The Revolution at Harvard

In an op-ed column in the New York Times last week, John Tierney claimed that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences rejected University President Lawrence H. Summers because he tried to get us to take undergraduate teaching seriously. Harvard faculty, Tierney claims, refuse to teach freshmen, shunt off their work to low-paid graduate students, and have to be pushed “to teach survey courses and other basics.”

Although his column was filled with strong opinions, he offered only one example of the egregious misbehavior of Harvard faculty. The Harvard history department, he claimed, can’t even be bothered to teach courses on the American Revolution. Ten minutes of research could have told him that the American history faculty, almost all of whom have been at Harvard less than 10 years, routinely win awards both for undergraduate teaching and for mentoring of graduate students. They hardly fit the stereotype of the “paleo-faculty” who supposedly resisted President Summers invocations to shapeup.

Apparently New York Times columnists don’t have to make sense. The claim that Harvard faculty have abandoned the Revolution has been making the rounds of the right-wing press for several years now. A couple of years ago, I actually received an e-mail from a correspondent in the Midwest asking me if it was true, as a local columnist claimed, that Harvard had replaced its course on the Revolution with courses on midwifery and quilting. As the author of a rather well-known book on an 18th-century midwife, I knew when I had been zinged. Complaints about the abandonment of the Revolution have little to do with Harvard, however. They ultimately derive from the “History Wars” of the 1990s, a period when National Endowment for the Humanities Chair Lynne Cheney and others denounced “revisionist historians” who supposedly wanted to replace the Founding Fathers with figures like Harriet Tubman.

Tierney’s version of this canard goes this way: “You might expect the Harvard history department to devote a course or two to the American Revolution or the Constitution, but those topics are too mundane. Instead, there’s a course on the diaries of ordinary citizens during the Revolution, and another...that considers the American and Haitian Revolutions as “a continuous sequence of radical challenges to established authority.” It is hard to know which alarms him more—the diaries or the notion that revolutions provoke continued challenges to authority.

Tierney seems to long for the day when American history courses line up in the catalog in neatly marked packages: 101, “From Exploration to Settlement,” 102, “The Revolution,” 103, “The Early Republic.” And so on. The narrative was familiar and reassuring. The names and dates were chiseled in stone. He is right. The Harvard history department doesn’t teach courses like that. We think our students deserve better.

Last year I had the pleasure of talking about the history of the American revolution with a small group of students visiting from Beijing University. I was impressed by their factual knowledge, but it was their questions that reaffirmed for me the value of the work that I and my colleagues try to do. The Chinese students wanted to know how ordinary people got their ideas about liberty. They were surprised when I told them that some of it came from religion. They wanted to know if I thought violent protest was also necessary. They pushed me hard on the question of slavery. But they were also fascinated with the rainbow of faces they saw on campus. “How can there be so many different races here,” one student asked. She said people back home had warned her about “that thing called wasp.” These students grasped the power and the paradox of American history.

For the record, I regularly teach a large introductory course, (Historical Studies B-40, “Pursuits of Happiness”) in the Core. It typically enrolls 150 to 200 students. Tierney didn’t consider it worth mentioning. Nor did he discover David Armitage’s course on the Declaration of Independence, Joyce Chaplin’s on “The Nine Lives of Benjamin Franklin,” or Jill Lepore’s new core course, “Liberty and Slavery.” He did mention Vincent Brown’s course on “Atlantic Revolution,” but sadly didn’t seem to recognize why Haiti mattered. Fortunately, Harvard students know better.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University professor and vice chair of the Faculty Council.