Dreadful (?) duo

History 89h. Henry Kissinger: Statecraft in Theory and Practice.

That's the title of an undergraduate seminar being taught by Niall Ferguson at Harvard this fall. A friend of mine described the combination of professor and subject as "unfathomably loathsome" (your mileage may vary, or it may not).

The course description in the catalog reads:

As National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger was the architect of the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, of the "opening" to China, and of the effort to salvage "peace with honor" in Vietnam. Yet Kissinger should be understood as a scholar as well as a statesman. Using selections from his writings, this seminar will assess Kissinger in his own terms and in the context of modern international history.

Who's going to take the course? Obviously some history students and maybe, I'd guess, some political science majors -- or, to use the school's official lingo, Government concentrators. Enrollment is limited to 15.

Although I can't abide Ferguson's politics (and cf. the recent justified outrage over his Newsweek piece), I have no idea what Ferguson is like as a teacher. If he welcomes a range of views and doesn't try to push his own line on students, the course might be, at least, non-terrible. (It might even be good.) If he does something else, well...

P.s. What if -- probably a very unlikely scenario -- Ferguson were co-teaching this with Stanley Hoffmann? Now that might have been really interesting.

Diamonds are forever; or, Institutional arrogance, 1970s edition

[title revised on 11/7]

A Crooked Timber thread about a recent student walk-out from Harvard's intro economics course (Ec 10), currently taught by Gregory Mankiw, elicited comments from a number of people who had taken the course in the past, sometimes the quite distant past. I was one of those commenting, having taken Ec 10 sometime in the mid-1970s (no need to get too specific for these purposes).

Late in the CT thread, one commenter suggested that having so many students in one course, albeit with numerous TA-led sections, was evidence of institutional arrogance. My response, which I'm posting here rather than at CT: if you think Harvard officialdom is arrogant today, you should have been there in the late 60s -- which I did not experience but have read a bit about -- or a decade later in the 70s.

Emblematic of the latter period for me, and no doubt for others, is a statement by the then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Henry Rosovsky. I remember this statement one way; I just discovered that Google (or, more precisely, an article I found via Google) remembers it slightly differently. Thus I'm going to give it in two versions. As I recall it, Rosovsky, probably responding to a question from a probably disgruntled student, intoned: "You are here for four years, I am here for life, and the institution is here forever."

Typing "you are here for four years..." into Google produces, among other things, a Feb. 28, 2005 NYT piece by Adam Cohen about the controversy then raging over Lawrence Summers's remarks about women in science. Here is how the piece opens:

"You are here for four years," Henry Rosovsky, who long served as Harvard's dean of faculty, once told a group of students. "The faculty is here for life. And the institution is here forever." The quote became part of Harvard lore: a campus film society promoted a James Bond movie with the slogan, "You are here for four years; Dean Rosovsky is here for life; and Diamonds Are Forever." But it also came to embody, for my generation of students and alumni, Harvard's imperious view of its place in the world.

It hardly matters whether my version or Cohen's version of the Rosovsky quote is correct. The point is that one would be rather unlikely to find a university administrator making a comparably patronizing, dismissive statement today, not because administrators necessarily have become more benign and enlightened but for reasons of survival in a changed climate in which, among other things, student opinion probably matters more than it used to. Btw, if you read down to the end of Cohen's piece you'll see that he managed to riff neatly on the statement in his last paragraph.

Gentlemen never sue

The name of Theodore Roosevelt (class of 1880 at Harvard) is invoked at the very beginning of the movie The Social Network. The actor playing Mark Zuckerberg confidently, if a tad bizarrely, informs his girlfriend that TR’s membership in the Porcellian Club is what ensured his eventual accession to the presidency of the U.S.

Theodore Roosevelt – who as a Harvard undergraduate spent on club fees and clothes in two years a sum of money that would have sustained the average American family of the time for six years* -- is in some ways (but only some) a fitting patron saint for this movie, whose themes of money and class would not have been foreign to him. However, the only character in the movie that TR would really have understood is the rower who is reluctant to sue Zuckerberg because that’s not what “gentlemen of Harvard” do. The rest of the movie -- including the computers, the drugs, the parties, and the sexual situations – would have been, it is pretty safe to say, either incomprehensible or shocking (or both) to TR. That’s not a criticism of The Social Network, of course, but it is an indication of how much certain aspects of the world have changed in the last 125 years.

