You can whisper about your prof behind his back, bash her anonymously on a blog, but you have to admit it takes balls to attach your name to an article slamming him in a national publication. Ross Douthat ’02 calls out specific Harvard professors in “The Truth About Harvard,” an article in the March Atlantic Monthly that zeroes in on Harvard’s Core courses as inconsequential, calling them “maddeningly specific and often defiantly obscure.”
Despite the mud being thrown on their names, the profs of these Core courses have not risen up in arms. Most declined to comment, while others vaguely remembered having heard about the article but not having read it.
When provided with copies of the piece, though, professors of courses like Foreign Cultures 78: “Understanding Islam and Contemporary Muslim Societies” made plenty of pointed observations about the author.
Douthat may state that “Understanding Islam” is “parochial” for examining “Muslim-animistic syncretism in Africa” but not the Koran or “the rise of radical Islam.” But Professor of the Practice of Indo-Muslim Languages and Cultures Ali S. Asani finds Douthat’s mind just a tad narrow.
“The author, I think, has a particularly stereotypical view of Islam, that studying Islam is just about reading texts,” Asani says.
And the history department may be on a “retreat into irrelevance,” but at least it knows how to fact-check. Folger Fund Professor of History Andrew Gordon, chair of the History Department, notes that Douthat forgot one important detail when complaining that there were no history classes on the American Revolution during his undergraduate years: there was one.
But other professors that teach the classes Douthat cites concede that he’s at least right about the lack of breadth in Core classes.
“If the author is referring to some of the themes represented [in the Core] as being more specific than general,” says Professor of Psychology Richard J. McNally, whose Social Analysis Core “Psychological Trauma” is described as the “obscure” alternative to Ec 10, “then I think he may very well have a point.” Translation: touché.
