Required Reading

A sampling of what Harvard people are saying, and what is being said about Harvard, in the press.

Gift Suggestions

Henry Louis Gates Jr., chair of the Afro-American Studies Department, has been writing a lot lately for the New York Times Book Review. His most pleasantly surprising submission, however, came last week with a clever poem that, no doubt, bears many messages about literature and modern culture. Let us know if you figure out what they are.

About suffering they were always wrong--

Forgive me, Auden, but we know,

Their works, like Queequeg's pipe belong

To Backward times we must outgrow.

As Christmas gifts, please bear in mind

Such literary classics may

Seem safe enough until you find

They've led your little ones astray.

Where children are concerned, I charge

Such models should not be on view:

Their dismal lives are, by and large,

A roll call of what not to do.

Thus, finding his renown was fading,

Melville sped his downhill slide,

Writing only bills of lading

And drove his son to suicide.

If Keats thought he could carry on

Like Milton, hubris was his sin:

His book about Hyperion

Went straight to the remainder bin.

Of Dodgson's dodgy tastes, the truth

Is something we can only guess:

He posed that uncorrupted youth

In wanton stages of undress;

While Dickinson, averse to fun,

Would hardly ever leave her room;

And even Hawthorne's friends would shun

This Johnny Appleseed of gloom.

They needed help, you see, not more

Of Emerson on self-reliance.

(Wretched, to have lived before

The art of life became a science.)

Bradshaw--Beattie--M. Scott Peck

Compose our own creative movement;

Times have changed as you'd expect--

Thus Art gives way to Self-Improvement.

If they lived now and could adopt

Our 12-Step Programs by the score,

Their self-defeating ways would stop,

Their self-esteem, for once, would soar;

They'd have support groups to attend,

Incest Survivor Groups galore--

That Inner Child would be their friend:

Co-dependency no more!

A pretty thought: but it's too late--

For them, and for their writings, too.

Their book as gifts? I'd hesitate

Before the cycle starts anew.

Unlike those bags dry-cleaners use

That tell you: This is not a toy,

They never warn the reader whose

Well-being they may yet destroy.

Protect, therefore, your young one's head

From all such literary swill:

That Art is Long is often said,

But Therapy is Longer still.

******

No New Fascism

In an article in this month's Harper's, Rosa Ehrenreich '91 blasts the myths of political correctness in a lengthy article focusing mainly on student politics at Harvard:

In my four years as a student at Harvard, I found few signs of a new fascism of the left. For that matter, there are few signs of the left at all. The Harvard-Radcliffe Democratic Socialists Club collapsed due to lack of members, as did the left-wing newspaper, the Subterranean Review. As to the neoconservative charge that the traditional political left has been supplanted by a feminist-gay-multiculturalist left: In my senior year the African-American Studies department and the Women's Studies committee each had so few faculty that the same woman served as chair of both. I got through thirty-two courses at Harvard, majoring in the history and literature of England and America, without ever being required to read a work by a black woman writer, and of my thirty-two professors, only two were women. I never even saw a black or Hispanic professor. (Fewer than 10 percent of tenured professors at Harvard are women, are fewer than 7 percent are members of minorities...

...The very notion on "politicization" makes most Harvard students nervous. I discovered this in the fall of 1989 when I was elected president of Harvard's community service organization, Phillips Brooks House Association. I had been reckless enough to suggest that volunteers would benefit from having some awareness of the social and political issues that affected the communities in which they did their volunteer work. I was promptly attacked in the Crimson for trying to inappropriately "politicize" public service. The paper also suggested that under my leadership volunteer training might mimic a "party line" with Brooks House as a "central planning office." This used to be called red-baiting. (So much for the liberal campus media.)