The Trouble With the Germans

I never thought I would envy a women’s college, but recently, Barnard College built Cathedral Gardens, a dormitory that houses both professors and students. Not on different floors. Not on opposite sides of the building, but room by room.

I wondered how such an idea would go down at Harvard, with its reputation for fiercely independent faculty. Probably not too well. My image of the quintessential professor here is Professor Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, University Professor of Ancient, Byzantine, and Modern Greek from 1860 to 1883, who lived by himself in Holworthy Hall, kept chickens in his room and wore a blue cloak and wild beard, that made, in the words of Professor Henry W. Longfellow, “Diogenes a possibility.”

Would Professor Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles choose to live in Cathedral Gardens? Probably not. But would we want him to?

For most of Harvard’s history, the answer has been a resounding yes. The early seventeenth century College required tutors—for all practical purposes the equivalent of today’s professors—“to be with their pupils almost every hour of the day, and sleep in the same chamber with some of them at night,” wrote Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard’s pre-eminent historian. In many cases, student and tutor remained life-long friends.

Now it is true that tutors were usually young graduates. But they differ from today’s residential tutors in these those tutors were thought qualified to teach a degree as soon as they had completed it. Age also didn’t matter when it came to a tutor’s moral duty, which was to guide students through not only appropriate intellectual but spiritual development.

This is a situation that has all but evaporated at Harvard. Professors now believe that their duties end beyond the classroom. One professor I took a class with last semester offered office hours, but had them at 9 a.m., required an appointment to be made with a secretary, and then proceeded to hold them in a building that no one had heard of. Another required her students to ask firm questions to which she would give terse replies, making them so uncomfortable that few would return. Harvard College—in the best formulation I’ve heard—promulgates a Japanese-style education, where the professoriate pretend to teach, the students pretend to learn, and everyone is happy.

Which is completely ironic, since the Oxbridge tradition of higher education, upon which Harvard College was self-consciously based, was formed in the 12th and 13th centuries partly in opposition to the University of Paris. The last adhered to the lazy continental practice of off-campus housing, where students would live in the city and connect with their teachers only at lectures. Instead, Oxford and Cambridge sought to develop residential colleges—what the founders of Harvard would later call “a real college” instead of the NYU-like nonsense—to foster student-faculty interaction.

We are all Parisians now. Ever since Charles W. Eliot’s teutonic reforms, which inaugurated the modern research university as we know it, student-faculty space has expanded dramatically. Few tutors were appointed after 1878 and none between 1904 and 1914; this while professors were being hired en masse. When tutors began to be hired again, their definition had changed; no longer were they teachers who also interacted with students; now they were graduate students, with no claim to specialized knowledge and with no claim to guide a student as to how he might live.

Part of this was simple logistical necessity—as Eliot himself put it in an October 19, 1869 inaugural address, “one hundred and fifty young men cannot be so intimate with each other as fifty used to be.” And as the College expanded in the post-Civil War years, so did its bureaucracy, which formed a wedge between measly students and exalted professors.

But the situation was also affected, to put it in simple terms, by the rise of science and the decline of religion. The most important rationale for tutors to live with students was so that they could aid their spiritual development. When the University lost faith in any agreed principles, it could not justify compelling students to adhere to any fixed ethics. In the name of science, any promulgation of a certain ethic labored under the stigma of what Isaiah Berlin called “the Cartesian condemnation,” attempting to justify all its findings scientifically and severely unable to do so.

Which leads us to the status quo, Harvard as a highly rational and bureaucratic, university—one that chooses its students based, in part, on exams and measures the worth of its professors, in part, by seeing the numbers of journal articles they have published.

Yet personal development cannot be quantified. And when Harvard increased the space between students and professors under Eliot, it repudiated the prime function of the humanities, which is to help people live better lives. It is all very well and good to read what Montaigne says, but unless you think about what it means to you, it is all just words. We now expect students to figure out things by themselves, without the aid of an involved teacher, who can not only redirect students to texts, but guide them through those that offer the most intelligent appraisals of human experience.

That Harvard College today is called a “college” is a lie. It is a guilty charity for lazy professors to spread their knowledge once in a while. And so it is that students routinely say in senior surveys that they learn more from their extracurricular activities than from their classes. If there is any single condemnation of the modern research university, it is this. We have separated the people who teach from the people who learn, and still expect to disseminate knowledge in the quality that we used to. What foolishness.

Sahil K. Mahtani ’08 is a history concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.