One of the most interesting paradoxes
in America today is that Harvard University, the oldest institution of higher
learning in the United States, is now engaged in a serious debate about what a
university should be, and whether it is measuring up. Like the Roman Catholic
church and other ancient institutions, it is asking-still in private rather than
in public whether its past assumptions about faculty, authority, admission,
courses of study, are really relevant to the problems of the 1990’s. Should
Harvard-or any other university-be an intellectual sanctuary, apart from the
political and social revolution of the age, or should it be a laboratory for
experimentation with these political and social revolutions; or even an engine
of the revolution This is what is being discussed privately in the big
clapboard houses of faculty members around the Harvard Yard.
Walter Lip Mann, a distinguished Harvard graduate, defined the issue
several years ago. "If the universities are to do their work." he said," they
must be independent and they must be disinterested... They are places to which
men can turn for judgments which are unbiased by partisanship and special
interest. Obviously, the moment the universities fall under political control,
or under the control of private interest, or the moment they themselves take a
hand in politics and the leadership of government, their value as independent
and disinterested sources of judgment is impaired... "
This is
part of the argument that is going on at Harvard today. Another part is the
argument of the militant and even many moderate students: that a university is
the keeper of our ideals and morals, and should not be " disinterested" but
activist in bringing the nation’s ideals and actions together.
Harvard’s men of today seem more trebled and less sure about personal,
political and academic purpose than they did at the beginning. They are not even
clear about how they should debate and resolve their problems but they are
struggling with privately, and how they come out is bound to influence American
university and political life in the 1990’s. |
