It Goes to Your Head

It is indeed amazing, as one peruses the Harvard catalogue, to discover that the University still offers no courses in the interesting and important field of phrenology. Phrenology is, in the words of the Fowler brothers, "a noble discipline, practical and spiritual, useful for head and hand, foot and mouth, hide and hair."

The omission of phrenology from the Harvard curriculum is indeed unfortunate, for it is a part of the great American cultural heritage, what Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has called "the intellectual backwash of a backward frontier economy." Surely such stuff is fit meat for the intellectual appetites of hungry Harvard students.

It may be idyllic to suppose that a full department dedicated to the study of phrenology may yet flourish under John Harvard's benevolent aegis. But indeed it may be truly said that University Hall's failure to recognize the noble discipline with even a puny half-course is but another reflection of Harvard's inability to adjust to anything--be it past, present, future, or timeless.