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Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?, by Harry Lewis
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America's great research universities are the envy of the world—and none more so than Harvard. Never before has the competition for excellence been fiercer. But while striving to be unsurpassed in the quality of its faculty and students, Universities have forgotten that the fundamental purpose of undergraduate education is to turn young people into adults who will take responsibility for society. In Excellence Without a Soul, Harry Lewis, a Harvard professor for more than thirty years and Dean of Harvard College for eight, draws from his experience to explain how our great universities have abandoned their mission. Harvard is unique; it is the richest, oldest, most powerful university in America, and so it has set many standards, for better or worse. Lewis evaluates the failures of this grand institution—from the hot button issue of grade inflation to the recent controversy over Harvard's handling of sexual misconduct cases—and makes an impassioned argument for change. The loss of purpose in America's great colleges is not inconsequential. Harvard, Yale, Stanford—these places drive American education, on which so much of our future depends. It is time to ask whether they are doing the job we want them to do.
- Sales Rank: #247790 in Books
- Published on: 2007-08-14
- Released on: 2007-08-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .75" w x 5.50" l, .66 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Lewis, former Dean of Harvard College, presents a biting, scattershot indictment of undergraduate education at America's flagship university. The curriculum, he contends, is a crazy quilt of courses that leaves students clueless as to what they should learn and why. Professors are ivory tower eggheads fixated on their narrow subspecialties and incapable of offering guidance about academics, career or character. And students, coddled by parents and plied by administrators with parties, pubs and concerts, remain dependent and infantilized instead of growing up. Lewis spares no one-least of all recently ousted Harvard President Lawrence Summers, a "bully" whose administration combined "arrogance" with "lack of candor" and "chaotic lurching"-and probes rarely-examined academic fundamentals (his comments on the meaninglessness of grades are especially incisive). Unfortunately, his remedies, like a sketchy proposal for general education courses, are vague at best. And while he deplores Harvard's failure to articulate "what it means to be a good person," his discussion of date rape-concluding that women should be encouraged to "move on" and "rise above severe trauma"-is an ethical muddle. Provocative and insightful, Lewis's call for an intellectually and morally coherent education does a much better job of raising important questions than answering them.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Harvard College professor, has been on the Harvard faculty for thirty-two years. He was Dean of Harvard College between 1995 and 2003 and chaired the College's student disciplinary and athletic policy committees. He has been a member of the undergraduate admissions and scholarship committee for more than three decades. Lewis lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
From The Washington Post
Few universities face the negative publicity that Harvard does when recruiting students. Books and magazine articles abound with titles such as Harvard, Schmarvard and Who Needs Harvard?, urging students to resist being blinded by prestige and to find a college that better fits their own distinct social and intellectual profile.
It doesn't matter. Year after year, no other university touches Harvard's ability to lure the best students from every corner of the United States.
Similarly, Excellence Without a Soul, by Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College (the undergraduate division of Harvard), will discourage precisely zero valedictorians and strivers from making their predestined pilgrimage to Cambridge (at least for a tour of the campus). Yet the book levels significant charges: Harvard has abdicated its core responsibility to decide what undergraduates ought to learn and has abandoned any effort to shape students' moral character. "I have almost never heard discussions among professors," writes this 30-year veteran of the computer-science department, "about making students better people."
If that language strikes you as too pious, you might still agree with Lewis's contention that Harvard fails to encourage its students to examine their social, intellectual and career choices in anything like the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson (class of 1821). The book's relevance is hardly limited to Cambridge, given that few colleges could pass the tests Lewis sets up for his own.
Mercifully, the overexposed Harvard ex-president and gender theorist Larry Summers plays only a minor role in this narrative. No fan, Lewis writes that Summers "will be remembered for his failures," as a man who mistook bluster for leadership. Lewis, however, is hardly in the corner of the arts and sciences faculty, which helped bring Summers down.
His chief complaint is that Harvard professors refuse to devise a coherent undergraduate curriculum. Lewis is nostalgic for the curriculum Harvard concocted in the 1940s, which forced students to take several wide-ranging courses with titles such as "Western Thought and Institutions." In the 1970s, that system was replaced by a more complex one that requires students to take specifically designed courses, outside the usual department offerings, from numerous categories, such as "Social Sciences" and "Humanities." By the time Summers arrived in 2001, the system was widely viewed as a tired hodgepodge.
Summers called for a curricular review, and Lewis, like the president, hoped the faculty would decide what literary, historical, philosophical and scientific works all students should be exposed to. But the vaunted review went nowhere. Oh, it grinds on in an attenuated way, but professors are leaning toward a simple "distribution" model, in which students could fulfill a history requirement, for example, by taking any course the history department offers. In the U.S. history subfield, that might mean "Medicine and Society in America" or "Pursuits of Happiness: Ordinary Lives in Revolutionary America" -- fine courses, perhaps, but ones that are part of no larger picture.
A lack of effective advising compounds the ill effects of the laissez-faire curriculum, in Lewis's view. Plenty of Harvard students have been gunning for the elite business-consulting firm McKinsey & Co. or Harvard Med since the ninth grade, and a few complete the journey contentedly. Yet others wake up their sophomore year realizing they've been achieving in a vacuum -- they don't want what they thought they wanted. They're lost, and, Lewis argues, Harvard professors possess neither the know-how nor the inclination to help them.
