This sounds like a pretty hard line, but it seems clear that Conant’s chief aim was to avoid having to follow it in any particular case. He conceded its inconsistency (it was, basically, a prototype of “don’t ask, don’t tell”: political beliefs are irrelevant to academic merit, but teachers whose politics are discovered to be subversive should be fired), but he was not disposed to clarify it; for he had a presidential yearning to send a signal that would be comforting to everybody. He wanted his faculty to think that the university was committed to academic freedom, and would not pursue investigations into the politics of its members; and he wanted the government to think that Harvard was staunchly anticommunist, and would not act as a shield for teachers who were manifestly disloyal. It was a very shaky contraption, and fortunately for his reputation as a champion of academic freedom, Conant left for Germany before he was ever required to fly it.
So that when Diamond and Hershberg cite, as circumstantial evidence that Conant acted as an FBI informant, a memo to J. Edgar Hoover from the bureau’s chief agent in Boston noting that Dr. Conant has “indicated his respect for the Bureau’s work and his understanding for its many and varied interests,”
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they are possibly eliding two points. The first is the innate desire of intelligence operatives everywhere to assure their masters that they enjoy access to the very highest levels of whatever it is they’re supposed to be gathering intelligence about. (“Who? Oppenheimer? Oh, yes, he passed us lots of information. Most cooperative.”) The second is the innate desire of men like Conant to express solidarity of purpose when there is nothing to be gained by appearing uncooperative. That he might have cooperated secretly seems contradicted by the fact that
in 1953 Hoover (as Diamond himself reports) ordered a “thorough investigation as to character, loyalty, reputation, associates, and qualifications of Conant,”
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and by the additional fact that McCarthy (as Hershberg says) was dissuaded from blocking Conant’s nomination to be high commissioner to Germany only by the personal intercession of President Eisenhower.
Still, Conant’s position wasn’t all rhetorical balancing. It was substantive balancing as well. By the time of the Korean War, Conant’s views on the Soviet Union had hardened permanently. He believed in the Communist juggernaut: he thought that the “Russian hordes,”
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as he called them, were prepared to overrun Western Europe at the first opportunity, and that Communist propaganda was a threat to the free world from within. His response to the military threat was to advocate the rearming of Germany, the institution of a peacetime draft, the containment of Soviet expansion, and similar cold war policies. His response to Communist propaganda was liberal propaganda. He thought that the best defense free societies had against Communism was to advertise their freedoms. This is why he campaigned publicly for the principle of academic freedom, and why he was also (much less publicly) willing to countenance the exposure of American Communists and their expulsion from the academy. Communists were the exception that made the principles necessary.
It is the logic that governed his supervision of Stimson’s article on the bomb, and it is a logic responsible for a great deal of folly, some of it criminal folly, in American political life in the cold war era: the belief that the survival of an open society depends upon concealment, and that the protection of rights in the general justifies their abrogation in the particular. Still, when Oppenheimer was hauled before a kangaroo court of the Atomic Energy Commission on security charges in 1954, Conant (though John Foster Dulles threatened to fire him for it) testified on his friend’s behalf. The evidence against Oppenheimer was hopelessly inconclusive, but he lost his clearance anyway. He was a victim of the very national security mentality he and Conant had helped to create for the nuclear age.
Conant hated the atomic bomb. He had, he once said, “no sense of accomplishment”
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about his own part in bringing it into existence, and although by the early 1950s he had come to believe, quite presciently, that if war could be avoided the Communist system would collapse of its own inefficiency sometime in the 1980s, he dreaded the interim. In concert with Oppenheimer, he opposed, unsuccessfully, the development of the hydrogen bomb, which he regarded as an instrument of genocide. He distrusted the military and barred classified research at Harvard. He despised right-wing anticommunists like McCarthy. But he thought the Communist threat was real, and that the public must never be permitted to relax its vigilance against it. He was even prepared to engage in deliberate hyperbole about the imminence of the danger to prevent this relaxation from happening.
There are many temptations to illiberalism implicit in this worldview: the sanctioning of secrecy, the willingness to engineer public opinion, the compromises entailed in presenting a united front with anticommunists of a less scrupulous stripe. Still, if the Communist threat could serve as a standing argument for the suppression of dissent, it could serve equally well as a standing argument for taking the principles of freedom and democracy seriously. The cold war obsession with communism helped make American society more conformist, but it also helped make it more liberal, and Conant was a representative figure in this development as well.
At the Harvard of his youth, Conant was a boy from the other side of the tracks. He was a townie, raised in Dorchester, and although his parents, by virtue of success in local business affairs, were reasonably well off, he took school very seriously—not only academically (he was, evidently, a gifted chemist), but as a way of bettering his lot in life. He was highly critical, even as an undergraduate, of anything suggestive of a class system in which wealth and position were handed on unearned. He believed in equality of opportunity and in the role of education in uncovering talent and bringing it to
the fore; and this belief dictated his sense of the sort of people who ought to get to go to college, and the sort of people who ought to get to teach them.
