Harvard's Cultural Suicide Leaves a Much Younger Corpse Than People Are Choosing to Notice

Henry Adams laughs.

At Bad Cattitude — I apologize, but I just have to capitalize — a pseudonymous Ivy grad argues that the Ivies are engaged in acts of obvious self-immolation: “the american ‘ivy league’ (which i and many of my friends and my friends’ children attended and therefore of which i have a more than passing knowledge) has long stood as a pinnacle of educational attainment and opportunity. it now stands ripe for extinction and irrelevance because it has fallen into the manyfold traps of decadence, dependence, ideological capture, and just plain rot.” Read the whole thing here:

elite universities are over

I feel every word of this in whatever dark bag of ashes I’m still using as a heart, but I think there’s a Part Two. And its name is Inky.

Well into the 20th century, America’s elite colleges and universities had not the slightest relationship to any conception of academic merit, and they very much didn’t intend to. They admitted students on the basis of character: no Jews, no dirty Papists, no grubby sons of shopkeepers or laborers, and for sure none of certain other types of person who weren’t even necessary to mention. You know, character. Yale men, or Harvard men, or Princeton men, had prepped appropriately, at places that had trained them for their station in life. The first Groton headmaster sort of famously believed that his role wasn’t to prepare young men to become prosperous, since any young man prepping at Groton would obviously be affluent as a matter of course; rather, his role was to keep those young men from growing into “playboys or pantywaists.” If you click on that last link and read Time magazine’s glorious 1944 profile of Endicott Peabody, you’ll read that he attended Cambridge University, “where he read Punch, Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson and the law—and not much else.” He was perfect, a culturally readied leader in the education of high-status young men. He didn’t read too much.

Nicholas Lemann’s book The Big Test describes the mid-20th-century transition to a system that aspired to meritocracy on the basis of standardized testing, in the face of a series of social and political challenges like the Cold War that convinced Americans to find the smart kids and credential them for responsibility. Leaders like the Yale University director of undergraduate admissions R. Inslee “Inky” Clark proposed the modernization of the university, transitioning to merit alone. Magnificently colorful reaction, from Lemann’s book:

Academic merit!?!? My God, man, are you out of your mind?

And so, looking back, Henry Adams went to Harvard in the 1850s, as the grandson and great-grandson of presidents, and found it “a social desert that would have starved a polar bear.” The title of his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, is an inside joke, a reference to the degree to which his education — of which “the practical value remains to the end in doubt” — began after he finished college and started trying to live in a rapidly changing world. Harvard taught him to be who he was, anchored in the past, a gentleman of high status whose place in life was derived from his descent from high-status men of the 18th and 19th centuries. Then, later, he had to actually educate himself.

Lemann, in The Big Test, argued that the transition to a meritocracy had created new forms of exclusion and stagnation, sorting access to education on the basis of a “merit” that had roots in social class. Embracing that argument, American colleges and universities turned against standardized testing, discarding the SAT and pursuing social equity and DEI-focused admission and hiring as virtuous goals. Now Harvard, the pinnacle of American academic life, is offering remedial math. And so the “elite” becomes a joke, and we turn against it. The reaction to a broken culture created a new culture that, breaking, created a reaction to a broken culture that created a broken culture, leading to a reaction to a broken culture. Which will break, and lead at some future point to a broken culture. The current disastrous form of the thing we call Harvard is maybe twenty years old, and follows a version of Harvard that was maybe fifty years old.

Harvard is suing the Trump administration, because (for example) the Trump administration suggested that they admit students on the basis of academic merit, and suggested that the institution pursue some degree of viewpoint diversity, and then cut off federal money when Harvard pulled up the drawbridge and declared its absolute refusal. You can read the administration’s letter here, and Harvard’s complaint here. The hair-on-fire reaction is, of course, that Literally Orange Hitler is attacking academic freedom. But however the courtroom drama ends, the conflict is the product of a cultural turn that isn’t going away, and it’s absolutely not a new development that from time to time we ask just what it is that universities are supposed to do. This discussion is going to happen, whether or not academia welcomes it. Look past the Orange Distraction. Sometimes we make course corrections, because sometimes we need to.