A Valued Colleague Offers His Thoughts About Our Book

We received the below comments on our book The Real World of College from Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Research Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, reproduced here with his permission. Our responses to some of his comments are included in the body of his note.

Dear Howard and Wendy,

I finally got around to reading The Real World of College. What an epic undertaking! You must feel like Odysseus, finally back home again with a wife who barely recognizes you.

I have a lot of thoughts about what you discovered, which I found fascinating in many ways. For example, I was as surprised as you that financial worries are not at the front of students’ minds – except insofar as they relate to job prospects. I wonder if in some cases students SHOULD be more worried than they are about the amount of debt they are taking on! In any case, my experience (at a school with generous financial aid) has not prepared me to address students who are less fortunate than mine.

Howard and Wendy: Yes, that was our feeling also. We do think that money is not a big concern day-to-day. We offered a $50 gift card to students in our study for an hour’s conversation and sometimes had difficulty finding takers. They could choose whether they wanted a gift card to Amazon or “donor’s choose.” Interestingly, only two students took up the donation option. In NYC, a metro card was appreciated more than an Amazon gift card.

Your findings about mental health have been confirmed by other studies, little as you may have expected them to dominate when you started out. I must say I am rather in the stress-is-not-all-bad camp of the professor you quote! We surely have many more students who are medicated (if not always wisely). But I rather think there is another group for whom the term “mental health” has gotten stretched beyond recognition (beyond my recognition at least). I work with students who seem stressed that that their roommate is getting a $125K/year starting salary offer and they are being offered only $100K/year. And while I had about 150 students in my course last term and very few grades below A-, the most distressed were three who got A- and thought they should get A. Oh, the bitterness! One of them actually leveled the charge that my grade was “subjective,” as though that was the worst thing that could be said about any grading system or any professor. I pled guilty. I don’t know how to get these students to relax. Part of it is, I imagine, that they have what you call a “transactional” approach to college—thinking that grades should be objective is an “if I do this then you have to do that” frame of mind. More deeply, I suspect that part of the problem is that lacking any larger vision of the horizon of their education, they get excessively jarred by the tiny pebbles under their next footfall. I wish the messaging from leadership were more repetitively and consistently reminding students about the real point of their education.

Howard and Wendy: Yes, at the more selective schools (and you saw what they were), a suboptimal grade could cause lots of anxiety. From high school on, grades and attendance rewards are such powerful messages that they drown out other reasons for doing things. It’s an incredible mind set and hard to challenge.

You are, of course, right about “projectitis,” and at a large institution like Harvard it’s even worse than you say, because here we are large enough that the same projects exist at multiple levels of the organizational hierarchy, with unclear lines of consultation and responsibility.

Howard and Wendy: And projects almost never die…

As one who used “soul” in the title of his book about Harvard, I am sympathetic to your prescription for alignment, and for a shared simple formulation of what’s at the institutional core. That said, in place like ours it doesn’t seem to me realistic to expect the institution to be about ONLY one thing. (Or even two.) Nor do I see how you infer that normative principle from your exhaustive data set. Harvard may be anomalous, but if we take that example, OK, “Veritas” for sure, but it can’t be just that. When I wrote the mission statement for Harvard College, I went back to the 17th century and quoted “to advance knowledge and preserve it to posterity,” which I thought might be a clever and grounded way to honor both research and education.

Howard: it’s good to have a simple and succinct mission, but of course “the proof is in the pudding”. West Point or Morehouse or Olin, may not have explicitly stated missions, but what is important is embodied in what is said and done every day in plain view, and what the sanctions are for those who flout the mission—as well as how public are these sanctions—not in shaming sense, but in a straightforward fashion.

Years ago, before we started the study, a college classmate said to me “Howie, the mission/message of Harvard is clear—it’s “success.” I think there is a lot to that implicit message—and it’s not all to the good!

