Riesman: An Educator Prodding Students and Teachers to Face The Fears of 'Being Ridiculous'

"One of the jobs of the teacher is to help the students not be afraid to be ridiculous. It seems to me that you can't get educated if you are afraid to be ridiculous."

If I could pick any college, real or imaginary, at which to spend four years, I would choose one created, staffed, and directed by David Riesman, without a moment's hesitation.

It would be a great place, an enclave of learning for its own sake, sheltered from the pressures of the creeping meritocracy outside. It would be a place free from the "mutual fear and rivalry" which Riesman thinks characterizes Harvard students' relationships with each other. It would be free from another fear, too--the fear of trying new things and perhaps failing, the fear of looking ridiculous. For one of David Riesman's criteria for admission would be that applicants "have the courage to believe that things worth doing are worth doing badly."

David Riesman '31, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, is an unusual man. He is a scholar who strongly prefers teaching undergraduates, a best-selling author who has enlarged the American vocabulary with such words as inner-and other-directed, a professor who first set out to be a biochemist and then a lawyer. Since returning to Harvard to teach in 1958, he has also earned a reputation as an imaginative innovator.

He got the chance to experiment with some of his theories his first year here, when the Freshman Seminar Program was just beginning. Riesman, working with an anthropologist, a political scientist, and a psychologist, organized one of the first seminars.

He picked the 60 members to represent a cross-section of the different aptitudes, fields of interest, and levels of preparation of the freshman class. The members of the seminar were required to take Hum 6 and strongly urged to take Nat Sci 5. In the Spring term, instead of the seminar work, everyone took Soc Sci 136, Riesman's upper level Gen Ed course. So the seminar was more than a course; it was a way of life, tying its members together through the same course load and weekly dinner meetings.

The group read C. P. Snow's Two Cultures; Riesman's goal was to make the freshman look across the divide between science and the humanities before identifying themselves with either side. The seminar was a study of the sociology of intellectual life and the process of choice. "What factors lead to an intelligent choice of major at the age of 17?" Riesman asked his group. "I wanted to give them a sense of the richness of Harvard and how to make use of it," he says now.

His original idea was to arrange for an entire freshman dorm to house the seminar's 40 boys and a whole corridor in a Radcliffe dorm for the 20 girls. When this was not possible, he settled for a small frame house near the Square to use as the group's home away from home. In retrospect, Riesman is relieved that the first scheme failed. "Enough group solidarity developed as it was," he says. "I just went to another seminar wedding."

The fear that people won't take advantage of the richness of college, and of Harvard in particular, is one of Riesman's major concerns. His proposal during this fall's Gen Ed debate that students be allowed to fail one course a year without the failure going on the permanent record was an effort to correct what he considers Harvard's "vitamin deficiency": a fear of taking risks. The average freshman (everything Riesman says about Harvard he thinks is generally true for Radcliffe) is awed by the articulate brilliance of those around him. "He becomes afraid, he withdraws," Riesman says; this self-consciousness creates a lack of communal feeling which in turn feeds back to reinforce the freshman's fears.

More Acute Here

Riesman thinks that this problem is more acute at Harvard than at any other college in the country, because of Harvard's reputation and standards, its size, and the impact of the graduate school complex on the College. At first, Riesman says, the presence of graduate schools improved the college atmosphere and gave college a new level of seriousness. But in the middle of a graduate community an elite college such as Harvard "suffers from a surfeit of its virtues." College life becomes "dehydrated"; nothing can be done or prized for its own sake because each step is preparatory to the next.

"Students become more like bankers than human beings," Riesman says. It depresses him to hear a senior say that he knew he would be happier in a different field but feels that he has to go on in his undergraduate major because he has such an "investment" in it.

"I want to tell them to look at me," he says. Riesman "drifted into law school" after majoring in biochem, because he didn't like science and wanted to stay in Cambridge. He really wanted to be a professor, perhaps because his father taught in a medical school. "But I felt inadequate compared to him. Law was something a person of normal intelligence could do." Riesman went on to become Louis Brandeis's law clerk before starting teaching at the University of Buffalo.

Riesman would like to humanize the college experience by digging behind old standards and cliches. In Constraint and Variety in American Education, a series of lectures published in 1956, he cited the need for "honest and probing consumer research" to find a way behind a college's stereotyped facade. Riesman wrote then: "If one loses a few dollars through misleading advertising, one can make others, but if one loses four years through misleading schooling, one cannot make them up--on the contrary, in some cases one may have formed false values, false estimates of one's self, of others, and of the universe."

Harvard: Wrong Choice

Harvard's reputation makes it difficult for high school seniors to reject an offer of admission, and Riesman feels that it is not uncommon for a person to make the wrong choice in coming to Harvard. He thinks that a more flexible system of transferring might be one solution. "I've been impressed by people who have transferred to Harvard. They usually