…according to a supposedly conservative professor. James Hankins, a Harvard history professor, had some thoughts on how to cure Harvard of its wokeness. I have some thoughts on his thoughts.
Hankins’ basic idea is that Harvard should reduce its acceptance rate of Federal dollars and rely more on private funds from Harvard alumni.
[W]e should strengthen ties with loyal alumni who know and love Harvard. Alumni are loyal in part because they remember with gratitude the teaching they received as undergraduates. That makes them more closely aligned with the university’s real mission: to teach and to produce high-quality, unpoliticized research. Empowering alumni would carry its own risks, no doubt, but in my experience, they have a much sounder sense than politicians and government bureaucrats of what Harvard should be doing to help the country and itself.
This is naïve, and it misstates Harvard’s—any college’s or university’s—mission. That mission is to teach, full stop. They’re also ideal places to do research, including basic research, but even in an ideal world, research would come second to teaching, not be placed on par with it.
Withal, Hankins exposed the core of his error in a couple of ways.
My sense is that the great majority of my colleagues don’t care for campus political activism. As an out-of-the-closet conservative, I often find myself playing the confidant to my liberal colleagues. They sidle up and say, sotto voce, “Please don’t tell anyone I said this,” then proceed to unload their disgust with the latest activist outrages. They might have identified as leftists in their college years, but a frequent refrain I hear from them now is “this is not what the left used to stand for.”
That silence, that refusal to say out loud what they’ll say sotto voce, however fearfully, is the professors’ cowardice. These cannot be trusted to do any sort of unpoliticized research. They’ll bend to whatever their woke liberal masters tell them to do with whatever dollars come their way.
And this:
Faculty at Harvard for the most part are serious scholars and scientists who just want to get on with their work. They have books to write and papers to publish. … They resent it when activists create turbulence at department meetings and waste everyone’s time.
Faculty at Harvard openly favor their personal careers over doing a right thing. They resent having their quiet careers interfered with, but not enough to stand up and object out loud. This is the cowardice of immorality. This sort cannot be trusted, either, not with their writing, certainly not with teaching our children.
Hankins has successfully identified his colleagues as perfectly happy to sit on the sidelines, if not all the way up on their porches, in what they see as safety instead of taking a stand, doing a right thing.
Don’t take the Federal government’s—us taxpayers’—money? The question has another direction, also: the Federal government shouldn’t be sending our tax money to an institution like this in the first place.
