Harvard is scarcely alone in substituting what is relevant, that is,
transient, for what is permanent. Reading a comic romp of a novel a friend
gave me the other day, "The Family Markowitz," I was proceeding blithely
along from one amusing chapter to the next when I came upon a description of
"mass-produced undergraduates processed through seedy lecture halls where,
under flickering lights, they slump with their knees up and take in lectures
as they might see movies. Where the familiar passes into the wide pupils of
their eyes and the rest dribbles down the aisles to collect with the dirt
and candy wrappers at the professor's feet. And the graduate students.
Hasn't he seen them at Princeton clustering around the office doors? Young
Calibans eager for praise. They tear open the Italian Renaissance before
lunch, strangle a Donne sonnet and crush its wings, battering away with
blunt instruments. As for the older scholars - like students at a cooking
school, they cook up Shakespeare, serve him up like roast goose, stuffed
with their political-sexual agendas, carve and quarter him with long knives.
These are the scholars in the journals now. They are at war with the
beautiful; they are against God and metaphor."
Hey, this was supposed to be a comic novel, not a diagnosis of the higher
education at our better - or, rather, more prestigious - universities. The
least this author, Allegra Goodman, could have done was put up a road sign
before taking us around this curve: Caution. Slow. Truth Ahead. Falling
Rocks.
At last report, that faculty committee at Harvard was backing away from the
idea of making a separate course in religion part of the school's core
curriculum.
That's understandable. Such an innovation could prove dangerous. A professor
might slip up and make faith interesting, even imperative. And some student
somewhere out there in the dimness of a lecture hall might get religion.