Harvard

I suspect that a great many Americans are ambivalent about Harvard University. It is an elite institution in a country that does not fancy elitism. It is unashamedly academic in a world that mistrusts academics, intellectuals, and experts. Huck Finn had America in his sight when he expressed his dislike of book learning. 

 

I’ve had mixed emotions about Harvard ever since I went there. To be sure, I had a wonderful experience. I met some great people. I dove into and swam in the libraries, which are stupendously great. I remember coming across an edition of Father Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du vieux testament, translated into English in 1685, in the open stacks. I brought it to the attention of the staff at Houghton Library, the repository of rare books at Harvard. They told me that they had the first edition, 1682, already in Houghton and didn’t need the 1685 version. Of course I availed myself of that open stack copy for my dissertation. But I still marvel.

 

I also encountered the self-conscious superiority of the place and of some of its students. 

 

Two examples and then a generalization, entirely partial in all senses of that word, as I hope I can go on to argue.

 

First example. A midterm exam in one of the big lecture halls. Time was up. We teaching fellows in process of collecting blue books. The leader of the teaching fellows, a very sweet young man who died from a brain tumor soon after this episode, demanding from one kid that he turn in his blue book. Said kid loudly proclaiming, “Do you know who my father is? I’m going to report you to the president.” Idiot child, to be sure. But still.

 

Second example. Being a poor grad student, I work-studied my way to a brighter future at Widener Library, in the Preservation Section of the Department of Collection Development. My work entailed sustained and constant use of the card catalog—yes, I’m that old. At the time of the incident the Harvard libraries were migrating to an online catalog, what became HOLLIS, which meant that the old card catalog room was discombobulated and topsy-turvied.

One alphabetical section of the catalog had been shoehorned into a narrow, square corner of the room, with a table in the center to rest the catalog trays as they were being used. Because space was at a premium, it was imperative that the corner be kept uncluttered—no pulling a tray halfway out and riffling through the cards while you blocked everyone else’s access. And having removed a tray and finished using it at the table, it was essential you return the tray to the catalog to open up space at the table.

 

That’s the context for the experience.

 

So there I was, working my way through a tray along with two or three other library workers when a kid—maybe a sophomore?—pulled out a tray, used it, and then was about to leave it on the table as he hurried off. I asked him to replace it in the catalog. In one of those Brahmin accents that you have to learn to tolerate, he responded: “I don’t have the time. I’m a scholar.”  I suggested that were he to leave the tray in situ he might find his scholarship rammed up his rear end sooner rather than later. He replaced it. But the attitude remained.

 

From these two, really three examples, then, the general case. Harvard institutionally and as a conglomeration of individuals is almost insufferably cock-sure of itself. It is arrogant. It is relentless in asserting itself and its interests. It is self-satisfied to a fault. My finding Father Richard Simon’s book in the open stacks, it turns out, was much like my discovering the arrogance of the student in that exam or my encountering the self-absorption of the “scholar” in the catalog room of Widener.

 

Still, Harvard as an institution of higher learning is irreplaceable. It is the source of much that makes American science, medicine, scholarship paralleled only by a handful of universities in the entire rest of the planet. It has given so much to America that, in its absence, America would have been an entirely different country. That greatness—a word I hesitate to use, but in this context must—has not always been for the good, to be sure, any more than the history of the United States has been always for the good. But the influence of the university has been and continues to be overwhelmingly beneficial to the country and to the world at large.

 

The most recent evidence of that contribution to American greatness is the university’s response to the Trump administration’s root and branch effort to take over the running of the institution—whom it hires, whom it admits as students, what it teaches, which direction its many-headed research efforts take. Without resisting those dictates, the university, and by force of the university's significance in the life of America, the whole of American society and culture, would become a mere appanage of the federal government.

 

Harvard is not an object to be given to the children of a king. Indeed Harvard’s resistance reminds us that there is no king who occupies this "shining city on a hill." That phrase derives from the Gospel of Matthew. It is first applied to what would become the United States in 1630 by John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, even before he and the settlers of the Bay Colony had left Old England and come to the New one.

