How Harvard Compromised Its Virtue

Harvard University’s virtue -- indulge me that old-fashioned word -- is

something I have observed with interest and concern for the 40 years that I have taught there. I have not made an academic study, but to understand a university today you must first take the pulse of the students. I have watched my students, asked their opinions, and read the undergraduate newspapers.

Harvard is America’s leading university today not because it has the best faculty members or the shrewdest administrators, but because it has the best students -- it gets the brightest, most-talented pool of applicants and the highest yield of acceptances from that pool. Its prestige does not come from seeking to be unique, as the University of Chicago once sought to be uniquely intellectual. Harvard’s prestige comes from being at the leading edge of trends, thus justifying my focus on this one institution.

What happens at Harvard sometimes presages, sometimes reflects, what happens at other colleges and universities. And today, what I see occurring on the campus signals the damage that may result when higher-education institutions compromise their virtue to minister to the self-esteem of students.

Aristotle divided virtue into the intellectual and moral, and I shall begin with the first and move to the second. Harvard’s intellectual virtue is respect for intellectual merit. There is little or no anti-intellectualism at Harvard, no anxieties that having a strong intellect may make you unhappy. The fashionable postmodern disenchantment with reason, indulged by Harvard, does not lead anyone here to wish he or she had less of it.

Conservative thinkers at Harvard say that respect for intellectual merit is limited by political correctness (a cliche that bores clever people but still stubbornly persists at the university today) and assert that a sense of merit is wrongly extended to beneficiaries of affirmative action and wrongly denied to conservatives. While that is probably true in fact, it is not true in principle. The liberal faculty members and administrators who are in charge at Harvard maintain that the university’s virtue is diversity. They would be very upset if they felt obliged to admit that they violate the principle of respecting merit with their policy of promoting such diversity. Their peace of mind depends on being able to convince themselves that advancing social justice does not come at the cost of respecting merit. But even if Harvard has not abandoned merit, it has certainly failed to educate it.

Harvard today, or the New Harvard, misses no chance to proclaim its devotion to merit and diversity, or to diversity without loss of merit, as opposed to the Old Harvard of white, male Gentleman C’s -- represented by people like Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- for which nobody has a good word. But I will say this for the Old Harvard: at least it did not spoil its students. When it was luxury to go to Harvard, the students were not coddled. Now that Harvard is open to anyone with merit, they are.

You often hear from Harvard students that it’s very hard to get into Harvard, but not very hard once you’re there. But the faculty, for the most part, does not realize quite how easy Harvard is now. It thinks only of the difficulty of getting into Harvard, arising from the fact that merit, and not family wealth, is now the predominant factor in admission. Thus, essentially all Harvard students are bright. But are they equally bright?

Grade inflation is a statement that they are. The phenomenon may have once arisen from the notion that grading is an undemocratic act of oppression by teachers over students, but nobody now advances that stale claim from the 1960s. Grade inflation has become a thoughtless routine convenient for faculty members, students, parents, and administrators, in which an individual professor overgrades his students as unconsciously as a parent might spoil his children.

Together with grade inflation comes its twin, the inflation of praise in letters of recommendation. Students may not see these letters, but they are written as if your mother were pleading for your life. They combine the greatest urgency with the utmost praise, the loudest tone with the highest pitch. Stock analysts and traveling salesmen could learn their craft from such letters today.

A third element in Harvard’s easy virtue is the degree of choice in the curriculum. This year’s catalog of courses for undergraduate and graduate students is more than an inch thick and runs to 860 pages. It purports to offer choice to students -- and it does. But it also serves the convenience of faculty members, who get to teach specialized courses on their research.

Harvard does have a core curriculum that requires about a year’s worth of courses. General areas like literature and arts are required, but not specific courses. Students can choose from up to a dozen courses in each area, and each of those courses is designed to give a sampling rather than a survey. You learn a literary approach rather than a body of literature -- as if the idea were to learn how famous professors think rather than how great authors write.

Students at Harvard denounce the core curriculum, and yet they take more core courses than are required of them. The paradox reveals a hunger in students to consider big questions and to study great people and events, even while the regime of choice under which they study has no sense of the relative importance of questions, people, or events. Any item of knowledge equals any other item, and knowledge itself becomes a question of perspective. There is nothing a student needs to know in order to be an educated person.

For students, the regime of choice does not strengthen the soul. It does not impart a bracing independence of mind in charting one’s own course. On the contrary, it ensures that one can almost always find a way around doing something one doesn’t want to do or has underestimated the difficulty of doing.

I am describing the regime of choice as if it were more rational, more considered, more chosen than it is. It seems, however, to have come into existence not so much by deliberate choice as by default, through the loss -- or surrender -- of professors’ authority. Socrates compared himself to a midwife helping to bring out the truth that is already there. But besides serving as a midwife, a professor needs to be a taskmaster. Learning is not self-expression. It is a joy, but the joy is in work. Almost all students need to be set to work, and to do this the professor must have authority over them.

It is hard now for professors to be hard on students. It is difficult for them to give demanding assignments, make unsympathetic comments, enforce deadlines, and be sparing of praise and tough to impress. Students are far from denouncing and protesting the authority of the older generation; they are sometimes just short of worshipful of their professors. But the respect of students for professors is exceeded by the respect of professors for students. And it is not that professors are devoted to their students in gratitude for their students’ respect. Their devotion is limited by their failure, on principle but also for their convenience, to consider what is good for students. The principle is that what is good for students is held to be mainly, if not entirely, what is their own choice. That principle conveniently lets professors teach what they have chosen for their own research. The only limitation on students’ choices is that they must not choose an education someone else might think is good for them.

