It would be hard to improve on Power Line’s title for its post about the latest round in Harvard radicalism’s jihad against Larry Summers: “Athens on the Charles” [now changed, for unfathomable reasons – did the mayor of Athens threaten a lawsuit? – to “The Clouds”, which also fits].
The Harvard faculty has narrowly voted (218-185) to express “no confidence” in the leadership of Harvard President Lawrence Summers. Socrates was convicted of impiety by a roughly comparable vote of 280-220. The vote essentially represents the conviction of President Summers for not believing in the gods of the city.
There are two principal differences: First, Dr. Summers will not have to drink hemlock. Second, unlike Socrates, he has not been bold enough to declare that his questioning of popular prejudices is “a gift from God” to his fellow citizens. To the contrary, he has insisted, with increasingly desperate vehemence, that he worships exactly the same gods as they. It is as if Socrates had come around to praising Aristophanes’ Clouds and promising never to raise uncomfortable questions again.
This incident is the latest to cause me to wonder whether contemporary universities do more good than harm to the intellectual state of society. We have more campuses, professors and students than ever before, but is the net effect a more vigorous life of the mind? Bundling general education for near-adults, professional education and scholarly research into a single type of institution seemed to make sense as recently as my own youth, because each element furnished something that the others lacked. I won’t say dogmatically that all has changed for the worst, but I can’t help but wonder.
A college education is vastly more expensive today than it was then. When I entered Yale 40 years ago, annual tuition, room and board totaled $2,800. Now the figure is $38,950. Adjusted for inflation, that is a 130 percent increase. The trend is the same everywhere else. For these higher prices, students more and more appear to be getting a curriculum of academic fads pushed by know-nothing extremists.
Universities aren’t the only places where youngsters can become familiar with the traditions of Western civilization while acquiring useful skills, nor do they have a natural monopoly on scholarship. The smug professorate that sits in judgement beside the Charles River may discover in a few years that no one is any longer willing to pay for its dubious services. The Muses are departing for more welcoming slopes.
Further reading: A Harvard professor (one of the minority) has a roundup of links to reactions to the vote.
Update (3/16/05): Also worth pondering is Eric Rasmusen’s reminder –
that the department chairmen are drawn from the faculty, and the senior faculty all vote on tenure cases. What are we to think of a university faculty of Arts and Sciences which has voted a desire to get rid of a powerful president because he dared be mildly politically incorrect at a scholarly meeting? How can any non-liberal assistant professor hope for fairness in a tenure vote? Summers can shrug this off – but the junior faculty can’t.
One can’t help but fear that, in the minds of some of those who voted for censure, that was the real objective: to warn less well-known dissidents that they are unwelcome in Harvard’s Athens.
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