Harry R. Lewis
EXCELLENCE WITHOUT A SOUL
How a great university forgot education. 288pp. New York: PublicAffairs. $26.
1 58648 393
America’s great universities, argues Harry R. Lewis, are becoming soulless and consumer-driven. Increasingly, they cater to their students’ desires, rather than forming their students’ characters. They have little concern for their role in the creation of citizenship. As a result, American society is in trouble, because America’s future depends on superior education at these elite universities.
Lewis, a distinguished computer scientist and former Dean of Harvard College at Harvard University, focuses on Harvard throughout, especially the time during the troubled Presidency of Lawrence Summers. Summers submitted his resignation in February 2006, after controversies over many matters, including his plans for the curriculum, his management style, and, perhaps most important, his defence of the economist Andrei Shleifer, whose indictment for conspiracy to defraud the US Government, as a result of his self-enrichment while advising the Russian Government on Harvard’s behalf, cost Harvard a settlement of more than $30 million. The Shleifer matter was painstakingly analysed by David McClintick in an 18,000-word article in the Institutional Investor, January 2006, but Lewis’s Excellence Without a Soul provides a handy brief summary of the main issues. Other details about the Summers Presidency also appear. But the reader who looks for a balanced assessment of Summers and his tenure would do well to read Richard Bradley’s excellent Harvard Rules, which offers real insight into the personae and their ideas, with a lively and well-written narrative. In Lewis’s earnest but rather tedious volume, the isolated anecdotes tell us little about the man and the complexities of the issues surrounding him.
Lewis has a vice that seems rather common at Harvard: the tendency to overestimate Harvard’s importance for the world. Throughout his book, Lewis shows minimal curiosity about any other institution. Yale and Princeton are sometimes mentioned as the other institutions that are crucial to America’s future, but all the meat of the analysis is drawn from Harvard, even where a serious examination of other institutions would have had great probative value. Lewis conjectures, for example, that it might be good to separate the “credentialing” role of grades from their motivational role. He does not, however, appear to be aware that Brown University, right down the road, has been doing this for years, by permitting students to take as many courses as they like on a pass–fail basis, in such a way that the student learns his or her real grade, but that grade is recorded only as “pass” or “fail” for the outside world.
Again, anyone writing about the corporatization of the university ought to study the changes introduced in the British university system during the Administration of Margaret Thatcher, where that sort of shift has gone much further than it has so far in the US. In the Thatcher era, the Humanities felt under pressure to justify their existence to Government bureaucrats by showing that a Classical training (for example) produces useful managers for industry. The financial backers of US universities, both public and private, have traditionally had more respect for the Humanities as disciplines valuable for their own sake, general enrichments of life and citizenship. But if Lewis lacks interest in his university’s fellow elite US institutions, it’s a safe bet that he has little curiosity about other countries.
Lewis bases his argument for his book’s importance on a repeated claim that Harvard (maybe along with Princeton and Yale) is crucial for America’s future. His book, he says, is no mere insider Harvard story, because these few universities, and the standards they set, “drive all of American higher education, on which so much of our future depends”. But is this so? Outside the US, where the diversity of higher education in America is less evident, such a claim might easily win credence. (In India, for example, I find that the singular importance of Harvard is widely believed, and controversies about President Summers were page one news in most major Indian dailies.) Lewis seems to think that Harvard and its fellows are crucial for America’s future because the best and brightest, society’s future leaders, go there. (Excellence Without a Soul begins with the experience of teaching Bill Gates.) Of the eighteen US Presidents since 1900, however, only seven went, as undergraduates, to any Ivy League institution. (Harry Truman never went to college at all.) Among the various people who represent or govern me as a resident of Illinois, only one had even a passing connection, as an undergraduate, to the Ivy League. I conjecture that a similar story would emerge from a study of leaders in business, journalism and the arts. Bill Gates himself dropped out of Harvard in his third year and never finished college.
