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Soldierly Coaching

Thank you for carrying Hoy's essay, which I found sensitively crafted and deeply thoughtful. Hoy's conclusion, the need for more cooperation, community, and restraint as well as the free play of ideas, at Harvard and elsewhere, seems, ironically, further evidenced in the very same issue by Craig Lambert's arresting sketch of the phenomenally successful coach, Harry Parker ("Upstream Warrior," May-June, page 42). I never fell under Parker's spell but can't help thinking his adolescent, self-absorbed, neurotically competitive behavior is not what most thoughtful adults would want modeled to their young, potential leaders.

When we pass over so lightly "the ferocity of his competitive instincts," we have really lost our way. Successful coaching doesn't have to be this way. For every Bobby Knight there is a Mike Krzyzewski or John Wooden. Our trouble persists when we ill-perceive such differences in our models. And most lamentably, we minimize, even disregard, the multitude of truly great teachers and models that Harvard and other great schools have given their young over the generations.

William F. Paul Belmont, Mass.

Along with, i'm sure, legions of other ex-rowers, I was extremely gratified to read Lambert's superb account of the extraordinary career of Harry Parker. It came as a jolt to learn not only that Parker is the same age as I am, but that as lightweights we must have rowed against each other on the Schuylkill in the spring of '54 when the Harvard freshmen, coached by Lee Rouner, went undefeated. How about that, class of '57, we beat Harry Parker!

Donald White '57 Philadelphia

I am one of the hundreds of Harvard oarsmen who was influenced by Harry Parker and whose fondest memories of college are of the camaraderie and competition fostered by the rowing program. I would like to add that, although winning is most important to Harry, he takes a personal interest in every member of the team, not just the varsity boat. I can remember several occasions after the third boat finished practice when Harry dined with its members and participated in the discussion on a broad range of subjects other than rowing. I believe this characteristic makes him unique among successful college coaches.

To set the record straight, Harry was not the first Cub Scout leader in Winchester to increase the speed of a pinewood derby car by adding lead weights. My father, who was the Scout "neighborhood commissioner" and also a physicist, put weights into my car (and installed wheels with ball bearings) five years before Harry's foray into the derby.

Andrew L. de Mars '79 Phoenix

Decanal Dissents

"Let them eat food for thought!" This variation on Marie Antoinette is the only way I can describe Jeremy Knowles's comments concerning the current overproduction of Ph.D.s ("A Dean's Half-Decade," May-June, page 72). According to Knowles, "a Ph.D. is not a preprofessional degree." He goes on to state that he would be "concerned only if a person felt he had been seduced with improper expectations of the future into a program that is really designed for intellectual exploration and development."

Not only were numerous persons so seduced, but they had reason to have great rather than improper expectations based on a U.S. government report published during the 1980s predicting a massive shortage of Ph.D.s by the mid-1990s. Knowles appears to have forgotten the existence of this report and has made those of us who believed in its veracity feel like absolute fools.

When I graduated in 1993, Knowles uttered very different words. Referring to the fact that Harvard was awarding more Ph.D's that year than ever before, he essentially told us that these were the best of times (for how could the world ever have too many Ph.D.s?) and the worst of times-for the job market had collapsed. He appeared to show concern for Ph.D.s who had not found academic employment. His sympathy has given way to a more patrician attitude. In view of the probable ignorance of many as to the proper definition of a Ph.D., I would ask the University to enclose a copy of Knowles's observations in all acceptance letters sent to prospective graduate students.

Linda L. Fleck, Ph.D. '93 Boston

I was stunned at the insensitivity of the comment by Dean Knowles about languages. Clearly the dean, and all your staff, are abysmally ignorant of the African languages. To combine Old Norse and Middle Irish, which are "dead" languages spoken only by a few academics, with Swahili, which is probably the second most widely spoken language, after Arabic, on the continent of Africa, is insulting to the African peoples. Swahili is very much a living language. As such, it clearly has a place in the curriculum of world-renowned institutions like Harvard. I can understand that this was an off-the-cuff comment during a wide-ranging conversation, but I believe that it should not pass without comment or clarification.

David F. Sinton, M.C.P. '70 Madison, Ala.

The Cloak and Dagger World of Harvard Librarians

Rodney Dennis's excellent saga on Codex Suprasliensis ("Mr. Vlasov Meets the Ham King," March-April, page 41) brought back memories of that afternoon of Slavic experts perusing the manuscript for hours. The Harvard librarian with whom Vlasov had first made contact, I was present at that long meeting. Finally at dusk Dennis proposed, "Mr. Vlasov, we shall need more time to examine the manuscript, so if you could leave it with the library we shall have your answer for you when you return to Cambridge next Saturday." To everyone's amazement and my incredulity he replied, "I trust Mr. Depta. I shall leave it with him."

Frankly, the very thought of keeping this unique manuscript in my care for a whole week scared me. I returned to my apartment at 320 Harvard Street. I stayed in the entire weekend with the briefcase containing the precious manuscript chained to my wrist while sleeping. On Monday morning as soon as the Harvard Trust bank opened, I deposited the codex in the bank's vault. I could breathe freely once again without constantly looking over my shoulder-or so I thought.