 

In the spirit of that phrase, only six years after Winthrop used it, the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony established the New College, soon renamed Harvard College, with a mission to “advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity.” In other words, to set up the light of truth, Veritas as the university’s motto puts it. The initial direction of the learning was par for the course in what John Milton called “the Wars of Truth” of the seventeenth century, to prevent the “leav[ing of] an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”

 

Since then the wars of truth have expanded far beyond the theology of the Puritan ministry in the Bay Colony. What the Trump administration wants to do is to put out the light of truth and substitute the will-o-the-wisp gaslight of dogmatic ideology.

 

To paraphrase the writings of another academic, English rather than American, this will not pass. And I, finally, find myself proud of an institution that I’ve found so difficult wholly to embrace.

"Remediation" in Colleges and Universities

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, in 1920 22% of Whites and 6% of Blacks had a high school degree; 4.5% of Whites and 1.2% of Blacks has a bachelor’s degree. It has no data for Master’s or higher degree until 1995.

In 2013, the last year for which I can find data, 94.1% of whites, 90.3% of Blacks, 75.8% of Hispanics, 95.4% of Asians, 95.5% of Pacific Islanders, and 84.7% of Native Americans had a high school degree; 40.4% of Whites, 20.5% of Blacks, 15.7% of Hispanics, 60.1 of Asians, 24.7% of Pacific Islanders, and 16.6% of Native Americans had a bachelor’s degree.

Do a great many people, of all races and ethnic backgrounds, need help with their educational aspirations? Absolutely. A parallel bit of data: PISA scores for kids who go to the highest SES schools outdo the scores for the most impressive national scores, like those of Finland or South Korea: 545 for the highest SES schools in the US and 541 for Finland. But the PISA scores for kids who go to the lowest SES schools are abysmal—in the lowest of the SES schools the scores amount to a measly 434. Those numbers are from 2009, when I did the research.

To be sure, in the US SES is so closely associated with race/ethnicity that it’s not surprising that only Asians and Whites have PISA score in the range of Finland. You can of course attribute the difference to race. I attribute the difference to SES.

By the time my kid had graduated from college, he had been to innumerable museums, had seen innumerable plays, had travelled overseas, and as a little kid had had book after book read to him until he picked up the reading habit for himself. He graduated from a very low SES school in PA. But his family, my wife and I, had the wherewithal to make up for what the school may have lacked—and I emphasize the MAY because in fact, with a couple of exceptions, the school district did pretty well by him and his cohort in the highest “track.”

It's always a matter of SES.

Given all that, I think maybe instead of bitching about the support that some of our students need, we should be celebrating the fact that, overall, 89.9% of American kids have a high school degree and 33.6% have a bachelor’s degree. That doesn’t mean that the education they’ve achieved is stellar. That will come when the SES evens out.

Sweat and the Single Boy

 When I was a tiny tyke the barber would come to our house to cut hairs for all the males on the premises—nine of us when everyone was around. I hated to have my hairs cut—or rather, I hated to have someone handle my noggin in aid of cutting my hairs. So I would hide wherever I could. Once I hid under the barber's car. Fortunately, I guess, I was removed and shorn before he could run me over. I suspect I'd have preferred death. But there you go.

 

But it wasn’t only the noggin-touching of the barber that I disliked. When I was still a wee lad, and well into my adult life, any body to body contact, with sib, friend, or stranger, put me off almost entirely. Fortunately in my Marist Brothers school, where I was a studious little brat through the beginning of third grade, we were not physical educated. At some point one of the brothers did institute a set of basketball teams during recess, to be sure, but that was for fully clothed kids, required essentially no bodily contact, and so no real threat to my contact phobia.

 

But then we became exilic, and in that cauldron of bodies called the public schools, where—mirabule dictu!—there were people of the female persuasion cheek by jowl with boys, phys ed became a requirement. Again, we were all fully clothed, so very little infringement of the bodily contact exclusion. Except when we had sessions of square dancing. Ay me! Swing your partner and do-si-do indeed. A coincidence, to be sure: it was during one of those square dancing sessions that we all learned of JFK’s assassination.

