The late Senator Joseph McCarthy used to refer to Harvard as the "Kremlin on the Charles" and "a smelly mess," and most of you will probably notice that people here are to the left of the people back home. It used to be that Harvard students--a lot of them anyway--were quite radical, and a few years ago there were building occupations and an active SDS chapter and so forth around here. Conservative alumni--one never hears about liberal alumni--are supposed to be in a constant froth about Harvard's extreme liberalism. In 1968 Harvard president Nathan M. Pusey '28 called Harvard students "Walter Mittys of the left," adding, "They play at being revolutionaries and fancy themselves rising to positions of command atop the debris as the structures of society come crashing down."

All that has died down a bit, but even people considered conservative at Harvard, like Pusey, have fought for causes generally considered liberal, like anti-McCarthyism.

9 Right-Wing Bastion Theory

This theory has two facets: first, that Harvard is conservative in its internal policies, even racist and sexist, and second, that Harvard is conservative by nature because it is an entrenched institution in a conservative nation. From the days of John reed and W.E.B. DuBois '90, who said he was always considered "a nigger on the team" here, people have complained about Harvard's white male ambience. And the University has also had an indirect role in political battles that could hardly be called liberal--from President A. Lawrence Lowell's calls for Sacco and Vanzetti's execution to Henry Kissinger's departure from the Government Department to oversee the Vietnam War. For all its eccentricity Harvard has never been greatly at odds with mainstream, old-line American capitalism. (cf. Ruling Class Theory)

10 General Education Theory

President James Bryant Conant '14 wrote in 1943, "Today, we are concerned with a general education--a liberal education--not for the relatively few, but for the multitude," and thus invented the prevailing optimistic theory about what Harvard College does. You will supposedly come here and become well-rounded and interested in the world around you, and opening your eyes in this fashion is Harvard's institutional purpose. General Education is still around, of course. Your proctor will tell you about it; mostly it means you have to take a science course here even if you don't want to, but the spirit still lingers.

11 Business of Education Theory

President Bok is known to complain from time to time about how administrative his job has become. It's understandable: his predecessors might have been simply educators, but Bok has to be head of a huge, labor-intensive, recession-plagued, hard-to-operate corporation. To make his job easier, Bok and his lieutenants have made Harvard a little more cost-effective, something that runs against the grain of the place and has stirred up some grumbling about how Bok's nothing but a bureaucrat. In any event, Harvard is huge, with a $200 million annual operating budget spread over hundreds of divisions that must each break even. So one could say that Harvard is just another corporation, except that it is in the business of educating people.

12 Philosopher Kings Theory

Before Bok, at least, if you had asked a Harvard savant about who ran the place, he would tell you the faculty did--they were, you see, this group of brilliant, quarrelsome, egomaniacal men, primarily interested in advancing knowledge, who somewhat incidentally kept Harvard going as well. It was an appealing theory because it implied that as long as there were brains here the place would run itself. Now, though, the theory has faded a little. Everybody knows the faculty members think they run the place--but the administrators really do.

The Harvard Man

13 Manifest Destiny Theory

William Bentinck-Smith '37, who was President Pusey's assistant for years and should know, once wrote: "The really important difference between Harvard men and other men is that the former went to Harvard and the latter did not. Like it or not, any entering Harvard freshman is subject to what might be called college predestination."

If you want to concentrate on Harvard as a collection of people rather than as an institution, you have to go on the assumption that there's a sameness to people here; you can be specific about Harvard people, their personalities, backgrounds and fates, or like Bentinck-Smith you can be general: everybody at Harvard (even the women, he must have meant) becomes a Harvard Man, and that's that. No need to define it further.

14 Thirteen Varieties Theory