Blushing Crimson

Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, by Ross Gregory Douthat (Hyperion, 304 pp., $24.95)

THIS is an account, written just after leaving Cambridge, of the author's four years at Harvard. He is reassuringly disinclined to hagiolatry, but he does not scorn Harvard's special endowments. These derive, of course, from ongoing resources--the faculty, the library, the plant--but the whole distills substantially from institutional venerability and a felt preeminence.

The figure fleets across my memory, from a query ten years ago: Seventy percent of aspirant freshmen who are accepted by both Yale and Harvard opt to go to Harvard. The university is comfortable with its singularity, and the author doesn't disguise the satisfactions taken by the student body from knowing that they are matriculating as Harvard students, and are presumptive members of the national elite, even if it will take a while to establish individual distinction.

Ross Douthat has certainly done that by writing this book. It is a satisfying account of the Harvard experience and quickly we learn that there are no themes in that experience asking to be consummated. Education at Harvard does not provide an across-the-board third act. Graduation ceremonies are merely transactional--as Douthat shrewdly observes also about most undergraduate sex experiences--not "transcendent." The four years give the students opportunities without ever attempting to shape them, and academic vigilance is scant. Douthat quotes a passage from Allan Bloom, who wrote reproachfully about the incidence of contemporary students who matriculate "hoping to find out what career they want to have." Such students are, paradoxically, misfits. "This undecided student is an embarrassment to most universities, because he seems to be saying, 'I am a whole human being. Help me form myself in my wholeness and let me develop my real potential'; and he is the one to whom they have nothing to say."

Douthat was a quiet conservative while at Harvard, if that can be said of someone who rose to be the editor of the Salient, the Harvard conservative paper. And he reveals that he is a Catholic, who from time to time is tempted to fidelity. He has sharp eyes for the color of college life, at trivial and intellectual levels, and tells about student impostures, intemperance, toleration, and the ambient confusion as clever and lucky students make their way through their schooling in cosmopolitan academic quarters.

Harvard is hardly immune to the strictures of conformity; Douthat describes how some compromises are effected. He does this with a fine mix of indignation and resignation. Consider the question of grade inflation. "In 1965, around 20 percent of students earned B+ or above averages; five years later, the number was 48 percent." One reason for this, to be sure, was to help students dodge the draft. If a student's grades were failing, he might end up in Vietnam.

But grades did not fall with Saigon. This was the natural effect of high self-esteem: If you consider yourself a member of the elite, you expect to be acknowledged as such. The mighty Harvey Mansfield resolved how honorably to face the problem, and addressed his opening class by saying that he would issue two grades. One grade would faithfully reflect his estimate of the student's achievements. The second would reflect his submission to the protocols. "The higher grade will be sent to the registrar's office and will appear on your transcript. . . . It will ensure, as I have said, that you will not be penalized for taking a class with me." But Professor Mansfield stuck a piece of ginger into the back end of the self-satisfied by closing, "And of course, only you will know whether you actually deserve it."

Douthat answers many questions that come to mind. How wealthy are Harvard students? About 70 percent of them have parents who earn more than $100,000 per year. What subjects are especially sought out? Economics comes first; and, interestingly, it is in that field that students find the odd scholar who is forthrightly conservative. That's because the market is king: its dispositions, ineluctable. The separation between student liberals and student conservatives can usually be measured by a five percentile sausage separating their positions on appropriate taxation. Douthat is eloquent in transcribing the demoralization of education when it lacks eschatological flavor; but he is not the protester who superordinates his concern for what is not there, so as to exclude what is there, which is everything from free condoms to the poetry of learning.

His fine coda tells of the author's sensitivity and the range of his concern. "I hope, in the end, that I love Harvard as we should love the world: not because it is good (it is not) but because there is good in it, and things worth fighting for. Perhaps the rest will pass away, until in my memory and the memory of my classmates only the best remains, the beauty of the place and the promise of greatness, a promise that went unfulfilled in my four years but endures nonetheless--as if around another corner, through another ivied gate, there waits the university of our imagination, the Harvard of our unrequited dreams."

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