It doesn't matter. Year after year, no other university touches Harvard's ability to lure the best students from every corner of the United States.

Similarly, Excellence Without a Soul, by Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College (the undergraduate division of Harvard), will discourage precisely zero valedictorians and strivers from making their predestined pilgrimage to Cambridge (at least for a tour of the campus). Yet the book levels significant charges: Harvard has abdicated its core responsibility to decide what undergraduates ought to learn and has abandoned any effort to shape students' moral character. "I have almost never heard discussions among professors," writes this 30-year veteran of the computer-science department, "about making students better people."

If that language strikes you as too pious, you might still agree with Lewis's contention that Harvard fails to encourage its students to examine their social, intellectual and career choices in anything like the spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson (class of 1821). The book's relevance is hardly limited to Cambridge, given that few colleges could pass the tests Lewis sets up for his own.

Mercifully, the overexposed Harvard ex-president and gender theorist Larry Summers plays only a minor role in this narrative. No fan, Lewis writes that Summers "will be remembered for his failures," as a man who mistook bluster for leadership. Lewis, however, is hardly in the corner of the arts and sciences faculty, which helped bring Summers down.

His chief complaint is that Harvard professors refuse to devise a coherent undergraduate curriculum. Lewis is nostalgic for the curriculum Harvard concocted in the 1940s, which forced students to take several wide-ranging courses with titles such as "Western Thought and Institutions." In the 1970s, that system was replaced by a more complex one that requires students to take specifically designed courses, outside the usual department offerings, from numerous categories, such as "Social Sciences" and "Humanities." By the time Summers arrived in 2001, the system was widely viewed as a tired hodgepodge.

Summers called for a curricular review, and Lewis, like the president, hoped the faculty would decide what literary, historical, philosophical and scientific works all students should be exposed to. But the vaunted review went nowhere. Oh, it grinds on in an attenuated way, but professors are leaning toward a simple "distribution" model, in which students could fulfill a history requirement, for example, by taking any course the history department offers. In the U.S. history subfield, that might mean "Medicine and Society in America" or "Pursuits of Happiness: Ordinary Lives in Revolutionary America" -- fine courses, perhaps, but ones that are part of no larger picture.

A lack of effective advising compounds the ill effects of the laissez-faire curriculum, in Lewis's view. Plenty of Harvard students have been gunning for the elite business-consulting firm McKinsey & Co. or Harvard Med since the ninth grade, and a few complete the journey contentedly. Yet others wake up their sophomore year realizing they've been achieving in a vacuum -- they don't want what they thought they wanted. They're lost, and, Lewis argues, Harvard professors possess neither the know-how nor the inclination to help them.

A necessary first step toward reform, Lewis thinks, would be hiring professors on the basis of empathy for young people and personal probity, not research prowess alone. As he notes, you can lose a Harvard professorship for "stealing your colleague's ideas . . . but not stealing postage or abusing your children."

But Lewis never explains how, if he were Harvard's hiring czar, he would balance research, teaching and mentoring skills. The question is trickier than he admits. He wants Harvard to be both a cozy liberal arts college and a research powerhouse. Is that possible? I, for one, might vote to grant tenure to Einstein at Harvard even if he had sticky fingers.

It's fun to argue with the ex-dean, whose knowledge of the subject vastly outstrips that of most commentators on higher education. Unfortunately, as the book progresses it starts to seem less and less a comprehensive critique than a collection of one man's cranky observations. Lewis's discussion of student "professionalism" is confused, for example: He hates it when his liberal arts colleagues sneer at students who seem mainly interested in landing high-paying jobs. (After all, he says, if you're the "best," there's nothing wrong with wanting the "best" jobs, too.) Yet Lewis himself writes, "Something is wrong with our educational system when so many graduating Harvard seniors see consulting and investment banking as their best options for productive lives."

And "unconvincing" does not begin to capture Lewis's chapter on grade inflation. He's all for it! It's no problem if most Harvard students get A's and A-minuses, he writes, because, after all, "grades have been going up for as long as there have been grades." Spot the logical error in that argument -- that would be a good question for a Harvard interview.

A "gentleman's C" used to signal that a student spent his time playing pool at his club or editing the campus newspaper. There was no shame in it and no pretense of distinction either. But a gentleman's (gentleperson's) A-minus? That seems pretty much like a fraud -- on students and graduate schools alike.

Reviewed by Christopher Shea
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