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HARVARD'S CONSERVATIVES
IT'S ABOUT TIME that Harvard acknowledged the existence of principled dissent to the liberal consensus ("The 30 Years' War," by Janet Tassel, September-October, page 57).
John Staddon, Ph.D. '64
Durham, N.C.
PART TIMOTHY LEARY, part Herbert Marcuse, Harvey Mansfield and other conservative gurus make a living these days by condemning a "repressive tolerance" they believe has settled like a shroud on America's elite universities. They want to spike the watery Kool-Aid of Harvard's curriculum with a mind-expanding dose of their transcendent values. And yet, I have confidence in the Harvard establishment. That Fleming, Huntington, and other oppressed minority voices can be heard in the pages of our alumni magazine is proof our liberal system still works for everyone.
Justin David Suran '91
Oakland, Calif.
CONGRATULATIONS to Tassel and the editors for the fine article regarding the struggle for Harvard's soul. The battle is important to Harvard's future as well as that of many other U.S. universities affilicted by the same sickness. The article gives me hope that Harvard has bottomed and that the good guys are finally winning, after 30 years of darkness.
My one complaint concerns the photographs used on the cover and opening pages of the article. The photographs of Professor Mansfield may make him look silly to many--a foppish dandy. If the photographs were furnished by Mansfield, in my opinion he made a mistake. If chosen by the editors, I hope that it was an honest mistake and not a deliberate attempt to reduce the audience for an important article that will do much good.
John J. Pringle, M.B.A. '61
Massey professor of finance
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, N.C.
Editor's note: clothed in this manner, Professor Mansfield presented himself at the steps of Widener Library to be photographed for this article.
PRIGGERY is easily mistaken for moral courage. What is irritating about Tassel's article is that it accepts--or at least transmits uncritically--some conservatives' glamorizing vision of themselves as embattled defenders of ancient wisdom against the barbarism of the majority.
Yes, some of the devices by which that majority seeks a more just and humane society are ill-conceived, or even disastrous, and deserve to be so charged. But if the individuals described long for an ancien régime of privilege (whether for white, male, Protestant Anglophones, or others), for the rejection of homosexuals and the subordination of women, and/or for the adumbration of a militarized, imperialistic state, then they should say so and reap the disdain those positions deserve in a democratic society. Such a position would be perverse, but it would at least justify the heroic attitude you report.
Karl S. Bottigheimer '58
Stony Brook, N.Y.
WHILE CONSERVATIVES may be in the minority at Harvard, they are certainly not the victims of a repressive academic establishment. If Tassel really wanted to find evidence of a repressive orthodoxy, she would do better to examine Harvard before the 1960s, a time that many of the conservative faculty she quotes seem to remember with great fondness. Prior to the 1960s, Harvard was a place where minorities and women were severely under-represented and quotas were placed on the number of Jews who could attend. Faculty members whose political views did not conform to the conservative "orthodoxy" that prevailed during the McCarthy period suffered real consequences. So what is so attractive about Harvard before the 1960s? According to James Q. Wilson, it is the fact that students were still required to wear ties to dinner.
Emma Berndt '00
Cambridge
TASSEL HITS THE MARK on so many issues that frame student life at Harvard that her article should be required reading for freshmen. I can remember well being a wide-eyed freshman during orientation week, when a seemingly endless parade of student organizations held "orientation presentations." For reasons that have become clear only in hindsight, these organizations were of a uniform political flavor. A typical example was one devoted to addressing issues of sexual orientation. Their presentation included a memorable exercise in which each person in turn was asked to say, "My name is...and I am gay," in a style reminiscent of Alcoholics Anonymous. It did not matter what your sexual orientation actually was, only that you repeated the party line. The avowed purpose of the exercise was to create a "safe and supportive environment" for each individual freely to express his or her sexuality. The irony of this, it seems, eluded the designers of this particular exercise.
Each of the other presenting student organizations had equally memorable and outlandish methods of assuring that, despite being asked to read excerpts from Emerson and Thoreau during the summer, each freshman understood that at Harvard one is free to march to the beat of a different drummer so long as one marches in the approved direction. It was plain that these organizations had the approval and backing of the University, as any student who failed to attend and participate was subject to disciplinary action. The free and open exploration of ideas is not well fostered by an environment where official "heresies" are recognized, as any constitutional scholar knows.
