directed at the University per se, for failing to live up to the high expectations the students had of it. While there was a certain academic discontent throughout the universities of the Western world—none of which, save those in the United States, had the experience of the Vietnam War or the civil rights movement—the focus of criticism at Harvard and at other U.S. institutions was domestic. That is to say, the Universitywas not behaving as it ought in matters of importance to students. This conflict of expectations between the institution and its youngest members contributed mightily to the troubles of the day, but it also created new dimensions in the ongoing relationship of engagement and apathy in the University. T h e activism of the late Sixties and early Seventies was generally understood to be a deliberate attack on Harvard indifference, which at least since the secularization of the University in the eighteenth century had been the dominant tone. For many, this signaled the dawn of a new age, at Harvard as in the nation and the world. There would be anger, even disappointment, when it became clear that the new age was more often than not simply a commentary upon the old. In a curious way, those who invest the most in the Olympian myth of the University have the most to lose. Somehow, of all our institutions, only the university is expected, nearly universally, to do and be good, having long ago surpassed both church and state as a place of public confidence. T h e expectation of such virtue is as old as Harvard itself; it was the ambition of the founders to be, in their ecclesiastical jargon, the militia of Christ, an army for the reformation and redemption of the world—no small claim for what Samuel Eliot Morison and others would call a glorified prep school for God. Despite the transfer of that zeal from heavenly wisdom to earthly knowledge and a commitment to research rather than redemption, the sons and daughters of Harvard, and indeed of all higher learning in America, have placed in the university the confident high hopes—both private and corporate—that once were vested in the church and its sacraments. In the 1960s students were disappointed that Harvard was unwilling to reform itself in order to fulfill these expectations. Had Henry Adams taken his degree in 1986, he might have agreed with the closing paragraph of graduating senior Michael Hirschorn's Crimson piece, "The Cult of Mediocrity,'' in which, after an autobiographical account of bad and indifferent instruction in the College, the author calls his Harvard education "a big inside joke" and concludes: "1 will leave Harvard today full of that nostalgia that annually afflicts graduating seniors, but I will not feel truly educated. Anyone who feels otherwise has either been extremely lucky at Harvard or is just deceiving himself." The faculty for self-criticism is, and has long been, alive and well at Harvard. Confusion on this matter is somewhat understandable in that the most savage criticism often comes from within the family, but one must be in the family to make it. The parochial version of this phenomenon is that only Harvard people know enough to know what's wrong with Harvard, and that is why one can expect the harshest judgments to emerge from the lips and pens of its own: when Nelson Aldrich and Timothy Foote go public with an expose on Harvard, you know it's from the inside, the gossip is fresh, the sources real, the passions experienced. Watching undergraduates at football games would not give one the impression that introspection, let alone criticism, took place here, especially when they say to Yale, "You may win The Game, but you have to go back to New Haven," or to Army, "Someday you will work for us." But
the tenor of the past fifteen years—gleaned from numerous conversations and from what's fit to print in the student press-— suggests that for many of our students, and now younger alumni, criticism rather than imitation is the sincerest form of (lattery. Could it be that those paradoxical Puritan qualities of idealism and self-criticism, self-assurance and self-doubt, those founding passions of what David McCord calls that "godly but beleaguered lot," are alive and well in successive generations of
Of all our institutions, only the university is expected to do and be good. undergraduates? In the absence of the old theological, sociological, or even intellectual consensus, could it be that contrariness, creative or cussed, is the only consensus that remains? Perhaps it is so, as someone has observed, that where two or three Harvard graduates are gathered together, there are three or four opinions in the midst of them. If anniversaries of the sort we now are undergoing stimulate great binges of self-congratulation, they also provide a guaranteed antidote of selfcriticism and anxiety. The anxiety comes ftom a belief that the myth was once true but is no longer: standards are tailing; we aren't what we used to he. One expects this of the alumni; they in some measure depend upon annotated memories. Dean Willard Sperry, writing in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin in April 1947, squarely observed that the alumnus, unless uncommonly generous of mind and spirit, is apt to be a liability rather than an asset in the ongoing life of the institution: " T h e very reasons that endear the place to him and bring him back to his reunions make him cherish the college as it was in his time, not as he finds it now. There were great teachers in those days; he delights to remember them and to tell the well-worn tales about them. Today there are only pedants and specialists. T h e place has deteriorated." What's tendentious in prose is a little livelier in verse, especially that of Laurence McKinney, who in the Tercentenary graduates' issue of the Lampoon, wrote of the returning alumnus looking for George Lyman Kittredge, Charles Townsend Copcland, and Bliss Perry: I low many years? Why, it's over twenty, Wc have seen triumphs and treaties go, We have come back through want and plenty Looking for scenes that we used to know. Gone from the Yard is the Class Day fountain, The graduate gropes in a strange abyss. Seeking a landmark, a reckoning mountain, Hoping for Kitty or Copey or Bliss. But what of those who never knew the past? They can only imagine a golden age because the present one seems like so much brass. It's not that these critics do not believe in the Harvard myth; rather, they may believe in it too much. T h e present moment is always a season of discontent—even in festival years—because one is certain that the ideal either has been lost or is yet to be achieved. T h e past and the future remain the preserve of the real and genuine Harvard, while SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1986
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