The Harvard Salient
The Sophistry of the Social Sciences
Modern academics miss the point of liberal education
By
Julius D. Krein, Deputy Editor
|
The recent selection of
Drew Faust as president of the university is but one example of the trend of
mediocrity that has lately come to characterize this institution. Not only is Harvard’s new
president an unaccomplished bureaucrat and unremarkable scholar, but the new
governing philosophy of our education is equally uninspired and uninspiring. The General Education proposal, while
originally promised to be a radical departure from the core, has emerged as
nothing but a more creatively named version of the same bland hodgepodge of
parochial disciplines. Nevertheless, this
curriculum, carefully contrived to avoid controversy, has still managed to
offend a few departments, providing yet more proof that career academics are
incapable of thinking beyond their own disciplines. If no one quite feels
“excluded” by the new proposal, some are not exactly sure how
they will be included within it.
Social scientists, historians and economists, in particular, have
voiced concerns over how their specialties will fall under the new
system. Even the 300th Anniversary University Professor,
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich—despite her work’s evidently broad
significance across academia—admitted in the February 16 Crimson
that she “just remain[s] puzzled about the categories.” Before the Faculty’s recent
decision not to require history courses, History Department Chair Andrew
Gordon had warned that “historical illiteracy” would be permitted
under the current Gen Ed proposal and pledged to rectify this by adding a
requirement that every student take at least one course “dealing with
the past.” Several of Harvard’s
leading economists have also acknowledged their uncertainty over whether any
proposed subject area will neatly encompass their field. But the important
question raised by these plaintive whimperings is
not how to fit each discipline into the new curriculum—or even if they
should be specifically included at all—but whether it is actually worth
studying them in the first place.
And the answer, at least pertaining to the social sciences in their
present form, is no. Today, history,
economics, and the social sciences in general—although some exceptions
can always be found—provide neither practical training nor intellectual
enrichment. If that claim sounds
exaggerated, (try to) read an academic journal. Try to overcome the banal prejudices
of our time and consider the value of a clumsily crafted political science
tract which can never be meaningfully applied to policy decisions and which
was written by someone who has never come any closer to real political power
than wearing a tie-died t-shirt in a poorly attended street protest. Unless there is some perverse pleasure
in assigning random numbers to artificially constructed categories—e.g.
“democracy scores” and “revolution
quotients”—then it is indeed a waste of time. Knowing the Markov Equilibrium value
for democratizing Of course, the crown
jewel of the social sciences is economics, and while most political
scientists have come to realize that their specialty is appreciated only
within an ever-narrowing circle of fellow specialists, economists seem to
believe that their discipline’s significance is growing along with the
number of economics students. A
recent Wall Street Journal article described a sense of
“wanderlust” among economists, who wish to apply their supposedly
superior methods of analysis to a wider variety of issues, including autism
research. This is especially ironic, however, since economists of all people
should know that their new devotees enroll in their courses only as a form of
“signaling.” They
wish to show potential employers their willingness to subordinate their
stronger human desires to the tedium and drudgery of manipulating
indifference curves, which indicates their willingness to take on all the
other forms of tedium and drudgery that one finds in an investment bank. Most could not care less about the
so-called insights of the dismal science. Silly social surplus diagrams are
useless in the real-world. Hume,
Smith, Keynes, and Schumpeter were failures in business. Save for Andrei Schleiffer
and a few others, the aphorism holds true that those who can’t do
teach, and those who are too nerdy to teach gym teach economics. The new core is
supposedly intended to move away from disciplinary approaches and instead
impart to students an education that is useful for life beyond Harvard. What, then, is the use of history for
life? Memorizing obscure facts
about unheard-of yurt-dwellers?
To the contrary, history can inspire us with examples of great men and
great deeds; it can preserve the admirable aspects of our heritage; and it
can critically undermine remnants of that heritage which are harmful to our
cultural vigor. But what do most
academic historians teach? They
give tiresome lectures on midwives and other insignificant personages whose
boring stories should long ago have been forgotten; they deliver interminable
harangues on the “exploitation and alienation” implicit in every
great victory and achievement of the West; and they undermine every salutary
fiction except the one delusion most in need of being destroyed—our
culture’s infatuation with knowledge and intellectualism. If this is what it means to study
history in today’s age, then perhaps the decision to exclude mandatory
history courses is actually a positive development. Today’s
society is characterized chiefly by its fetishization
of knowledge. The mere thought
that a student might escape Harvard without being exposed to some body of
facts, or that knowledge of such a body of facts might not be useful or
edifying, is shocking to the modern ear.
One of the main criticisms of Salient Publisher Christopher Lacaria’s recent Crimson op-ed on Drew Faust
was that it was “anti-intellectual.” That intellectualism is something to
be admired is simply taken for granted, and “anti-intellectual”
is a term of abuse requiring no justification. But how many
passionless response papers do students have to write before they will
seriously question the value of this intellectualism? Simply because something happens to be
taught does not prove it is worth learning. Simply because an “approach to
knowledge” exists does not make it worth taking. And simply because a few like-minded
people went through a particular graduate program, wrote a number of arcane
journal articles, and have academic chairs does not mean their specialty is
essential to humanity. It could
very well mean that those same people have wasted their lives, leaving behind
mountains of unread papers as the sole monuments of their existence. Indeed it is quite
humorous that most books published by university presses today are printed on
acid-free paper, as if some unknown associate professor’s
interpretation of Swedish democratization was the one thing that must survive
to mark the achievements of the West.
Most of these publications will not be read in five years, never mind
five centuries. Equally amusing
is academia’s paranoia about plagiarism. Only among a mass of indistinct
mediocrities are such rigorous redundancies necessary. Writers in previous centuries could
borrow from their intellectual forbears because intelligent readers would
recognize the allusions and consider it a tribute. Now extremely cumbersome citation is
required because so much material exists, and so little of it is worth
remembering. As every good
“expos” student knows, massive and monstrous volumes are in fact
devoted to and required for teaching the elements of the academic essay. Heaven forbid that the next generation
of post-docs might fail to learn how to create monstrosities of their own. Yet it is precisely
this degenerate pedantry which is held as the sole criterion by which to
judge all things. A
thought’s merit is not measured by its beauty or its insight into the
paradoxes of human life, but by how nicely it can be fashioned into a journal
article. One’s wisdom is
measured by how many degrees he holds, which chair he occupies, and how much
jargon he can recite. How few
become educated enough to think little of this education, to despise it! The best hope for
the new core is that it will at least succeed, albeit unintentionally, in
awakening such disdain. |
Copyright © 2007 The
Harvard Salient, Inc.