Englishman Reports on Fair Harvard, Raps Graduate Students, Complacency

A clever and caustic, friendly but critical observer of the Cambridge scene offers a few reflections on Harvard in the current (July) issue of the British monthly Encounter. After ticking off a number of points in a long, impressive indictment of the University's failures, Marcus Cunliffe concludes meekly that "the criticisms that are made of Harvard can be seen as unavoidable consequences of Harvard's very strengths."

But the criticisms remain. Cunliffe, professor of American History at the University of Manchester in England, taught at Harvard for a year, in 1959-60.

* Generally pleased by the local landscape and skyline, Cunliffe mourns only over the new twin towers of Leverett House, finding them "incongruous as black teeth in an otherwise ideal smile."

* Undergraduate papers: "Fair only...full of jargon and approximation...unable to penetrate imaginatively beyond the immediate past." The more sophisticated papers were contaminated by Scholar-Speak. Papers were studded with the most recent vogue--words of college life. The average undergraduate--pretty mediocre.

* Graduate students: Cunliffe's remarks have already raised a few tired eyebrows in the stalls of Widener. Of the graduate student as teacher, Cunliffe comments simply, "I disike the habit of entrusting so much instruction to graduate students." But his strongest criticisms involved the lack of imagination among many graduate students, many of whom he found "prematurely old and cautious, as if they were absorbing the vices of academic life before they had a chance to grasp its virtues."

"Stalemen of the graduate treadmill," "youngsters winded in their twenties," the typical graduate student at Harvard emerges in Cunliffe's account a tired, harassed, nervous, ineffectual, resigned, passive bedbug.

He notes, too, "the sickly attachment to Harvard of so many of the graduate students," unwilling to leave Widener to take a teaching job in the academic hinterland, but doomed by the fierce competition for each permanent place.

*Decay: The theme of Harvard as a kind of graveyard, a might mausoleum runs through Cunliffe's piece as a leitmotif. He quotes a friend as predicting that Harvard may yet come to be called "the forest Lawn of the East Coast." He goes on: "the Lampoon used to be a funny magazine. Now it's like the embalmers' Monthly."

*Emotional thinness: Cunliffe repeats the point that has often been made about the University--"namely, that what ever Harvard stands for, it cannot be achieved without a surrender of some essential Americanness." He notes the derivative mannerisms of many undergraduates--the weariness and complacence of speech and carriage.

He chafes at the "we happy few" exclusiveness and smugness of the Cambridge community, and finds himself so exasperated that at times he is hoping that Berkeley will surpass Harvard "in the contest for top place on the academic prestige-scale.

But at the end, the indictment completed, the myth of "Imperial Harvard" stand, much assailed and much lampooned, but nevertheless alive and vital. Harvard is overrated, effete, thin, smug, decaying, but still... What greater tribute than Cunliffe's final sentence: "If I were an American I would want my son to go there."