Doubting Douthat

Back in the fall of 2001, Tufts Dean Charles Inouye told the Tufts Daily News that grade inflation at Harvard was “just another symptom of their culture of arrogance—image over substance.” And he went further. “Everybody in the business knows just how little Harvard students work,” he asserted. “They’re essentially a lazy bunch. A lot of them aren’t even that smart.”

At the time, Inouye’s remarks aroused the ire of a vast contingent of Harvardians, and students took up their own defense through a barrage of letters to the Daily and the Dean’s Office. One outraged Crimson columnist even employed the power of the press. In “The Harvard Syndrome,” published November 5, 2001, he argued that “the acknowledged fact that some Harvard students are lazy” and “the presence on campus of a few meatheads, legacies, and dim bulbs with bizarre talents” are used by the ignorant to draw unfair—and even blatantly false—generalizations about the University and its students.

Clearly, Ross G. Douthat ’02 (the aforementioned Crimson pundit) has changed his mind.

In a recent piece in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Truth About Harvard,” Douthat reveals that in retrospect, he feels “cheated” by his undergraduate experience at Harvard, and proceeds to bash practically every aspect of academic life—the classes offered, what is expected of the students, the way grades are given—on his way to concluding that Harvard is, as its critics have long suspected, easy. Harvard students are “creatively lazy,” committing their considerable intellect to achieving the highest grades with the least amount of effort.

This verdict is based on an entertaining mixture of personal anecdotes and general observations, and while many of the latter can claim validity, the former have no real place in an informed discussion.

Douthat falls victim to his own college-era critique, generalizing the experience of a Harvard student from his own career, which was largely dependent on his personal choices. Perhaps the most vivid recollection in the article is the discussion of a “pathetically easy” paper, for which he apparently “didn’t need to do any reading, absorb any history, or learn anything at all.” One can only wonder why an individual with such a high commitment to academic rigor would have enrolled in such a course in the first place.

In proving—via his own example—that “gut” classes and delinquent students exist at even this great university, Douthat does no more than acknowledge that Harvard students are more normal than the traditional “egghead” stereotype might allow. And despite the fact that an exposé of this sort seems to pop up every few months, the article’s success proves that this sort of revelation is clearly still considered newsworthy.

Where Douthat’s critique proves more valuable is in his discussion of the problems with Harvard’s current academic structure: there are major flaws in the current Core Curriculum, the academic advising system, and even the apathy of some professors and teaching fellows. But these descriptions succumb to an inherent bias. Douthat blasts the humanities for inflating grades—he argues that it’s a reaction to their “retreat into irrelevance”—and neglecting to prepare those students who are not headed for professorships of their own. Perhaps the history and literature department failed to prepare him adequately for his editorial position at the Atlantic, but his emphasis on liberal arts and the importance of giving students a strong background in history, a “Great Books” experience, and so on, clashes with his implication that the sciences are the only real fields of study remaining.

In addition, Douthat is unabashedly Eurocentric. It is a tragedy, he claims, that an undergraduate might leave Harvard’s walls “unable to distinguish Justinian the Great from Julian the Apostate.” Instead, they’re more likely to be familiar with propaganda in Nazi Germany, the role of the samurai in Japanese culture, or the Castro regime in Cuba. Of all the things to criticize, why complain that Harvard is too successful in attempting to expand the cultural and intellectual horizons of its students?

Perhaps there has been a move in the American university system away from fact-based learning—and perhaps Douthat is right that this trend is not a positive one. He may even make an argument for increased control over grades or more direction for confused undergraduates faced with a massive course catalog and no idea where to start. But these flaws are pervasive, not unique to Harvard, and tossing in the Harvard name to attract attention is cheap journalism.

Douthat never points to a better model. He never suggests that Harvard is being held to an existing standard and has been found wanting. Instead, he chooses to follow in the steps of so many before him and demand that Harvard, and its slothful students, isnot living up to some ever-elusive ideal. Based on his past performance, we rather expected better.