Reading Buttigieg in Commonweal

Professor Kloppenberg

Commonweal, a Catholic magazine of longstanding quality and reputation, published a piece three  weeks ago which I would never have seen but for the good offices of a neighbor who passed it along.

The piece was written by James T. Kloppenberg, who teaches humanities at Harvard and who taught Mr. Buttigieg in two classes.

I could not restrain myself from responding with a letter to the editor, but knowing it will never see the light of day, post it here for the consideration of the Phantom's vast audience of American intelligentsia and Russian trolls. 

Reading Professor Kloppenberg's remarks on his former student, I was struck by his comment that he did not give Mr. Buttigieg an "A" in his course. And, the professor tells us,  his course was described by the Harvard crimson as "the toughest humanities class at the College, combining soul-crushing dense and difficult material with a will-breaking workload."
The professor then lists the pantheon of American thinkers he explores with his students: John Dewey, Irving Kristol etc, etc, etc, and his own role in sending Buttigieg off to Oxford for his Rhodes scholarship, where Buttigieg would have to cope with the rigors of analytic logic, contemporary moral philosophy and neoclassical economics. These difficult will breaking courses will be necessary if the student is to be deemed worthy by the faculty to lead the free world.  Later the professor mentions Buttigieg emerged with a "coveted First from Oxford," thus validating Kloppenberg's recommendation: even though Buttigieg hadn't risen above "the middle of the pack" under his scrutiny at Harvard, Peter had enough intellectual firepower to excel at Oxford.

This is all in that mode of "the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eaton."

Which is to say, what we do at Harvard, selecting out the creme de la creme and grooming them, is so very important to the destiny of the nation, as we train, hone and prepare the nation's best and brightest to lead us into destiny.

Hogwarts for the American ruling class. 

All this reminds me of the story about Abraham Lincoln (who did not go to Harvard or take a course in the American intellectual cannon, but somehow became the 19th century's greatest writer), who feared oblivion, feared living a life which did not matter. Signing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln remarked he finally believed he might have made his mark.

A career in B.S. 

I suspect Dr. Kloppenberg (and possibly other Harvard faculty--including Henry Kissinger) secretly suffers the pangs of feeling their lives have not really mattered, not changed the course of history, as they sit in their offices and faculty clubs, telling themselves they have set the world in motion, groomed and chosen kings and great men and sent them off to make history with the skills and insights learned at the feet of the great faculty at Cambridge, MA. 

Mr. Trump, somehow, without reading any of the great thinkers examined by the professor, managed to capture history, at least temporarily. And then there are the cases of  Bill Gates, and after him, Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom spent one year at Harvard and concluded someday they would be very rich and very important people, but if they stayed at Harvard they would  be neither, and both decamped to locations as far away from Harvard as they could get.

The question is: does thinking and considering the works of the pantheon in the humanities really change the world? 

Or, put another way, has Harvard become a stairway to  oblivion?