An Interview With Former Harvard College Dean Harry Lewis

Andrew Schuman and Isaiah Berg

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In his bestselling book, Excellence Without A Soul, Harry Lewis addresses what he perceives to be the prevailing problems in higher education. Drawing on nearly forty years of experience as a student, professor and Dean of Harvard College, he writes, “Universities have forgotten their larger educational role for college students.” They excel at creating and disseminating knowledge, but they have “lost the sense that their educational mission is to transform teenagers into adults…with the learning and wisdom to take responsibility for their own lives and for civil society.”

A self-proclaimed secular humanist, Dr. Lewis nonetheless actively supports the integration of faith and reason, and he believes that questions of faith should be central in the educational curriculum.

On October 12, 2007, Lewis visited Dartmouth to meet with faculty, campus ministers and students. During his stay in Hanover, Dr. Lewis graciously granted this publication an interview.

DA: Professor Lewis, in your book you reference not only the problems of education but also what education could be or should be. What is the ideal college education?

HL: Well, there are ends and there are means. I have a clearer picture of the ends than the means. At places with talented students like Dartmouth and Harvard, the fundamental purpose of undergraduate education is to graduate students who somehow leave the world a better place than they found it, and return to society, with interest, what they have taken from it in the process of receiving their education.

DA: What are some current problems in the university that you hope to address?

HL: First, I must say that most of the ills that have befallen universities are unintended consequences of the inherently good and successful progress of research. Nevertheless, there is something of an imbalance when we consider the objectives of the university as a whole. When the press compares universities, they write about advances that they have produced in science and in other fields. While we should recognize research as central to the role of universities, research is not their sole purpose. When research specialization and the pursuit of excellence become the major foci of higher education, so that administrative decisions are made to increase the opportunity for Nobel Prizes or to steal professors from other elite universities, the faculty tend to splinter into independent research specialties. The students, who in most cases will not pursue a career in academia, expect a broad education. They risk getting their breadth only in the sense of studying a wide range of splintered and specialized subjects. The curriculum as a whole lacks coherency. The faculty will not have a relationship with students that will help the students address important issues. If students overly focus on immediate success, they won’t think about their place in the world twenty-five years from now. In an educational system like this, it requires a great deal of effort to have collective conversations with the whole faculty about the experience of the student as a whole.

DA: For your book, you chose the title Excellence Without A Soul. The word “soul” has a very religious, spiritual, and personal connotation. Why did you choose it?

HL: By soul, I mean some animating principle, some core to which we can return when transient things in our lives are knocked away. I don’t have a clear and simple answer to what the “soul” of the university should be and how it should be instilled in students. Perhaps it is the capacity to question yourself and your relationship to society. I don’t feel there is enough questioning in students. Everyone has to find their own soul, and the university must remind students that the pursuit of personal identity is one of the most important things in life. It usually happens in your twenties. There is an inevitable self-questioning that happens in that time.

I won’t accept the notion that we’ve passed the stage where the university can have a soul. We must have more to say about what students should get out of college. I have some suggestions for curricular structure, but I don’t want to force my version of what the college should do operationally. I believe these questions ought to be rationally discussed among people of many different points of view, under the constraint that they must find an answer. “There isn’t one” is not an acceptable answer. Take a bunch of people, lock them in the room, get them to agree like a jury and don’t let them come out without a unanimous verdict. No nihilistic verdict, nor dissolution into thousands of splintered departments. We must find the redefining attribute of what an education means, and it doesn’t have to look the same for every college.

DA: In your talk, you mentioned an anecdote about a “Reason and Faith” course rubric at Harvard. What is the story about that occurrence and its correlation to faculty/student personal interaction in the classroom?

HL: The faculty committee had proposed some areas, or rubrics, for required courses. One was “reason and faith,” with the idea that these courses would teach the matters of faith from a perspective different than that of philosophy or comparative religion. I thought this was a great idea because everyone has beliefs and moral principles to which they adhere. We are certainly inconsistent in how we apply those beliefs, and sometimes the beliefs themselves are irrational. Nonetheless, faith is a major force in people’s lives. I thought this was a natural thing to discuss. In college, we must have difficult conversations that force people to think about things that trouble them, to have their beliefs and prejudices challenged. We must be forced to ask if we really do believe what we believe.

You should not be able to graduate from Harvard without taking a course that kept you up at night worried, sleepless, troubled, because someone had forced you to think about something in a different way than ever before. You can force students to think about that through readings and philosophy and plays and novels. Students want to leave class with a smile, but I think we should recognize that you can’t mature unless you are occasionally made constructively unhappy. I feel that there should be a curriculum maintained for that purpose. The new curriculum has a rubric called “Culture and Belief;” there are opportunities within this rubric, but I feel it is sort of a chicken way of going about it. It substitutes anthropology and sociology for a very direct look at the sciences and epistemology.

The biggest hit to the proposed curriculum came from Steven Pinker, who basically said that universities were about reason, not about faith, and that is why a course about faith should never be taught. He may not have meant this as baldly as I have proposed it. There was a lot of resistance and indifference in the faculty. I don’t know what students thought about it. You probably would have gotten mixed views.

DA: You address faith and reason as valuable parts of the college experience. Here at Apologia, our mission is to integrate our faith and our reason as we approach life’s hard questions, and to try to engage others along the way. What else can we do?

HL: You are doing something worthwhile right now, and I applaud you for it. Just as much as in the classroom, student activities that persuade people about the importance of issues are some of the principal learning vehicles in the student experience. Try to get your word out. Don’t just speak to people who are already on your train.

My own view is that most student attempts to change things in college do not ultimately work because one college career is not long enough to achieve those goals. You have so many things to accomplish as students. You need faculty sympathizers to preserve some “durability” and push for any change. Seek out the faculty who support your goals, and support them in what they try to do for you.

Keep at it after you graduate. Anything you do in the meantime to further the conversation is going to have an immense effect on the direction of the college in the future.

“[Universities] have forgotten that the fundamental job of undergraduate education is to turn eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds into twenty-one- and twenty-two-year-olds, to help them grow up, to learn who they are, to search for a larger purpose in their lives, and to leave college as better human beings.”

“Universities are having a hard time making the case that the education they offer is about anything in particular. ‘Breadth’ and ‘choice’ have become goals in themselves . . . and breadth and freedom in academia are like lower taxes in politics—it is hard to be against them, even if they come at a cost.”

“The relentless competition for research excellence has produced a university system optimized for research. We all benefit from the resulting production of knowledge: universities’ scholarly discoveries and scientific inventions have brought prosperity to America and to the world. But undergraduate education has lost direction in the process.”

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