Course evaluations by students, typical at colleges and universities since the 1970s, also undermine the authority of professors. Such evaluations make faculty members accountable to students on the basis of needing to please them, like businesses pleasing customers or elected officials pleasing voters. The superiority of those who know over those who don’t know is slighted, and the students’ judgment comes down to the charm of the professor as students perceive it. What at first might be justified as useful feedback from students ends up distorting the relationship between faculty members and students.

Another factor in the loss of professional authority is feminism. Feminism makes the liberal males who dominate universities feel guilty for having dominated for so long, for doing so even now. In their eagerness to share their power and palliate the appearance of patriarchy, they do their best to accommodate the viewpoint of women and soften their own authority.

Feminism made its way among intellectuals less by argument and action, like the civil-rights movement, than by “raising consciousness” -- a concept of therapeutic insinuation that feminism did not invent but adopted. That concept reigns today in college and university administrations. Deans no longer lecture misbehaving students gruffly, glare at them unsympathetically, or dismiss their excuses sarcastically. Therapy is the order of the day, unctuous care the universal remedy. This solicitude for the young is performed with great good will, but it suggests that the duty of those in authority is to forgive, and it often comes across as weakness. A student knows very well when he or she is getting away with a misdeed, failure, or lax effort.

Self-esteem is the promise of multiculturalism and affirmative action, the two university policies of our time whose purpose is to give everyone the easy confidence of George W. Bush when he was an undergraduate at Yale. Somehow, though, the result of multifarious therapy is closer to anxiety than self-esteem. One can get a hint of the problem by noting that Bush did not get his self-esteem from receiving high grades.

Yet it would be wrong to stop here. The faculty provides a forgiving rather than demanding atmosphere at Harvard, but students also create an atmosphere for themselves. At the Old Harvard, students took it easy because they had it made: Their families were prominent and wealthy. Now, students want to make things easy for themselves because they don’t have it made. Their greater merit does not induce them to work harder; it only enables them to be more opportunistic. Students want an unblemished grade record not so much because they like being lazy as because they are ambitious. They strongly compete for the best jobs and, even more, for the plums of postgraduate study. At the same time, the undemanding atmosphere of the university itself does not free them of anxiety but only increases it because they know it is up to them to distinguish themselves.

Why should students want to distinguish themselves? Here we come to Harvard’s moral virtue. It’s because they have a sense of pride that urges them to do something important in their lives, something worthy of the merit they know they have. For the most part, these students are not sheer opportunists; their opportunism is in the service of their pride. Sometimes, their pride impels them to avoid the easy way and to seek out hard courses from which an A is unlikely. It’s no good, after all, to receive general respect for your fine record if you don’t respect yourself for the way you got it. The educators who promote the idea of self-esteem do not reflect on the fact that self-esteem is a matter of pride.

Which is why, ultimately, Harvard’s true virtue is neither merit nor diversity. It is something perfectly obvious to anyone who looks at the place -- except to its faculty members and administrators, who are almost perfectly oblivious of it. That virtue is ambition -- the ambition to make something of one’s life.

Years ago a student of mine, a Harvard senior, told a story about himself as a freshman. In his English course, a new instructor asked each student in the class to say what he expected to get from Harvard. When my student’s turn came after all the others had spoken, he said he came to Harvard to get an education. The instructor exclaimed, “At last, a Harvard student who doesn’t want to be president of the United States!” My student frowned and said urgently, “I didn’t say that!”

Harvard students are aware of their ambition but do not quite understand it. The trouble with challenging yourself to a difficult course is that you feel you are risking your future by not getting an A. So, rather than being pampered by others, you pamper yourself just like the Gentleman C student. But the Gentleman C knew how to enjoy life, and you don’t. You worry too much. Your desire to get ahead, instead of seconding your pride, gets in its way and makes you ashamed of both getting ahead and pride. That is why the pressure from peers works less well than faculty pressure from above.

Harvard is afraid to look ambition in the face. To Harvard, ambition and the responsibility that accompanies it look elitist and selfish. (“Elitist” is the fancy, political version of “selfish.”) Harvard gives its students to understand that the only alternative to selfishness is selflessness. Morality is held to be sheer altruism; it is service to the needy and the oppressed. A typical Harvard student spends many, many hours in volunteer work on behalf of those less fortunate. But what he or she plans for his own life -- a career -- seems to have no moral standing. To prepare for a career is nothing but to make a selection under the regime of choice. It is careerism -- a form of elitism and selfishness -- that seems unattractive even to those contemplating it.

Selfless morality is fragile and suspicious: Who believes a person who claims to be unconcerned with himself? Yet mere selfishness is beneath one’s pride. Harvard is caught between these two extremes; it has lost sight of its virtue. It cannot come to terms with the high ambition that everyone outside Harvard sees to be its most prominent feature.

The notion of self-esteem rampant in American education today is a debased version of pride. It is pride that shies away from any standard of good education, fearing that to apply a standard will hurt someone’s pride. But true pride requires a standard above itself in which to take pride. True pride is neither selfish nor selfless, but both. It is not afraid of a test -- and would rather lose than flinch.

Harvard should respect the self-confidence of its students and not pay so much attention to their anxieties. If it did, it would cease to be such a trendy place. It would regain its own confidence, sometimes misnamed arrogance, and re-establish its right to leadership in American education.

Harvey C. Mansfield is a professor of government at Harvard University. This article is adapted from a speech to the National Association of Scholars when he received its Sidney Hook award.

http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 24, Page B7