The university Conant inherited in 1933 had been created largely by two men: Charles William Eliot, who became president in 1869 and transformed Harvard into a modern research university, and A. Lawrence Lowell, who succeeded Eliot in 1909 as the candidate of forces who thought that Eliot had gone too far. Conant essentially represented a return to the educational philosophy of Eliot (who was also, as it happens, a chemist—although, as Alfred North Whitehead noted in lamenting Conant’s appointment, he was, at least, a very bad chemist). But Conant also reinforced the effect of certain innovations that had been instituted by Lowell.
Eliot revolutionized American higher education in two ways. He created the free elective system for undergraduates; and he established (on the model of Johns Hopkins, which got there first) the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which was designed to train and accredit the scholars who would teach the undergraduates. Eliot felt that the college experience should be nonutilitarian—that undergraduates should pursue their interests without vocational anxiety—but his notion of higher education as a whole was utilitarian, in the sense that he imagined a posttheological university whose students were being prepared for productive lives in a modern, industrialized society, and whose faculty were committed to research programs that kept social benefit in mind. Lowell rose to the presidency on a wave of reaction against the free elective system. His supporters wanted a return to the centrality of the liberal arts—to a less professional, less specialized, less vocational educational ideal. To limit the tendency to smattering inherent in the elective system, therefore, Lowell required undergraduates to choose a major and a minor field. The effect of this reform, though, was to place control over undergraduate course work in the hands of the specialists—the professors within the disciplines. Whatever Lowell’s intentions, he actually ended up taking Harvard some further distance in the direction of academic professionalism.
Conant went the rest of the way. He did this by instituting an
“up or out” tenure system, designed to ensure that Harvard departments were staffed by the most credentialed specialists available—that is, by professional scholars rather than by career teachers. Instead of promoting automatically from within, departments were expected to undertake national searches in filling tenured positions, and ad hoc committees were set up to monitor hiring and promotion. Conant himself intervened in several cases, a few of which became fractious, to let go junior faculty he considered academically underqualified. His preference was to farm out junior professors after their six-year stints and to make them earn their way back to Cambridge by scholarly toil subsidized by some lesser institution.
Conant thought that professors selected on merit ought to be teaching students selected the same way. One of his first acts as president was to assign two of his deans, William Bender and Henry Chauncey, to examine the newly created Scholastic Aptitude Test. Their favorable report led to Conant’s campaign to introduce standardized testing into both the college and the graduate school admissions processes—a campaign that culminated in the establishment, in 1946, of the Educational Testing Service, with Chauncey at its head. To make the emphasis on aptitude meaningful at Harvard, Conant created a “National Scholarships” program, which provided financial assistance to students outside Harvard’s traditional geographic and socioeconomic regions of recruitment.
Conant was, in short, as Nicholas Lemann has said, one of the founders of the modern American meritocracy.
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The educational system he helped put into place remains the basis of the educational system we have today. In its ideal form, students are admitted to college on the basis of aptitude, where they are instructed in an academic specialty by experts who have been appointed on the basis of scholarly achievement. Successful performance in this arena, determined by grade point averages, commendations from teachers, and further standardized test scores, allows those with ability to proceed to graduate or professional school, where a final round of accreditation takes place. The reward for the student is a professional career that it is impossible to buy or to be born into. The reward for society is the enhancement in productivity that comes from matching talents more accurately with careers.
We now take the theory of this model virtually for granted. But it has governed the educational and socioeconomic reward system for only a few generations, and creating it involved a profound adjustment of traditional expectations. How profound this adjustment was is reflected in two striking articles Conant published during the war in the
Atlantic Monthly:
“Education for a Classless Society” (1940) and “Wanted: American Radicals” (1943). In a pure meritocracy, everyone must begin de novo: no one can be allowed an unearned head start, and this means, logically, that wealth should not be inheritable—which is, in fact, precisely what Conant believed. He felt, he complained in 1943, the need for a new American radicalism, which he defined as a commitment to the ideals of Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, and which he imagined as a stimulus to social and economic progress. “To prevent the growth of a caste system,” he says, this imagined figure, “the American radical, will be resolute in his demand to confiscate (by constitutional methods) all property once a generation. He will demand really effective inheritance and gift taxes and the breaking up of trust funds and estates. And this point cannot be lightly pushed aside, for it is the kernel of his radical philosophy.”
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This was a fairly stunning thought to commit to print for the president of an institution heavily dependent on testamentary bequests, and the article actually inspired a brief but unsuccessful coup attempt, soon after it appeared, by members of the Harvard Corporation. Putting the idea in the mouth of a hypothetical “radical” gave Conant enough wiggle room to placate his trustees; but the idea was clearly his own.
The Second World War was the best thing that could have happened to the theory of meritocracy, for two reasons. The first was that large-scale social disruption had already taken place through mass conscription; so that there was (as Conant argued) a real-life opportunity to start everyone de novo by seeing to it that the eleven million American soldiers returning from the war were placed on the career ladders suited to each. This opportunity was cashed, in the end, by the GI Bill, which opened higher education to millions of men, and which helped to create the postwar middle class.