In short, Lewis seems unaware that higher education in the US is rather democratic. Despite the undeniable credentialing function of a Harvard degree, people manage to influence American society despite their choice of other undergraduate institutions. Even the idea that Harvard students are the best and brightest, to the extent that it was ever true, is becoming rapidly less so, given the rising costs of a Harvard education ($40,000 per year, according to Lewis) and the high quality of the alternatives. Harvard’s ample financial aid does not stop middle-income families from being badly stretched; they, and many poorer families, often choose a state school, or one where their children can live at home. Indeed, on the basis of my own experience with undergraduates at a wide variety of institutions, I would say that the most serious students differ little in basic intelligence and motivation. To the extent that students differ in preparation, that difference gets rapidly ironed out through the superior teaching that they often encounter at schools that know that they have to try harder. “Lesser” schools can typically attract first-rate young faculty, on account of the contraction of the academic job market.
No book as narrow in focus as Lewis’s, then, can tell us very much about higher education in America. That is a pity, because there is a lot to be said on his topic. It does appear as if the drive for success in the global market has begun to erode time-honoured commitments to a truly “liberal education”, meaning an education that (while asking students to major in some subject of their choice) also prepares them, more generally, for citizenship and life. Such a liberal education needs to be many things. It certainly needs to find ways to communicate to non-scientists the scientific concepts that they will need, as voters in a nation where evolution is being debated, as jurors in cases in which they are asked to assess DNA evidence, and in a wide range of other public and private roles. The part of Lewis’s book that seems least tired and perfunctory is the part where he talks about his own subject, and how one would teach non-specialists to work on problem sets. Here the book comes to life, and one wishes Lewis had written a book on how to teach the sciences at the undergraduate level. The scientific part of liberal education, much though it needs intelligent thought, is, however, in no danger of attrition, since everyone agrees that scientific literacy is crucial to America’s success in the global market.
Much more deeply threatened is the role of the Humanities. Lewis seems to be a supporter of their role in required undergraduate courses, but he has made little effort to learn what Humanists do. For example, discussing Harvard’s required area of Moral Reasoning, which typically offers a variety of courses in ethical theory and the history of ethics, Lewis makes the jejune complaint that students will try to give professors the “right answer”, so they won’t really learn anything. But this complaint shows that Lewis has made no effort at all to visit such classes and see what actually goes on there.
Anyone who teaches ethical argument to undergraduates is well aware of the danger Lewis mentions, and any decent teacher works hard to avoid presenting the students with a cooked “right answer” that can easily be identified. In any case, it is really not the answers that one is trying to convey, it is the way one might analyse a problem, and the different theoretical approaches to such problems. Moral reasoning, if well taught, is Socratic: it is about showing people how they might go about leading an “examined life”; that goal requires caring about arguments, more than about “right” conclusions.
So lacking in curiosity is Lewis about what his colleagues in the Humanities have been doing that he fails (at least in this book) to grasp a very fundamental distinction that goes across the Humanistic disciplines: between the intellectual aspect of character-building and the many other ways (personal advice, personal influence) in which young people can find their characters shaped by what they encounter in a university. He repeatedly suggests that the main way in which universities build character is through the latter set of techniques – mentoring, advice-giving, personal example. In consequence he makes the alarming proposal that candidates for academic posts should be evaluated for their moral character: not just that part of character that is relevant to the performance of one’s job, where severe substance abuse or a penchant for sexual harassment might possibly be legitimate issues to raise in the hiring process, but their private lives as well, their treatment of their children, and so forth. I think that Lewis simply doesn’t believe that the intellectual endeavour of the Humanities makes any contribution to building character. Because he has not spent any time with the Humanities, he cannot picture what that contribution might be. But one may learn to take apart and deeply appreciate a line of Latin verse from someone whose behaviour to his or her children is simply not known or, even, is known to be bad. One may learn how to think about the arguments of Plato and Aristotle from someone whom one might not like to have as a friend. Learning these modes of analysis, however, does make its own contribution to citizenship, for the reason identified by Socrates: most people, having never learned to examine their beliefs, are actually somewhat half-hearted and crude in their commitment to them. If you simply don’t know how to distinguish a utilitarian from a Kantian argument, there are issues that you may easily miss – as a doctor, as a juror. You might think, for example, that respecting a patient’s choice and promoting the patient’s interest are the same thing, and you might just assume that your own judgement about the patient’s interests is the only thing that needs considering – as many doctors are all too inclined, paternalistically, to do.
