At the Tip of the Ivory Tower

...Then he examines the social and humanist disciplines one by one to show how scholarship destroys the spirit...

...He classes the School of Education with the Divinity School as "poor relations...

...About money Rosovsky is completely realistic...

...But living three blocks from Harvard Square, I find his account of women's studies consistent with my own sense of what now excites academia...

...Chutzpah, Rosovsky concludes, was worth about $4 million dollars...

...In the European system, the buck gets passed around until all are exhausted...

...The accusations left him untroubled...

...Loeb carefully folded the napkin and put it in his vest pocket...

...Academics, David Riesman has said, tend to have self-sealing minds...

...The models for what would replace it are not named, and at this particular time in history his proposals are not likely to find many takers...

...Loeb said...

...A stern letter will be put in the mail by evening...

...With Bok's support Harvard-affiliated hospitals have made contracts with private firms here and abroad to do research whose results will belong to the funders, opening possibilities for corruption that have been widely discussed in the press...

...But How Harvard Rules is totally negative and gives us nothing to build on...

...Worst in this respect are militant undergraduates, whose stay in the university is the briefest...

...No, what was wanted, Rosovsky replied, was 10 million as a "leadership" gift to get others to give five...

...Rosovsky is so sure of himself that in his account of a dean's typical day he can be joily about the difficulty he has, during a morning of unbroken appointments, getting inconspicuously from his office to the remote toilet in a building that predates inside plumbing...

...There are, of course, perennial problems with the core curriculum, the tenure system, teaching vs...

...Smith was the founding provost of the University of California at Santa Cruz...

...Trumpbour's final plea to the students has a hollow ring as he urges them to create a hegemonic culture à la Antonio Gramsci as a prelude to radical revolution (character still undefined...

...A Harvard biochemist named Mark Prashne invested $1.5 million with Ivan Boesky, half of the money he made when the shares of his Genentech Company leaped from $35 to $88 in a single day of trading...

...That comes close to chutzpah," he said, then suddenly asked if either of them could spell the word...

...One of them, Chester Hartman, in "Uppity and Out, " tells of his own failure to receive tenure for policy reasons so questionable that the University itself appointed an investigative committee that took three years for its work and issued a report of 319 pages...

...With his zest for money-raising, Rosovsky gladly resumed his old post, but retained his seat on the allpowerful Corporation...

...The book ends with numbered and strongly defended principles of governance that, he says, got him accused of academic toryism in America, Oxford and the Hebrew University in Israel...

...Rosovsky came to this country at age 13 from Danzig, Poland, a Jewish refugee unable to speak English...

...About recommendations for faculty positions he writes, " Certain code words immediately alert an experienced pair of ears to trouble.'Good in small groups' almost always means a lousy teacher...

...From Rosovsky we can expect no solution to the crisis in education, or even acknowledgment that it exists...

...We must be content with a manual on ho w to run an existing university smoothly...

...The educational results have been disastrous...

...When he himself, for instance, was a teaching fellow at Harvard, three of his co-workers were Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and James Schlesinger...

...Rosovsky grew to like doing it...

...African-Americans, in fact, do not attend most meetings of other groups...

...Highly militant young women they turned out to be, obsessed with the "gender agenda...

...I did check one reference in which Smith has Brooks Adams referring to "Uriah's grievance against Solomon for appropriating Uriah's wife...

...I understand my responsibilities...

...It is impressive that now over one-third of American youth enter colleges...

...The "owners" referred to in Rosovsky's subtitle, however, include all with an interest in the university: faculty, students, administration, trustees, nonacademic employees, alumni, parents, donors, foundations, grant-awarding government agencies, the press, and the general public...

...The only way Solomon appropriated her was in being born to her...

...It tells a lot about present-day Harvard, both good and bad, that he was chosen for the dean's post, and that he held it so long...

...John Trumpbour, its editor, a graduate student in history at Harvard, wrote most of the text, but included some 20 other contributors from Alexander Cockburn of the Nation to the widely read Harvard Professor of Zoology Stephen Jay Gould...

...At least five biogenetic firms have been started by Harvard professors...

...Later his giftofnine million was announced...

...Rosovsky thinks hardheaded professionals are ideally suited for the role because they are "comfortable with the notion of trade-offs," which humanists and scientists, purists both, are likely to find immoral...

...Though they focus often on Harvard areas not under Rosovsky's direct control, Trumpbour and his colleagues speak with a specificity that makes some of Rosovsky's short comments seem glib or evasive...

...Trumpbour has nothing but ill to say of Harvard as a willing instrument of the military-industrial complex...

...When the gift is large it is well to have the president at your side...

