The Harvard Salient	October 21, 1996
Cover Story

rom corporate boardrooms to political campaigns, aspiring leaders are growing increasingly cognizant of the need to articulate a vision. Bill Clinton has run two presidential races by portraying himself as the candidate of new ideas. Talk shows and best-seller lists tout achievement gurus who satiate the public appetite for novel management paradigms and success secrets. An unsettling number of our fellow citizens (whose attention spans are normally measured in seconds) sit mesmerized for an hour each day, weeping along with Oprah at the maudlin antics of pop psychologists. Americans are searching for ideas to shape their public, professional, and personal lives. And the ideas they find have profound and lasting consequences for our culture.

Also evident is that most of these ideas are generated in an academic setting, by scholars who spend a lifetime of thought and energy grappling with their complex implications. Those ideas that come from outside academia are too often the misconceived offspring of feeble minds and pop-culture tastes. Universities have a special responsibility to provide leadership in thought. The most important part of Harvard's mission is the training of thinkers who will uphold the highest standards of intellectual excellence.

Our vast resources, which top those of nearly any other institution in the world, are uniquely suited to the task. Here students have the opportunity to interact with the world's foremost scholars, to explore the treasures of our extensive libraries, to enjoy stimulating discussions with other talented minds. Harvard is the perfect place to educate a new generation of influential academics who will carry on (and, I hope, contribute to) the great intellectual debates. Tragically, this vision is not a reality. That such a disproportionate number of Harvard graduates migrate into professional careers, and do not continue these noble pursuits, is a fact to be lamented.

Our much publicized drop in the U.S. News & World Report rankings may be an early symptom of this trend. Small liberal arts colleges are drawing respect and academically-oriented students away from places like Harvard. In truth, they do boast a far higher percentage of students who go on to earn doctorates in the liberal arts.

Why does this disparity exist? Some would argue that the close contact with faculty at these schools inspires students to choose scholarly careers. Of course, recruiters from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley do not visit these campuses as frequently to entice seniors into lucrative jobs in finance and industry. Others say Harvard's preoccupation with money has trickled down to its students. They contend that fundraising trumps education in importance. There is probably a grain of truth in each of these criticisms. But whatever the explanation, Harvard needs to consider and re-arrange its priorities if it is to remain America's flagship university.

Showing promising scholars the attractions of the contemplative life is especially imperative. Business and technology are becoming more complex. Private-sector demand for high-level theoretical knowledge and employees with advanced degrees is greater than ever. People whose skills were primarily relevant in academia now routinely seek jobs elsewhere. The obvious rewards of this career path appear more luminous than the subtler, but no less real real, pleasures of intellectual adventure. Students should at least be encouraged to weigh the benefits (and costs) of mammoth salaries and a fast-paced lifestyle against the freedom and different sort of challenge that scholarship offers. If the delight that Harvard professors, almost without exception, take in their work does not prove somewhat contagious, then Harvard has failed in a necessary aspect of its mission.

A university dedicated to scholarship promises advantages beyond the mere production of more professors. Even for those who do not go on to scholarly careers, an appreciation of academics will enhance their contributions to their country and communities. Would Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. have become such a remarkable jurist if he had not studied enthusiastically under William James? Holmes, who once wanted to pursue philosophy and deprecated the law as a mere grab-bag of details, brought his academic bent to bear on the most practical questions of jurisprudence.

n an age when the academy is awash with more and more ideas, but fewer and fewer good ones, teaching the thinker's craft is indispensable to the continuing prestige and viability of American universities. There are a plethora of Ph.D.s, but few young scholars with the sharpness of mind to create anything but ephemeral intellectual products. Many liberal arts dilettantes gravitate toward nebulous departments (such as cultural or ethnic studies), but only a select number devote their careers to timeless disciplines that promote the betterment of mankind. Harvard students have the talent and the opportunity to pursue rigorous scholarship and provide leadership through thought. To demean the place of the scholar in society is to suggest that ideas do not matter, for only with freedom for concentrated reflection can one feel what Justice Holmes extolled as "the secret, isolated joy of the thinker, who knows that a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men will still move to the measure of his thought." It is by the production of similarly dedicated thinkers that Harvard, in the last analysis, must be measured.

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