Shades of crimson
Harvard University's flaws, and its future, are debated in two thought-provoking works
Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most
Powerful University
By Richard Bradley
HarperCollins, 375 pp., illustrated, $25.95
Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class
By Ross Gregory Douthat
Hyperion, 288 pp., $24.95
Two very different books show that Harvard's crisis isn't really about President Lawrence Summers's assaults on what his gleeful enthusiasts call smug political correctness. His affronts to Cornel West, affirmative action, opponents of campus military recruiting, and academic wisdom on women's underrepresentation in the sciences did prompt Tuesday's faculty face-off with him. But more is at stake, according to both Richard Bradley's gossipy exposé of Summers's career and Ross Gregory Douthat's heartbreaking account of Harvard student life.
Before his recent name change, Richard Bradley was Richard Blow, known to aficionados of glossy political journalism as the editor of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s George magazine and then the ''instant" biographer of his late boss. Here he upgrades his work as well as his name in a still gossipy account of Harvard's travails. Bradley confers humanist martyrdom on West, university marshal Richard Hunt, college dean Harry Lewis, teacher/activist Timothy McCarthy, and other victims of Summers's heavy hand. He makes a show of stalking Summers more in sorrow than in anger, as he (i.e., Blow) did in a controversial 1997 Washington Monthly attack on Summers ally Martin Peretz's New Republic.
Bradley does clarify some of the real challenges: Will American universities keep governing themselves as communities of scholars, independent of political and market riptides, or will professors be employees of governors like former Treasury secretary and World Bank vice president Summers -- who has his own Treasury mentor, Robert Rubin, on the Harvard Corporation? Will elite colleges keep nourishing an American civic-republican leadership that has often saved capitalism from itself, or will they be morphed into crucibles of a global ruling class accountable to no polity or moral code?
''Summers' globalization push was occurring without any meaningful discussion of what it meant to be an American university in a post-9/11 society," writes Bradley, who quotes the ousted Lewis's query: Who will balance globalism with ''a recognition that the particular 'free society' in which Harvard exists is founded on ideals which Americans continue to be proud to defend?"
Summers fans who retort that Harvard's real dangers come from postmodernist, post-nationalist professors should open Douthat's ''Privilege," an earthy, bemused, vulnerable, passionately democratic meditation on Harvard undergraduate life. A 2002 graduate and a conservative who edited the right-wing Harvard Salient, Douthat has hopes for Summers, who was president during only his senior year, but otherwise he eviscerates the meritocracy Summers means to invigorate.
Unlike conservative punditry that hides partisan agendas in faux-folksy humor, Douthat's humor and literary grace rise from a grounded integrity: He cares too deeply about his views not to wonder how opponents came by theirs. He's so loose-limbed a writer -- as in sketching an amiable, homeless black man who nearly moved into his freshman suite -- that one fears a Stephen Glass fabrication. But knowing his Harvard milieu and contemporaries as I do, I trust this gutsy, magnanimous book.
His quote page bears Christopher Lasch's apothegm ''Meritocracy is a parody of democracy." He shows us a student body weaned on rational-choice gamesmanship and self-marketing, jumping to quarterly bottom lining in a kind of global
Douthat probes the follies of his ''diversity"-inspired freshman cohort and Harvard's all-male, preppy final clubs. He's dazzled by ''the obsession with fame, and the desire for riches" of a charming but embezzling doyenne of extracurricular life who personifies ''Harvard's raging id." Yet he also has a ''sneaking sympathy" for earnest sit-in protesters who won a minimum $10 wage for Harvard employees against conservatives' derision and the Harvard Crimson's disapproval. And he warns that his privileged crowd's breezy divorce of sex from love and commitment pulls a moral rug out from under decent, struggling poor people who can't afford the consequences: ''We practice safe sex . . . because [it] requires only motivation, self-control, and a healthy self-regard, which we have in abundance. These motivations don't exist everywhere, but it's not our fault if other people don't have our bright futures to remind them. . . . We live in a meritocracy, don't we? We deserve to be where we are, don't we? . . . We don't get pregnant young or married too early . . . we don't have to have abortions" or bear ''the fatherless children . . . we're generous enough to tutor . . . in Harvard's admirable after-school programs."
Thus equidistant from free-market right and liberationist left, Douthat notes a perverse codependency. Gestures against racism and sexism reconcile some liberals to their complicity in deeper inequities they can't bring themselves to oppose. Unlike Bradley, Douthat approves of Summers's dressing-down of West and firing of Lewis, wishing he could uproot ''the professoriate's entrenched [liberal] biases." Yet by his own reckonings, it's free marketeering that pumps a false free love into the campus pressure cooker.
Douthat's rich if conflicted moral witness makes Douthat a relic and type of an old, honorable Harvard conservatism that runs deeper than Bradley's trendy liberal exposé. But both books connect enough dots to outline the real elephant in Harvard's great room -- not Summers, but a huge, rough beast, slouching toward its Bethlehem, that he's trying to goad into a gallop.
Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, holds a doctorate in education from Harvard and was a Shorenstein Center fellow there in 1998. 