...It is ironic that one of the actual academic revolutions that came after it and flourished led to Smith's fleeing the academic world...

...Rosovsky writes that his late colleague "Otto Eckstein founded DRI, a highly successful economic forecasting enterprise...

...In the American system, the buck stops—for all practical purposes —with the president...

...They successfully insisted on introducing specialized women's courses in most major departments...

...The adulterer was David...

...His epithets recall Marxist polemics of the pre-Popular Front era...

...some of Trumpbour's contributors, those who did not "make it," write from in or under the dark cold water...

...Are you asking me for 5 million...

...He asked his friends to question their adolescent children and found that the few who knew Bolero did not like it...

...To this American campuses in their incoherence are not responding adequately...

...My reading of these books does not help me to imagine how they may do so...

...Smith's Killing the Spirit is a confused book, hitting out in every direction with no clear sense of what he expects to attain...

...Rosovsky read what Allan Bloom said about the effect of sexual music on students and that Ravel's Bolero, with its mounting movement to orgasm, was the one piece of classical music they knew and liked...

...As did some rebelling students in the '60s, Trumpbour thinks that the whole system governing this country is evil...

...In his revolt against scholarship, Smith avoids footnotes yet quotes frequently from authors whose texts we have no way of checking...

...None do they wish to offend...

...For 11 years, from 1973 to 1984, he was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the longest holder since World War II of "the best academic job in the world...

...Otto Eckstein sold his consulting firm for $100 million...

...At Santa Cruz, under heavy pressure, males who had run things began to employ more women...

...On one occasion Rosovsky needed nearly $ 10 million to finance 15 junior faculty positions...

...It is well, then, to read Rosovsky and Trumpbour together, aware of Trumpbour's extreme bias, to test Rosovsky against Trumpbour's documented facts...

...Professors could be difficult too, being "verbal and visible and trained in the advocacy of issues...

...Number 8 of his "Helpful Hints for Academic Administrators" reads, "Cultivate the art of asking people for money...

...Especially important with an individual donor is the moment of closing...

...Heis an economist, a pragmatist, with no yen for reform...

...Though they were still graduate students and two "were afflicted with heavy accents, I am sure that their performance as teachers was at least adequate and not below the level achieved by good college teachers...

...Rosovsky found them "verbose, self-righteous, self-important, condescending, and deeply suspicious of institutions and elders...

...Being the bad guy is one of them...

...your career may depend on the results...

...He listens quietly to familiar complaints...

...research, and staffing large undergraduate courses...

...His style is similarly relaxed...

...Writers & Writing AT THE TIP OF THE IVORY TOWER BY ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS FROM the very first chapter ?f The University: A ? Owner's Manual (Norton, 309 pp., $26.95), Henry Rosovsky makes it abundantly evident that he is delighted with himself and with Harvard and that the two are not easily separated...

...And it is not clear how much of their agitation or that of fellow activists bears directly on the problems that should unify the country...

...This past March Rosovsky's successor, also an economist, daunted by Harvard's new multi-billion dollar fund drive, the largest ever undertaken by an American university, resigned unexpectedly to leave for Stanford...

...Adams had it right...

...Mostly only teachers of writing discuss the frightening inadequacies of the preparatory education and the influence of the electronic media on the young...

...Two-thirds to three-quarters of the top universities in the world are in America, he observes, and foreigners flock to study here...

...Dean Rosovsky mentions schools merely to speak of an elite handful with a special relation to Harvard...

...If our lower schools, strapped for funds, have virtually stopped teaching and if our elite universities give us no imaginative, innovative leadership, our situation is dark indeed...

...Killing the Spirit reproduces on its cover a painting by José Clemente Orozco showing a skeleton in mortar board hat extracting from a skeletal alma mater skeletal infants in mortar boards to be preserved in sealed glass containers...

...He too wants arevolution, character undefined, although spiritual, not political...

...An owner's manual tells you how to drive your car and keep it in good shape, not how to redesign it...

...Rosovsky is scornfully blunt about those not as tough as he...

...Rosovsky treats them all with graceful moderation...

...Like Trumpbour, heistotally denunciatory, notof Harvard, but of higher education generally...

...We hear a good deal from them about the fate at Harvard Law School of the socially oriented Critical Legal Studies and of the gradual elimination by nonpromotion of those active in it...

...As usual Trumpbour is more specific...

...Militant group indignations about women's rights, pro-choice rights, Palestinian rights, gaylesbian rights, African-American rights fill the columns of the Harvard Crimson and provoke frequent public meetings...

...A serious issue, which Rosovsky does discuss briefly, is the conflict of interests when professors in the graduate schools go on from consultantships to starting businesses of their own and frequently involve students...

