The Nation's Pulse

...But on the whole, one's dominant impression is that Harvard is a seat of learning, a place where achievement is encouraged and excellence rewarded—not simply with external awards and academic honors, but also with that quieter, deeper fulfillment that comes when challenge, talent, and effort combine to produce growth...

...We have freent and occasionally heated discusns about whether a given idea is in fact 'ritorious, but we are not torn by selfubt about what the basic criteria of ;al excellence are, nor plagued with New York Readers...

...I hope and pray that the same will be true for my children...

...But there are percepti)1e and growing traces of doubt about the worth of the entire educational endeavor —a gnawing sense that standards are ;omehow arbitrary, that merit and excelence are merely expressions of opinion, hat teaching individuals to be wellounded and responsible adults repreents some kind of narrow cultural imrerialism...

...Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 29...

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...I was more than pleased with Susan's election, because I though her work indicated that she deserved the job...

...Please note that The Alternative is available at newsstands in the Pan Am Building and the Algonquin Hotel...

...This is a rather personal topic, compared with the normal subject matter of this column, and there is always the temptation to generalize from one's own experiences a bit more than is called for...

...Of course, life at Harvard is not a perpetual grind of academic endeavor...

...The last seven of these years have been spent at Harvard—College and Law School—and it is about this period that I wish to write...

...28 The Alternative: An American Spectator April 1976 'asive: Harvard still evaluates, disci3lines, and teaches, and in many cases foes so quite well...

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...Recently, we elected Susan Estrich to be president of next year's volume, which makes her the first woman in our 90-year history to hold our most crucial editorial position...

...This tendency is not, in many ways, a conscious phenomenon...

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...But I think it is fair to say that the Review is one example of Harvard, and of education in general, at its best: a challenging, work-demanding preparation of individuals for responsible participation in and contribution to the cultural tradition to which we are all heirs...

...Nor (since I am a bit young to be a crotchety alumnus) am I upset about whatever changes may be taking place in the more external and superficial aspects of the University's traditions...

...One finds them in a growing trend toward grade inflation, which reflects less the standard canard that grades are a faulty measure of ability and achievement than it does an increasing sense that any effort to evaluate individual performance by objective criteria is somehow a demeaning and inherently untrustworthy task...

...While our educational institutions have a vital role to play in that process of criticism and improvement, their crucial task remains one of "transmission" to each succeeding generation...

...There is isually unstated but nonetheless heavy iphasis on substantive merit in putting ;ether an issue, which reflects a corn->n sense of personal responsibility to Review as an institution...

...But I was especially proud of the note she struck in discussing her election with the media, for it reflected what most of us feel about the magazine: that it is a demanding, significant, and worthwhile endeavor, where merit and quality of performance are the paramount criteria...

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...It is a praiseworthy tradition, by and large, and Harvard swiftly seeks to make its entering students feel that they are a part of it...

...Gradually, one develops the sense that when the institution speaks, with a touch of largely forgivable arrogance, of a "Harvard man," it does not mean a seventh-generation Cabot or Adams, but rather refers to one who has been educated and trained for responsible citizenship in a free society...

...No doubt I am projecting a bit in talking about the Law Review, because I have devoted so much time to it over the past two years...

...If you think it should be sold at other newsstands, please send us their names and addresses...

...It is not directly expressed in faculty resolutions, nor in the reports of the President to the Harvard Corporation...

...Most members have a pretty sound sense of what they are about in producing a legal journal...

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...I entered Harvard in 1969 at the age of 18, somewhat awed by its reputation, a bit proud that I had been admitted, a bit frightened about whether I would be able to keep up...

...Her selection, she agreed, had a certain symbolic significance for women, but that significance lay in its demonstration that a woman, even in a male-dominated institution, could be evaluated and elevated on the basis of merit, rather than on the basis of some variety of reverse discrimination...

...As I finish my formal education and leave this university, experiences of this type are foremost in my mind...

...But there is also much about today's Harvard which I find disturbing, particularly so in light of its long tradition of excellence...

