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Harvard's Role In Perpetuation Of Class-Exploitation

To many pupils, and to a certain number of professors too, the views I hold in this respect will seem not only lacking in conventional politeness but lacking also in substantial precedent. The first is true: the second is an error. The same ideas have been expressed in every generation for a hundred years. Emerson, Upton Sinclair, and Charles Sumner, all at one time or other, spoke directly of the hypocritical and self-serving character of Harvard College.

Sumner, firebrand senator from Massachusetts who took to the U.S. Senate floor to launch a direct onslaught on slave-holders, was judged unfit to be professor at the Harvard Law School. He recognized the reason and described it clearly in a letter to his brother: "I am too much...reformer...to be trusted."

Emerson had some memorable words to speak in this regard. Harvard scholars, he wrote in 1861, have no voice in Harvard College: "State Street votes them down on every ballot." Everything is permitted in the university, he said, so long as it adorns the elegance and privilege of Boston. That which implies an ethical provocation is not given voice. Generosity of thought within this university, he said, has a bad name: "The youths come out decrepit citizens."

Misnamed buildings

When will we see these strong and lucid statements carved out in granite on the portals of that building which still bears his name yet stands in hypocritical defiance of most decent values that he represented? When, for that matter, will the Harvard-Radcliffe students have the will or courage to demand that buildings named for arrogant and loveless members of the ruling-class--Loeb, Lowell and Lamont--be named instead for those, such as that great and gentle Harvard drop-out named Pete Seeger, who had the brains to quit before his heart was dead and soul was cold? When, too, will we see buildings named for brave and rebel women such as Helen Keller in the Radcliffe Quad? Is it not time to rediscover use of chisel upon granite, use of hammer upon stone?

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The strongest statements are those of Upton Sinclair, published first in 1923. Sinclair had no fanciful illusions in regard to the real function of the universities and colleges. Inevitably, he saved his strongest words and deepest vehemence for Harvard. We are told of Harvard, by its loyal friends, he says, that it is liberal in its educational policies: Is it liberal also in the policies by which it governs its investments? "Do you suppose," he asks, "the votes of...Harvard...are...for policies of justice and democracy in enterprises it exploits?" If you suppose that, he replies, you are naive. The Harvard votes are cast, just as the votes of any other business, for the largest amount of dividends for Harvard.

With the same irreverence, Sinclair looks upon the ideological bias of the university and speaks without much gentleness or kindness of the so-called "open market of ideas." Course-study at Harvard, he observes, is governed by "class-ignorance, class-fear (and) class-repression." Harvard "sets forth statistics" to confirm that it is not a rich man's school. Yet the character of its accepted courses--as much that which is kept out as that which has been retained--reflects the wishes of its Overseers. The revolutionary struggles of the present decade, he observes, are not offered to the students: "They go out ready to believe the falsehoods which are served...to them.

Brave scholars

Time seems to make few changes. Still, in each decade, there are those who stand, speak out, express their indignation with full power and passion. The brave, distinguished Harvard scholars, George Wald, Erik Erikson, and Robert Coles are three such bold exceptions in our time. None, I think, will wish to be identified with all of my own views. There is a certain protocol at Harvard which commands a mild degree of kindness and discretion to one's fellow-members of the Common Room. It is, indeed, this very kindness which at length proves most alarming...

I remember a day, about five years ago, when I returned to Cambridge late one afternoon in May in order to visit with an aging scholar who had been my teacher when I was a senior. I remember that I spoke to him that afternoon about the sense of vested interest Harvard people inevitably feel in the denial or non-recognition of those very disproportions and unequal opportunities for economic self-promotion which they presently exploit and enjoy.

The conversation is still vivid in my mind today: He was polite, relaxed, attentive and unhostile. He nodded, reflected, took off his spectacles, put hand to chin and studied me a while, knocked out his pipe-ash on the round cork knob within the center of a pewter bowl, looked out the window with a weary sense of aging decency, pressed thumb and finger to his brow in old and practiced sense of sorrowful exhaustion. He said to me this: "Of course it's so of course it's not correct. It isn't right for some of us here to have so much, and others have so little. It isn't right. It isn't necessary. We don't need all this surfeit and excess."

He sits and speaks. I listen and I hear. He says he does not need what he now views, possesses, holds, enjoys, depends on; and yet the truth, I think, is that he does. He does need life set up, protected, decorated, ordered in this fashion. He cannot live without it. Nor, to be candid, do I think that he does genuinely believe that the needs he hears of, and the abstract agonies to which his syllables of decency reply, are genuine needs and actual and unquestioned agonies. I do not think that he can dare to give belief to this. I think that, if he did, his whole world would begin to crumble.

He sits here now and looks out into the courtyard. The light of the sun reflects and shivers in the garden window, patterned with small panes behind his desk. The glowing space of light and warmth, along the book shelves and above the desk, summon for me a wealth of English recollections and associations, olden days in ancient places green and golden, many good hours of secure existence. I think of this also: lead-paint plaster, roach-invasion, rat-infestation of those desperate tenement-quarters on the other side of town in which 10,000 black and Puerto Rican families lead their hungry, hot and agonizing lives. I ask myself: Is it for this, for cruelties like these, for disproportions on this scale, that all of his labors, dreams and hours are contrived, exacted and expended? Is it for this that he has given fifty years to the analysis and explication of the work of Mann and Kafka, Auden, Eliot, John Donne?

Gandhi, asked by a close friend what made him the most sad in life, supplied this answer: "the hardness of heart of the well-educated." The genteel and reflective scholar in his sunbathed study does not seem to go with words like hardness, coldness, emptiness of love or barrenness of soul. Gandi perhaps had in his mind a less genteel, and more Imperial prototype. Yet there is a brand of unresponsive Love and of Inert Concern which blesses no more, and damages no less, than straight-forward cynicism. Quiet compassion and relaxed (i.e., controllable) self-accusation are no less evil in their end-results than those more blatant actions of overt destruction executed by the redneck cop, ill-educated soldier, ice-cold corporation-leader. Different in temper, intellectual dispassion and self-exile of this kind is nonetheless the same in faithful service of an unjust social order. Less explicit in form, it is no less brutal in its operation. Covered with ivy and pronounced with low-key, understated intonations, it is no less final in its ultimate exactions.

Copyright 1973 by Jonathan Kozol.

When will the Harvard-Radcliffe students have the will or the courage to demand that buildings named for arrogant and loveless members of the ruling-class-Loeb, Lowell, and Lamont-be named instead for those who had the brains to quit before their hearts were dead and their souls cold?

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