuit of and the astonishing success of the research University that Harvard has become (18-19, 71-72). Many of the other polemics also suffer from a failure of focus, failing to take account of the differences in perspective and intention relating to institutional type. Returning Harvard to an institutional posture remotely similar to that of the 17th or 18th centuries requires stripping away the results of centuries of hard work and effort that produced the research university of today. Far better, one might argue, to find ways to take full advantage of all that exists on such campuses, as Earnest Boyer suggested just prior to his untimely death. Success in institutional reform typically comes from re-invention in the light of new conditions and needs, not a return to the past.
Fundamentally, Lewis's book lacks the analytical foundation and useful guidance of Derek Bok's recent assessment--cited earlier--of the state of undergraduate education, and thus will, in this reviewer's opinion, have much less influence on reform. Readable, often delightful in the caustic and humorous discussion of difficult issues, with brilliant flashes of insight, Lewis's book leaves the reform movement where he found it, languishing in the yearning for paradise lost or the "myth of the eternal return," as Mircea Eliade characterized the attitude. He offers virtually no sense of how to bring about the change he so eloquently advocates, perhaps because he prefers the role of Jeremiah to that of Peter. In a real way, the "myth of the eternal return" or search for an idyllic golden age leads only to the present. Absent a direct engagement with the actual societal conditions and needs of today, putative reformers will seek their desired ends with little effect. As most polemics or jeremiads, Lewis's passionate advocacy excites the emotions and stimulates the desire to act but provides no realistic means of achieving the ultimate objective.
Notes
[The Montana Professor 17.2, Spring 2007 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]