Just as the revolution of the '60s was needed to overturn the heresies of that era, we need another revolution to free us from the dogmas that define political heresies in the '90s. That revolution, of course, has been silently spreading in classrooms throughout Harvard. Today's students seem more concerned with practical, personal issues relating to family and career and less devoted to movements or ideologies than students of a generation ago. The age of activism at Harvard has been on the wane for some time. This is a development sure to be viewed as ominous by both the ultraconservatives and the Law School's "Crits" [adherents of critical legal studies], who may see it as a sign of increasing selfishness, cynicism, and materialism. Yet it is also a return to a unique brand of American individualism and pragmatism that distrusts comprehensive ideologies and excessive rationalization, and views anything "political" as at best a necessary evil. For good or for ill, it is a predictable reaction of my generation to the excesses of our elders and to the civilization that is their legacy to us--the most complex, unpredictable, and rapidly changing society the world has ever known.
Thinh H. Nguyen '96, J.D. '99
Palo Alto, Calif.
WHAT A BREATH OF FRESH AIR was Tassel's article. Cutting through the smog of ultraliberalism and political correctness, it blew on the embers still alive in the tinderbox of hope that the Harvard I knew and loved in the late '30s was not yet dead. The current overemphasis on diversity, multiculturalism, and affirmative action ignores the motto we still put on our coinage: E Pluribus Unum.
The treatment of ROTC has particularly disturbed me. Let alone that Harvard has turned its back on the national- defense needs of the U.S., it is denying to its students the broadening experience of military training and discipline. Even liberals should agree that Harvard is blocking the input of fresh and often innovative ideas to our officer corps that can come from liberal-arts graduates--a most desirable leavening influence, as I saw during my years of wartime service at sea as a reserve officer.
Go, Harvey Mansfield and your other advocates of honest, practical, and clear thinking, go!
Richard E. Bennink '38
Franconia, N.H.
Editor's note: As reported in "ROTC Resurfaces" (July-August, page 82), where the annual commissioning ceremony in Harvard Yard is shown, Harvard students do participate in ROTC classes and drills on the MIT campus, the nearest of the Boston-area regional ROTC centers. Fees are paid by alumni, not with Harvard funds, in keeping with University policies opposing discrimination, which conflict with military policy concerning homosexuals. Were the military policy to change, presumably so would Harvard's policy on funding, but there is no indication that the Department of Defense would create another regional training center on the Harvard campus.
I APPLAUD YOUR EFFORTS to bring to light different segments of the Harvard community, and hope this most recent venture will not be met with the vitriolic hatred that some letter writers vented on Andrew Tobias after his piece on gays at Harvard ("Gay Like Me," January-February 1998, page 50).
There is, however, a troubling factual problem with the conservative critique. Tassel speaks of the conservatives' "fondness for old-fashioned words like 'patriotism,'" and Professor Samuel Huntington lauds the ROTC program because it "provides an opportunity for students who wish to have a military experience and in effect provides a fellowship to them...." Unfortunately, the patriotism of gay and lesbian Americans is not valued by ROTC, which excludes them from participation.
If the conservatives in your article mean what they say about opposing judgment of humans based on "social or racial or gender categorization," as John Couriel '00 claims he does, they should be leading the charge against a program that excludes patriotic Americans based on such categorization.
Kevin Jennings '85
Executive director, Gay, Lesbian, and
Straight Education Network
New York City
I COULD NOT BELIEVE my eyes when I read the comments of Ruth Wisse and Roman Martinez. Wisse believes that feminism has contributed to domestic violence, the decline in education, and the collapse of the American family. I'm surprised she didn't throw in the greenhouse effect while she was at it.
Feminism arose in response to the existence of domestic violence and the hypocrisy and inequality of the "American Family." Wisse is perhaps of the belief that if daddy is drinking, beating mom, and fondling little Susie, that's a healthy American family--so long as there is no divorce.
Martinez finds that by observing in a "silly" book that androcentrism exists at Harvard, the Alliance for Social Justice assumes a stance as victim. It's an observation, Mr. Martinez, and one with which I concur. If a person of color observed that racism exists in this country today, that wouldn't make him or her a victim, either. I am not a victim, and I can safely observe that racism, classism, and sexism are still very much alive on this planet today.
Women have chosen to no longer live in silence and fear, but in freedom and exuberance. That's what the women's movement is about. The world has been shaken by our upstart voices, and while it may seem a little messy and confused at present, I'm sure it will even out in the end. We will all be the better for it. Even Ruth Wisse and Roman Martinez.