As for the movie on its own terms: it’s entertaining – especially the scene in which the actor playing Larry Summers appears – but I would take most of it with a few grains of salt.

---------------

*Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (paperback ed., Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), p. 259. For TR's views on masculinity, race, etc., in historical context, see Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (Vintage Bks., 2005), pp. 355ff.

If I'd been writing the letter

Harvard College recently sent admissions notices to 2,110 of the 30,489 applicants to its Class of 2014 -- an admissions rate of 6.9 percent. The linked article notes that applications have doubled since 1994, with half of that doubling coming since the university introduced a series of financial aid initiatives, aimed at students from middle- and lower-income families, in 2004.

If I'm not mistaken, an applicant to Harvard 30 or 35 years ago had roughly a 1-in-5 chance of getting in. Now the odds are roughly 1-in-15 (or 1-in-14). This year, as has no doubt been the case for a while, far more students than the total admitted had perfect SAT scores and ranked first in their high school classes.

Some of the 28,000-plus applicants who got the "we regret" letter from the Harvard admissions office at the beginning of this month are probably mature and self-confident enough to have shrugged it off; but others of these kids, maybe especially the ones with amazing records, were perhaps quite disappointed (and at least a few, eighteen-year-olds being what they are, were probably crushed). Now, I don't know what the Harvard "we regret" letter says, but I'm willing to bet a fair amount of money that it doesn't say what, IMHO, it should.

If I'd been writing that letter, I'd have said something like this:

"Dear Sally/Tom/Peter/Julia/Jason/Alberto/whoever:
We regret [etc.]. We know this is not the letter you wanted to receive from us. We had an enormous number of exceptional applicants and could only admit one in fourteen. We have to consider all kinds of things in making our decisions, and although we could have admitted, for example, a class comprised entirely of high-school valedictorians, that would not have resulted in the diversity that Harvard, like every other institution, aims to have in its student body. So while we considered each applicant very carefully, in the end you should take our decision not mainly as a reflection on you, but rather mainly as a reflection of the constraints under which we were operating.

"Since we work here, the undersigned obviously think that Harvard is a good university. But we also know that, as the country's oldest university, it is shrouded by a mystique which obscures the reality that Harvard is not better than many other institutions whose faculties, students, and programs are just as good and just as distinctive. In any case, the quality of your college education and experience will depend principally on you, not on the particular institution you attend. There are no automatic or guaranteed tickets to success (however one might define success), and you will come to realize sooner or later that the institutional name on your diploma is less important than what you did in the course of earning it. Even in a status-conscious society such as ours, reputation goes only so far, and in the end it cannot substitute for individual efforts (or, for that matter, cover up our own shortcomings). We hope that these observations will help you put our decision in proper perspective.

With all best wishes for your future [etc.]
Sincerely,

I guess this is why I never got beyond Ec 10

For a university to lay off 250 staff members because its endowment has fallen to $26 billion -- that's billion with a "b" -- seems, somehow, rather insane. Yes, I know about imbalanced budgets and all that, but it still seems a bit nuts. Glancing through this NYT article (hat tip for it to L. Sigelman at The Monkey Cage) leaves a bad taste. Not because of the hot breakfast stuff -- that's trivial nonsense -- but because of the way the NYT writes about these things. Breathlessly and, dare I suggest it, not overly intelligently. As for the stuff about the supposed horror of "being quadded" -- that was being said more than 30 years ago and it was way overblown then. Why don't they yank their reporter out of Cambridge, Mass. and tell her to go cover some interesting stories somewhere else? Perhaps that wouldn't be as much fun as hanging around Mass. Ave. and recycling decades-old clichés, but it would be better for the NYT and its remaining readers.

