Harvard at 350

Harvard at 350

HARVARD UNIVERSITY now celebrates its 350th birthday. It has a magnificent history stretching back virtually to the beginning, all those Adamses and so forth, the Puritan divines and the Transcendentalists, the merchants and the Roosevelts: a great saga. It now has a decent president in Derek Bok, and perhaps the strongest faculty in the country. It is harder to gain admission to Cal Tech or maybe even Amherst, but that does not matter. Harvard's endowment is $2.8 billion, dwarfing all rivals. There have been leftist faculty flurries about SDI and Ed Meese, petty, symbolic flurries: Harvard performs massive services for Washington, to the tune of one-fifth of Harvard's annual budget, or $130 million. Pushed by Edwin O. Reischauer, for example, Harvard pioneered in Japanese and East Asian Studies, and the same is true in other fields.

All is not well, of course. The glass is indeed half empty. Like Columbia, Berkeley, and other places, Harvard rolled over before the rioters and protestors of the 1960s. Chicago, under President Edward Levi, did not, and there are many who argue that Chicago is now the place to go. This year, Harvard allowed shanties.

There has been severe aesthetic and cultural attrition in Harvard Square and around the campus generally. Evidentially the environmentalists were unable to protect their own environment against vulgarization, and maybe even failed to recognize it as such.

Sub-intellectual crazies seem to have run the student newspaper, the Crimson, for at least a millennium. The famous law school has been riven and undermined by a Marxist/nihilist faction. Not surprisingly, good professors are leaving for Chicago.

But Richard Herrnstein has a place at Harvard, and first published his incendiary genetic conclusions there. Martin Feldstein, former chairman of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors, teaches at Harvard. So do Harvey Mansfield Jr., Straussian and Burkean, and James Q. Wilson, sharp-eyed, eloquent, no-nonsense social scientist. Henry Kissinger taught there. Under Bok and Dean Henry Rosovsky, Harvard has instituted a required "core curriculum" that actually tends toward seriousness and is being widely imitated elsewhere.

Harvard, in its permutations, will always be Harvard, someting of a pain in the neck. It is excessively high-minded and earnest, and also complacent-snobbish. There is some truth in the title of Le Boutillier's bad book, Harvard Hates America. It is quite possible that Daniel Ortega is more popular at Harvard than Ronald Reagan is.

But T. S. Eliot studied and taught there. Students listened to William James and George Santayana and Alfred North Whitehead, Christopher Dawson, F. O. Matthiessen, and the great Kittredge. The latter refused to take a PhD, explaining, "After all, who would examine me?" Once, while entering his lecture room, he tripped over the threshold and fell on his nose. "At last," he said, "I am on a level with my students."

There is undoubtedly life in the old place yet, not much, as James Reston would say, but some.

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