Valerie Gilbert '85
New York City
I WAS PUZZLED by Tassel's portrayal of the program in women's studies. She does not mention that women's studies is a well-established field of scholarly inquiry and a demanding, honors-only undergraduate concentration. Since the establishment of the program 12 years ago, women's-studies concentrators have garnered a disproportionate number of summa degrees, prestigious fellowships, and academic prizes. Last year, for example, four of our 11 senior concentrators were awarded Hoopes Prizes in recognition of the extraordinary quality of their honors theses--a rate of 27 percent. It is worth noting that Hoopes Prizes are decided by a College-wide committee, not by individual programs or departments, and that, overall, only 66 out of 1,469 seniors who graduated with honors (less than 5 percent) received this recognition. Women's studies is committed to the highest standards of scholarly excellence, and the performance of our students bears this out.
Women's studies is an academic field, not an ideological program. We welcome students of differing political commitments, and we encourage debate in the classroom. Indeed, I believe you will find a much wider range of political opinion expressed in any class in women's studies than in Tassel's article, which makes no attempt whatever at a balanced presentation of this important topic.
Katharine Park '72, Jf'80, Ph.D. '81
Zemurray Stone Radcliffe professor of
the history of science, and chair, Committee on Degrees in Women's Studies
Cambridge
NORMALLY ASSAILED by the right wing for being humorless, we feminists, it seems, will also be excoriated for displaying a sense of humor. I refer to the ridiculing of women's-studies courses in Tassel's article. While the first half of my course title is playful ("Shop 'til You Drop"), the second half ("Class and Gender in Consumer Society") should make the seriousness of the subject matter quite clear. Interestingly, Tassel wrote nothing about the courses themselves. So I can't resist mentioning that the 182 students who chose to study one of the central economic and cultural developments of human history (i.e., consumer society) read Veblen, Galbraith, Bourdieu, Marx, Friedan, and Raymond Williams, among others. About 35 percent of the students were men, by the way, which is consistent with the general trend toward more diversity in the kinds of students who want to take women's-studies courses.
Juliet B. Schor
Director of studies, Committee on
Degrees in Women's Studies
Cambridge
I RECENTLY LEFT HARVARD, where I was an assistant professor in the Department of English and American Literature and Language and also had faculty appointments to the Committee on Degrees in Women's Studies and the Committee on the Study of Religion. One of the real pleasures of teaching at Harvard was the diversity of views encountered in the classroom and in the faculty room. I found students more than willing to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies, whether of the right or the left. Nor was my experience at faculty meetings one of political or intellectual conformity.
I certainly did not recognize Mansfield's description of feminists at Harvard. Very few of us are "shielded by tenure," as he imagines. Even less recognizable, though certainly more risible, was his colorful portrayal of faculty feminists "geld[ing]" (his term) the president, deans, and other too-sensitive souls to enforce feminist hegemony.
One of the women's-studies courses I had the privilege of teaching was "Introduction to Women's Studies: Changing the Subject," in the fall of 1998. Imagine my surprise to discover in Tassel's article that Salient publisher Hugh Liebert audited my course and even cites it as proof that Christina Hoff Sommers was right and "professors really do try to indoctrinate you with their political ideologies."
I am sorry that Liebert's experience in my course confirmed his worst fears about women's studies. For, like him, I value a diversity of perspectives, and one of the aims of the course was to present a diversity of views from within feminism. To this end, much of the course was conducted through guest lectures. I even invited Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? (a chapter of which I was assigning), to give a lecture. Unfortunately, the invitation went unanswered.
I can only assume that Liebert did not attend the entire course. If he had, he would have discovered that feminism is and has always been a buzzing, booming mix of voices and perspectives.
Ann Pellegrini '86
Associate professor, Department of
Women's Studies, Barnard College
New York City
THIS IS BY FAR THE BEST article I can recall reading in Harvard Magazine. President Nathan M. Pusey's replacement by Derek C. Bok was the first strong signal to those of us away from Cambridge that something was significantly amiss. Over succeeding years, the extent to which Harvard has abandoned reasoned analysis, scholarly discourse, and personal and institutional dignity became ever clearer.
It is good to know that the forces of unreason aren't going unchallenged, that there are worthy foes of the notions that traditional Western scholarship is drivel, and that nonsense (e.g., deconstructionism and critical legal studies) can be scholarly pursuit. Three cheers for Gomes, Mansfield, Rosovsky, and their colleagues.
John L. Warden '62
New York City
I AM QUITE SURE I have never been so amused in more than 20 years of reading the magazine as I was by Tassel's piece. The article reminded me of Lionel Trilling when he says in The Liberal Imagination that conservatives do not have any ideas, but rather "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."
