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Excellence Without a Soul
How a Great University Forgot Education
by Harry Lewis, Former Dean of Harvard College

America's great research universities are the envy of the world-and none more so than Harvard. Never before has the competition for excellence been fiercer. But while striving to be unsurpassed in the quality of its faculty and students, Universities have forgotten that the fundamental purpose of undergraduate education is to turn young people into adults who will take responsibility for society.

Excellence Without a Soul
How a Great University Forgot Education

by Harry Lewis
ISBN: 1586483935
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In Excellence Without a Soul, Harry Lewis, a Harvard professor for more than thirty years and Dean of Harvard College for eight, draws from his experience to explain how our great universities have abandoned their mission. Harvard is unique; it is the richest, oldest, most powerful university in America, and so it has set many standards, for better or worse. Lewis evaluates the failures of this grand institution-from the hot button issue of grade inflation to the recent controversy over Harvard's handling of date rape cases-and makes an impassioned argument for change.

The loss of purpose in America's great colleges is not inconsequential. Harvard, Yale, Stanford-these places drive American education, on which so much of our future depends. It is time to ask whether they are doing the job we want them to do.

Author Bio

Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Harvard College professor, has been on the Harvard faculty for thirty-two years. He was Dean of Harvard College between 1995 and 2003 and chaired the College's student disciplinary and athletic policy committees. He has been a member of the undergraduate admissions and scholarship committee for more than three decades. Lewis lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Author Q&A

In your book, Excellence Without a Soul, you talk about universities that no longer fulfill their students' needs but instead cater to their wants. In other words, Harvard no longer shapes the student; the students shape Harvard, and therefore they may graduate without the level of preparation they once would have. Is this a fixable problem?

Absolutely-in fact this problem could be solved more easily at Harvard than anywhere else. Harvard's vast resources enable it to take the high road. Superb students will still be attracted to Harvard if it spends less time talking about pubs and parties and more time talking about the things that really matter in life. What Harvard needs are good leaders, and trustees who want to move it out of its consumerist track. I am cheered that Derek Bok is returning as interim president-he is sensitive to ethical issues, he loves Harvard deeply, and he understands higher education better than anyone. But he is back only for a year, so a lot will depend on whether the Harvard Corporation, the small group which legally controls Harvard, thinks of these educational issues as fundamental, or as some kind of sentimental nonsense, out of place in the hard-nosed, fast-moving, businesslike, "modern" university.

Is grade inflation something that needs to be addressed? If, so, how?

If we are going to continue to pretend that grade point averages are some kind of important figure of human merit, then yes, grade inflation has to be addressed-because after a century of steady increases, there is almost no room left on the grading scale! In principle it wouldn't be hard to do something about grade inflation-just have every professor grade on a numerical scale and have the administration re-scale the scores so the grade distributions come out the same in every course. We don't do anything like that because doing so would introduce new problems, more serious than the grade inflation problem. Deep down, we know that grade point averages (GPAs) don't measure anything particularly significant and that we have more important educational problems to worry about. When the entire student body is incredibly talented in national terms, GPAs and graduation honors based on GPAs simply are not meaningful measurements. When students are taking different courses, which are evaluated differently, GPAs look like objective statistics but they are very far from that-they are really a numerical soup of unreliable ingredients. It's not even clear, among students at places like Harvard, that higher GPAs are better than lower! Of course we don't want students to try to get low grades, but consider this: When I told a group of business leaders recently that the important thing for Harvard to do was not to lionize the students numerically at the top of the class but to worry about the quality of the education received by the bottom half of the class, the room exploded in delight. Apparently this enormously successful and socially committed group consisted mainly of Harvard graduates who had not been academic stars! Extremely high GPAs are mainly evidence for privileged secondary school preparation and extremely risk-averse course selection-not things for which we should be awarding honors, and not good indicators of success or achievement in later life. I like the MIT system, which doesn't give graduation honors-everybody who graduates is just an MIT graduate, not magna cum laude or "with distinction."

