TDR Interview: Harry Lewis

Friday, February 8, 2008

By Jeremy Pham

Harry Lewis was a former Dean of Harvard College, responsible for the entire undergraduate experience, and a long time member of the College’s Admissions Committee. During his tenure, he was controversial for randomizing the placements of students in the House System, the banning of kegs at the tailgates of the annual Harvard-Yale game, and for being fired suspiciously in an obvious political move by the former Harvard President, Larry Summers, in an attempt to weaken one of the last remaining vocal critics of the administration after Cornel West’s departure. Lewis has spent nearly his entire life at Harvard, with a bachelor’s in Applied Mathematics summa cum laude in 1968 and a PhD in 1974 in the same discipline after serving at the National Institutes of Health. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1974, and has been there ever since. He was awarded the title Harvard College Professor in 2003 for his teaching excellence.

Lewis is the author of the Boston Globe bestseller Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future? which is the basis for this interview. His book brings up a variety of provocative issues, some perhaps more politically incorrect than others, that question the meaning of an education and the hilarious contradictions of some administrators and organizations. For example, the former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Bill Kirby pondering during the Curricular Review over how the university could give students free choice in its course selections – when in fact that’s what electives already do. Or when women’s groups successfully shamed Summers into giving them gender specific facilities after the College’s rape crisis – a peculiar backwards movement from an ostensibly well understood 1954 Supreme Court case or rather, a passionate 1920’s movement for equal rights.

Lewis’ most controversial topic dealt with grade inflation at the university – the benefits of which are rather questionable due to a perceivably increased lack of effort in certain subjects. Lewis doesn’t provide an outside perspective on college curriculums that have worked—such as the California Institute of Technology and its notorious grade deflation. In a true quantitative style however, as expected from a veteran engineering professor, he makes various arguments about the economic incentives of certain faculty and students, such as why those on financial aid are more inclined to go into investment banking and management consulting. However, as the theme of the book goes, human considerations are also important, and so the interview goes...

The Dartmouth Review: Why did you choose to go on a tenure-track? What motivated you to become an academic?

Harry Lewis: I love learning, I love all kinds of learning, I love solving puzzles and problems, and I love people too. I got into Computer Science at a time when the field became tremendously exciting. There were lots of new things happening, lots of new inventions being created – those were all terribly exciting, and I considered academia an honorable line of work. I thought becoming a professor was a worthwhile way to spend my career.

Yes, I taught Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve been teaching introductory courses in Computer Science at Harvard for so long, pretty much everyone who’s been through Harvard and studied CS has come across me. I take no credit for anything any of these people have done, but it’s interesting to look back at people after they’ve made such enormous successes of themselves, and see that you knew them when they were figuring out what they were going to do.

TDR: What are the benefits you see of a professor motivated student support system over counselors, hired advisors, and peer advisors?

Lewis: I wouldn’t exactly make that distinction. You need both professors and professionals, but my worry is that with the development of the research university, the pressures to get published and get recognized among academic peers means fewer and fewer expectations that it actually becomes less of a convention for faculty to respond to the human side of the students’ lives in a way that people used to relate to each other in university settings.

I get accused of having a somewhat paternalistic view about this, but I don’t think that anybody should take offense to the fact that we need to recognize that young people in the 18-22 age group very often go through many personal problems, nd many things happen during development where they try to figure out who they are and whether they want to leave behind the old identity that they had. We’ve gotten so good at the production of original knowledge in universities that there are all kinds of pressures to have faculty spend less of their time on personal interactions with students on anything that’s not academic.

We had a hilarious brochure a few years ago that basically told you what phone number to call when a student breaks down crying in your office and whatnot. You clearly need professional counselors, and there are things a student would rather talk to with people who were at a somewhat more similar level than a professor teaching them in a course. But professors can make a difference in people’s lives by noticing them and asking them what’s going on and giving advice when they’re in trouble. The pressures of time, workload and the reward structure, with which professors were hired and promoted, very much cut against the students.

TDR: You talked about how we were going in a general direction towards specialized learning. The rage now is for interdisciplinary classes and cultural studies. Why is that?

Lewis: The problem is, novelty has such a high value in the academy – doing something new. You’re judged on whether you did something new, changed the way people think, or did something revolutionary or unconventional. These are what people look for during the process of evaluating faculty. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this – new science gets created from people breaking through a long-held understanding of the world. Novelty has no negative political consequences in the sciences because when there’s a paradigm shift in say, physics, it never actually replaces Newtonian Mechanics rather, we now just have approximations that can be made on a different scale in the context of an enveloping theory which just includes the Newtonian theory as a subset.