An artifact from the early 1960s: The Duke's Men of Yale on the New Frontier

Some time ago, a friend who is an alumnus of two Yale a capella groups, the Duke’s Men and the Whiffenpoofs, gave me a multi-CD compilation that he had produced of recordings by “Da Doox” going back to the early 1950s. One of the songs on the first disc is “New Frontier,” which pokes fun at JFK, Camelot, and (of course) Harvard, and which the Duke’s Men first recorded in 1963. The song is interrupted by a monologue in which one member of the group does a more-than-passable Kennedy imitation. Although the flavor of the song cannot be captured entirely by the lyrics alone -- indeed, the music and the lyrics are very well matched -- I thought the lyrics in themselves were clever and evocative of the period. And in light of what happened in November 1963, the last lines take on a certain poignancy. So here are the lyrics.

New Frontier
First recorded by the Duke’s Men of Yale in 1963
Music and lyrics by
Carl Kaestle and Gurney Williams
(Lyrics reproduced by permission)

We sing of the pioneers of old
Who ventured forth so brave and bold
Far from their rightful homes so dear
They slept beneath the stars on the old frontier
And the rocky campground’s peaceful glow
Cheered the hearts and souls of the men below.

But the old frontier is dying
The old frontier is gone.
Yet behold the low clouds passing
To hail another dawn.
Yes it’s a new frontier
Put your money on the sunny boy from Hyannis
Hail to the sod where Kennedy trod
A hunter on the new frontier.

Oh we love the walls of ivy
That surround the new frontier
[JFK monologue]
Jack is the king of the new frontier
Jack is the fellow who makes folks cheer
Massachusetts' favorite son
Hah-vad moved to Wa-shing-ton.
And though he began as the un-der-dog
Now he's considered a vi-tal cog.
Let John Harvard fade a-way
Jack Harvard's here to stay.
It’s young Jack Harvard so shout hoo-ray Hooray-hoo_eee.

Fight fiercely

Basketball? Je m'en fiche. But HC drew my attention to an AP item in the Wash. Post about the Harvard basketball team's upset over Boston College, which was fresh from its own upset over North Carolina. The AP item suggests that Boston College did not come with its game face on, or something like that. Whatever. A win is a win is a win, as Gertrude Stein (Radcliffe, 1893-97) might have said.

(H/t and/or apologies to Tom Lehrer for this post's title.)

Samuel P. Huntington, 1927-2008

This blog's general policy is not to note deaths, of notable people or otherwise, though I have made a couple of exceptions: see here and here.

In the case of Huntington, his fame/notoriety and the impact of his work warrant a link to the 'official' obituary: here.

One small moment in time

When I was in college, I took a lecture course on modern drama. The professor was Robert Chapman. For reasons that had nothing to do with Chapman, the course was not an especially happy experience; and I never got to know Chapman, not being an English major or a student actor and feeling, predictably if perhaps stupidly, that I had no reason to go to his office hours.

One morning about halfway through the course, Chapman strode to the podium and announced, without preface or throat-clearing: "George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House is the greatest play written in English since Shakespeare." Wow, I thought. Nice opening line. Dramatic. Then a student who had actually been keeping up with the reading raised his or her hand and informed the professor that, according to the syllabus, the day's lecture was not supposed to be on Heartbreak House but on some other play. Chapman abruptly turned around, went back to his office, returned with a different set of notes, and proceeded to give the correct lecture. His lecture on Heartbreak House had been spoiled for that semester.

I knew virtually nothing about Robert Chapman when I sat in his course, and indeed it was only very recently, when I was prompted for some reason to find his obituary online, that I learned something about him. Among other things I learned that, although a tenured professor in Harvard's English department, he had no graduate degrees: he had a bachelor's degree from Princeton and that was it. Apparently he liked to boast that he and the famous critic and scholar Harry Levin were the only members of the department who lacked graduate credentials.

I remember little else about that week in 1976, or maybe that month; but I'll always remember the morning when Robert Chapman began his lecture on Shaw with that dramatic flourish, and then had to stop, turn around, and go back to his office. I think I might have felt a little bit angry at the student who informed him of his mistake. I still do.

Globalization of healthcare-for-the-rich

"There is a revolution afoot in international healthcare." So begins a piece in the May-June issue of Harvard Magazine, which notes that changes in U.S. visa policy since 9/11, making trips to the U.S. for certain purposes more difficult, have prompted wealthy non-Americans to seek "world-class" healthcare outside the U.S. Hospitals for the wealthy (or relatively wealthy) have been springing up around the world, and various U.S. universities have sought to capitalize on this.