What are the biggest changes you've seen at Harvard since you attended in the 1960's?

The student body is more interesting and talented in every way. Half the undergraduates are now women-it was only a fifth in my day, and that change alone has drastically changed the social structure: the weekend road trip is a thing of the past! More importantly, the women are now themselves a more diverse group-Radcliffe used to have a well-deserved stereotype of being intellectual and artsy, but Harvard women now are doing athletics, business, engineering, and so on, just like the men. Of course we are far more ethnically and geographically diverse as well, but a more important and less recognized form of diversity is socioeconomic. The student body is hungrier and more ambitious because so many more students have little money and are on their way up in the world-most of my classmates in 1968 were from families who had already made it. That change has made the political climate more centrist-you are less likely to engage in radical political action, occupying buildings for example, if doing so would put at risk your family's enormous sacrifices and your own high but fragile aspirations. A less happy change is that the college has become more bureaucratized even though there aren't many more students-there is more of a business management spirit and there are more administrators whose jobs seem to be to manage other administrators. The result is fractionalization-domains of oversight have become so narrow that people forget that everyone's responsibility is actually the whole student. It was a better place when most people thought of themselves as educators and felt free to weigh in on decisions that were not properly theirs to make.

In your book, you discuss Harvard's student selection process. In your opinion, what is the ideal Harvard student?

Let me begin to answer that with a story. A year or two ago the president was arguing against grade inflation because, he said, inflation made it harder to know who was the best student. An undergraduate wondered aloud about the notion that there was a best student-and asked the president if he thought there was also a single best book! In the same spirit, there is no ideal Harvard student. The best students are bright, ambitious, and extremely good at something-they know what excellence is because they have achieved it. And I have high hopes for their good character, their morality, and their capacity to recover honorably from reversals. Most Harvard students are distinguished academically when they are admitted, but they also need a good dose of humility, cheerfulness, and strength of character, since inevitably most of Harvard's high school valedictorians are nowhere near #1 academically here. But their spirit of achievement and their promise for the future sustain them and drives them on. It is sobering to think every fall that I could have the next Bill Gates in my class-since I once did have the original Bill Gates in my class! More than anything else, the best Harvard students are deeply committed to leaving the world a better place than they found it, by making their own special contributions as well as they possibly can, and by balancing their extraordinary personal talents with a measure of kindness toward others.

How has the Harvard community reacted to the publication of your book?

I have gotten almost nothing but positive comments-though of course the people I have offended may not be talking to me! Some of those I criticize have tried to dismiss me as an antiquarian, nostalgic for a time that never was, but a lot of people have thanked me for being idealistic about Harvard and about what education can accomplish. Some academic colleagues whom I respect have said that I explained changes they had they saw happening at Harvard. Of course that is the highest compliment a professor can receive: "Thank you. I observed what you observed, but I didn't really understand it. After reading your book, it all makes sense." A lot of alumni are buying the book and giving it to their friends, so I seem to have struck a chord with them. But maybe the most meaningful comments have come from people at Harvard I do not even know and who are not professional scholars or educational theorists. A security guard who has worked at Harvard for nine years stopped me as I was leaving a humanities building after a recent meeting. He thanked me for writing the book and said, "That is what Harvard is supposed to be about." That comment alone confirmed that the time I spent writing the book was worthwhile.

What effects do you hope your book will have on the future of college education?

I hope conversations will take place, internally at colleges and at places where colleges meet the outside world, such as meetings of alumni associations and governing boards. I hope this sort of question will be asked: Have we gone too far in the direction of student service and student satisfaction, so far that we have been distracted from student development and education? Can we restore a sense that we can do students a favor in the long run by saying "no" to them more often in the short run? And can we have an honest conversation, a conversation not staged by our development and public relations offices, about how the enormous freedoms and legal privileges that universities enjoy come with an obligation to prepare students for useful lives, not just individually successful lives, but lives that serve the public good?

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