Harvey & Harvard

At School many of us, without any reason, took a superior attitude to those "Top Ten" universities that dominate American higher ed. We did this, I think, because all of us wanted to go to Harvard (or Princeton, Stanford, Dartmoth, etc.) but could never get in. So in our our minds we made TAC the new Harvard, or more truely, the new Oxford, Paris, Salimanca or Tunbigen(spelling?) . We thought of ourselves as the true heirs of those students who would come to class in the acedemic gown and listen to Aquinas give a lecture on being. This fantasy was feed by many a guest lecturor and tutors who told us that is exactily what we are. However, we live in the twentey first centery after Christ's death, and not the fourteenth, and we are not the heirs of the medivel Cathediral Schools or Town colleges. We do not have their values (in a cultural not religious sense) nor there prejudices. Nor where we the heirs of the great scholars of the nineteenth centery; to argue so would be silly. For the true heirs to the Victorian universities are the modern universities, and the Victorian univeristies are the true heirs of the medivel ones (in name and in spirit). Thus, I would argue that Harvard is closer to Aquinas' Paris then TAC ever could be. Would Aquinas ever be teaching the same texts year after year in a provicial shit hole? Or would he be on the cutting edge of new findings? A look at his life forces us to say he would be doing the latter. Aquinas would be teaching (nay doing research) at Harvard, and not teaching at TAC, if he where alive today.


What does this have to do with anything? Well Harvard is reviewing its ciriculum, and they asked the great Harvey G. Mansfield (as well as other profs) what views of liberal education he had. So I brought up my Alma Mater because I want to show that our idea of liberal eduaction (one that I love, and put $80,000 behind) is not the only one, nor necessarily the best. Mr. Mansfield (now in his seventies) looks back at the history of Harvard to see "what went wrong".


He finds that the Core is a popularity game, and the contestants are the departments themsleves. The biggest departments, English for example, getting the most amount of Core requiments. Further he sees a problem with choice, that is, there is too much of it. "Give out condoms and you imply, don't you, that there will be generous opportunity to put them to use? It's the same with courses. Despite the almost unbelievably large number of courses offered, finding that fourth course every semester gets harder and harder for students as they move towards graduation." Before you get smug Mr. Mansfield says that Harvard shouldn't "want to become another great books college".


I think Mansfield rejects the great books college idea (at least for Harvard) because he has seen too much and done too much research. Could he ever write those, now classic, books on Machiavelli and Hobbes if he had to teach Euclid every day?


Read the essay, In fact this post was going to be a collection of qoutes from the essay. I want to point out a few things first. Both the Harvards and the TAC have there place, and TAC is not better than them, and fromif the qualifications of the teachers are idicitive of anything we are much much worse. Harvard and TAC have the same mission; to give America a population with a liberal education. There are many ways to do this. One way is the great books (the one I chose over and above the research univerityI could get into viz. Colorado at Boulder). However the research university is as ligitimate way of giving students a liberal education as any other. It shoud not suprise us that Harvard needs reform any more then when some one at the Rocks stands up and says "you know what TAC needs ...".

(It is almost 2:00 am and I don't want to spell check this, so forgive me.)