The Times and Harvard, Part II
There's something else that's curious about Charles McGrath's report on the Harvard curricular review (see below): Though his piece is not generally favorable to the review, it's considerably less critical than it could be, and much of the reporting seems to have been shaped by Harvard, and more specifically, Mass Hall.
In the piece, McGrath explains that a "Gang of Four" of professors involved in the review pushed for a greater prescriptive general education program, but were defeated by Lilliputians on the faculty.
"We would have been happy with a bit more structure," Steve Pinker, a member of the cadre, says wistfully. But alas, the heroic Gang of Four was beaten down.
Well, now, hang on a minute, here....
First of all, who is this gang? According to McGrath, it's Pinker, English professor Luke Menand, Michael Sandel, "a historian," and philosopher Alison Simmons (who happens to bear a striking resemblance to
Judith Miller).
I don't know much about Simmons, but the other three are all Summers' boys, professors either recruited by Summers or/and upon whom Summers has bestowed advancement and high status at the university. They are his spear carriers. Pinker is even quoted as saying that "it's necessary in understanding a scientific discussion to know the difference between a gene and a chromosome"—an oft-used line from the standard Summers stump speech.
Which is important for two reasons. First, these are not helpless martyrs. If they really wanted more structure, they had the clout and connections to push for it. After all, they
wrote the curricular review report.
(Although there's a little historiographic problem here: according to the Crimson story linked to above, the Gang of Four was once the Gang of Five. Pinker was not a member of the Gang of Five. Scientist Andrew Knoll and historian Charles Maier were. Maybe there was a purge....)
Second, McGrath was surely right to interview this group; they're important players in this drama. But it's a little weird that the only professors with whom he appears to have spoken are Larry Summers' favorites. My guess is that McGrath went through the Harvard public relations office, and they set up these interviews for him. Curricular review dissidents were, apparently, not on the list of people Harvard thought McGrath should interview, and so he didn't. Sigh. Sometimes the MSM is so predictable.
I think this partly because it's the nature of Times reporters to make their first call to the public relations people, and secondly because McGrath also landed an interview with Larry Summers, so the Harvard president obviously sanctioned cooperation with the Times. Summers helped himself by cooperating. He takes a mild hit for the women-in-science speech, but McGrath strongly implies that the review would have been better had Summers not absented himself from it, when all the evidence suggests that Summers' involvement was making the review less coherent and more fragmented, and that by the time he disengaged it was obvious the thing was already a bust.
Summers tells McGrath that "there is a great appetite for science courses when they're well taught. We think that will happen."
(To my mind, a very open question, as getting scientists to teach general ed courses is a notoriously difficult problem.)
He continues: "There's very little appetite here for great books"—by which Summers means a great books curriculum such as Columbia's—"but we think we can give students attractive choices in courses that will impart broad foundational knowledge."
Plus, Harvard students are already learned when they get there. "For all the bashing of American hgh schools, the students coming in now are better prepared than ever."
That's a curious statement, since some of that bashing has come from Summers himself and his early speeches regarding curricular review clearly suggested that American high schools had not prepared students for the world around them.
But I think the more important point is the general laissez-faire tone of Summers' remarks. He no longer wants to
make students
take certain courses—in science, for example—and no longer wants to make them study abroad. Instead, he wants to make courses "attractive," like flight attendants or Swedish furniture.
Pardon me for being crude, but it sounds very much like Larry Summers no longer gives a damn about the curricular review. He has checked out.
