Will students change Harvard?

In a WSJ op-ed Harvard Professor Ruth R. Wisse says needed change may finally come to Harvard (excerpts):

But student response to (Summers') ouster suggests another long-term outcome. Although the activists of yesteryear may have found a temporary stronghold in the universities, a new generation of students has had its fill of radicalism.

Sobered by the heavy financial burdens most of their families have to bear for their schooling, they want an education solid enough to warrant the investment. Chastened by the fall-out of the sexual revolution and the breakdown of the family, they are wary of human experiments that destabilize society even further.

Alert to the war that is being waged against America, they feel responsible for its defense even when they may not agree with the policies of the current administration.

If the students I have come to know at Harvard are at all representative, a new moral seriousness prevails on campus, one that has yet to affect the faculty members because it does not yet know how to marshal its powers.

As long as (the Faculty of Arts & Sciences) went about its business as usual, no one may have noticed its skewed priorities, but its political victory (in bringing down Summers) sets its actions and inaction in bolder relief.

The same professors who fought so hard to oust their president did not once since the events of 9/11 consider whether they owed any responsibilities to a country at war.

FAS continued to ban ROTC from campus on the excuse that the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy discriminates against homosexuals. Many students realize that this is tantamount to letting others do the fighting while advertising their moral superiority.

Several years ago, the Undergraduate Council voted to give ROTC its approval. Although the faculty ignored this vote and simply waited for that cohort to graduate, other students will sooner or later stand up for their contemporaries who want to serve their country.

I hope Wisse is right about change at Harvard being on the way.

But the students will need help from other elements of the university, including faculty who are not rigid, self-indulgent and abusive ideologues of the kind who brought down Summers.

For too long fair-minded faculty have been silent when they should have been speaking out.

Consider what happened in March, 2002 when Law Professor Laurence H. Tribe wrote a bullying and factually incorrect letter to the editor of the Harvard student newspaper castigating the editors for saying historian Doris Kearns Goodwin should resign as a University Overseer because she had plagiarize and arranged a large payment to the author she plagiarized in exchange for the author's silence.

A Crimson editor later told me not a single faculty member wrote to the paper supporting what the students had written or taking Tribe to task for his bullying or correcting his many errors of fact.

And friends at Harvard say they can't recall any effort by FAS to pass a motion saying Goodwin should resign as an Overseer. Yet a few years later, that same faculty voted “no confidence” in Summers.

Talk about bias and double standards!

We should pay more attention to what's happening at Harvard. It's a direction-setter for the Academy. What happens there in the next few years will tell us a lot about where American higher education is headed.

More on all of this tomorrow.