 

And then came the move to junior high school. There we were obliged to change from regular clothes to phys ed gear. I didn’t mind the nudity in the locker room. In fact, it was interesting in its own way—the visible differences, the comparisons, the strutting and fretting. Still, the boys’ locker room gave onto the phys ed teachers’ office, with expansive, wall to wall windows overseeing the whole cadre of naked boys while the adults gazed on. That was a bit of a put off, particularly because the gentlemen kept their college frat paddles, which they used from time to time to warm some of those naked bottoms, adorning the top of the windows.

 

But there was worse to come.

 

In that junior high school we were instructed in the fine art of wrestling. We all know what wrestling entails. Bodies locked together in mortal—or what passes for mortal—combat. Limbs locked, fingers fumbling, torsos tortive. We kept our gym shorts on, praise be, but had to remove our shirts. And all of us in seas of sweat—this was Florida, after all—we grappled. Compared to wrestling, the square dancing of elementary school was anodyne. Shangri-la. Eden itself. After so much body against body, I welcomed the shower, even as the phys ed teachers gazed on.

 

Wrestling continued through the end of high school, and always the shower was more than welcome. College was a different story. We were required to have graded credits in phys ed back in those days, so phys ed was kismet.

 

My initial experience with the phys ed department was less than stellar. We had to prove that we could swim and float in the water, so we boys—in the days of sex segregation such exploits demanded separation—dutifully showed up at the indoor pool to perform our natation. I automatically took my swimming trunks because it seemed a gimme. A number of kids did not, however. And they learned that they would have to perform in the nude. I suspect that would not happen nowadays.

 

We also had to prove that we could run a certain distance, perhaps a mile?, in seven minutes or less. At the time I was a smoker. Of tobacco. As well. I went through two or three packs a day, and did so until I couldn’t afford the cost, when I started to roll my own cigarettes. I couldn’t keep track of my consumption then. At any rate, there was no way that I could possibly run for anything like a mile in seven minutes—or half an hour, for that matter. So I was obliged to take remedial phys ed for my first credit. Since all of us up for remediation were equally dead physical losses, we didn’t do much for that credit beyond show up and walk around the track that we were supposed to be running. Every now and then an instructor would crack a verbal whip. With no notable effect. One result of that experience was that my otherwise perfect 4.0 average for the year was marred by the C I got for the class. It was a gift.

 

Such demonstrations of prowess aside, we could choose what activity to experience. And I learned that I could game the system. I chose to take exhausting classes, like bait casting, which entailed us standing on one side of the gymnasium, elevating our school-provided rods and reels with a plumb weight at the end of the line, and aiming to hit a bull’s eye target on the other side of the gym. I did not sweat a great deal in that class. But I did get pretty good at the task, and ended up with an A, no less. The first and only A ever in a phys ed class for me. I got a little more adventurous and signed up for a class in fencing. That was fun, except that all of the instruction was for right-handed people. Oh well. And I took a class in ice skating, which was fun as well. I can still skate fairly well.

 

The point of all those choices was that they required absolutely, positively no body-to-body contact at all. Glorious! And yet square dancing came my way again. I chose to take a class in folk and square dancing—not to relive my elementary school nightmare, but rather because by that point in my life I’d learned to make exceptions in the bodily contact exclusion rule when it came to people of the female persuasion. I may not have known the young lady with whom I danced, but invariably she, a series of shes, seemed cheerful and attractive. A little hand-to-hand contact was OK, I thought, especially since the gym where we danced was nicely airconditioned, so sweat was minimal at worst.

 

But square dancing would rise up again for me, alas not in airconditioned comfort. One hot July night, for some unknown and possibly unknowable reason, the woman I loved, who not much later became my wife, decided that it would be neato keano if we went to a square-dancing venue out in rural Massachusetts, somewhere west of Boston, at any rate, and rural insofar as the dancing took place in a real live barn. Not airconditioned, to put it mildly, in the heat of that hot hot July evening.

 

I was prepared to dance and enjoy myself, not just because I had the college phys ed class under my belt, but also because I’d be dancing with my beloved, with whom bodily contact was absolutely not to be avoided in dance or in any aspect of life. What could go wrong? What my soon-to-be wife had not told me was that the rules of the dance required that no one partner the person they came with. Lordy lordy. The whole evening was a nightmarish mishmash of sweaty palms and a stream of sweat every time partners swung. But I endured. Ain’t love grand?