Those of us who lean on academic credentials when offering the public our wisdom should draw a lesson in intellectual humility from the recent outing of Harvard University.
It is a sordid and deadly tale from the Pre-Politically Correct era of ivory-tower history.In 1920, Cyril Wilcox, a Harvard student, committed suicide at his family’s home in Fall River, Mass. The tragedy could have been chalked up to his despondence over poor grades and the story might have ended there, except that Wilcox had told his brother George he was homosexual. Shortly, two letters addressed to Cyril soon arrived at the Wilcox home, their content indicating that he was part of a group of gay men at the university.
George Wilcox passed that information on to a dean at Harvard.
These days, American universities have gay-student groups and offer courses in gay history and culture. Campuses are governed by regulations forbidding sexual discrimination.
“Persecuting individuals on the basis of sexual orientation is abhorrent and an affront to the values of a university,” Harvard President Lawrence Summers said when the Wilcox affair came to light late last year.
Summers’ predecessors thought differently. In the 1920s, homosexuality was beyond the pale. Harvard acted on George Wilcox’s tip accordingly.
The university’s Administrative Board, which handles disciplinary cases, decided “the matter should not go through the regular channels,” according to a contemporary memo.
Indeed, that instruction was so faithfully followed that all traces of the incident were buried deep in Harvard’s archives. They might still be there, except that the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, got wind of the case and put in a request to see the file. Harvard has a regulation that student records remain sealed for 80 years. The Wilcox case took place 82 years ago and thus, by the university’s rules, should have been accessible.
It took the Crimson six months to make that point to university officials, who offered one rationalization after another for denying the paper’s request. The reason behind the stalling became apparent once the file was turned over.
The 500 pages of “Secret Court Files, 1920” that the Crimson finally received demonstrate that Harvard wasn’t always a bastion of enlightenment.
The file takes its name from a faculty investigative body appointed by Harvard that dubbed itself “The Court.” Its methodology was drawn not from the traditions of a seminar room but a police lockup. According to members’ notes, one student “confessed to H.S. [homosexual] relations … after denial at first.” Another student was described as “notably effeminate in some degree” by a Harvard official.
Using a technique borrowed later by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, The Court pressed students under suspicion to offer the names of others. When the trail led to a Harvard lecturer, President A. Lawrence Lowell fired the man, telling him he’d never get a PhD from Harvard.
In all, the court’s investigation led to the expulsion of eight students and the lecturer.
One of those expelled lingered on campus, perhaps thinking family connections would pull him through the crisis. But in a stern letter to the student’s father, a former U.S. congressman, university officials insisted that his son must go.
The student never got the message. He already had committed suicide in Harvard’s infirmary.
Of course, Harvard is not alone.
What American institution can take unlimited pride in its past? Through World War II, U.S. armed forces were segregated. Our public schools were separate and unequal for even longer. Women were denied the most fundamental of democratic rights, a vote, until 1920.
Reflecting on that kind of checkered history should give the present-day stewards of institutions pause: If our predecessors made such grievous errors, shouldn’t we check our own motives before advocating this or that course of action?
But it is hard to learn from the mistakes of the past when you lock your history away in a secret file and resist your own student reporters’ attempts to bring it to light.
Maybe that is why when professors take out full-page newspaper ads about an issue, they seldom say: As best as we can figure it, this seems the way to go. The clear implication is that academics know for sure what is right.
With the Supreme Court about to consider affirmative action, professors and college presidents argue that there is no other way to ensure minority representation. Yet not so long ago, universities were more concerned with who they wanted to keep off campus. About the time Harvard was dealing with gays in a draconian fashion, Yale’s dean of admissions sadly predicted that the university would become “a different place when and if the proportion of Jews passes an as-yet-unknown limit.”
A Columbia University dean hailed the SAT because “most Jews, especially those of the more objectionable type, have not had the home experiences which enable them to pass these tests.”
It is not hard to see from whence springs the surety of academics. Lecturing to young people who scribble down your every thought is an exercise in self-hypnosis. I know from personal experience. For 20 years, I taught undergraduates about Caesar’s fatal mistakes and Galileo’s brilliant insights. After a while, you’re captured by a kind of emotional syllogism: If I know all that, certainly I have important things to say about contemporary problems.
Susan Sontag fell into that kind of self-imposed metal trap shortly after Sept. 11. The literary critic and novelist said “this was not a `cowardly’ attack on `civilization’ or `liberty’ or `humanity’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions.”
No group yet had taken responsibility for the attack–let alone said why it was done. So how could she possibly have known what she claimed to, except by tacitly assuming she has superhuman mental powers?
In recent decades, too many academics have asked us to grant them that assumption. Proponents of deconstruction, a fashionable campus philosophy, don’t so much study literature as pick at it. Novels and plays are read not for their poetry but as examples of a litany of society’s shortcomings.
Woe to those who object, saying that’s not how they recall literature from their campus days. A feature of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the ivory tower’s trade paper, is some professor’s essay decrying the fact that laypeople just don’t get it. Without a PhD, it says, they shouldn’t presume to understand the life of the mind.
The pity is that we need the insights of academics. Given the magnitude of society’s problems, we need all the help and advice we can get from the ivory tower. But non-academics are more likely to accept aid if they don’t feel they are being preached to by those who consider themselves infallible.
The terrible story of Harvard’s anti-gay crusade suggests that professors, just like everyone else, need to examine what demons haunt their past. Twenty-five centuries ago the Delphic Oracle recognized the prerequisite to prescribing for others.
“Gnothi sauton,” it cautioned the ancient Greeks. “Know thyself.”
