The Council and the 'Whole Man'

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Your story and editorial comment on the Student Council's plan to investigate the effect of a Harvard education on the "whole man" interested me greatly. This investigation, as you observed, will probably be a worthwhile undertaking. Perhaps it will materialize into an extension of the admirable effort which the General Education Committee's report began. But I hope I am not being unduly skeptical if I suggest that the nature of the inquiry will limit the findings to a very broad outline, and that this outline is already visible. It is really not necessary to launch an elaborate four-year study to answer the question which the Council has posed.

The initial difficulty attendant to this problem is finding a good definition of the term "whole man." Is he the "complete Rabelaisian man" to whom Aldous Huxley refers: "great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover, clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs?" To know whether or not Harvard trains "whole men" it is necessary to know what such men are and it will be difficult to arrive at any definition which will not either outrage the convictions of a segment of the student body or else be so abstract as to be meaningless. Furthermore, it may be even harder to draw the line between the effects attributable to a Harvard education and the mere continuation of personality traits which have formed in a person before college. When we look at a Harvard graduate, how are we to know--even with the help of self-evaluation--whether he is a "whole man" because of Harvard or in spite of it?

I think it is obvious that questions like these could be asked endlessly. The point is that the major part of the answer is already apparent. Harvard does not and cannot train the "whole man." It can only try to channel the into pursuits that will benefit them while they are here and after they graduate; but nothing can alter the fact that Harvard has little or nothing to do with the formation of character which so greatly colors the life of any student before he comes to Cambridge. This means that no person or persons can accurately gauge the effect of four years at Harvard upon the development of the "whole man," because under the tradition of freedom of which this college is justly proud, those four years can be anything from an orgy of bridge, women and spirits to a protracted eyestrain. It depends upon the individual who can and probably does leave Harvard no more or less a "whole man--potentially or actually--than when he entered. Robert B. Spindle '52