In the humanities and the social sciences, this same devotion of trying to break through learning by completely changing the ways people saw the world, gets you overvaluing people coming in and saying that certain views are all wrong – that human society works a certain way. I think universities do their jobs best when they just simply respect their responsibilities of accumulating and generating ideas, passing on old knowledge, and exposing people to what’s going on.

TDR: For the humanities majors out there, how do you intertwine values in science classes? How could science classes impart something useful to any student who’s required to take them?

Lewis: I have a particularly Harvardian picture of this, and we’ve been in this mode for some time in thinking that the courses that students take for their general education or distribution requirements should be specially designed to teach students the significance of different fields in which they are not a principle participant. How different classes are significant to their lives and to their understanding of society are emphasized.

I teach this course called “Bits,” and it’s about computer technology and communications technology for a non-scientific audience. But we talk a lot about how we got from the engineering cornerstones of digital technology to arresting teenagers for downloading movies. Both of these things are not disjointed: the second event didn’t happen independent of the first. There was a transition from science and technology to social policy in the form of legislation with the economic forces around us. In my view, the right way to teach any area with students whose majors are not in those areas, is to teach it in a way where they can understand its significance to their lives—and not just their personal lives like how it’s going to help them earn a living or drive their car or something like that—as citizens and as people who are going to be around at a particular time when they’re going to be passing on knowledge to the next generation.

Everything we do here has to do with our responsibility to pass civilization on to the next generation, and everything we teach—particularly to people who aren’t going to be specialists—have to have some elements of significance to the general population in it. You can easily do that with any science area that’s worth teaching. If there’s an area that’s completely irrelevant, then it shouldn’t be a part of the general education requirements.

TDR: It’s rather interesting that you said “real learning about values can take place only when one’s own values are challenged.” So what’s the problem here?

Lewis: We don’t tend to talk about value related things in class because we’re so uncomfortable at the art of dealing with sensitive subjects, in which people are likely to get emotional or personally involved, that we tend to avoid them altogether. We had an interesting curricular review at Harvard where we reconsidered our general education requirements and for a time, we considered having a set of odd categories. One of these was called “Reason and Faith,” and this didn’t fit in any academic department. I thought it was an interesting proposal because it’s an important clashing force you see in many places of the world, but it’s also an importance force in the hearts of many 18 and 19 year olds—particular those who have been brought up in their local communities where the norms and what they believe are one thing and the environment they’re brought up in the next are another. The proposal was defeated very quickly because some believed that we were making a Harvard statement in favor of religion. I think part of the reason we didn’t want to talk about the proposal was because few of us imagined we could conduct a classroom conversation in which people would be very likely to get very angry, upset or offended.

It’s important to have good conversations, obviously not in a let-it-all-out Dr. Phil kind of way, but with informed knowledge through reading books and reading serious critiques in which people have tried to reason through similar issues in the past 3000 years. It’s a lot easier to teach if your subject matter is rather sterile where no one is going to react to anything you’re going to say. I think we ought to have more courage to challenge ourselves as teachers and to challenge our students as well to engage in things where feelings might be very strong.

TDR: Why is it important to understand the underpinnings of America more so than other countries in a college curriculum? Is a shared sense of direction important?

Lewis: I find that in this country, and—heaven knows—in this particular electoral climate, the things that people say about what the founding principles of this country are and how they apply to the problems of today are so random that it becomes more important for people to get a better education than what they received from an American high school about the nature of how democracies work and how ours was set up. It’s going to be possible very soon, if you wanted to actually do this, with any important legislative question to give everybody a computer and a broadband connection, put the question on the computer screen and ask, “Should we pull out of Iraq tomorrow?” Yes, or no. “Should we raise taxes?” Yes, or no. “Should we lower the drinking age to 18?” Yes, or no. We have the capacity now, which didn’t exist in 1776, to completely bypass the system of representative government to turn us into a true democracy rather than a republic—which is what we are now.

We have the potential to have everyone vote on everything and bypass our Congressmen and Senators. Here’s an example of something so transcendent that we might have to face because some of the reasons that made the current system necessary practically in the 18th Century no longer apply because of technological changes. But there are also deeper reasons why a republican government might be a better idea. I don’t think our citizens are very well educated about our options and also like I said in my book, anybody who comes to college in the United States from a foreign country expects American things to be taught in an American college.

