Harry Lewis has been at Harvard, man and boy, for fifty years. He’s a professor of computer science, and formerly Dean of Harvard. He has long been a Cassandra, a vox clamantis in deserto, alarmed about the state of education at Harvard, where he has registered the decline brought about by the madness of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and by self-indulgent faculty members who teach what they want — their niche subjects — rather than what the students need. More on Professor Lewis’s analysis of Harvard’s “debased curriculum,” and comments on it by Professor Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution, can be found here: “Harvard’s Crisis Stems From Debased Curriculum,” by Peter Berkowitz, Real Clear Politics, February 18, 2024:
Last month, Harry Lewis published a Harvard Crimson column that squarely laid the blame on Harvard for the crisis that has engulfed the great university. Fifty years of experience on the banks of the Charles River inform Lewis’ severe judgment: He is a longtime Harvard computer science professor, a 1968 Harvard College graduate, and, from 1995 to 2003, he served as dean of Harvard College. Nevertheless, while illuminating Harvard’s damaging politicization over the last 20 years of its undergraduate curriculum – and despite his half century at Harvard – Lewis overlooks the full extent of the crisis.
In “Reaping What We Have Taught,” Lewis maintained that the surge of antisemitism on campus following Hamas’ perpetration of mass atrocities in Israel on Oct. 7 was not the fault of Claudine Gay, who resigned as Harvard’s president in early January. Nor, he asserted, had Harvard admitted antisemitic students or hired antisemitic faculty. The problem, rather, lies in Harvard’s curriculum: “Unapologetic antisemitism – whether the incidents are few or numerous – is a college phenomenon because of what we teach, and how our teachings are exploited by malign actors.”
Lewis performed a simple experiment. He typed into the Harvard online course catalog search box key words associated with fashionable progressive ideology. The word “decolonize,” he found, “is in the titles of seven courses and the descriptions of 18 more” – more than triple its appearance before 2000. The words “oppression” and “liberation” are each “in the descriptions of more than 80 courses,” while “‘Social justice’ is in over 100.” Lewis also searched for “white supremacy” and “Enlightenment” – these days, it is often said, the latter arises out of and perpetuates the former. He discovered that the terms’ appearances in the online course catalog run “neck and neck, both ahead of ‘scientific revolution’ but behind ‘intersectionality,’” which barely registered before 2000…..
Consider the Ethics & Civics category. The 2024 spring semester offerings feature such options as “Ethics of Climate Change,”; “Evolving Morality: From Primordial Soup to Superintelligent Machines,” and “Ignorance, Lies, Hogwash, and Humbug” (which deals with fake news and other forms of deceit that mark “the post-truth era”). With one of these courses, students can check the ethics and civics requirement at Harvard without ever studying Western civilization’s biblical and classical foundations, the synthesis of faith and reason in the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Middle Ages, the modern tradition of freedom’s emergence in the 17th and 18th centuries, and, not least, America’s founding principles and constitutional traditions.
The post-Oct. 7 educational crisis at Harvard, entwined with antisemitism, has been several decades in the making. Effective reform must replace the current curriculum, which advances professors’ interests in niche scholarship and partisan politics, with one that serves students’ interests in acquiring an organized introduction to the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences and in undertaking a reasoned exploration of the United States, the West, and the world.
Can the curriculum be changed at Harvard, removing niche subjects offered by self-indulgent professors, so that again requiring that students be provided with what they need to know: the “general education” that demands basic instruction in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences? And who will remove the modish madness of DEI from the campus, so that it no longer the deciding factor in determining the courses that are taught, the faculty who are hired, and the students who are admitted? What Dean or future President of Harvard would take on the twin tasks of DEI removal and curriculum reform? Perhaps, despite his age, the Harvard Corporation will offer the job of President to Harry Lewis himself. That would be a welcome sign from the Corporation that it’s willing to break with the past. Harvard could not do better.