Something called Harvard Medical International (HMI), which was set up in 1994 to make money for Harvard Medical School (HMS) and which has projects in 20 countries and an operating budget (for '07) of $21 million, is being transferred by the university to Partners Healthcare, "the parent organization for two of the largest Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals." The rationale for the transfer is that HMI is a consulting company that should never have been a formal part of the university in the first place. But the new organization will be allowed to use the Harvard name, when entering into new contracts, for the next five years, and the university will continue to be involved in some aspects of HMI-connected projects. HMS will continue to operate, for example, its Dubai Center (for postgraduate and continuing medical education), which is linked to the projected 4-million-square-foot Dubai Healthcare City.

A pertinent issue, broached but not really tackled by the article, is whether this whole trend benefits anyone other than the wealthy. If so, very indirectly, would be my admittedly ignorant guess. On the other hand, an interesting coda to the article, which may relate to this issue, questions "the model that says medical advances develop in the United States and ripple out to the rest of the world." It relates the story of an HMS student, Eric Twerdahl, who spent a summer researching "the impact of HMI projects in Dubai and India on healthcare in their respective regions." It goes on:

Twerdahl met a vascular surgeon in Bangalore who has revised operating room practice -- for example, sterilizing and reusing equipment, instead of using disposable items -- to cut the cost per procedure. He met a cardiac surgeon in Mumbai who has pioneered open-heart surgery without general anaesthesia, using instead an epidural administered above the level of the heart. These innovations sharply increase access to care, but were unlikely to develop in the United States, where the healthcare system is much less responsive to cost. In this sense, says Twerdahl, "the days of U.S. medicine thinking that it's at the top of the pile are numbered."

But at the same time, of course, that organizations like HMI are engaged in projects that may encourage such innovations, it is safe to assume that a number of health systems in various parts of the world are not at all in good shape: see, for instance, this report on the situation in what used to be Soviet central Asia.

Hoffmann on bureaucracy

I know it hasn't been a week.

But I can't resist reproducing this remark of Harvard's Stanley Hoffmann, complaining at a faculty meeting in April about increasing bureaucratization of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences:“I happen to come from one of the most bureaucratic countries in the world, France,” said Hoffmann, addressing [Dean] Smith following his Faculty-wide presentation. “And when I hear about new levels, each one with its own enlarged personnel of support, with expanded powers over what is under that level, I’m starting to think of all the reasons I had to come to this country.”
The quotation is from an April 23 Harvard Crimson article, "Profs Guarded on Reform," which, incidentally, mistakenly identifies Hoffmann as being in the history department.

P.S. No, more bureaucracy is not always and everywhere a bad thing (though in the case of Harvard's faculty it probably is). I'm not making a political point here; it was just an excuse to quote Hoffmann.

Blast from the (Harvard) past

From Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (Yale U.P., 1977), p.407:

He [i.e., A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard, 1909-1933] wanted the university to open its doors to minorities in order to assimilate them. What he said of the Irish applied to many other groups: 'What we need is not to dominate...but to absorb.... Their best interests and ours are, indeed, the same in this matter. We want them to become rich, and send their sons to our colleges, to share our prosperity and our sentiments. We do not want to feel that they are among us and yet not really a part of us.' In the early 1920s, when he tried to establish a formal quota for Jews, he did so not because he felt any prejudice against the Jew per se [perish the thought--LFC], but because Harvard could not assimilate the Jews if their number became too large. One of Harvard's goals [according to Lowell] was to produce the 'pure American' Jew [citing H.A. Yeomans, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, 1850-1943, Harvard U. P., 1948]. Harvard had to give 'special consideration' to the Jews just as it did to alumni children: the nation would be strong only if both groups received Harvard socialization. Lowell's real problems came with the blacks. He wanted them to receive Harvard's educational advantages but he believed they were not socially assimilable under any circumstances. His troubled ruminations when he banned blacks from the Freshman Halls measured his limitations and his fear of cultural pluralism [not to mention his racism--LFC] : 'I wish I knew what our Saviour would think it wise to do about the Negro in America,' he confided to his wife. Cambridge could make a Jew indistinguishable from an Anglo-Saxon Protestant; but not even Harvard could make a black man white.