At Harvard, Excellence Without A Soul
As Alex Beam reports in the Boston Globe, there's a new book coming out about Harvard shortly. It's called Excellence Without A Soul: How Great Universities Forgot Education, and it should make for compelling reading. The author is Harry Lewis, the former dean of Harvard College who was ousted—ostensibly by FAS dean Bill Kirby, but more likely by Larry Summers.
(Lewis' story is covered in Harvard Rules; Beam interviewed me for his article, and he quotes me briefly in the article.)
I haven't read Lewis' book, but it seems to me that this intangible question of how to make Harvard not just excellent, but also good, has been at the center of all the recent books about Harvard—Lewis', mine,
Ross Douthat's. No one questions Larry Summers' desire for excellence, but lots of people wonder about what gets lost in the relentless push to make students automatons of achievement. One example: Derek Bok's "moral reasoning" requirement in the Core curriculum, which the new curriculum will abandon.
Lewis' book should provoke debate about the central question of Summers' presidency—how, in the process of getting ever richer and more corporate, Harvard has lost its heart. Other than "excellence," what does Harvard stand for?
The two men have always disagreed about fundamental questions of Harvard's direction, and unlike Summers, Lewis has always believed in the intrinsic value of public debate. This should be interesting.