As the author of a book on Derrida and deconstruction, I am always delighted by the conservative boilerplate that ends with postmodernism-slash-deconstructionism as the root cause of all this mess we are in. That neither Paul de Man nor Jacques Derrida ever wrote anything remotely like what Edward O. Wilson attributes to them is a standard part of the game. Thankfully, one thing I learned at Harvard from true conservatives like Robert Fitzgerald (late Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory) was always to start by reading the text.
Peter Baker '78
Professor of English and cultural studies
Towson University
Baltimore
I SUFFERED a modest identity crisis reading Tassel. I used to think of myself as a liberal. Now I learn that to maintain my liberal status at Harvard, I would have to scorn literary works by dead white males and to endorse the critical methods of the deconstructionists. How depressing! Don't you think I might be permitted to defer from the latter set of requirements and still call myself a wee bit left of center?
Frank Rettenberg '52
San Rafael, Calif.
READING TASSEL on the conservative critique of Harvard's culture, I can too easily imagine a bunch of old grads (my contemporaries, perhaps) sitting around and telling each other that's what they've been saying for years.
As someone who served on the faculty (in the Law School and the Kennedy School) in the '60s, and has kept in touch since then, my picture of what happened then and what is happening now is much more nuanced, to borrow Mary Ann Glendon's word quoted by Tassel.
Surely those who have kept ROTC out of Harvard are cutting off their noses to spite their faces, and denying the military the beneficent influence of liberally educated Harvard graduates. Political correctness deserves to be made fun of, wherever it rears its silly head. On the other hand, the "Crits" on the Law School faculty are a dissident minority, useful just because they are not dominant. Thomas Sowell, as a black student in the '50s, didn't experience "the kinds of ugly racial incidents" that are reported today because blacks hadn't arrived on college campuses in significant numbers at that time. Without feminist pressures women would still be excluded from the Widener reading room and denied admission to the Law School. Grade inflation is a serious manifestation of anti-intellectualism, but it can be understood only in the context of a humane response to Vietnam-era draft policies, and, like any creeping weed, it will take time to get rid of it--nor is it peculiar to Harvard.
To the question whether the students who sat in at University Hall should have been expelled, there was--and still is-- no right answer. But I remain convinced that President Pusey's decision (at the last possible moment) to allow an SDS spokesman to speak at Commencement in the late '60s avoided bloodshed, or at least broken bones, and exposed the speaker and the organization to the justified ridicule of the assembled audience.
Harvard needs its conservatives, as it needs its radicals. Between them they keep it on an even course, calm rising through change and through storm.
Adam Yarmolinsky '43
Washington, D.C.
Now what's the follow-up? Do we retreat and snipe from prepared positions? I do hope Harvard Magazine will aggressively pursue being a continuing forum for the pragmatic, courageous, and decent from all sides to come out and inhabit the present no man's land of discourse.
Thomas C. Blandy '54
Troy, N.Y.
BEAUTY
It was with a little sigh that I finished Craig Lambert's "The Stirring of Sleeping Beauty" (September-October, page 46). The much-maligned "classical education" model always saw the trinity of truth, goodness, and beauty. Lambert's article brought to mind the many occasions on which scientists have seized upon truth, moral dogmatists on goodness, and aesthetes on beauty, to the exclusion of the other components, and the excoriation of those who espoused them. Why do we continue, like the people in the old story about the blind men and the elephant, to seize on a part and proclaim it the whole?
Phyllis A. Watson, A.L.M. '86
Arlington, Mass.
Equating beauty with the subject matter of aesthetics ignores the fact that works of art are often not beautiful but ugly, disturbing, shocking. Further identifying aesthetics with formal properties alone, the article thus not only treats beauty itself as formal but, in addition, ignores denotation, representation, depiction, exemplification, and expression, through which works of art typically function. Such points are systematically developed in the pioneering aesthetic thought of the late Harvard philosopher Nelson Goodman '28, Ph.D. '41, professor of philosophy at Harvard from 1968 through 1977, who died last November. His theoretical but hardly dreary masterpiece, Languages of Art, provides a brilliant counterexample to the claims of two Harvard scholars quoted in the article that "aesthetics does not lend itself very well to theory building" and "philosophical inquiries into the field of aesthetics during this century have ended pretty drearily and with very little to show." It is ironic that Languages of Art, critically acclaimed by a worldwide audience since its first appearance in 1968, is apparently not well known or much appreciated in the university where Goodman studied and taught for so many years.
