Drew Faust has the back page of today’s NYT Book Review. Can anyone figure out what she’s trying to say?

The piece is titled “Crossroads—The University’s Crisis of Purpose“—promising title, sounds interesting—and Faust’s essay starts thusly:

The world economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama will change the future of higher education.

Blogger: Here’s an existential question. Can you change something that hasn’t happened yet? Or would you shape/affect/influence the future of higher education? (Small point, I know.)

Even as universities, both public and private, face unanticipated financial constraints, the president has called on them to assist in solving problems from health care delivery to climate change to economic recovery.

I love that—”unanticipated financial constraints.”

It saddens me to fault an essay from its first paragraph, but, coming from an historian, this paragraph seems ahistorical. Universities have faced financial constraints before; presidents have called on universities to help solve problems before. Kennedy asked Harvard for foreign policy help (that worked out pretty good); Reagan sought academic advice on remaking the economy; and Clinton did the same on health care reform. I’m sure you could come up with your own examples. Perhaps the reason Faust doesn’t mention these instances is because, well, they were all failures.

Is now so different? Faust’s essay begs the question.

The piece continues with some boilerplate paragraphs, which sound like they’re cut-and-pasted from prior speeches, about how conservatives attack higher education but basically it’s pretty important.

Faust locates this trend “in the past decade and a half.” Again, her knowledge of history seems oddly incomplete. The attacks on “political correctness” per se began in the Reagan ’80s, but you could certainly trace this line of argument back to the 1950s, and someone who knows something about this would probably identify America’s love-hate relationship with universities as part of a historical cycle.

Just before the end of the essay we arrive at what seems to be Faust’s real beef: that universities were too soft on Wall Street.

Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also of (often inconvenient) doubt. They are creative and unruly places, homes to a polyphony of voices. But at this moment in our history, universities might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise the deep and unsettling questions necessary to any society.

As the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism, should universities — in their research, teaching and writing — have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and denial? Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to economic irresponsibility? Have universities become too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?

(Good luck with that capital campaign, Drew!)

Faust clearly thinks the answer is yes. But a more serious consideration of the issue would have posited some specifics. How exactly did universities fail? What specifically should they have done that they didn’t? Where does blame lie, and what can be done to make sure the problem doesn’t happen again? What “excessive materialism” does she have in mind?

(I think the Times editors were simply too happy to have the president of Harvard writing for them to actually edit this article.)

Today’s students are too pre-professional, Faust argues. (The same argument was made back when I was graduating from college in the mid-1980s.)

…we need to ask more than this from our universities. Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Human beings need meaning, understanding and perspective as well as jobs. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to.

That’s a nice idea (if a glib construction), but it should be more like the second paragraph of the article rather than the last. This is a mistake that editors sometimes see (and I often commit) when editing/writing an article: Only after you’ve written your initial draft do you realize that the most interesting thing is at the end, when it should be at the beginning. You had to write the boring stuff out of your system before you arrived at your real topic.

It’s all sweetness and light for Faust to say that more students should major in gender studies. But how exactly does that play out when the unemployment rate is 9.7%? After all, if you’ve just shelled out $200k to attend Harvard, a job would presumably be a good thing.

I’m not saying there aren’t good arguments to be made in support of Faust’s point—some studies suggest that liberal arts majors do better in the business world than their business major peers—just that she doesn’t make them. And from her $800k a year podium, all this is easy for her to say. People living in presidential mansions need to be careful about criticizing “excessive materialism.” Presidents of almost-went-bankrupt Harvard need to be careful about proposing the university as a solution to “bubbles of false prosperity.”

That’s why the specifics are so important. They flesh out what might otherwise look like someone in a stained-glass house throwing stones. But they’re also the things that might stir up controversy, and Faust seems determined to avoid that.

(You have to wonder how Larry Summers would feel about this article. Aside from the fact that it’s implicitly critical of him, it’s the kind of fuzzy liberal thinking for which he had such contempt.)

A few random thoughts.

1) Good for Faust that she’s stepping out in the realm of the public, trying to make some points about higher education. A Harvard president should do that. But as I’ve argued before, she hasn’t made a successful transition to a public voice. This essay is so vaguely written, whatever point Faust is trying to make won’t have much impact.

To be blunt, it’s dull. Which makes it perfect for the NYT Book Review!

2) Part of the reason she hasn’t transitioned to a successful public voice is that she still writes in the voice of a historian who attended graduate school in a particular era. Every mild point she makes is followed by the recitation of three sources/footnotes backing it up. While some historians write like this, not many people read like this. It’s as if Faust doesn’t trust her own thinking….

3) …or that these aren’t really her words, but those of a ghostwriter. For example:

After World War II, the country witnessed the establishment of a new partnership between Washington and the nation’s institutions of higher learning, with the federal government investing in universities as the primary locus for the nation’s scientific research. This model now faces significant challenges. Steep federal deficits will combine with diminished university resources to intensify what a 2007 report by the National Academies declared to be a “gathering storm,” one that threatened the future of scientific education and research in America. The Obama administration has set a goal of devoting more than 3 percent of gross domestic product to research. One hopes this highly ambitious aspiration can become a reality.

Indeed, one does hope that this highly ambitious aspiration can become a ….zzzzzzzzz.

4) It’s interesting that Faust is appearing in the book review—it’s like the bland meeting the bland—rather than, say, “Week in Review.” I wrote in my recent Boston magazine article that Faust’s advisers are trying to frame her as a great historian, a scholar-president, in contrast to the activist-celebrity-president who preceded her. (Remember, Larry Summers was featured in the NYT Magazine at this point in his presidency, and, a little bird tells me, is the subject of a forthcoming Vanity Fair profile.)

This essay seems part of the packaging of the president. I once described Faust’s as an “NPR-presidency.” I’d now say “NPR-NYTBR-Baby Boomer-presidency.” Your cultural aesthetics may differ from mine (for your sake, I certainly hope so), but I don’t find this melange of cultural affinities inspiring. Or, more important, the right mix for the historical moment.

5) When it comes to social and cultural criticism, Faust has a knee-jerk liberal sensibility. She’s ecstatic about Obama’s election, and in a number of talks has cited it as a watershed for Harvard and universities generally. But is there a risk in tying the university too closely to the zeitgeist of a single politician? Already, talking about the seismic change of Obama’s election feels backward-looking rather than forward, the conventional wisdom of a year ago.

6) While I’m at it, here’s a confession I’ve been harboring for some time: I thought This Republic of Suffering was a disappointing book, and I was baffled by the acclaim it received. I love the time period, loved the topic, loved the book’s potential, and the questions at stake are both original and important.

But the actual execution of the book was anti-climactic. To me, its structure as a series of essays on various themes felt like a cop-out, like a graduate school dissertation rather than what should have been a magnificent narrative history about the agony of a nation and the changes that flowed from all the blood that was shed. Yet in its clinical, antiseptic writing about so much loss, so much death, This Republic of Suffering felt bizarrely bloodless. How many people who started it, do you think, actually finished it?

I know: The critics loved TROS. But would they have loved it quite so much if they didn’t know that its author was Harvard’s first female president?

I suspect that the pundits will applaud today’s essay for similar reasons. It suits their politics, it’s so drily written it’s hard to take offense—Faust is truly the anti-Summers in this way— and it appears in an establishment organ which has, with page after page of tedious reviews, numbed its readers’ critical sensibilities like muzak in a mall.

But if this article ran somewhere without so much official imprimatur, and if it had a different byline, would the conventional wisdom be so kind?