It has been a month since I wrote about the disastrous Congressional hearing at which the presidents of three of our most prestigious universities gave testimony. I concluded that essay with the following sentence. “It is possible, barely possible, that this debacle in a congressional hearing room will lead to some good.” This is hardly a confident or optimistic remark, but as things are turning out it is not nearly sufficiently tentative or guarded. For it now seems likely that far from lancing the boil, this episode is likely to inflame it further.
The presidents—all of them highly accomplished, credentialed, and experienced —testified in a fashion at its best disappointing and at its worst disastrous concerning the intellectual health of their institutions. Let me expand that sentence. Their testimony had to do with the intellectual and spiritual health of their institutions. For though education is no longer frequently a religious enterprise, at its best it is often a spiritual one, especially when its subject matter is the modern versions of the “liberal arts”, the old trivium and quadrivium of the medieval schools.
Here the word spiritual is being used not in distinction to secular, but perhaps to material. All our earliest universities were born as religious institutions; the evolution of all of them has been secular. But they all continue to claim, and rightly claim, intellectual and cultural aspirations beyond the utilitarian and the vocational. The implicit acceptance and valorization of this claim by society at large forges the bond uniting it with the higher education “industry.” Ordinary folks may be nearly wholly ignorant of the “ivory tower” or bemused by its eccentricities, but they have been at least subliminally convinced of its important social role.
During the forty years of my own teaching career, despite all the minor league drama that comes with dealing with a large variety of often temperamental people on a regular basis, hardly a day passed without my pinching myself to make sure I was immersed in real life rather than a dream. Was it really possible that I was being paid good money to do something that wild horses could not prevent me from doing for free? Not everyone gets to follow a vocation, carried out among ever-changing throngs of exciting and often inspiring young people, that is so plausibly useful as well as pleasant.
The tardy resignation of Harvard’s president, a resignation at least tacitly demanded by her employers, dissolves the bonds of an unwritten contract. I call it “tardy” because the first response of the Harvard Corporation was an imprudently strong affirmation of seemingly enthusiastic support. This essay is not about the ex-president personally, but about how the “question” of American higher education has instantly been transformed into a major battlefield of our culture wars. News from our universities seldom makes a big splash in the press. But on page 2A of today’s (Tuesday’s) paper, the “Inside the Times” page, there is a whole article detailing the extraordinary interest that recent events in Cambridge Mass have garnered far beyond the Harvard campus.
For Harvard is special. I called it the greatest university in the world, and I am willing to stick by that for purposes of convenience, despite the fact that the genius of our higher education is the variety which renders such a judgement symbolical if not meaningless. At least let us agree that Harvard is “iconic.” When average Americans think of the acme of higher education in this country—you must grant my premise that average Americans do exist and that some of them from time to time might think about higher education--they are likely to think “Harvard”. I am old enough to remember when President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State caused a bit of a stir by suggesting that what was good for General Motors was good for America. In this instance I have to think that what is bad for Harvard is bad for America. And I think what has just gone down in Harvard Yard is likely to be quite bad. There are not too many large institutions in this country that command wide-spread admiration or even respect. Our Congress is a disgrace. Our system of primary and secondary education, though impossible to categorize easily, is generally mediocre when compared with world leaders. The distribution of the nation’s nearly incalculable wealth, which is mainly managed by people whose job is to make rich people richer, is grossly, possibly dangerously, uneven. Religious institutions and their leaders no longer play a major role in our national life. Our great universities have been the world’s envy. We could do without thrusting them into the vortex of nasty polemic. And it has immediately turned nasty. A good deal of the fault lies with the Harvard board whose investigative diligence has been less than keen. It was perhaps imprudent to endorse the embattled president so fulsomely. The not-so-subtle volte face, when it came, smacked rather of the G-men determined to get Al Capone at any cost. Fortunately for them Capone hadn’t been paying his taxes. Who could have guessed that the wild card in Cambridge would be pre-presidential plagiarism? The origins of plagiarism are not always sinister, but they are never wholly innocuous, let alone flattering. And in the academic context plagiarism—and what you have here is, yes, plagiarism—has to be taken seriously. It is a gross offense against fairness or what they call “equity”. It is not to be judged non-existent because the whistle-blowers are your political enemies or simply strike you as unpleasant people with bad motives. And as this plays out, it is very disappointing that among the first cards to be played is the race card—disappointing, but sadly probably inevitable.
