Our Immoral Amoral Harvard Education

The other day, I was speaking with a friend about finance. I’m interested in a career in public service, so my nuanced position on the issue was pretty predictable: “Finance is bad. Very, very bad. I hate everyone in finance. Bad banks are powerful and ruin economies and are bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad.”

Having actually done a finance internship, my friend had more optimistic and more informed perspective:

“Financial institutions are powerful. Therefore, you want good people working for them. So it’s good that many Harvard graduates pursue finance.”

As I walked away from our conversation, grumbling, I thought about his statement: Are Harvard students truly “good people?"

“Good” has two sorts of meaning in this context. The first is that Harvard students have good technical skills. As a person with a statistics secondary who has a seen a statistically significant number of people beat me on the curve of almost every exam I take, I’d say Harvard students are probably pretty “good” in this way.

It’s the other version of “good” that leaves me doubtful: moral good. It’s the good that stops greed from blinding the judgment of big banks, preventing them from breaking the law or taking unwarranted risks that threaten the livelihoods of others.

So, are Harvard students morally good?

I can’t really see how our admissions process could screen for morality. Nor can I think of a reason why a Harvard education itself would make our students, on average, more moral than other college students. Sure, the Gen Ed program aims to make us good “citizens.” But what the hell does that even mean? What does being a good citizen even look like?

Harvard never really seems to take a stance. As Dean Khurana says, over and over again, our education is meant to be “transformative.” But are all transformations good ones?

In the 1800s, seniors at Harvard would end their college careers with a capstone course from the University President on moral philosophy and living “the good life.” However, after the rise of Darwinism and other strains of thought that shook the foundations of “objective” Enlightenment/Victorian moral philosophy, Harvard did away with its capstone courses and, eventually, its moral education (see Hist 1330 on this topic, offered next spring).

It’s easy to see that this trend of amorality persists today. Our classes on morality involve debates between utilitarianism, communitarianism, Kantianism, and every other -ism in the book. In the humanities and social sciences, everything is a debate. And there is no sense that, through our debates, we approach any objective sense of morality. Instead, our classes train us to critically analyze and pick apart any and all moral arguments. Professors often pride themselves on the fact that students walk out with more questions than when they walked in.

In the community of strict scrutinizers we’ve created, every action has consequences. Making a commitment to volunteer in Africa becomes an act of paternalism. Inventing an online tool becomes an attack on personal privacy. Training to become the first woman to reach Mars becomes an effort to waste public funds.

Don’t get me wrong: Strict scrutiny is good. Critical thought allows us to assess the consequences of our actions, giving us a clearer picture of the most effective ways to act and carry out our goals.

But, I also think scrutiny can easily lead to apathy. If every action has negative consequences, if every systematic reform can be picked apart, if there is not even a single compelling way to act or live “the good life,” then what’s the point in using our education to serve others and to better the world?

Part of Harvard College’s mission statement is to help students learn “how they can best serve the world.” Instead, Harvard trains us to see the infinite ways we can’t serve the world.

After such an education, if Harvard really wants us to make a positive difference, it cannot simply tell us to do so. Rather, it has to actively convince us that our lives are best spent in service to others. In other words, Harvard needs to take a stance. It needs to return to its moral education.

The recently proposed General Education reforms seem to be taking steps in the right direction. But Harvard needs to go further. Specifically, it needs to ditch Gen Eds, bring back distribution requirements, and bring on the triumphant return of compulsory capstone courses—one for freshmen and one for seniors. These classes could bring in lecturers who spend hours over the course of a semester making a case for bettering the world through the private, public, and academic sectors. Successful leaders in many fields could expose students to examples of how, say, the satisfaction of owning a yacht pales in comparison to the satisfaction of receiving constant respect and gratitude from others because of one’s work. They could expose us to urgent problems that inspire our compassionate hearts and problem-solving minds.

These courses could forge our class into a community that takes ownership of one mission: to use the tools we’ve been given to better the world. We may not agree on how to pursue that mission, but I think every religion and humanist ideology on campus would agree that we must pursue it. Then, and only then, could we even suggest that “good” Harvard graduates run the most powerful institutions in the world—financial or otherwise.

With so much at stake, it is immoral to remain amoral. We must have a moral education.

Dashiell F. Young-Saver ’16, a Crimson editorial writer, is an English concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.