Higher Education: Lemann on Harvard

Nicholas Lemann (dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia) has an interesting take on Summers' resignation, which coheres nicely with some ideas about education that I've been kicking around recently (spurred on mostly by The Closing of the American Mind). The general gist of the article is that Summers was trying to rectify (in an admittedly acerbic fashion) some major instutional problems endemic to Harvard and the other elite universities. He notes that this disatisfaction is not limited to Summers alone:

Bok [Summers' replacement and thus "safe"] has just published a book titled Our Underachieving Colleges, which follows a similarly downbeat book in 2003. One of the Harvard deans pushed out by Summers has a book about the university coming out soon called Excellence Without a Soul. The new book by former Princeton president Harold Shapiro is called A Larger Sense of Purpose--implying that universities don't have one.

This lack of purpose is further reflected in the undergraduate curriculum:

When Summers announced early on that he wanted to remake the undergraduate curriculum to ensure that Harvard graduates knew more, especially about science, he set off a direct conflict with the faculty, whose incentive is to spend as little time as possible designing and teaching undergraduate courses. Summers then made his goal harder to achieve by picking fights with faculty members, making disparaging remarks about entire categories of academics (such as women in science) and, probably most important, vetoing tenure cases that had been elaborately assembled by individual departments. It looks as if the collapse of his curriculum-reform effort, which ended with a report calling for almost no core requirements, led to the bitter departure of yet another dean, which set off the endgame of his presidency.

Summers was right that Harvard and other universities need to provide a more structured education for undergrads. But the institutional tides push powerfully in the other direction, and the credential value of the degree is so high that there's no penalty to Harvard for placing the needs of its faculty over the best interests of its students. McKinsey and Goldman Sachs will come calling with $90,000-a-year job offers regardless of what's in the curriculum. Harvard's next president will face the same pressures and have a difficult time standing up to them.

As I did not attend an Ivy League school, it is hard for me to know whether Lemann makes an accurate assessment; however, his thesis rings true from what I experience in my own undergraduate education and what I've read about the Ivies. My reaction was one of hope, just not for the Ivies. The problem seems to be a lack of a common focus--a seemingly unsurmountable difficulty. But this difficulty is only unsurmountable in a secular school (public or private). If, say, there were a Catholic university ranked in the top twenty, maybe it could seize this chance to offer students a coherent education of the highest caliber. Now I'm not too excited, afterall it was during my tenure at said instituion that the last remnant of what once a two semester Great Books class required of every student irrespective of major devolved into a required one semester discussion class--topic of the professor's choosing--with the full blessing of the faculty. The replacement of Monk with Jenkings does give me hope though. We shall see. Notre Dame has a chance to become something truly great, I hope it doesn't botch it.