There is a popular notion that Cambridge is like a village, and not much happens there without everybody talking about it. That point was driven home to me when two days later I was dining in one of Cambridge's eating establishments. I was just about ready to leave when two elegantly dressed individuals approached my table and asked if they could join me. Nonplused, I protested, but they sat down, promising their business would be brief.

"We represent a wealthy collector in South America who is willing to pay $250,000 for the manuscript in your possession," said one of the men. "In addition, on arrival in Buenos Aires you will receive an Argentinian passport."

"I'll need time to think it over. Where can I reach you?" I said.

"We shall call you tomorrow night," the taller man replied, and they departed. Stunned, I sat at my table for quite a long time considering all possible scenarios. The key to the safe was in my pocket secured with a small chain tied to my belt. The bank had been given specific instructions that no one else was to remove the contents of my safe deposit box. Thus, even if those two fellows should corner me, they could not get hold of the codex. Should I reveal my predicament to our director, Merle Fainsod, and ask for permission to sleep in Widener Library until Saturday? Should I leave town? Finally, I did not return to my place, but went to a friend's apartment. She was always glad to see me and asked no questions.

Codex was safely returned to Poland and I did not besmirch my family name. I never saw the two individuals again.

I came across Codex Suprasliensis some six years later, when my wife and I were in Poland. In 1971-72 I was on leave from Harvard as requested by the State Department to work in Poland for the U.S.I.A. A couple of days before Christmas, I arrived at the Polish National Library. The director with his entourage met me at the entrance and led me to the hall, where a special exhibit had been set up "in honor of my visit." There amidst rare manuscripts and splendid incunabulae sat the magnificent Codex Suprasliensis, "in the recovery of which you were instrumental," the director concluded his remarks.

Alas, I had to cut short my visit that morning as I suddenly became ill. My embassy driver returned me to our apartment in the U.S. compound, which the then-U.S. ambassador, Walter Stoessel, had put at our disposal during our stay in Warsaw. Embassy staff summoned a resident British doctor, who concluded "pneumonia!" In a flash it became clear to me why the communist authorities were so insistent on getting me "for an examination" of my old spinal injury a few days before while I was working in Gdansk. There they tricked me into drinking a powerful sleeping potion while awaiting a doctor. I awoke three hours later without a shirt on my back in an unheated room. Water in a saucer under my bed was frozen solid. Inducing pneumonia was one of their favorite methods of getting rid of unwelcome visitors. They knew I had stumbled upon the budding solidarity movement and were anxious to be rid of me. However, our subsequent adventures in Poland form a topic in itself. The following day my rubber overshoes, which I, in my hasty departure from the National Library, had left behind, were brought to our U.S. compound by a special messenger. The package had an annotation: "Rubbers of Mr. Ambassador."

Pawel J. Depta Lakewood, Col.

Diversity Debate, Part II

The March-April issue was notable for containing President Neil L. Rudenstine's "The Uses of Diversity" (page 48), which has now evoked three admirably thoughtful and thought-provoking responses in the May-June issue (pages 6-7, 10).

Unhappily, two of these responses, by my colleagues E.L. Pattullo and Harvey Mansfield, consider diversity and affirmative action as primarily a black vs. white race issue, in face of the fact that Harvard's most successful application of affirmative action principles to date has had nothing at all to do with race, but has been the doctrine of "equal access" of men and women to Harvard admission.

Pattullo begins by nearly recognizing that the whole idea of affirmative action grew up as an antidote to the negative action of minority quotas, and is the invention of those opposed to a quota system; the basic idea of affirmative action is to increase the qualification of all who aspire to a particular status, thus making possible wider choices. Although it seems to me that Rudenstine clearly recognizes this principle-there is absolutely no notion of "proportionate representation" of any group-somehow Pattullo manages to convince himself of the opposite. This is a simple mistake, but the fact that we want a Harvard education to be available to women as well as men says not a word about proportions; the proportions depend on the number of qualified applicants, plain and simple. Equal access is equal access, not "reverse discrimination."

The goal is qualified applicants to a course that aims at excellence, so Mansfield is simply confused when he suggests that affirmative action is "at the expense of excellence." This is precisely wrong, as I thought Rudenstine made quite clear. Unhappily, Mansfield goes on to bring up the chestnut that "blacks do not perform as well as other groups on standardized tests."

True or not, what does this have to do with affirmative action, and why the automatic assumption that this as a fact would show fault in blacks? I once took a course in educational measurement, and within this course it would have been obvious that, if Mansfield's assertion were true, the tests had been improperly standardized. To assert that one race does poorly on a test is only equivalent to pointing out that the test is racist.

Let us by all means pursue excellence and the promotion of knowledge, for everybody! We are a diverse society, and any success we have must reflect this. No quotas, no biased tests, but excellence for all. Kudos to President Rudenstine.