By the way, the reason the College did not talk much about veritas in either Latin or English after the cheating scandal is, IMHO, that so much blame would have to fall on the institution itself, in any reasonable accounting.

Howard and Wendy: In general, if colleges and universities shared their thinking about vexing situations, they would be modelling an important ingredient of “good work.”

I have much less problem than it seems you would with a big blooming buzzing confusion of a college, in which individual students figure out their own ways to make the place smaller. By the time I graduated, everything academic except computing might as well not have existed. I was fortunate to find my niche, but I am glad nobody tried to create a strong mold to pour me into.

Howard and Wendy: We would just like the confusion to be about learning, expanding your mind, being open to changing your ideas, while holding on to those positive values that you received from family, faith etc.

Now we find confusion about what college is about, questions and misunderstandings about its purpose. That’s not good.

Furthermore, we encountered depressingly little discussion of these ideas focused on learning, except from faculty and some administrators…very rarely from the other constituents (e.g., trustees, parents, recent alums).

We do expect students to individually figure out their own paths. But we would like these paths to be about learning and thinking (including ethics) and expanding their minds, and not about things extraneous to this—including earning—which is often seen as more important than learning!

But surely you are right that people underestimate the real costs of new projects and how hard it is to get rid of them. I wish we spent 10% as much time talking about learning these days as we do talk about diversity, but very few academic officials seem to want to lead discussions about educational purpose, and we have many diversity officers. And you will not be surprised to hear me scold you on always using athletics as the example of the tail wagging the dog. There are plenty of other candidates, and at least in the athletic program, at Harvard anyway, there are adults doing a good job building character as well as skills, which cannot be said for most of the faculty or most of the student service professionals. And do you think it is just a fluke that Massachusetts seems likely to have two Harvard varsity basketball players as successive governors?

Howard and Wendy: We of course we have nothing against athletics, and endorse intramural sports, but we don’t like so many authorized teams and so many privileges. It is a very bad message and makes no sense in the rest of the world of higher education. At some of our campuses, we learned about the special privileges granted to athletes, not to mention the “athletic recruiting” that occurs in high school (and sometimes middle school) for college teams.

The biggest puzzle for me is how, at a place like Harvard, leadership would ever get the faculty to follow or cohere around any “alignment” or “mission” agenda. In any research university, your characterization would be disputed: “of course, your primary role is to teach, and, to the extent possible, to teach well and effectively … you may have a research or student-support mission as well.” At Harvard, teaching is AT BEST of status comparable to research and service, and the three are treated as having similar weight. Faculty think some do more of one and some do more of another; but numerically all faculty in a department do the same amount of teaching, which means that a significant fraction of the professors spend less effort on their teaching than on their research. You need some other strategy to light a fire under them. I would do it, yes, in part by jawboning and inspiration, but in part by competition for resources: units should be rewarded for attracting more students (with quality controls in place). Some departments have more students than they want, and are accordingly indifferent to them; they would be happy to see many go away, and there is no real penalty if that happens. The context of the cheating scandal reflected the same misaligned incentives.

Another point: it is a mistake to identify education with teaching. Some of the best educators are inspiring figures who are hopeless in front of a classroom or writing a final exam.

One other thing. I wonder if one of the reasons students become more alienated from the institution as they progress through college is simply that as they mature, they become more critical and skeptical and less accepting of authority. So, things that were sold to them as big deals about the institution when they were high school students or in their first college years just seem overrated in retrospect. That does not seem to me a bad thing—again, to use myself as an example, by the time I graduated I was a fanatical devotee of the research and faculty mentorship I was getting in computer science, but House life, which doubtless served its purpose for me, was no longer at the front of my mind.

Howard and Wendy: Yes, you are right here. The United States wagered on having great scholars and researchers situated at colleges and at universities—and our generation profited from that conjunction. We wonder whether that will be sustainable going forward. Too many of our (and your) talented scholars now end up at Google or Wall Street and never look back to the campus where they were launched.

