Each fall the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy hosts a conference focusing on issues in higher education. This year’s conference, which will be held on Saturday, October 27, has the theme “Building Excellence in American Higher Education,” and the keynote speaker will be former Harvard dean Harry Lewis.
Harry Lewis is an ideal choice. He has many years of experience as a professor and administrator at Harvard. Last year he published a book entitled Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education. It spells out in detail the reasons why Harvard – and most other colleges and universities – are failing to live up to all their publicity hype.
The most glaring defect Lewis addresses (and which will be the topic of his speech at the conference) is in the curriculum. In years gone by, most colleges and universities required students to devote most of their credits to a core of courses that, by general assent, were crucial to a well-founded education. Some subjects, in other words, were more important than others.
These days, however, the idea that anything in the academic universe is more important than anything else is deeply repugnant to the relativists who dominate in our education system. Why should a course on the history of the United States be “privileged” (to use a buzzword popular in educationist circles) over a course on the history of the Maoris in New Zealand? Why should a course on British literature be privileged over a course on TV sit-coms of the 60s?
Writing about the curriculum review project at Harvard, Lewis says, “The bottom line was that nothing in Harvard’s curriculum was held to be more important than anything else. Like a mother of quarreling children, Harvard looked at its thirty-two academic departments and their countless subspecialties and declared that they were all loved equally.”
As Lewis sees it, the trouble is rooted in a sad fact about the modern university – it is run mainly for the benefit of the faculty. The professors usually bend administrators to their will; they can teach pretty much whatever courses they want to and devote loads of time for research. The result is an undergraduate curriculum consisting of a huge smorgasbord of narrow specialty courses that aren’t ideal for the students.
Furthermore, the quality of teaching generally leaves much to be desired since promotion has nothing to do with how well a professor conveys information and motivates his students. Reaching the nirvana of tenure depends on scholarly publication. It’s unfortunate but true that “great teaching can be viewed in academic circles as a kind of performance art, fine if you can do it, but raising doubts about the teacher’s seriousness as a scholar,” Lewis maintains.
Things don’t have to be that way. At Harvard, the business school emphasizes teaching quality. “A quarter mile from Harvard Yard,” Lewis writes, “the Harvard Business School puts pedagogy high on the list of institutional missions. Students who move from the College to the Business School are astonished by the improvement in teaching quality.”
Another item on Lewis’s bill of indictment against Harvard (and most other colleges and universities) is that the moral education of students is ignored. Universities go to ridiculous lengths to make sure they have a faculty that is as “diverse” as possible – counting only certain characteristics as ones that matter in diverse-ness – but they are not interested in hiring faculty who can raise the moral plane of the students. “Rarely,” Lewis writes, “do they even suggest that professors should be responsible for students as whole human beings during their crucially formative years, or that professors should be chosen, trained, or evaluated with that objective in mind.”
Now, there is a reactionary idea, which no doubt had Harvard professors rolling their eyes when they read it (if they did).
Harry Lewis is certain to give an informed, lively, and iconoclastic talk at the conference.
Editor’s note: To learn more about the conference, go to www.popecenter.org or write info@popecenter.org. George Leef is vice president for research for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.