The hysteria over the word "ecology" has submerged most real issues. Ecology is an idea of balance and not a political issue. Politics never seem to transcend the scale of banner-waving. "Ecology" does not comfortably fit a banner. Banners that are waved too hard tend to flutter at last in tatters.
III
Must Harvard be a professional prep school? Students are seen as unpleasant vacuums to be stuffed as soon as possible. The individual sensibility capable of learning something in a manner that may even prove stimulating to a teacher is treated as an introducer in Academia. Consequently that student hides and sometimes dies.
"What happened to all the life they had when they were freshmen?" It is not surprising that life drains from a student who must learn worn-out paradigms and conjure with them. Too often, the overloaded departments hide behind the arbitrary rules of convenience and forget what is the function of the department.
The professors reward those who precociously emulate them in the use of the honed-down tools of some over-defined discipline. This is a perversion of the liberal education, conceived to be somehow different from a professional apprenticeship.
The tools and disciplines are seen as the absolutes, and learning is conceived as service to these rather paltry absolutes. This is an empty sort of anarchy, substituting erudition for sweetness and regulation of light. Forms are empty if prefabricated and compared.
Problems define the disciplines necessary to solve them, but at Harvard one is expected to deal with the problems of the discipline. In many cases, students benefit greatly by exposure to an academic discipline. But surely the University can permit other forms of inquiry.
IV
Harvard no longer has a sound ideological foundation for the education it offers. Its old ideal, the liberal education, seems lost in administrative quibbles. Widener, the laboratories and museums are valuable tools, but even more valuable is the question of their use. Surely wisdom has more function than filling libraries.
The world-view of science is concealed from the average student because of the demand for trained professionals and researchers. In the departments themselves, research is rewarded at the expense of teaching.
The humanities bog down in criticism, history, and scholarly research which are not appropriate tools for education, however useful they are in scholarship. The responsibility for education falls not only upon scholars who have other obligations and are not suitably trained.
The social sciences get lost in the analytic paradigms and sterile historicisms that abstract themselves above the level of ordinary responsibility in social issues. There are more important questions than techniques of manipulation, nor are quotations from Marx a major form of understanding.
Concentrations, instead of serving as tools to focus a student are treated as binding molds that a student must fit in growing. In this case the simplest reform is best. Just leave more loopholes in the requirements for concentration. The new independent studies program, although it asks the right questions, is too complicated and asks them at the wrong time.
The responsibility for learning devolves on the student anyway. No amount of requirements, however foolish, can force learning. It is also silly that freshmen have more freedom than seniors. Senior year is the right time for free study and should perhaps be dedicated to the question of "What have I learned?" or given how things run now, "What should I have learned?" Freshmen should study mathematics, Greek, music and drawing.
In reexamining its goals, the University must recognize its prime responsibility in education. The best means of doing this is to develop a faculty whose prime interest is teaching. This involves some personal renewal on the part of everyone on the faculty. Responsibility only sits on the shoulders of individuals. Committees slouch.
Frogs can live only in the world they expect. What am I to expect? Our worlds seems to have a lot of dead flies. Shall we starve?