Photo: Leaders of an Indivisible rally display a Harvard sweatshirt.
It made me feel like an imposter, wearing my Harvard hat to the grocery store last weekend. I wore it in public for the first time to show support after the White House sent Harvard a ridiculous list of demands that would infringe on academic integrity and civil rights. The hat was given to me by our son-in-law, who attended Harvard, not as a legacy, but with scholarships based on merit.
Unless it was my imagination stewing under the hat, at the grocery store it felt as if people who noticed showed some reaction. Deference, awe, contempt? My sentiment at the time was defiance. Stand up for Harvard and higher education in general against the authoritarian wanna-bes seeking to control all aspects of life. Further inspiration came from seeing someone waving a Harvard sweatshirt recently at a local Indivisible rally.
Contempt for elite universities may have been on the upswing in recent years. Among rural and less educated voters (either/or, not always both), Ivy League schools such as Harvard may elicit scorn. The Ivory Tower may have lost some of its luster. One explanation may be that tuition and related costs have surged far ahead of overall costs in recent years.
According to Pew Research Center, somewhere in the past 20 years voters without a college degree leaned away from the Democratic Party and toward the Republicans. The Republicans now hold a 6-percentage point advantage over the Democratic Party (51% to 45%) among voters who do not have a bachelor’s degree. In comparison, the Democratic Party has a 13-point advantage (55% vs. 42%) among those with a bachelor’s degree or more formal education. Voters who do not have a four-year degree make up 60% of all registered voters.
Harvard’s slogan, Veritas – Truth – sums up in one word the ideal, the goals, of all social organizations. Truth is often elusive. What we may think of as truth is often no more than a doctrine or belief of a particular group. When interrogating Jesus before his crucifixion, Pilate asked ‘what is truth?’ Of course, to Christians, truth stood there in front of him. God is the ultimate truth.
Here on earth and for mere humans, beyond individual inspiration, knowledge approaching truth is often the product of many minds working together. In business and government, bureaucracy is more than just red tape. It is the process of a multitude driving together toward truth for a particular issue or project, the best decision or the best outcome.
This perspective gradually emerged in my thinking after working several years in state government. Coming from a previous job at a daily newspaper, I became impatient at the slow process in a bureaucracy. I became aware of flexible deadlines, far from my daily newspaper experience, which I once described to a state co-worker as going to work every day with gun to your head.
In time I learned that the process has a purpose. As long as an issue was not an emergency, taking time with input from many minds usually resulted in the best decision – closer to the truth. My work also included emergency response, where you had to act fast. However, good training in advance was vital.
In one case of government process, I experienced peer review similar to the academic world. I had developed a series of ‘factsheets’ with background on primary pollutants affecting water: Nitrogen, phosphorus, algae, sediment, bacteria. Technical staff sent the phosphorus one around for review by their peers in other states. It took about six months. To my surprise they didn’t have many changes, but overall, it was an improvement.
Unfortunately, when the process becomes too slow or cumbersome, many people become frustrated. Some see it as an obstacle against their quest for power. When this happens to many people, they may be drawn to a charismatic, prominent person who may promise to eradicate bureaucracy, whether in government, or higher education.
In the current political drama, we are encouraged by the defiance of Harvard against the assault on higher education and its autonomy. “More than 150 presidents of US colleges and universities have signed a statement denouncing the Trump administration’s “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” with higher education – the strongest sign yet that US educational institutions are forming a unified front against the government’s extraordinary attack on their independence,” reports the Guardian.
Following up on my promise in last week’s post about Earth Day, I have been reading about Ralph Waldo Emerson. Many notches above my brainpower, he entered Harvard in 1817 at the age of 14. Widely known and admired in his day for his poetry and essays, he is less prominent in popular culture today, except perhaps for his quote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and the rest of it, “adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
He entered the Earth Day picture due to his Transcendental philosophy and the fundamental importance of nature. The preceding quote comes from one of his more well-known essays, “Self-Reliance.” The Earth Day connection comes from another prominent Emerson essay, “Nature,” where he says, “he happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.”
I wonder what Emerson and other sages of earlier times would say about the current assault on higher education, science, rule of law, equal rights, and diversity going on today. Reading through passages of his collected works I hope to get some ideas.
Or, you can take free courses from Harvard online; its website lists 137. For many Americans today – especially certain members of Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court – a good place to start would be with one called “American Government: Constitutional Foundations – Learn how early American politics informed the U.S. Constitution and why its promise of liberty and equality has yet to be fully realized.” Isn’t that the truth!
