Harvard, Humiliated

 

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. 

 

Camões--and a Little Chaucer--at Harvard

   

 

 

    

 Watch out, Geoff.  I've got my eye on you.

 

 If I declare our visit to the Camões Conference at Harvard a great success—and I do—the credit for our personal comfort goes primarily to Leah and Brian, our generous hosts, who with what appeared to be ease balanced busy professional careers and the demands of two adorable children with the care and feeding of a couple of octogenarians.  On the academic side, on the Harvard campus, the treatment was likewise most welcoming, and the intellectual feast quite rich.  Many of the principal scholars in this field, including the Portuguese ones, were there; others made presentations via Zoom.  Rita Marnoto came from the University of Coimbra, the ancient academy at which Camões himself must have acquired some large part of his enormous erudition.  It is rather as though Davy Crocket had picked up a Yale doctorate on his way to the Alamo.  She gave the introductory talk, a bibliographical tour de force concerning the poem’s first edition(s) of 1572.  Around the edges there were pleasant group meals full of friendly and informative talk; Joan sneaked off for half a day at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and offered a report on some of the marvels viewed.

My belief concerning the European Renaissance, a belief by no means widely accepted by my colleagues, is that in most essentials it continued in the philosophical and theological traces of high medieval culture.  Historians are more interested in change than in stasis, and there of course appeared in the sixteenth century major stylistic changes and intellectual innovations for us to talk about.  My talk, indeed, in part concerned possible “medieval” relationships between Camões and Dante.  Such relevance as the digressive comments about the Middle Ages in this paragraph might possibly have  concern my welcome of two unexpected fourteenth-century Chaucerian interventions into our sixteenth-century Camonian event.

At the Houghton Library, where some of Harvard’s fabulous bibliographic treasures are stored, experts had mounted a small collection of first and other editions of the Lusiads.  The Harvard library is among the richest in the world in this as in so many other subjects.  But there is hanging in an elegant room not far from the exhibition space what is probably the most famous, and possibly authentic , portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer.  I had seen a hundred reproductions of it, but never it.  The Librarian of the Houghton, knowing that I had taught Chaucer for many years, took me aside for an unscheduled private viewing.  It was a very memorable kindness.

                         The Houghton Rare Book Library, Harvard University

A second way the Middle Ages intruded into our very Renaissance conference was via the front page of the New York Times, which reported that two major Chaucer experts had discovered new evidence concerning a mysterious episode in the poet’s life.  Though Chaucer’s life records, when sufficiently spread out and annotated, occupy a pretty thick book, there is a great deal we do not know about him, including practically anything that might shed light upon his “personality”.  One intriguing document, however, has garnered a great deal of attention and much speculation.  It is a legal affidavit attesting that a woman named Cecily Champagne absolves Chaucer of any charge of raptus against him.  This document has sometimes been used by feminist scholars and others to impute patriarchalism, misogyny, and other unpleasant medieval attitudes to the father of English poetry.  What is new in the Chaucer scholars’ discovery is that Cecily and Geoffrey were allied in a legal action denying the charge.  Any scrap of evidence about Chaucer is a major discovery, and the discoverers of this one merit high praise.  But there is no particular illumination of Chaucer’s character in it.  Anybody with access to the Du Cange dictionary of medieval Latin would know that it is quite unlikely that raptus in the context of the original document means forcible sexual possession.  Hardly more likely does it mean that he secretly married her.  No form of “kidnapping” or “false imprisonment” or other coercion is likely.  Secondly, and without the slightest ambiguity, what the document says is that Chaucer did not commit raptus, whatever raptus means.  Only in places like Park Slope has inveigling away somebody’s cleaning lady with an offer she cannot refuse risen to the level of a crime.  Somewhat strangely, one of the discoverers of the supplementary document was quick to add that nothing in this episode undermines certain previous scholarship concerning it.  This is a little like saying that nothing in Copernicus undermines anything in Ptolemy.  That is one of the current stylistic differences between scholarship in the humanities and scholarship in the natural sciences in America.  The study of past ages can be very rewarding and indeed instructive.  But the past is a series of unique ages, each with its own inherited cultural patterns each with at least some cultural innovations.  It cannot be true that “to understand everything is to pardon everything.”  Still it does little to divvy up the past into convenient but inadequate categories for flagellation among our own current moral and political certainties, many of which would seem novel if even comprehensible to our not too distant ancestors.

Traveling by train worked out very well.  It took about five hours.  Flying would not have required less, though it would have involved a great deal more difficult walking and the general hassle of security lines.  There are far worse fates than to sit in a comfortable, roomy seat with a good book for a few hours. 

Still I was once again struck, as I so often am, by the disparities between the private and the public in our country.  Everything I saw on the Harvard campus was elegant, functional, imposing, inviting.  It was clean.  It was tidy.  You might never guess that the institution’s endowment is less than sixty billion dollars.  Boston South rail station, where we arrived and whence we departed, is a civic disgrace.  The area from which the trains arrive and from which they depart has the air of a long-abandoned steel mill.  The vibe of the interior waiting room, where I was able to buy a pint bottle of soda water for $3.84, is decayed inelegance.  And though the Amtrak train did get us to Trenton, and on time… How are you going to keep them down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?  The distance between Marseilles and Paris is greater than that from Trenton to Boston.  The TGV (very fast train) covers the distance in three hours and twenty-seven minutes, and you can safely place your bottle of soda water on the little-fold down table without fear that it will be bounced into your lap within the first quarter mile.  Of course my weekend thoughts were full of other cities: Lisbon on the Tagus River, and others I shall never see, Mombasa, Malinde, Goa.  Forget the train stations for the moment.   In this country I have actually been paid good money to read, teach, love, talk, and argue about old books that I love with a never-failing succession of inspiring young people.  And hang out at Camões conferences for down time.  What a privilege.  What an honor!