Making Harvard Great Again

 

To title a post "Make Harvard Great Again," assumes, at base, that Harvard was once great.

What could possibly justify that thought? 

Well, if the mission of an American university is to cultivate, select and nurture succeeding generations of the best minds and to foster the generation of new knowledge and insights, then Harvard has, arguably, done this over the past century. 

Granted, one might argue it has failed at that, and no greater examples would be the observation that the two men who had the greatest impact on America through innovative thinking and new knowledge in the early 21st century were two men who spent a single year at Harvard, leaving once they realized Harvard had nothing to offer them: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, the men who dreamed up the idea that in the future people would have a computer in every home and that social networks would transform communications, the media and political life.

Of course, Gates was only one actor among many, including Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs (a Reed College drop out) and others who accelerated the dream of a computer in every home to a computer in every pocket, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who pioneered Google which made the internet accessible and foundational to every day life.  And, not to forget Jeff Bezos (Princeton) who revolutionized shopping, commerce, media streaming and a variety of other stuff.

The century since the 1920's saw the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, a steadfast proponent of segregation, embrace the "eugenics" movement which saw inter racial breeding as destructive to the superiority of the white race. While he allowed an honorary degree to Booker T. Washington, Negroes, and other non Wasps found no welcome at Harvard. As a "thought leader" Harvard's president led the nation to embrace a white supremacist ideology, and in that he found strong company with Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton, and failed President of the United States.

So, I'm not so sure Harvard was ever really so great.

But there was a time, after World War II, when the baby boom generation was rising the Harvard name provided an aspiration of the ultimate in the idea of meritocracy. The new religion of that generation was of excellence, achievement and success based on hard work and native brilliance. Parents of that generation had just succeeded in defeating what looked to be an unstoppable, indomitable foe, the Axis of Germany and Japan, through, among other things, sheer technical competence which allowed the United States, which had 4 aircraft carriers at the time of Pearl Harbor to having 400 within a year, which allowed for the development of the atomic bomb and then a vaccine for polio, and a host of other scientific achievements, including landing a man on the moon.

Halfway through the 20th century, the luster of sheer technical dominance wore thin, as America descended into the miasma of Vietnam, where bringing to bear an irresistible force of arms was defeated by the determination of an agrarian nation which had a greater core value system. "We can gain the world, but lose our soul," Martin Luther King said, and we surely looked like that was our fate in Vietnam.

And all the best and the brightest from schools including Harvard told us we could calculate how many tons of bombs would win the war. Harvard's Henry Kissinger was more stupid than the average conscript from Beaver Falls, PA, who knew you couldn't win that war with bombs. 

So, what could Harvard do to achieve the goal of identifying the best and the brightest (assuming there is such a thing) and then training them, inspiring them, equipping them to move the ball forward?

Modern universities have never been very professional about the "personnel" aspects of their job, i.e. figuring out what "good" is in aspiring applicants.

My father, who spent his life in "personnel," had very modest expectation about the possibilities of identifying talent. When I pointed out to him that the SAT exams (pioneered by Charles Eliot at Harvard) never did better than to predict who would flunk out after the first semester at college, my father responded, "Well, but that's a good test then! That's all you can really hope for. You don't want to accept a bunch of kids who won't last past the first semester."

By mid century, however, the SAT was widely viewed as not just an infallible intelligence test but as a predictor of future academic glory. It never was that. At the few schools which bothered to track the performance of high SAT students, there was virtually no correlation between scoring high on the test and those kids who made Phi Beta Kappa. (A Wesleyan University study.)

So, how do you identify students who, beyond not flunking out, will actually learn and then go beyond what their professors know to explore new realms?

I have no data. But I have some ideas.

One goes back to my experience as a 4th year American medical student on a stint at a London teaching hospital. Listening to my presentation of a case who had been admitted the previous night, the English professor of medicine got a dreamy look on his face and confided to me later, "Oh, how I'd love just a dozen students of the quality of you Americans."

This stunned me, because I had been impressed greatly by the English medical students, their powers of observation, their ability to "connect the dots" in unraveling diagnostic quandaries. But there were differences: For one thing, the Brits thought of themselves as middle class tradesmen. They would be rewarded with no more than a modest place in the community, sort of gentile poverty, so they cleared out to the pub at 5 o'clock, and the only students you saw laboring over charts and patients at nights were American. The attitude of the Brit medical students was, "We may not work very hard, but they won't pay us much, either."

But the biggest difference was the age of the Brits vs the American medical students. The Brits entered medical school directly from high school--they were 18-21 years old, where the American medical students were 22-26 years old. We were simply more mature.

Maybe that misspent youth in organic chemistry laboratories, classes in philosophy and ethical studies had benefited some of the American students, but, overall, we were just older.

After World War II, colleges were swamped with returning GI's who got to go to college on the "GI plan" where Uncle Sam paid the tuition. Like the GI plan for mortgages, the government played a huge role in investing in the generation which had won the war, and, by extension, their children. These college freshman, who had spent 2 years or more at war, brought a vastly different set of understandings to the classroom. I can only imagine how those professors dealt with them, although some of the professors may have also served.

I know, some of my own professors in college had been soldiers in the great war and they brought what they saw to what they found in Shakespeare. I'll never forget that line from Falstaff, looking at the bloated corpse of a soldier, saying, "There's honor for you." And my professor said he understood that entirely, as he described sweeping body parts off airplane wings when he served in the Army Air Force.

And how does any of this relate to making Harvard great again?

Well, if students did not matriculate at Harvard directly from high school, but were compelled to work in teaching hospitals for a year or two,  if they were interested in becoming pre medical students, or at law firms, or architectural firms or financial houses and banks, maybe Harvard would have a better basis for selecting its students and maybe its students would be better students when they arrived.

This, of course, is unlikely to ever be accepted by all those parents who are in the college acceptance sweepstakes, who seek bragging rights. It would also mean that some high school grads would not go on to college at all, once they saw the real world--like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerman. 

But the colleges would be, most likely, better places.