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...Of this last fact, Harvard is particularly and self-consciously proud—not so much a Daughtersof-the-American-Revolution, "we were here first" pride (although there is some of that) but rather a certain satisfaction in being unique among American institutions of higher learning, coupled with a sense of obligation to continue training talented individuals for service to the nation...

...Its indications are of a subtler variety, but are nonetheless real...

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...Ours is a culture of which we can be proud, however conscious we are of its faults and however much we would seek to improve it...

...it is college, after all, and there are football weekends, parties, booze, sex, and the whole gamut of periodic indulgences to which undergraduates are prone...

...One quickly moves beyond iniThe Doubts of Academe tial misgivings about whether one belongs, and is caught up in that sense of intellectual challenge and excitement which is education at its best...

...I admire the way you make no apology or excuse about the excessive price of your tee shirts and buttons...

...There is in short a serious and rotentially critical loss of faith in what the tniversity is about, a loss which is invitably reflected in the attitudes of the niversity's students...

...On balance, I believe that my own experience speaks fairly highly of their performance of that task...

...plies to his personal and idiosyncratic conclusions...

...Rather, what disturbs me is that the institution is becoming less sure of the values it has historically taught, and less confident of the standards it has always maintained—in other words, that Harvard, like much of the nation, is developing a certain tentativeness and uncertainty about those attitudes and beliefs which lie at the very core of Western civilization...

...And one notes them, most disturbingly of all, in classrooms that are all too often dominated by a superficial and misguided "tolerance"—an atmosphere in which all opinions are "valid," all ideas are of equal merit, and "truth" is but a label which each individual ap...

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...e. are proud of that fact, and like to think at our magazine has some modest imrct on the course of legal development...

...Freedom is not self-perpetuating...

...in particular, it cannot survive the moral vacuum where all standards of performance are rejected as arbitrary, and all judgments dismissed as merely "relatively" correct...

...The result is a tenency toward impotence of intellect and haracter which neither a university nor a ivilization can long survive...

...But if I may be permitted a few moments of personal reflection in this usually politically-oriented space, I think that there is much about Harvard in the last few years that speaks of the current pulse of the nation...

...This event sparked a fair amount of local and national news coverage, but Susan's response to innumerable questions about whether she was chosen because of her sex spoke well both of her and of the institution she will head...

...The Reiew is a somewhat clannish institution, if aly because the demands of putting out ght issues a year force us to work to-ether for some forty hours each week...

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...ry ra911existential questions about the concept of merit itself...

...bout two-thirds of our members are sected on grades, with the rest chosen on re basis of a writing competition, and it by and large a fairly talented aggregaam The work is often tedious—checking tations and correcting press errors take lot of time—but it is often exciting as ell, as one gets the chance to learn and rite about significant issues in American w. The Review is fairly respected nong the nation's lawyers and jurists...

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...Most members of the Review are conierably more liberal than I in their poical outlook, and almost all of us have -ong personal convictions accompanied a healthy measure of self-confidence...

...I am not referring to things like drug use or sexual activity among students, although the hedonism which such pursuits reveal may be a reflection of the larger problem with which I am concerned...

...a remarkable degree, however, pernal and political predilections have ght influence in either the publication mess or in the final product...

...The problem is not yet per...

...As Walter Lippmann once noted, "the acquired culture is not transmitted in our genes, and so the issue is always in doubt...

...Today the issue is in doubt largely because we are increasingly traumatized by an uncertainty about our purposes that is almost totally unjustified on the historical record...

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...I have spoken of my "dominant" impression of Harvard, and have done so in fairly laudatory terms, for it is an experience I cherish and an opportunity for which I am grateful...

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...But I am conscious as well of the other observations that I have noted here, observations which trouble me about the continuing vitality of Harvard and other institutions as vehicles for such growth and preparation...

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...One sees them in a university grown excessively tentative and apologetic about its disciplinary procedures, as if to expel students who deal in hard narcotics or seize university buildings would be to display an insufficiently sensitive attitude to "alternative" lifestyles or modes of political expression...

...It is indeed an impressive institution on first meeting, boasting a large and occasionally beautiful campus, a faculty of national and often international repute, and a 340-year tradition of academic excellence...

...For the last two years I have spent bout one-third of my waking hours workig for the Harvard Law Review...