A necessary first step toward reform, Lewis thinks, would be hiring professors on the basis of empathy for young people and personal probity, not research prowess alone. As he notes, you can lose a Harvard professorship for "stealing your colleague's ideas . . . but not stealing postage or abusing your children."
But Lewis never explains how, if he were Harvard's hiring czar, he would balance research, teaching and mentoring skills. The question is trickier than he admits. He wants Harvard to be both a cozy liberal arts college and a research powerhouse. Is that possible? I, for one, might vote to grant tenure to Einstein at Harvard even if he had sticky fingers.
It's fun to argue with the ex-dean, whose knowledge of the subject vastly outstrips that of most commentators on higher education. Unfortunately, as the book progresses it starts to seem less and less a comprehensive critique than a collection of one man's cranky observations. Lewis's discussion of student "professionalism" is confused, for example: He hates it when his liberal arts colleagues sneer at students who seem mainly interested in landing high-paying jobs. (After all, he says, if you're the "best," there's nothing wrong with wanting the "best" jobs, too.) Yet Lewis himself writes, "Something is wrong with our educational system when so many graduating Harvard seniors see consulting and investment banking as their best options for productive lives."
And "unconvincing" does not begin to capture Lewis's chapter on grade inflation. He's all for it! It's no problem if most Harvard students get A's and A-minuses, he writes, because, after all, "grades have been going up for as long as there have been grades." Spot the logical error in that argument -- that would be a good question for a Harvard interview.
A "gentleman's C" used to signal that a student spent his time playing pool at his club or editing the campus newspaper. There was no shame in it and no pretense of distinction either. But a gentleman's (gentleperson's) A-minus? That seems pretty much like a fraud -- on students and graduate schools alike.
Reviewed by Christopher Shea
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Can excellence have no soul?
By Reid Mccormick
“The role of moral education has withered, conflicting with the imperative to give students and theirs what they for the money they are paying.”
If you look at the history of higher education, you would see a clear decline in moral education. Colleges and universities of the past were tied very close with the church thus moral teaching came directly from the church’s teachings. As time progress the connection between higher education and the church digressed.
In many ways the university has deviated from its original goals. The curriculum from 17th century would be completely alien to professors and students today. As the years progressed, the goals and curriculum has changed, and in his book Excellence without a Soul, Harry R. Lewis retells the history of Harvard and the issues confronting the renowned school. As the former dean of Harvard College, Lewis was involved in plenty of faculty feuds, student protests, and national scandals. Many times he saw the school take the easy way over the smart route. Many times he saw the school bend to pressure instead of standing firm on values. He states late in the book, “The college is more interested in making students happier than making them better.”
This is a very interesting book. There are plenty of resources criticizing higher education, but rarely are those criticisms written by someone with such high credentials as Lewis.
When I picked up this book I was really looking for a book that addresses the university’s need to approach morality. Though a lot of the book is dedicated to the history of Harvard and its challenge in every aspect, Lewis does spend a bit of time confronting the issue of morality.
He says it bluntly, “Harvard today tiptoes away from moral education, little interested in providing it and embarrassed to admit it does not wish to do so.” Schools have completely abandoned the idea of morality, mainly because in a postmodern culture morality is a questionable idea.
I found this book to be extremely interesting. I never would have thought working at a prestigious school such as Harvard would be that difficult, but it actually sounds worse.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A nice read.
By Steven Kaplan
Lewis a former Harvard dean seems to have written this to get lots of things off his chest. Some parts, such as the section of why "grade inflation" is not so awful, are quite interesting. Some others on sexual harassment/assault are very dated. A nice read.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
From Harvard.edu to Harvard.com
By Richard B. Schwartz
Harvard did not cause the commercialization of higher education but it succumbed to it. In Harry Lewis' words, the top institutions were `overtaken' by it, a polite way of saying that they did not possess the values or the will to counter it. The nub of Lewis' argument is that Harvard now neglects to educate the whole person. Students between the ages of 18 and 22 are no longer children, but neither are they mature adults. The process of moving to mature adulthood (in addition to the process of taking coursework) was once a high priority of our top universities. Now, students are `pleased' rather than educated. We make them happy; we satisfy them, which is to say we allow them to dictate the terms of their student experience.
Where students were once counseled and guided by doctorally-trained institutional mainstays, with long memories and a respect for the successful elements of the institution's traditions, we now have `student services professionals' to make them happy. Lewis compares the modern university to a daycare center.
This may sound harsh, but it really isn't and Lewis' arguments are grounded in deep institutional history and a thoughtful consideration of key issues and events. Most of all he laments the absence of core curricula. He is not calling for a monolithic, soul-searing program of Gradgrindism, with endless recitations and an ethos of threats and intimidation. Far from it. All he is seeking is a handful of courses (say, 10, of which students would take 5) designed to serve as a foundation, a common experience that would unite students both socially and culturally as well as intellectually. Now there is no core. There may be distribution requirements; there may be explorations of disciplinary methods, but a content-based core, even a modest one . . . no.
Editorial writers, legislators and naïve trustees often wish that `universities would be run like businesses.' Flash: they already are, in many destructive ways, and more's the pity.
Lewis' position as a former Dean of Harvard College, with 30+ years of experience at Harvard, adds weight and point to his observations. His book is candid, engaging and free of pulled punches. Everyone who cares about the plight of higher education today (from parents to trustees to faculty and prospective students) should read this book. Few go to Harvard, but Harvard's influence is enormous. Their decisions or indecision are replicated by their imitators and all research universities and research colleges can be affected.
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