A couple folks have wondered what I think of Drew Faust’s video welcome to the students.

(Or is it for the students. Hmmm….)

The answer is: Not much!

It’s not that I object to the idea in theory. A little video welcome isn’t inherently objectionable and could have some value.

And the problem isn’t that Drew Faust is pretty awful on video, though she is. It’s not her medium. Drew! Add a little punch to those words. Show some heart!

It’s that the format inevitably dumbs down the message. Faust’s exhortations to improve human health and boost economic growth, to “unlock solutions” to “consequential challenges” (consequential challenges?) in an “increasingly interconnected world” may be true enough, but they’re soundbites, and not only that, they are old and tired soundbites, which means that they are platitudes. This message could have been delivered in 2011—or 1911. Except for the shots of Harvard students doing wild and crazy things. They wear masks! They dress up as a moose! They play frisbee!

Wacky kids.

Perhaps even this banality wouldn’t be so bad if Faust was still writing the Derek Bok-style annual report—something ambitious and meaningful and personal that can’t be ghostwritten, as all of Faust’s stuff seems to be. (For her sake, one hopes it is.) Or if in other talks she delivered more challenging stuff.

But Faust hasn’t done that, and the Harvard community should probably start considering the possibility that she never will. That substance deficit makes this little bit of popcorn somehow more annoying.

One final point, which is subtle but, I think, important: All of Faust’s suggestions about Harvard’s raison d’etre involve practical, problem-solving work. The point of Harvard is to invent stuff, to boost the economy, to discover new breakthroughs, etc.

All of which is important.

But there’s really nothing about scholarship in Faust’s words—about the value of open-ended learning that does not have immediate practical relevance.

There’s an implicit vision of the university here, and it seems to me something like this: Why should you pay $50,000 or so to go to Harvard at a time when post-collegiate employment is down and post-collegiate wages are down? When the price of Harvard has far outpaced inflation over the last decade?

Because Harvard is practical.

Is the essence of Faust’s message, then, that Harvard is a very sophisticated and elite trade school?