But the war was useful because it provided an immediate justification for egalitarianism and social mobility. A caste society is dangerous,
Conant warned in “Wanted: American Radicals,” in 1943, because a society stratified by class is exactly the kind of society in which communism takes root. This became the theme of all Conant’s postwar educational writings, from
Education in a Divided World
(1948) to
Slums and Suburbs
(one of the Carnegie studies, published in 1961). “What can words like ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty,’ and ‘equality of opportunity’ mean for these young people?” Conant wrote of inner-city children in
Slums and Suburbs.
“With what kind of zeal and dedication can we expect them to withstand the relentless pressures of communism?”
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Communism here is the license for liberalism.
The picture has one more piece. Equality of opportunity does not, as Conant conceived it, mean equality of result; and when the talented tenth goes off to law school, a gap opens between it and the nine other tenths, who are left behind to become office managers and civil servants and hamburger flippers. This is what is known as the problem of “general education”: in a system designed to track students into the specialties appropriate to each, there must be some common core of learning appropriate to all, or social antagonisms will simply get reproduced in every generation. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Conant convened a committee of twelve Harvard professors (which included I. A. Richards, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., and George Wald) to address this issue. They labored for two years, and the book they produced,
General Education in a Free Society
(1945), commonly known as the Red Book, is one of the landmark documents in the general education movement. It’s not a landmark because Conant’s committee had anything especially original to say: “seldom has such an effort,” as one educational historian has put it, “been devoted to reinventing the wheel.”
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The Harvard report is a landmark because it is the
Harvard
report, and it therefore constituted an influential endorsement of a solution that had already been adopted elsewhere, notably at the University of Chicago and Columbia.
The solution was a core curriculum, nonspecialized, in which classic texts of the Western tradition are read for what they have to say in themselves, rather than through some disciplinary matrix (as one would expect, for example, in an “Introduction to Literature” or
an “Introduction to Political Science” course). These texts serve, in theory, as a vocabulary of ideas shared by all the members of an otherwise diverse and mobile society: social tradition, which stratifies and divides, is replaced by intellectual tradition, which provides what the report refers to as a “binding experience.”
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The belief that free societies are in danger from an external political threat is obviously a great argument on behalf of such a program: people with no common set of beliefs are vulnerable to ideologues peddling, if nothing else, coherence. It is not hard to see that the system is extraordinarily vulnerable on many points, and that it was probably fated, in certain respects, to become a victim of its own success. The greater the variety of people it accommodated, the greater the strain on the impersonal and abstract notions of “merit,” “objectivity,” and “greatness” which underwrite it. When nontraditional populations (that is, women and nonwhite students) began integrating American universities in substantial numbers after 1970, the backlash against the color-, race-, and gender-blind ideals of meritocratic theory, and of the “great books” solution, began. So did the backlash against the imposition of scientific standards of objectivity on the softer disciplines—the turn from paradigms of “knowledge” to paradigms of “interpretation.” It took academic humanities departments more than twenty years to sort out the consequences.
And there is, in the end, something culturally tone-deaf about the system—as there was about Conant himself, a man who could never understand what the study of art and literature was doing at a research university, who attempted while president of Harvard to close Harvard University Press and to cut loose the Divinity School, and who confessed that the whole subject of higher education for women made him uneasy. The scientistic standards he imposed on the selection of students and faculty at Harvard (and, through that example, on much of the rest of the country’s institutions of higher education) reflect a certain impercipience about the variety of forms that contributions to knowledge and to the cultural life can take. He largely drove imagination out of the university, and he helped to quantify talents—such as “verbal aptitude”—which it is meaningless to assess in purely quantitative terms. You don’t have to be an enemy of logocentrism to have doubts about the system Conant
helped to create. You only have to look around you at the people who have “made it.”
The twelve authors of the Red Book were far more attuned to the holistic nature of intelligence and ability than the man who appointed them was. But a certain deafness persists. The report speaks continually of the “diversity” of the student population, but it never mentions differences of ethnic background, religious belief, or even gender. When the authors use the term, they mean only diversity of socioeconomic status; and the assumption that socioeconomic status correlates with some rank order of abstract aptitudes is still central to the meritocratic system the report presupposes.
This complaint about the Harvard report’s definition of diversity is not anachronistic. The President’s Commission on Higher Education for Democracy, headed by George Zook, whose report appeared just two years after Harvard’s, in 1947, gives considerable attention to the inequalities in educational opportunities available to African-Americans. Yet the commission perceived the solution to the heterogeneity of the student population and the proliferation of specialized courses in the same terms the Harvard team did. “The failure to provide any core of unity in the essential diversity of higher education,” it concluded,
is a cause for grave concern. A society whose numbers lack a body of common experience and common knowledge is a society without a fundamental culture; it tends to disintegrate into a mere aggregation of individuals. Some community of values, ideas, and attitudes is essential as a cohesive force in this age of minute division of labor and intense conflicts of special interests … . Colleges must find a right relationship between specialized training on the one hand, aiming at a thousand different careers, and the transmission of a common cultural heritage toward a common citizenship on the other … . This purpose calls for a unity in the program of studies that a uniform system of courses cannot supply.
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