Again, if you don’t know how to recognize the various forms of logical error that politicians bring your way, as they always do, you might fall for a fallacious argument and end up with a conclusion that you would not endorse if you got all the thinking right. One could say related things about the skills learned from the close reading of literature and the study of history. What Lewis really doesn’t understand is that literary, historical and philosophical skills make their own contribution to character and citizenship.
Not having a handle on this very fundamental point – which, after all, is crucial to saying why we want young people to go to college, rather than only to church – Lewis is not in a position to make any very useful recommendation about what an undergraduate liberal-arts curriculum ought to be. And he does not even try. On the question whether there is any necessary tension between the goals of a great research university and those of a fine liberal arts college, dedicated to teaching, Lewis does not get very far, simply because he assumes that academic expertise doesn’t help build citizenship.
And yet Harvard does have one large problem, peculiar to itself, which Lewis fails to mention, rather like the elephant in the room. This is that Harvard, with its requirement that all candidates for tenure survive an international search and an ad hoc committee including outside experts, tenures far fewer people from within than its peer institutions, with the possible exception of Yale. The University of Chicago tenures about 50 to 60 per cent in the arts and sciences; at Harvard, the figure would at one time have been closer to 5 per cent, although there has recently been improvement in some departments. Instead, Harvard typically lets its young faculty go, and brings people in at a much later career stage. So far as I can see, this additional selectivity doesn’t fully pay off in quality. Institutions with higher tenure rates, such as the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, do extremely well in departmental quality. Even more clearly, however, Harvard’s policy deprives Harvard of young scholars just at the time when they may be most creative as teachers and programme-builders. Therefore many young people will find that they get a better liberal education at the many fine liberal arts colleges, which are a little more generous than Harvard, and even than other elite universities, in granting tenure to younger faculty.
Lewis’s book ranges widely over issues curricular, pedagogical and campus-life-related. It contains a sensible and helpful study of grade inflation and the whole topic of grading, only somewhat marred by Lewis’s lack of interest in the practices of other institutions. It contains a useful discussion of financial aid and the difficulties of integrating a student body from widely varying class backgrounds. It contains, further, a confused and confusing chapter on date rape, in which Lewis, despite his pivotal involvement in the shaping of Harvard’s policy on this difficult issue, shows absolutely no interest in the arguments made by legal experts involved in the reform of rape law.
Lewis’s faculty interlocutors evidently tried to insist on the distinction between affirmative consent and the mere absence of struggle. For Lewis, however, apparently (his discussion is at this point not very clear), any policy that holds that a man commits a sexual assault if he goes ahead and has intercourse with a woman who (being drunk, for example) has not affirmatively expressed her consent is a policy that condescends to women and fails to develop women’s characters. (The legal literature points out that we would never say that about financial crime: a person who steals a friend’s wallet while that friend is drunk and does not protest commits a theft.) Lewis’s book may have been rushed into print, to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Lawrence Summers’s resignation. Nonetheless, haste is not its only problem. It shows a lack of engagement with, or any serious dedication to the pursuit of, the difficult Humanistic issues that lie at its core. Perhaps this neglectful way of writing expresses Lewis’s conviction (which he once explicitly states) that there are no real objective standards in the Humanities anyhow; perhaps he believes that good character is sufficient to make a good book. Harry Lewis does emerge as a person of good character, albeit a little lazy about things on which it’s important to do one’s homework. He has written an inadequately argued book. It is a book, however, that shows the need for other, better books to tackle the urgent problems that it (more or less) identifies.
