Required Reading

A sampling of what Harvard people are saying, and what is being said about Harvard, in the press.

Just Say No to Nader?

David Frum, an assistant features editor at the Wall Street Journal wrote an article in the conservative magazine The American Spectator about Dean Robert C. Clark's effects on the left at Harvard Law School:

Bok...picked as Vorenberg's successor Robert Clark--a young corporation law professor, a faculty adviser to the Federalist Society, and one of Harvard Law's three confessed Republicans. It was all rather as if the 101st Airborne had parachuted into Prague in February 1948.

There are limits, of course, to what any one dean can do. The left still exercises huge power at Harvard Law. Just last fall, a popular first-year property-law professor found his classes boycotted and picketed after he confessed in class that he didn't know enough about the laws of antebellum slavery to spend more than a single class on the topic. Even now, one of the school's weirder characters, Professor Derrick Bell, has taken a year's leave of absence to protest the absence of black women from the school's tenured faculty. (The New York Times and other newspapers have reported that Bell is self-sacrificingly forfeiting his salary; in fact, it is being quietly made up by Bill Cosby.) There have been marches and demonstrations, and a group of students has brought an antidiscrimination lawsuit against Harvard, demanding the appointment of a black woman professor. The suit has been joined by national civil rights organizations, and is surreptitiously being advised by members of the faculty, including Bell himself.

Yet the left at Harvard Law is unmistakably deflated. In his fall 1989 address to the incoming class, Dean Clark broke with the rigid custom that requires law school deans to urge their students to go to work for Ralph Nader after graduation, and said instead, "No part of the profession has a monopoly on 'doing good.' Helping people to solve their problems--to cope with government agencies and neighbors and spouses--is essential work of lawyers. So is helping the wheels of commerce turn and helping business produce the goods and services needed by society. Do not let anyone convince you that you are 'selling out' in whatever career you choose."

Items in the Reporters' Notebook are submitted by Crimson reporters and are edited by Brian R. Hecht