Books and the Hidden Harvard

When I arrived at Harvard in 1967 to begin a doctorate in Near Eastern languages, I was told that my classes would be held in the Semitic Museum. Much to my disappointment, that museum turned out to be a few steamy, windowless rooms in the basement of a building occupied in some splendor by the Center for International Affairs--or, as an older student characterized them for me, by “Kissinger’s people.” In my classmates’ eyes, what we were doing was scholarship. What those hurried fellows in their dark suits with their gleaming attache cases were doing was--well, who knew what it was? Ours, it was understood, was a period of occupation.

When Derek Bok was appointed president in 1971, the year I graduated, the mood in the Semitic Museum was not initially cheerful. Bok was a lawyer, so the usual analysis went, not a scholar. His emphasis would predictably be “public service,” which we heard as code language for a broadening and leveling of the road that led from the Yard to the Capitol and back. Public service? Call it rather public servitude, we thought: the transformation of a once-proud citadel of learning into an imperial academy.

A year later, when Bok appointed Arthur Rosenthal director of Harvard University Press, the reaction in our precincts was approximately: “It figures.” Rosenthal, founder of Basic Books, was best known as a publisher of social science and psychology. He would fit only too well into the social scientization of Harvard. In 1975, when Rosenthal handed over the venerable Harvard Semitic Monographs to tiny Scholars Press (proving, if nothing else, that you don’t have to be anti-Semitic to be anti-Semitica), our worst fears seemed to be confirmed.

Fifteen years later, however, it is clear that our fears were mostly groundless. A graduate student in Near Eastern languages arriving at Harvard today and wending his way to the Semitic Museum will find the Center for International Affairs gone. The ivy that “Kissinger’s people” (or whoever) had allowed to grow over the lintel has been hacked back. The words SEMITIC MUSEUM, still carved into the stone, are visible once again. The museum itself has ascended from the basement and occupies its ancestral home in dignity and style.

As for Harvard University Press, I am pleased to report, having just conducted a title count of every seasonal catalogue from three years before Arthur Rosenthal’s appointment down to the present, that the ratio of two humanities titles for every three social science titles has been constant throughout this period. The change that most strikingly has occurred under Rosenthal’s direction is not a desertion of the humanities but rather the pursuit of a lay readership for Harvard books of all kinds.

It is just this change, however, which prompts an otherwise unlikely juxtaposition of two books published in this, Harvard’s 350th anniversary year.

The most original, most interesting chapter in Bok’s own sesquitricentennial offering, “Higher Learning” (Harvard University Press: $15; 201 pp.), is the one entitled “New Developments,” in which the author records his astonishment on discovering some few years ago that Harvard’s non-traditional, “continuing education” enrollment was three times its traditional, matriculating enrollment.

Before Bok, this hidden Harvard of summer programs, workshops for executives, seminars for physicians, crash courses for congressmen-elect, etc., was regarded as, at best, a source of income and, at worst, an inconvenience for the real Harvard. In “Higher Learning,” Bok now makes the radical suggestion not only that, all unrecognized, these second-class citizens have been bringing Harvard’s future with them but also that traditional forms of education, especially in the professional schools, should be cut back to make more room for them.

Nothing Harvard said about itself during its recent anniversary celebration and nothing anyone else has said about it lately--from the Prince of Wales on down--has witnessed more eloquently to the university’s eminence than this proposal from its president. I have, I admit, a longstanding fondness for irregular students. Harvard admitted me to its doctoral program without a bachelor’s degree (I still do not have a bachelor’s degree), and I wondered at the time: Would another university have been so indifferent to credentials? It was both exhilarating and intimidating to discover that what counted at Harvard was what Harvard thought of you. If that institutional self-confidence can be insufferable at times, it does create a climate in which key decisions may be made without too anxious a calculation of prestige. Bok’s decision to back Harvard’s “extension” programs even at the expense of some of its traditional programs is one that few, if any, other university presidents at his rank could risk.

The Harvard book that Bok’s proposal immediately called to my own mind was Max Hall’s recent “Harvard University Press: A History” (Harvard University Press: $20; 257 pp.). It did so for the simple reason that reading--plain ordinary reading--is everyman’s continuing education. No Harvard continuing education program has so large an “enrollment” as the Harvard University Press. And yet, as Hall’s painstaking, objective, occasionally rueful account makes clear, few forms of continuing education at Harvard have been in such repeated peril as this one. In 1943, President James B. Conant “acknowledged that if left to himself he ‘might well be the executioner of the Harvard University Press.’ ” Others before and after him, most especially when the Press failed to pay its own way, have spoken almost equally grim and discouraged words.

Bok has been wholeheartedly behind the Press, and yet he takes no formal notice in his new book that the Press in turning to non-academic book buyers has done something strikingly analogous to what he himself now proposes for the University as a whole. And there is another, related point to be made. The Press could be, in and of itself, Harvard’s principal continuing-education commitment in the humanities, for it is in the humanities, if anywhere, that the old, half-cynical saying is most nearly true: A university consists of a library and a printing press.

In “The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation” (Simon & Schuster: $22.95; 397 pp.), Richard Norton Smith reports that, on the eve of his 1971 appointment, Bok had one reservation: “Bok acknowledges having been ‘very, very ambiguous’ at the time as to whether he had sufficient knowledge of what Arts and Sciences was doing and what students felt to lead the University.” Fifteen years later, Bok has by common consent led the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and even the Semitic Museum, as well as he has led the professional schools. The education magazine Change calls him the most admired university president in America.

And yet, the attentive reader of “Higher Learning” finds Harvard’s president speaking about the future of the professional schools with familiarity, energy and high hopes, while he speaks of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, especially at the humanities end, with what rarely amounts to more than a vague and distant respect. If there is, so to speak, a seat being held for humanistic learning in Harvard’s emerging commitment to continuing education, I for one hope that it may be filled by an expanded and renewed humanities program at the Harvard University Press. For of all Harvard’s irregular and sub-academic operations, the Press may be the one that carries within it the seeds of the richest future for humane learning on the far side, or the wrong side, of graduation. The arms of this university, after all, do not simply bear the motto veritas , “truth,” they bear that motto in books.