Pride, Privilege and Prejudice

THERE ARE FEW creatures as sad as sad alumni. They hover on the fringes of groups of jollier grads at class reunions, their class ties faded, their expressions somber. They have every reason to be solemn for they take upon themselves the responsibility of informing their classmates (with a ponderousness proportionate to the gravity of their message) that something is amiss at the college they all love so well. Though the tune may change, their sad song always conveys the same message: Alma Mater, that grand old dame at whose dugs they were once suckled on the sweet nectar of collegiate knowledge and sociability, is no longer, alas, what she once was. When the sad alumni walk past those ivy-bedecked, Roman numeral-inscribed walls, they can tell, almost viscerally, that something is different. Though they are never quite sure what that something is, they know it was better when they were students.

Normally, this group has little clout. Though they grumble to class agents and occasionally send off a letter to a dean, their complaints rarely reach more than a handful of people at the University, much less the world at large. It is rare indeed for a respectable American magazine to allow an old alum to fill its pages with nostalgic gripes. But since Harper's let Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr. '57 (one of the magazine's contributing editors) write such a piece for them, and since they made it the cover story of their March issue, and gave it the hype-laden title "Harvard on the Way Down," this otherwise unimportant, unenlightening article demands some response.

Alrich's main complaint is that in the past few decades Harvard has become more and more like the real world, and less and less the warm womb of "cushioned unreality" it was when he was a student. He flinches at the large enrollments of courses like Ec 10 and Chem 20, for the students appear to be forsaking the liberal arts tradition that served him and his fellow alumni so well. He complains that the professors have changed too. They now exhibit a "professorial worldiness" marked by "their eagerness to sell their advice, to fly to exotic meetings ground," and worst of all, by "their loyalty to the profession over the institution." As a result of the intrusion of the real world and its crass values upon Harvard's sacred terrain, the University has lost its sense of purpose, and is now simply "a shattered place, a loose congeries of interests and values and ideologies, peopled by men and women who are ferociously defensive of their notions of the right way to make use of it."

Take the students, for example. They are divided, Aldrich writes, between "the careerists and the party of fairness." We all know the careerists. The fairists are that group of students who favor lotteries as a means of admitting students to freshman seminars and oppose master's choice. The force which motivates the party, says Aldrich, is a "passive, dull, and slightly sullen drive to do away with 'distinctiveness.'" In case you are still wondering just who Aldrich is referring to, he tells you how to spot them: "The most obvious emblem of the party is a uniform seen practically everywhere at Harvard--construction boots, jeans, plain flannel shirts, and puffy quilted parkas."

Of course, this is nonsense, pop sociology at its most superficial. There simply is no "party" of fairness at Harvard. There are individuals who believe in what Aldrich terms "fairness," but they neither act like nor identify themselves as a party. More importantly, as individuals they are not powerful forces within Harvard. The status of the College's elite, "unfair" concentration, like Social Studies and History and Literature, remains largely unchallenged. One of the most vocal student movements during the past year was the Radcliffe residents' drive to keep a higher percentage of women in their Houses than there are at Harvard, to maintain an "unfair" distinctiveness in the Quad Houses. And even if Aldrich's party of fairness existed, its members would not necessarily find themselves opposed to the careerists. There is no reason a pre-med would be any more likely to favor master's choice than a non-careerist VES major; conversely, a fairist could as easily be an egalitarian pre-law student as some one with no plans past tomorrow.

Aldrich's misunderstanding of the social and political climate at Harvard serves his ends. He wants us to imagine that sullen cadres are manning the ramparts in defense of fairness, for it supports his belief in the broader, more nefarious movement that threatens to turn Harvard into just another indistinguishable subdivision of the real world, a collegiate Levittown. To regain the "character" it has already lost, he believes the University will have to dedicate itself to "intuition over fairness, to judgment over test scores, and it must discriminate before it facilitates."

To advocate the use of "intuition" is to advocate no specific policies unless one is willing to provide an ideology to direct the intuition. A radical's intuitive approach to Harvard admissions might prescribe a drastic cut in the number of preppies admitted to make more spaces available to minority students; the intuition of some of Aldrich's fellow alumni might lead to the selection of sons of men just like themselves--cultured, upper-crust, white. Aldrich neglects to name the brand of intuition he favors, but his rhetoric reveals his predilections. Discussing student opposition to master's choice, he writes, "The merest suspicion of discriminate assembly by students and housemasters raised the specter of an old Harvard of snobbish hauteur, the specter (oh, how hated!) of social class." The university spirit Aldrich wants ("a quality of self-confidence now always condemned as arrogance"), he finds in John Maynard Keynes's description of pre-World War I Cambridge University.

Aldrich's choice of Cambridge in this epoch belies the apolitical face he presents us. Not only was there an abundance of exuberant self-confidence in those years, but the student body was tip-top as well, all boys of good blood and fine manners, up from Eton and Harrow or straight from their private tutors. Back then, you simply did not have to trouble yourself with great numbers of people less confident then you, people like the sons of workers, or women, or the other outsiders referred to in England as "Wogs." They must eave been grand old days--similar, in fact, to the good old days at Harvard.

What is sad about "Harvard on the Way Down" is that Aldrich is not completely off-base. Harvard is in many respects like the real world, or at least like the real world found on Capitol Hill and Wall Street and in other places where this country is programmed. For better or worse, many Harvard graduates make their way into postions of power, so an analysis of Harvard's existence and ethos could help explain why the United States is the way it is today. But that analysis will have to be written by someone, unlike Aldrich, who understands Harvard, and who does not believe that the best future for Harvard is to retreat into the past.