Karl V. Teeter, JF '62 Professor of linguistics emeritus Cambridge

Mansfield argues that affirmative action at Harvard-Radcliffe vitiates the morale of the University, which is based upon "devotion to academic excellence" and that, even worse, President Rudenstine (and Harvard-Radcliffe more generally) can't or won't admit that fact. But he does not make good enough arguments in support of his contention that affirmative actions means academic compromise.

First, he assumes that race itself is the only positive distinguishing feature of the black students admitted to Harvard-Radcliffe. Blackness is not a quality in the admissions process equivalent to literary or scientific facility-the more "literary" or "scientific" or "black" the better?!-but is a superordinate category, more like gender, within which high levels of talent are sought-and found.

Second, Mansfield is way behind the times in offering as sufficient proof of academic inferiority blacks' average SAT score difference from whites for the classes of 1991 and 1992. The SAT is a decent measure [only] of some academically relevant verbal and quantitative reasoning skills. Furthermore, a difference of 95 points is less than half of one standard deviation on the SAT, since the standard deviation for verbal and math sections together is 200 points. Does Mansfield really believe that such a difference, defined in these most traditional and narrow of terms, is evidence of compromised academic excellence?

In my 17 years of work as a teacher and college counselor at a college-preparatory independent school in Pittsburgh, I have had one of the greatest pleasures of my life teaching and coming to know black students of tremendous analytic and synthetic intelligence, compelling leadership ability, artistic depth, passion for social and political issues, and outright diligence. These students have in no way compromised our standards but have performed in a superior way and have enlarged and refined other students' understanding of the U.S. culture we more-or-less share.

It puzzles me that Mansfield believes that the College's black students are much like those I have known-"capable and self-reliant"-but that even so, the affirmative action policy which he assumes is responsible for their presence "does harm to the morale of the institution which depends almost entirely on its devotion to academic excellence." Perhaps that policy merely assures that Harvard-Radcliffe does what it ought to do: locate, admit, stimulate, and benefit from intellectually vibrant individuals who are black.

Susanne Wilson Hershey '67 Pittsburgh

Rudenstine's lengthy apologia is bad history and, as it turns out, bad law.

Harvard-and, with perhaps less finesse, the rest of American higher education-has relentlessly pursued racial preferences to obtain and publicize higher percentage numbers for minorities, presumably to achieve its notion of what looks fair, avoids embarrassment, or in any event relieves its conscience.

Until federal legislation forbidding race preferences is passed, Harvard will probably continue to get away with this pious exercise of its prestige. In spite of the federal research grants the President is zealous to seek and insure, Harvard is not a state actor for Fourteenth Amendment purposes as was the University of Texas in the recent Fifth Circuit Hopwood case. But the law laid down by the Supreme Court during the past decade, and, it seems, the politics of this election year, leave no doubt that soon Harvard's number will come up. Until then it may dissemble and repeat the clich� of its diversity; it may euphemize by referring to its "constructive and well-conceived admissions program" and its "well-designed and carefully administered affirmative action initiatives"; it may press statistics into service to proclaim progress but deplore its being slow and insufficient; it may continue to sponsor paternalism and carry the white man's burden; and it may ordain all this in the name of egalitarianism. It may simpliciter deny its quotas-floors rather than ceilings-as rigorously enforced as any Jewish quota under President Lowell. And in doing so it will sponsor the kind of self-segregation one sees everywhere on college and school campuses where students, black and white, many sullen with suspicion or certainty, know that separate standards have been used to admit them, at the sacrifice of their mutual respect and self-respect.

An American these days is an Asian- or African-American, a Latino, an Anglo or what have you. And we are told to be glad of it. Well, I for one am not glad of it. Harvard should stop on a dime, pivot, and head the other way, back towards e pluribus unum, and it should do so before it is told to.

Rudenstine has produced a tract that is not merely flawed but unworthy. In its moral message, it is as dated as the quaint theories of President Eliot, and it has, one would think, less excuse.

Thomas E. Engel '67 New York City

There is scarcely a more futile or foolish group in the academic world today than those who deplore assimilation and Americanization. It is simply happening and three cheers for it. What do these folks want? Quebec, Ulster, Bosnia? What possible purpose is served by encouraging identification by ancestral national origins? In the ordinary sense of the word, there is plenty of diversity of people and ideas. You meet them every day.

If "diversity" is about anything real or important, it is about the seemingly intractable problems of integrating more African-Americans into mainstream American life. I don't have the the answer. Keep working at it as best we can. But it seems to me that multicultural babble is no help. Trying to create or recreate "African" culture for a people totally cut off from Africa 200 years or more ago is pathetic.

While Harvard was laggard in the creation of a diverse student body, it has been preeminent intellectually among American universities. Rumors reaching us old grads about the impact of "multiculturalism" on the curriculum, not its effect on student selection, are what have us deeply concerned. Deprecating western civilization is shooting off your own foot. What about that, Mr. President?

Shane E. Riorden '46 Asheville, N.C.

The ugly statement by Mansfield that he "does not know whether this fact [lower black test scores] is inherited or acquired" brings to mind John Stuart Mill's observation that "of all the vulgar modes of escaping from consideration of the effect of social and moral influences upon the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences."

Richard D. Clarey, LL.B. '62 Boston

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