Could This Really Be True About Harvard? And If It Is, What About Podunk State University?

Gary North

Look at this headline in the Boston Evening Globe for May 27, 2006: Ex-dean says Harvard run like day care.

Harvard University leaders are running the school like "a day care center for college students," trying to dazzle undergraduates with concerts and a new pub, rather than teaching them to be responsible citizens, a former Harvard dean writes in a newly released book.

Harry R. Lewis -- the former dean of Harvard College, who many believe was pushed out of his post for being critical of President Lawrence H. Summers -- writes that the university has gone off track in a number of ways. His book is Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education, published earlier this month by PublicAffairs.

As you might imagine, "Several Harvard administrators whose policies Lewis criticized, including Summers, declined through spokesmen to comment on the book." Yet he is a Harvard man, and so is the rest of his family.

Both controversial and popular as dean from 1995 to 2003, Lewis earned his bachelor's degree and doctorate at Harvard and has taught in the computer science department since 1974. His wife, Marlyn McGrath Lewis, is director of undergraduate admissions. One daughter is a Harvard College graduate about to earn a Harvard MBA; another is an undergraduate.

He said that Harvard is not alone in this regard.

Yet there are parents who are paying the full cost of Harvard, or $41,675 this year. Don't try the following at Podunk U, where the taxpayers subsidize the program. Parents "routinely call professors to complain about their children's grades, he writes, and they believe that the university should erase any evidence of bad academic performance or personal misconduct, excusing those failings as symptoms of psychiatric problems or disabilities."

He offers a more important criticism. "With its emphasis on customer satisfaction, the university pays too little attention to students' development as moral citizens, Lewis said."

My suggestion: Don't attend and don't pay the outrageous costs that a conventional college education asks most students and their parents to pay. There are loopholes to beat the system.

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