Andy Cap says
On this website, recently someone wrote ‘garbage in, garbage out’. Nowadays what goes into Harvard is garbage, and out come people like Gay. So the answer is a firm ‘no’.
James Lincoln says
What can be done to wake up Harvard:
1. Alumni need to stop all donations. All.
2. High school graduating seniors not apply to Harvard.
3. All government funding should stop. All.
And Harvard should:
1. Not accept any foreign funding. Any.
2. Deep-six all DEI programs. All.
3. Have at least 50% conservative professors.
maria says
Agree
tgusa says
Democrats have shifted there historic racism away from blacks and are now projecting the same thing on to whites.
Christopher Watson says
“There” denoting the location of an object or a person.
“Their” belonging to.
I do wish wish people would learn English or learn how to use a dictionary.
mgoldberg says
What happened to the meaning of a Liberal Arts education. It was 75 yrs ago, an honorable 4 yrs degree that included Logic, Rhetoric, Debate, history of the west and the world, American history, the classics, language. This was to be foundation and the important basis of an understanding of what it meant to learn western history, how to debate issues, how to understand how to debate and understand how to make a good argument. Nowhere was it a command to seek only ‘correct’ viewpoints. These have weeded out all the ideas that make for an actual education, and now, all that’s left is the propaganda movements
Ray Jarman says
I still remember television program, Paper Chase, and thought that to attend an Ivy League school would have been fantastic but I could not have even paid for the room & board. To have studied under Han Morgenthal at the Kennedy School of Government would have been the greatest experience I could have ever had and now I would not go there if one paid me. I would return to the U. of Maryland first. I never thought that the anti-Semitism that runs amuck could have occurred either.
Ray Jarman says
I still remember television program, Paper Chase, and thought that to attend an Ivy League school would have been fantastic but I could not have even paid for the room & board. To have studied under Han Morgenthal at the Kennedy School of Government would have been the greatest experience I could have ever had and now I would not go there if one paid me. I would return to the U. of Maryland first. I never thought that the anti-Semitism that runs amuck could have occurred either.
Jayell1 says
How sad to hear how far the rot has spread at Harvard. I’m afraid I have to tell people that the same rot seems to have spread right around the world as I noticed in a recent trip to Cambridge, UK, when I saw an LGBQT rainbow flag hoisted proudly over the hallowed 16th. century quadrangle of that ancient international bastion of academic excellence, King’s College, where some kind of national or otherwise respectable flag would normally have been in times past. I’m not setting foot in that place ever again. So if Harvard, USA and Cambridge, UK, have clearly gone right down the drain, what’s happened in the rest of the erstwhile civilised world?
Waldorf says
You do the math: ‘The problem, rather, lies in Harvard’s curriculum: “Unapologetic antisemitism – whether the incidents are few or numerous – is a college phenomenon because of what we teach, and how our teachings are exploited by malign actors.’ That would seem to sum it up, except for the fact that these teachings aren’t only being exploited by malign actors, but also taught by them, if you ask me. But that just makes it worse.
Jeeves says
One would nearly be tempted to say ‘Drain the Swamp a.s.a.p.’. Does ivy loose its leaves in the fall?
Westman says
It would seem that Harvard never was an important institution based on the quality of a superior educational offering, rather, it was a place for recirculation of the elite and an absorber of a limited number of highly gifted neophytes into the hallowed strata.
Harvard boasts of its Alumni accomplishments without mentioning that it is the gatekeeper which introduces these “scholars” to the social contacts which give them the imprimatur and opportunity to excercise powerful societal positions.
It doesn’t require great wit to discern some astounding ignorance and poor logic in Harvard graduates. Even more astounding is the number of Americans who believe some political fakery because its promoter is a graduate of Harvard or some other elite school with a portfolio larger than the budgets of major cities.
Harvard will continue to lay its imprimatur upon upon the knighted. Education is secondary.