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March-April 2004
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Cambridge 02138 |
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| Bunche |
| Courtesy of Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, New York |
In his biographical sketch of Ralph Bunche ("Vita," November-December 2003, page 42), Benjamin Rivlin states that Harvard University "offered [Bunche] a tenured professorship in 1950." It was more than an offer.
The Corporation voted his appointment as professor of government on January 16, and the Overseers confirmed it on April 10. At Bunche's request, Harvard did not announce the appointment until October, since Bunche felt his position at the United Nations might suffer if it were known he had accepted a post elsewhere.
The situation abroad led him to request a one-year leave of absence, following which he planned to teach Gov. 170: "International Law" and a course in colonial administration in the 1951-52 academic year. In the spring of 1951 he worried about leaving the UN to come to Harvard when Harvard men were being taken out of college to fight for the UN.
Harvard granted him an additional year's leave, during which he turned down the presidency of CCNY, saying that "unless peace can be established through the UN, no academic job will be worth anything." In February of 1952, Harvard announced that Bunche had resigned as professor of government.
All this is important because, although he did not in the end teach any courses, Bunche has the distinction of being the first black person to hold a professorship in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Caldwell Titcomb '47, Ph.D. '52
Auburndale, Mass.
ON GLOBALIZATION
President Lawrence H. Summers wants us to search for veritas as we consider complex issues such as corporate globalization ("Economics and Moral Questions," November-December 2003, page 63), but I didn't find his excerpted address on this issue to be very truthful or considered. By simplifying the hard work of many activists and organizations to put an end to exploitative working conditions, and by suggesting that the profit motive is the best system for promoting justice and altruism, he diminishes the real work of building equity, prosperity, justice, and peace in the world.
Summers is correct that there are people who are willing to work for meager wages and under horrendous and brutal conditions (for lack of better alternatives), but this does not mean the system is not oppressive and cruel. Nor does it absolve us of responsibility when we purchase cheap sweatshop-made clothing and products. That's too easy a way to assuage our guilt in participating in others' suffering. Boycotts of multinationals to pressure them to offer fair wages and non-abusive working conditions to employees allow us to put our money where our values are and to compel these corporations to do the right thing (while at the same time supporting companies that practice fair trade). There are many alternatives to either letting free-market capitalism dictate the conditions of workers or resorting to socialist economies. Veritas is to be found along a middle path that recognizes self-interest while placing restrictions on the exploitation of poor, disenfranchised, and desperate people.
Zoe Weil, M.T.S. '88
Surry, Me.
SKIP THE JOKE
Karen Bergreen's bravery in tackling the standup-comedy circuit ("From Courtroom to Comedy Club," January-February, page 79) is truly admirable. In the spirit of this bravery, perhaps she will reconsider making jokes about "being so bored at parties, [she] slips [herself] a roofie." Rohypnol (streetname: roofie) is one of many illegal drugs used to facilitate rape, and is commonly used by sexual predators in campus environments. While we are working diligently to raise awareness about this sinister trend, Harvard students are not immune to the dangers of these drugs. In recognition of the silent suffering endured by young people who have been victimized in this way, I hope Bergreen will reconsider this type of "humor" and the impact it has on our collective ability to effectively combat these life-changing crimes.
Susan Marine
Director, Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Cambridge
EARLY WARNER
Dean Barry Bloom's thoughtful, cogent article "Bioterrorism and the University" (November-December 2003, page 48) was excellent. He reminds me of Paul Revere.
Ralph F. Sortor '49
Hales Corners, Wis.
SCHOOL OF ADJUSTED VISIONS AND ADAPTIVE TOOLS
I confess to some twenty-first-century astonishment at the letters of Robert Hecker '69 and Shane Riorden '46 (January-February, page 4) in response to the "Rethinking Education" article (November-December 2003, page 61). All the more surprising is that these disparaging views of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), and of its genus, come from education professionals. Both respondents might avail themselves of the tool of close textual reading to digest the first overlooked fact: HGSE denominates itself a school of education, not a school of teaching, not a teachers' college, not a Pedagogy Tech.