...Derek Bok, a scion of the wealthy Bok-Curtis publishing family, is a "lapdog of corporate interests...

...The chairman of a small department comes to him because three tenured professors have asked for leave the next year, which would be bad for the department and the students...

...But in the colleges themselves, amid the meetings on Central America and South Africa little is said of the other two-thirds—the bulk of the nation, the vast majority of them cut off forever from the kind of careers and citizenship the college graduates assume as their right...

...The gravamen of African-American complaints centers on representation in teaching and course content, rather than on the condition of inner-city ghettos...

...Before reading Rosovsky's The University I read How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire, an allout attack published in 1987 by a small press and little noticed by the media...

...With each of these the deans and university presidents have to deal...

...Yet Trumpbour's book, half again as long as Rosovsky's, is richly footnoted, with all sources cited...

...The pertinence of his title becomes clearer the more we read...

...But American capitalism is faltering too as debts mount, services decline and the infrastructure goes to pieces...

...Everyone who deserves it has a session with the dean...

...His own sort know how to look for untoward consequences that enthusiasts, caught up in the idealistic fervor of the campaign of the moment, are disposed to ignore or disdain...

...Rosovsky, whose career has been devoted to building up the very involvements with the power structure Trumpbour so vehemently condemns, is complacent in his sense that Harvard alumni and the American people want it this way...

...Stanford is a stout rival but Harvard is Number One, and has by far the hugest endowment...

...Communism has manifestly failed, and the industrial Communist countries are at last, under extremely difficult circumstances, dramatically responding...

...Harvard President Derek Bok was trained in law...

...Harvardis so deeply implicated in the evil that the only way to reform the university is to smash the system...

...In universities in Holland, for instance, "power over virtually all decisions came to be equally shared between students, faculty and employees...

...We hear even more about the tie-ups, secret or open, between the Kennedy School, the Council on Foreign Relations, the CIA, and the Defense Establishment generally...

...Harvard's "selfstyled liberals" line up to write for colleague Martin Peretz' New Republic despite "the atrocious swill pumped from Peretz' stall...

...The chairman cannot bring himself to tell them they cannot go...

...Huge sums are at stake...

...Rosovsky grabbed a napkin and reached for his pen, but Bok snatched the napkin from Rosovsky's hand and printed CHUTZPAH in block letters...

...Any changes would be for the worse, and Rosovsky can use his success to prove this...

...Her womb consists of books...

...On April 24 President Bok announced that Rosovsky would return to his much-loved deanship on an interim basis until a permanent appointment could be made...

...He hoped to get the sum from the financier John L. Loeb, and took Derek Bok to see him...

...Introduction to Feminism' had 750 students enrolled of whom only 10 were men...

...The University: An Owner's Manual'is fun to read...

...They have much justification but little overlap...

...It is the Corporation, whose proceedings are secret, that really runs and owns Harvard...

...Loeb's face darkened...

...In a free market this is the way to test "the feelings and priorities of a constituency...

...To confirm Orozco, Smith goes over almost exactly the ground that Rosovsky covers, observing at every point how wrong it all is...

...The '60s student revolution destroyed itself in an agony of irrationalism...

...Despite the bad press that education is receiving, Rosovsky, from his privileged Cambridge perspective, is consistently optimistic...

...The way Harvard does things is right...

...Smith misremembered...

...Expanding campus democracy, politically fashionable, is not, he says, an answer to educational problems...

...His articles have titles like "Jackboot Liberals," "Sexual Shakedown," "Neighborhood Bully," "Blinding Them with Science," '"Cleaning House': Hiring, Tenure and Dissent...

...Increasingly institutions of higher learning choose lawyers and economists to lead them...

...The word "spiritual" is popular now with those who encourage a return to religion without having to defend any particular theology...

...Even more telling was his subsequently becoming one of the seven members of the self-perpetuating Harvard Corporation, the oldest corporation in America, long a bastion of New England conservatism...

...Again like Trumpbour, he invokes the '60s...

...Very different from Rosovsky in another way is Kilting the Spirit by Page Smith (Viking, 315pp., $19.95...

...Though their eagerness for relevance and reform might seem just what Smith is after, he departed academic life to occupy himself with his eight-volume People's History of the United States...

...Rosovsky writes from the tip of the iceberg in bright sunlight...

...Soon, according to Smith, there were 80 such courses, most offering unabashed sexual politics, with no pretense of objectivity...

...But despite his directness and freedom from cant, Rosovsky remains a conservative with a small "c"—long on experience, short on ideology...

...This man has more conscience than courage—in my experience a common situation—and wants me to issue a decanal edict denying two of the leaves...

...Often he can point out errors of fact...