Of course, our students need good and devoted teachers more than they need those who have garnered the most citations. We hope that does not become the option at our more selective schools. Interestingly, in our study, we heard some resentment from faculty at the less selective schools that they had to publish—they wanted to focus on students—they understood that was their mission. (We also find that students at these schools view college as a chance to change the course of their lives. While some are still “transactional” about the college experience, we call them “transactional to be transformational,” because they do want to change as a result of the experience.

The one thing I wish I had seen more of in the book is an acknowledgment, like the opening chapter about the significant history of American higher ed, that late adolescence is a psychologically fraught time, but not a mysterious one. We know a lot about how young people break free from their parents and establish autonomous identities, or don’t. The struggle for independence follows some well understood patterns. In the Harvard case, I think the elimination of the Bureau of Study Counsel in favor of a study-skills program on the one hand and a mental health service on the other is, IMHO, horribly regressive. The “mental health” problem most common on the college campus is the one we used to call “growing up.” With Bill Perry (whom you do cite) and Kiyo Morimoto and Charlie Ducey gone and not coming back, no one at Harvard talks about the College experience that way. That is unfortunate, and I am sorry you didn’t have a bit more to say about it.

I am not sure which box I would have been in myself as a 17-year-old freshman – exploratory, I suppose, though that would be giving me too much credit. Lost, would be more like it. I was certainly transformational by the end. Harvard did that to me by making me read troubling books, especially in philosophy courses, but also in history courses. And also, by giving me some bad grades in courses, so that I knew the experience of being in over my head. It was important for me to come to grips with what I was NOT, my romantic self-image notwithstanding. (I went from being the best mathematician my school had produced in 10 years to the 100th best, if that, in my Harvard class. I am glad Harvard “explained” that to me freshman year, with its low grade in Math 55.)

Finally, and really to repeat a bit, I think “belonging” to the institution as a whole is overrated. Everyone should find a home, but the microcosms need not have much to do with each other. 

Howard and Wendy: This was just a preliminary categorization that emerged halfway through our study—belonging or alienation to three realms: institution, academic work, and peers. We are now taking a closer look at the belonging or alienation expressed by different constituencies. Of particular interest, many faculty feel alienated because their educational mission is not appreciated or even mentioned!

Regarding your hypotheses of why belonging decreases/alienation increases over the course of college, you may be right. Our study confirms earlier research on this topic. Graduating students have “one foot out the door.” Interestingly, we find more alienation (and less belonging) over the course of college to peers and institution than to academics.

And I leave you with my strongest reaction, I am wondering how William James would have reacted to “The Real World of College”, as opposed to his article on “True Harvard" (link here). I cannot stop thinking about it. It seems to me so right. This is the address he gave after Commencement when Harvard gave him an honorary degree. Your prescription for the institution to have a unitary identity seems to run counter to the imperative to honor the lonely contrarian thinker, and yes, to make that person feel at home. I’d much rather be at a university where that is honored than to be at one where everything is well aligned.

Howard and Wendy: We don’t at all see how having an identity of exploring and being open to transformation conflicts with William James’ message. Also, the more we read about the household in which the James’ grew up, the more I see how exceptional they were as a family. At their best, colleges should provide a James-ian atmosphere for all students. It certainly did for us.

Of course, there will always be real outliers—in Howard’s ignorant time, we called them “crazy”—and some of them were indeed destroyed as they aged (including suicides). But there were also outliers who did amazing things. We agree that the college should not stamp out idiosyncratic souls, and that’s a difficult goal to achieve, particularly in a “woke era,” where both left and right are equally judgmental and equally rejecting.

In a paper (link here) a few years ago, we mentioned our finding that students at Harvard who major in humanities are often challenged or confronted by peers or even parents who wonder why they aren’t joining the stampede to Google or Goldman Sachs.

May you rest on your laurels!

Howard and Wendy: Well, we are actually continuing our work on these issues and, happily, so are you!

Warmly,

Harry