TDR: “The integration of Harvard and Radcliffe—bringing together space that was once gender-segregated – was a victory for equal rights.” It’s a little ironic then that so many special interest groups are for gender and ethnic specific housing? What is the value of an integrated education?

Lewis: This is a perfect example of an issue where the institution has to be a little paternalistic. Left to their own devices, people will usually cluster with people with whom they feel the most comfortable. They have other things to worry about than becoming educated in the larger sense, like paying their debts, worrying about a sick father, or getting a job after they graduate. There are a lot of things they could worry about than whether or not they could learn something from somebody else that they happen to have the opportunity to learn from.

Part of the educational process at especially selective colleges like Dartmouth and Harvard, where they go out of their way to bring different kinds of people together, is to set up some conditions that will encourage that. I’m quite Libertarian, and I believe that people should be left to make their own decisions but I believe in a structured curriculum with some level of requirements—not like a “Great Books” curriculum where we spend 4 years all reading the same texts. But I think that the level of integration that happens in Harvard’s residential system works, and it works well enough that nobody tries to move off campus. We only make freshman live on campus, and if students want to spend their next 3 years living off, then that’s fine with us. There is a ton of ways here in which students can group themselves socially by gender and ethnicity.

TDR: Tell me about a good course at Harvard “with good concepts behind them,” where students come away enlightened, even if the lecturer was imperfect.

Lewis: I tell this story in the book of someone who said that she liked the course even though it was in a lecture hall and she never met the professor. You can see what courses these are: They’re the courses hundreds of people show up for and keep showing up for even halfway through the term when people stop showing up to lectures when they find the classes not very engaging. And it’s not because they’re entertained or because they’re being graded on attendance, but because even when the lecture devolves into minutiae, there’s a point when somebody quickly pulls all of the threads together and you can see how all of the stuff relates. This is harder to do in the sciences than in the humanities because when you get into too much technical detail, you have to focus so many of your neurons on making sure that you’re understanding which hats the various rabbits are being pulled out of—especially when you’re not good at that kind of technical stuff.

I know which courses have the qualities that I’ve described, having huge enrollments and everybody wanting to go to them. Michael Sandel’s “Justice” class is a classic as you know, and Helen Vendler teaches a general education course on poetry. These classes are popular not because they’re easy but because at every lecture, people feel that they understand, that there is always a point there, and it isn’t something people have to do because it’s the next thing in the syllabus they have to get through. There’s something there that’s meaningful.

TDR: It’s interesting how the Harvard Business School puts teaching as a high priority. I think one of the biggest complaints I hear all the time is that Harvard undergraduate teaching is rather uneven, so I wonder why can’t the undergraduates also get a better education?

Lewis: The Harvard Business School has a completely different system for evaluating faculty, which depends much more not just on teaching skill but also on contributions to pedagogy—making up case studies that are used as the principal pedagogical device. It’s quite remarkable. My older daughter graduated from Harvard while I was Dean and after a couple of years of working, she went to the business school. She called me up after the first week there and told me how great it was to be in a place where people cared so much about teaching. Students really have to be prepared not in the sense that they have to recite stuff rote, but they have to be able to think and respond—this requires a professor who has the certain skills to facilitate those responses and carry the conversation along.

I don’t know if this is all generally characteristic of business schools, but it makes our business school different from the FAS here. The incentive and rewards system for the faculty at the FAS is not based on education, and we’re no different from other Arts and Sciences faculty at other universities in that we’re all in competition with each other for the same top distinctions. The basis on which this competition is played is who will be the people who will make the difference in the production of knowledge. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it seems to me that that criterion is currently inconsistent with a more serious commitment to education. There are some incremental changes we can make to push the institution to commit to the education of undergraduates.

My friends at Dartmouth assure me that it is a different kind of place, and that’s why they went there—because they knew that it’s not the same kind of research monomania that exists at the major research universities. However, people are becoming more critical of the extent to which Dartmouth is emphasizing research productivity as an important faculty metric are worried about a more Harvard-like Dartmouth.

TDR: What was the most important thing Harvard taught you?

Lewis: There’s no doubt that Harvard taught me what the pursuit of excellence really meant – what it meant to work beyond you thought you were capable of. It also taught me that it was OK to pursue what both what you were good at and what loved doing, and that there was no need to settle for one or the other. n

TDR Interview: Harry Lewis

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