I might agree with Riorden that the most basic qualifications of a classroom teacher are "know your subject, love your subject, and have the irrepressible urge to share your enthusiasm...." In an ideal world that might be necessary and sufficient qualification. But we live in the empirical world of imperial contingencies. We start to encounter contingencies in his last clause with adjective ("irrepressible urge"), verb ("to share"), and noun ("enthusiasm"). That is just Alice-in-Wonderland talk. The irrepressible urges of 20-year-olds become the lost ideals of career employees. Sharing falls victim to the political impediments of access, school-financing legislation, redistricting, and red-lining. Enthusiasm atrophies in the face of the ever-present spectre of school-dropout syndrome, resulting from the grinding nonschool social forces that impinge on learning and access to learning: market forces, mass-media culture, immigration demographics, labor-market forces in a globalized economy, technology, socialization with respect to parenting skills and gender roles.
The study of these issues, which are all exogenous to classroom teaching per se, is sufficient justification for the continued existence of schools of education. It is in these specialized think-tank retreats that patterns are identified and quantified, that statistics and arguments are assembled, that strategies of remediation are conceptualized for the purpose of advocating policy adjustments within the ever-changing socio-economic dynamic of the capitalist superpower, with its legislative finance committees and budget allocations.
We know that public education, and the public/private-system polarization, have served to disenfranchise, discourage, and de-educate generations of low-income, working-class, rural and urban youth. We know that the macro function of schooling is the socialization, indoctrination, and enrollment of successive age-group cohorts in the role of consumer-patriot as the onward soldierly march of capitalism continues. Now that working-class roles have been displaced to peripheral holdings of the empire, the need for a class of the great unwashed here at the center — the reserve army of the unemployed — has become obsolete, and perhaps undesirable for its destabilizing potential. This creates a problem for education and schooling officials, and for national domestic policy planning. Do we plan to maximize the development of human capital and educate for broad access to all levels of technology, management, training, and productivity? Or do we continue to enforce, tacitly, a class and caste system — through primary reliance on an intentionally dysfunctional public-education system that serves as a national screening and filtration mechanism? The status quo ante of the twentieth century is a policy of nondelivery of educational services to those families who cannot (or choose not to) purchase the access to learning that they thought came to them with their citizenship, residency, or birth in an ostensibly rational body politic. These areas of policy study, finance, management, and deployment fall under the research purview of HGSE and its sister academies. Education is a process of negotiation between individual consciousness and social context. Education is not a human activity defined by the preparation and delivery of lesson plans within a classroom. Schools such as HGSE empower education workers with adjusted visions and adaptive tools that enable them to irrigate obsolete social stratifications and to perforate destructive structural impediments so that capitalism's deathwish of erecting a New Jerusalem on the foundation of a social stone age does not go unchallenged.
The primary distinction between the school of education and the schools of law, medicine, business, architecture, and government (apart from the fact that it is not an Aristotelian category, which may be in its favor since Aristotle was tutor and adviser to Alexander, the ur-vector of European imperialism) is that its students and alumni have neither the goal nor intention of reaping from the harvest of surplus production that remains disproportionately sequestered in the smooth hands of those who have enjoyed private or privileged educations in the U.S.A., K-20. HGSE actually cultivates students, alumni, and faculty who want to help fellow human beings and to mend the social fabric, without thought of gain. Imagine such a thing in the twenty-first century.
Taylor Ayres McLean '65, Ed.M. '81
Jersey City, N.J.
PEAKS OF INSIGHT
I take exception to the review by Robert and Ellen Kaplan of some mathematics books ("On Mathematical Imagination," January-February, page 16). Not to the books, but to the Kaplans' description of typical mathematics teaching as "oases of horror in a desert of boredom."
In all subjects that prepare people to operate in the real world, a certain amount of routine — even occasional unpleasantness — comes with the territory. Teaching good manners is an obvious example. I have spent my life teaching mathematics and statistics. One cannot please everybody, nor did I try to do so, but I know that many of my (and others') students found our investigations of these subjects to contain mountain peaks of insight in a terrain of increasing competence.
Robert M. Kozelka, Ph.D. '53
Chapel Hill, N.C.
