Cayuga's Waiters, a Cornell a cappella group, sings that "We didn't go to Harvard" because, among other things, "We're not that cocky, and they can't play hockey." The success of its hockey team notwithstanding, a recent Atlantic Monthly article by a Harvard graduate handily proves the first assertion. Entitled "The Truth About Harvard," the sprawling essay covers grade inflation, meritocracy, non-challenging courses, the inferiority complexes of humanities professors, the ineffectiveness of Harvard's core curriculum and Ivy League graduates' race to fill schools of medicine and law and, of course, prestigious investment banking jobs. At the end, the author, Ross Douthat, looks back at his college experience and feels cheated.
I have to admit that after I read it, well, I shed a little tear.
Once I finished feeling sorry for the Harvard grad with the Atlantic Monthly gig, I tried to make sense of his arguments.
While he doesn't come out and say it, he appears to be writing from that now-familiar position, the (yawn) slighted conservative student at a terrible liberal campus (and once again, I'll point out liberals' willingness to trade to conservatives our English departments in exchange for their military, Pentagon, departments of justice, state and education, company board rooms and, hell, I'll even throw in Wharton while we're at it). Somehow, every professor in the piece who isn't a blithering idiot also happens to be right of center, and Douthat manages to paint one of them in a swashbuckling light generally reserved for comic book action heroes. Of course, he reserves the majority of his scorn for humanities professors, making them seem both threatening and obsolete.
He claims, "To tilt to the right is in some sense to assert a belief in absolute truth," while "attempts by humanities professors to ape the rigor of their scientific colleagues have led to a decades-long wade in the marshes of postmodern academic theory, where canons are scorned, books exist only as texts to be deconstructed, and willfully obscure writing is championed over accessible prose." Truly nothing is quite so accessible as an obscure scientific article responding vehemently to a different obscure scientific article.
I can't speak to Harvard's curriculum. But I've paid attention to this dynamic in any politically-related course I've taken at Penn, and in each one the professor went to great lengths to ensure airtime for both sides. Far from forcing their opinions on students, my professors refused to divulge their political orientation in class, which would not necessarily have been a bad thing: One of the most fulfilling courses I took at Penn was taught by Mark Adams, a conservative professor who was always up for a bout of political sparring during office hours. I never felt intimidated or that my grade would be threatened by the fact that I didn't necessarily share his admiration for Ronald Reagan. It was fun and engaging, the kind of interaction that, some might say, is the point of college.
Not so in Mr. Douthat's world. What is most fascinating to me is his ability to weather glaring contradictions without a second thought. The negative influence of know-nothing liberal humanities professors pervades the campus, but according to him, students flock to the courses taught by conservatives. He complains that in college he was able to write reams of bullshit backed only by anecdotal evidence without anyone calling him on it, yet in that very article, free of the protective confines of the Ivory Tower, he spews on unchecked.
This same phenomenon plays itself out on a national scale all the time. Politicians use issues like these to drum up support, regardless of the fact that they are contradicted by postmodernism's kryptonite, the truth. White Christian males dominate all three branches of government, yet no one is quite so persecuted by "the establishment" as white Christian males. The last five years have seen the most capitulatory press corps since Scotty Reston devolved into Kissinger's cheerleader, yet we never hear the end of the liberal media and all its sins. And by usurping the language of populism, every single bill passed by Congress that appears to widen the economic divide between rich and poor, from tax cuts to handouts for credit card companies, comes at the behest of "the people."
In 1962, while accepting an honorary degree from Yale, John Kennedy made the famous declaration that the best of both worlds was a Harvard education and a Yale degree. These days I'd flip that around, but really, it's hard to complain about either and still be taken seriously. If Mr. Douthat is still searching for what it all meant, I can offer only this: It afforded him the opportunity to have a rambling, 4,000-word manifesto published in The Atlantic Monthly. At least that's something.
Eliot Sherman is a senior English major from Philadelphia and former editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Diary of a Madman normally appears on Tuesdays.
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