Presidents of Harvard

            Presidents of Harvard, one presumes, know whereof they speak.  And so, for all the talk and controversy about what is wrong and what is right with higher education, nothing comes closer to pinning down the issue than old (pres. from 1909 to 1933) Pres. Abbott Lawrence Lowell's remark that "Universities are full of knowledge.  The freshmen bring a little in, and the seniors take none away, so knowledge accumulates."  The witticism may say something about the educational accomplishments of Harvard undergraduates in the first third of the last century.  But more significant is what Lowell doesn't say.  One listens in vain here for hints of exit testing to determine the educational differential of a school's product output.  Indeed, one listens in vain for any hint at all of the pompous flapping that we hear all too often from the professional hierarchy of academe:  education, Lowell suggests, is scarcely serious, and surely not useful.  Only asses would set out to assess the enterprise.

            On the contrary, Lowell implies that the function of universities is to be repositories of knowledge rather than the automated student-stuffing machines for which our modern educational czars drool.  I would go Lowell one better, in fact:  any college that graduates seniors who think they know a great deal is infallibly not doing its job at all. Colleges ought to sap all confidence from students, and can do so very simply by letting their knowledgeable freshmen, and even more their wise sophomores, loose in the stacks of a great academic library.  Consider:  50,000 miles of shelves, at a conservative 8 books per foot and 500 pages per book, with 500 or so words per page, all to be read in 4 years.  Even the most replete of freshman minds is bound to collapse under the strain.

            Humility is not a darling of the modern educator's canon of virtues, but surely it ought to be.  True humility such as Lowell suggests in the graduating senior must lead to a never-ending quest for knowledge.  There is always the fifty-thousand-and-first mile of shelving being added onto the stacks, after all.  One can imagine Lowell arguing that the greatness of Harvard as an educational institution is the sense it fosters in all students and faculty, not only that there is that extra added mile to go, but that a peer or colleague (and certainly one's teacher or mentor) is well past the three-quarter-mile mark.

            While she was visiting New England in the 1930s, Gertrude Stein said, "Education is thought about and as it is thought about it is being done it is being done in the way it is thought about, which is not true of almost anything."  And that is the problem with education today.  We cannot risk thinking that the learning of skills, portable and useful as they are, is education.  If we do so, we will also risk graduating seniors who know more than the entering freshmen.  Lord only knows what chaos might be the consequence!