Viewpoint Diversity and the Scientists

Two weeks after the lawsuit, the battle is on between Harvard, which did not want battle, and the Trump Administration that sought it. A major concern among the Trump Administration is Harvard’s lack of viewpoint diversity.

Harvard’s one-sided fondness for the left, comprehensive and prolonged, provoked — or even invited — the clash. It also revealed a deeper division between science and the humanities — quiet now but with a Harvard history.

Viewpoint diversity means wanting more conservatives, not a further sprinkling of garish extremes. To lack a proper mix of left and right is not legally a crime — so we assume goes Harvard’s reasonable position in the battle — but it is a massive error, one that has forced Harvard into the courts. To depend on the courts to defend its independence is still dependence, and it offers only tenuous relief from a Trumpist siege.

If Harvard wants to prevent further trouble with Republicans, it needs to change its attitude. As the Harvard administration has begun to see, this gratuitous partisan attitude does not preserve Harvard’s independence — it endangers it. There is much to gain and little to lose in welcoming conservatives to share our company.

Who risks the most in Harvard’s battle? The scientists, who need the government’s money. This fact opens up a second problem of viewpoint diversity within universities that is not so easy to fix: The divide between the scientists and the humanists.

Harvard scientists will no doubt admire its president’s impressive move to check the Trumpist attempt to take over the University, but some of them will reflect that it is Harvard’s humanists who cause the trouble while the scientists pay the cost. A deeper look into the difference between science and the humanities will help to understand this second division.

When I arrived as a freshman at Harvard in 1949, I took a science course, Natural Sciences 4, taught not by a professor but by former University President James B. Conant. He was a scientist who had been part of a committee making recommendations regarding the Manhattan Project in World War II that produced the atomic bomb. Absorbed in the question whether this was a good thing for humanity, he inspired a new program at Harvard called “General Education,” of which this course was one. To make education “general,” including both science and humanities, seemed to be the goal.

After this course, the differences between them became clearer to me. Science deals with numbers, the humanities with persons — the particular human beings from which science abstracts. If a course takes up proper nouns like Shakespeare and Goethe, it belongs to the humanities; if it concerns impersonal objects as common nouns, it is science.

Our names are essential to us. Every human being has a proper name, all different, to respect the human desire for self-importance. Yet a doctor using medical science does not need to know your name in order to treat your human body. Science is a nameless collective enterprise of what “we know,” though inconsistently allowing for the pursuit of Nobel Prizes. Humanities professors write their own books and make “contributions” to Shakespeare literature.

Science calls itself hypothetical (Nat Sci 4!) and progresses by discarding old hypotheses and finding new ones. Humanities do not progress — who now is equal to Homer and Shakespeare — and they offer insights into permanent human truths of honor and beauty that the scientific method cannot discern or recognize.

As opposed to the humanities, which pore over dusty books and archives, science, with its “pioneering research” (as University President Alan M. Garber ’76 stated in his reply to the Trumpists) can deliver manifest benefits, above all in modern medicine. But science (or its technology) also delivers risks to humanity from possible atomic warfare and changes of climate. Perhaps science has remedies for dangers it brings, but perhaps not.

Moreover, science needs to address and convince the non-scientific public that its research is worth funding. This is difficult because the exactness of modern science arises from its use of mathematics, which keeps it remote from the great majority of human beings who are not adept with numbers — including myself. We have to be addressed with rhetoric — inexact and often promising too much. Our experience shows that science is hypothetical and open-minded, while conveying science can be partisan and closed-minded.

Science dominates the university, but it cannot defend or explain itself without departing from scientific rigor. There is no scientific proof that science is good. From my recollection of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn — once an instructor in Nat Sci 4 — scientific progress is more a change of rhetoric from one normal paradigm to another (which is politics) than the pioneering discovery of truth.

Yet, when we turn from science to the humanities we encounter postmodern arguments like Kuhn’s helpless relativism. Far from giving reason why science might be good, the humanities fail to justify themselves. They know they are not science, but then what are they, and what do they know?

Why should Harvard be independent? Because it helps society; it’s worth the money! That answer makes Harvard the expert part of society. Doesn’t it need some standard from outside society to justify itself as independent? Something like veritas that combines science and the humanities — a Harvard that looks for the wisdom that makes science valuable to human beings.

A political scientist myself, I like to think that this wisdom centers on politics. A wiser politics than devotion to a single party would have protected the scientists and corrected the humanists.

Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 is the Kenan Research Professor of Government at Harvard.