Q&A: What's the point of education? Mary Jacobs, Mar 14, 2007
Harry R. Lewis
America's great research universities are the envy of the world, but have they forgotten their fundamental purpose? In his book, Excellence without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (PublicAffairs, 2006), Harry R. Lewis argues that top universities have cleansed their curriculum of moral principles and "have a very hard time explaining the overall point of the education they offer." Mr. Lewis is a Harvard College professor of computer science and was dean of Harvard College from 1995-2003. He spoke recently with Associate Editor Mary Jacobs.
You write, "I have almost never heard discussions among professors about making students better people." What's behind that reticence?
Professors rarely think that character formation is part of their jobs. They're appointed because of their research or teaching expertise within their discipline. There's nothing in the hiring criteria, in the promotion criteria or the rewards structure that would provide incentives or encouragement for faculty to take a step back and say, "Gee, this would really be better for the student as an individual in the long run if we held the student to this standard rather than to that standard." The standard is, teach as much about your discipline as possible and hopefully have a few of your students go on to reproduce ourselves and be great professors.
At the same time as research universities have become so dominant in America, quite rightly, for their contributions to the American economy and the great discoveries they've made . . . everything that has to do with student behavior and student personal growth has been pushed off into a separate part of the university, the student service efforts and the counseling services. There's almost a feeling that faculty members really are not welcome to get into things that are too personal, because there are professionals who handle student services. It's not because there's any ill intent on anyone's part. The system has evolved to create and reward success of a particular kind . . . so that the professorate becomes more academic and more exclusively concerned with the academic achievements of their students and less concerned with their personal development. There are exceptions, but they happen in spite of the system.
You talk in your book about how Harvard and our other great universities "lost sight of the essential purpose of undergraduate education." What is its essential purpose?
The most thing important thing we do for our students is to see that during the time they are with us, they develop into the kind of people to whom we want to entrust the future of civilization. We should be trying to do what we can to equip them with the knowledge and wisdom necessary to make a better world. That's not inconsistent with other things we do - creating leaders of industry, government, medicine-where we also equip people with a specialized knowledge. We want people to develop a broad view of life-their personal lives and their place in society. And we want them to develop an attitude where success has some larger purpose than their personal wealth metrics.
In light of all this, what advice do you have for parents who are helping their children to select a college?
Parents ought to ask: "What's the big takeaway from your institution? What do you hope my son or daughter will remember from their education 25 years from now, after they've forgotten Einstein's theory of relativity or the difference between Chaucer and John Donne?" I went to a funeral for an alumnus, an attorney from the (Harvard) class of 1942. Read out at his funeral was a line from his 25th report from Harvard, where he'd been asked, looking back, what he appreciated most about Harvard. He appreciated Harvard "because of the frame of mind Harvard tried to instill in us, which made me more than a bit intolerant of humbug when exposed to it, and somewhat troubled when handing it out." That's not a big ambition. But if every attorney that Harvard produced said that, the world would be a better place.
How can we begin to teach morality - for example, how to be a better person - in a secular university within a secular society where we're loath to tell anybody what is "moral" and what's not?
I think we carry that lack of confidence in our ability to recognize wrongdoing or bad behavior to an absurd extreme. We have a professor of economics here who was found in a federal civil court to have conspired to fraud the government. Harvard had to pay a $26 million fine; he had to pay a $2 million fine. And nobody's had a word to say about it. All of his economist colleagues say, "Oh, we don't think about that stuff, we just think of him as the brilliant guy we've always known." He's still there in the classroom. So some of this stuff is not very complicated. It's recognizing the obvious. If you don't recognize the obvious, students will take away the message that that's what real grownups do. That is, (adults) are cynical and they're self-interested, and that those are the things that matter.
The university doesn't have a choice about whether it's in the character formation business. You've got people who are 18-22 years old with you for four years. They're going to be different when they leave. That's what happens at that age. They take lessons from everything around them. The only choice we have is whether to signal to students that the important things in life are pubs and parties and competitive success and financial success, or, whether you're going to take advantage of the opportunity you have to remind them of other important things in life.
Harry R. Lewis
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