RADCLIFFE GOES TO WAR
Charles Thompson '47 didn't include in The Harvard Class of 1947 and World War II accounts of Radcliffe women in the military ("War Stories," January-February, page 82). I was class of '46 at Radcliffe. During my freshman year, the men were still at Harvard, in the ROTC or Naval Reserve. When they were called into active service the following year, the nature of the two colleges changed. Thus, in my second year, trying to remember bits of literature from Beowulf to Thomas Hardy to identify in an English 1 exam seemed not important.
I left school and joined the Women's Army Corps (WAC). So did a good friend from freshman year, Sarah (Sally) Ames. I am sure there were other 'Cliffies.
At my father's insistence, my two brothers and I had each studied typing in high school. Therefore, I was sent to typing school in the WAC. I liked it; we learned to type rhythmically as someone in front played an accordion. Then I spent the rest of my time at Fort Sheridan, outside of Chicago, typing payrolls. I was no hero, but I played my part (in my GI-issue khaki slip and bloomers). And I learned to keep my cool as thousands of recent returnees from the Pacific theatre yelled, "Quack, Quack!" as I walked down the army-post road.
Mary Fitton Fiore '46
New York City
PLESCH AND RICKETS
The medical methods of Janos Plesch ("Vita," January-February, page 28) remind me of some I experienced in 1930s Berlin. One in particular, the exposure of children to a sun lamp during the winter, had a valid medical motivation beyond the prevention of spring sunburn, namely the prevention of rickets. Rickets is caused by a vitamin D deficiency. Milk is now fortified with vitamin D to prevent rickets; it was not in Europe in those days. Rickets was a common problem in Northern Europe with its long winter nights and sunless days. The standard, unpalatable solution was cod-liver oil. My father, a physician, also preferred the sun lamp. It is worth noting that there is currently some concern that the overuse of sun-block might lead to a recurrence of rickets.
Gunther K. Wertheim, Ph.D. '55
Convent Station, N.J.
GINGERICH IN MIND
Thank you for your update on Professor Owen Gingerich ("The Copernicus Quest," November-December 2003, page 44). Like everyone who experienced it, I remember the vivid sight of Gingerich exiting class on that rocket sled. (It was especially effective because he wasn't quite cool enough to convince us it didn't scare him.) I remember his obsession with astronomer Harlow Shapley, and the Keplerian amount of time spent on Shapley's exegesis. I remember the yearly cockfight Gingerich staged in the garage of Allston Burr lecture hall between primatologist Irven DeVore and MIT physicist Philip Morrison over the question of whether there is life on other planets. But most of all, I remember his amazing sense of perspective and humor. (He described himself to us, kind of — perhaps clearly— tongue in cheek, as the world's authority on the Messier classification system of celestial bodies. And he took the laughs this got as a kind of encouragement.)
When I think about my time at Harvard, Gingerich is one of the first things to come to mind. And I spoke to him maybe twice. He spectacularly displayed a sense of humanity about how science was always, in its most important moments, human. He took me, an art guy, and made me forever aware of this. My life has been so much better for it.
Jeffrey A. Goodby '73
San Francisco
SPEAK UP, PLEASE
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ELECTRONIC ENHANCEMENTS
This magazine's website, www.harvardmagazine.com, offers two new features that readers may find useful. First, the Web version of each Harvard Magazine article has a link to a PDF version: by clicking on the miniature page, you can download a copy of the story and art exactly as they appear in the original magazine. The PDF files facilitate printing for ease in reading or personal use of articles off line. We hope this feature makes the magazine more readily enjoyable for potential readers who do not receive the printed edition — particularly international alumni.
Second, it is easy to register from the www.harvardmagazine.com home page for the bimonthly "editor's highlights." This text message, summarizing the contents of each new issue and offering links to articles, is e-mailed just as each edition is printed and posted on the website. Another link makes it easy to submit class notes or letters to the editor. This simple tool is another way to help international members of the Harvard community keep in touch with the University and with each other.
If you have a friend, former classmate, or roommate based outside the United States, please spread the word!
Peter Gutmann, Ph.D. '57