Israel Scheffler
Thomas professor of education
and philosophy emeritus
Cambridge
PRISON REFORMER WINSLOW
In his "vita" about the contributions to prison reform of Howard Belding Gill (September-October, page 54), Thomas C. Johnsen quotes favorable comments about the Norfolk State Prison Colony made by Malcolm X, who became a prisoner there in 1948. Malcolm X's comments should be taken to refer to the prison as run by my father, Maurice N. Winslow, after Gill's dismissal in 1934.
My father had been appointed superintendent following a brief tenure as deputy to Gill. He continued policies he considered sound and changed those he felt had contributed to Gill's demise--particularly in the area of uniforms and the ownership of dogs. (Dogs had been used by some inmates to attack guards.)
Gill served during construction of the Norfolk Prison Colony and for a very short time thereafter. My father served from 1934 to 1950 (less a leave of absence for World War II). I am certain that he had far more influence on the direction of prison policies than did his predecessor!
My father was the youngest of nine children raised on a farm in Maine. He worked his way through Tufts College--earning a degree in civil engineering. He supervised the construction of the prison colony and was made deputy because of the way in which the inmate laborers (then living in tents) cooperated with him. Unlike Gill, he was down-to-earth, and this approach allowed him to communicate well with all involved. I remember well his salty language when angered. When asked why he resorted to such language, he replied, "It's because I want them to know where I've come from. Nothing was ever handed to me. I lost my teeth to malnutrition while working my way through college, and I know what it's like to be hungry and down." I believe that it was this aspect of his personality that endeared him to the inmates.
David K. Winslow, Ed.M. '58
Brookhaven, N.Y.
DEMOCRACY, FROM THE BOTTOM
The roundtable discussion "Democracy's Prospects" (July-August, page 48) was an interesting view--from the top. Has it occurred to any of the notables participating that the view from the bottom might offer more clues as to why the American people have become so cynical about the government?
For the past 25 years, the income-and-wealth gap between the rich and poor has grown to record width. Democracy is supposed to provide some kind of leveling of opportunity, some degree of basic economic justice. Otherwise, we might as well have stuck to government by aristocrats, if they're going to be the ones to benefit. It looks to many of us as though that's exactly what's happening.
It is no coincidence that the poorest people are the least likely to vote. Only the rich, or people who cater to the rich, can win elected office; as a result, there is no one to vote for who can be relied upon to speak for the average worker, never mind for the poor. Can democracy survive such disenfranchisement?
When a person can work for 40 hours a week and still be unable to afford rent, decent child care, or health insurance, there is no way this country can lay claim to being a just form of government. Government must do more than go to war, fill potholes, and provide minimal care for the elderly or disabled. Government should be limiting the excesses of unrestrained capitalism, whose natural result is to continue to route wealth from the many to the few.
Corporations have ended up with far more rights than individual persons, and the government is far more concerned with the health of corporations than with the health of its human citizens. As long as this situation obtains, expect confidence in government to continue to erode. Non-rich people lack dollars, not sense.
When the current economic boom goes bust, and millions of middle-class people find out that the past 60 years' worth of safety-net programs have been dismantled and the government is unable to help them through the crisis, we might see how thoroughly justified is people's cynicism.
Jane Sass Collins '71
Medford, Mass.
RETURN THE POETRY PAGE
Did not Harvard Magazine's poetry page suffer an untimely demise a few years back? What a joy, then, to see the pieces by Frank Bidart, A.M. '67, in the September-October issue (page 40).
It is curious to me that Harvard Magazine, usually so quick to retail Harvard's particular gloss on every relevant aspect of modern life, has chosen to devote so little attention to the one cultural area in which Harvard's residual dominance remains unmatched: American poetry. Although there is nothing like a "Harvard school" of poets--thank goodness--I am amazed at how many publishing poets, including some of the most artistically influential, are Harvard alumni. It's a quiet trend that shows no sign of abating, as some of my schoolmates (Kevin Young '92, Adrienne Su '89) are now publishing their own first books of poetry to critical acclaim. This phenomenon alone should suggest that the poetry page be returned to Harvard Magazine as a regular feature. That would be quintessentially consistent with the magazine's dual mission of mapping the known Harvard world while educating, challenging, and--yes--delighting its readers.
G.C. Waldrep III '90
Yanceyville, N.C.
CORRECTIONS
In the september-october issue, Dr. Anthony Komaroff was incorrectly quoted in the "Harvard Health" column by John Lauerman ("In Sickness and in Health," page 24). Considerable evidence indicates that hormone replacement therapy may lower the risk of heart disease in women, except perhaps in women who already have active heart disease.
The photograph of elderly surfers on page 78 of the July-August issue was credited imperfectly. The credit should have read: "CORBIS/Catherine Karnow."