Why Doesn’t Harvard Inspire People?

In the limitless admiration that some admit to having for this degree machine, I see a worrying lack of perspective. Certainly, this private university, which is also the richest in the world, does not lack laurels, but we must remember that the laurel likes to grow in manure.

Act I: Our French universities are as poor as Job on his manure heap, and all teachers who have traveled across the Atlantic come back piqued by what they have seen: research funding, fully-equipped classrooms and laboratories, high-tech lecture halls and libraries, salaries that inspire the imagination of a French university professor a whisker away from retirement. America is a young country which has invested in knowledge and youth. It produces gray matter which has generated its technological advances and proved to be one of the sources of the country’s superpower. The American dream! Difficult not to be seduced.

In Isabelle Rey-Lefebre’s article (“Les Secrets d’Harvard, la Première des Universités” (“The Secrets of Harvard, the Top University”), Le Monde, May 16, 2012), we learn that “44 Nobel Prizes, 46 Pulitzer Prizes and eight U.S. presidents have come from these ranks.” Unbelievable. Based on “The Hidden Face of Harvard,” by sociologist Stéphanie Grousset-Charrière, the article examines the advantages and disadvantages of the university’s characteristic teaching methods. We have looked at the advantages, of which the disadvantages are the logical equivalent: the teacher is never absent even when they are ill; they have a personal relationship with the student and do not criticize them when they are being assessed, but rather praise work “constructively.”

Viewed from afar, such reasoning appears interesting and innovative, as it is true that respect for the pupil is more valuable than contempt or humiliation. But Harvard did not invent this motivational education, which flourished in Europe in the wake ofJean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Emile.” What is worrying about this pupil-teacher relationship is not that it may be marked by constructive listening and attention, but that it is the result of consumerism. By paying dearly for their Harvard tuition, the student not only expects his teacher to be knowledgeable, competent and efficient: He expects them to be submissive, since the customer is king.

This consumerism explains why students assess their teachers, and anyone who is not convincing enough sees themselves unilaterally terminated, like a servant in a Marivaux play. The payer decides the fate of the doer’s country, which is stronger than the thinker. Even Seneca, who was close to Nero whom he tutored, complained in his book “On Benefits,” about the fact that human relationships in Rome rested on debt: He wanted to substitute this trader-client relationship, the relationship of gods to men by which he defined charity. I infer from this that making a child start off in life in debt constitutes a misdemeanor, if not a crime. The problem is not that bad teachers might be revoked, rather that the relationship between master and student should be commercial and not intellectual. At Harvard, education is subject to the economy, intellect to the clientele.

Act II: He who says debt, says debtor. The American student is less in search of knowledge than of income, as long as it allows him to repay his debt. It is already difficult to motivate a student to learn, so is it necessary to indebt him in order to transform his slight scholarly appetite into super-motivation for college? The liberals (in an economic sense) say that someone who indebts himself finds his motivation. The psychoanalyst says the same thing to their patient: Pay to know yourself. We can see a kind of masochism at work in such reasoning.

Certainly, even though Max Weber described this logic in “L’Ethique Protestante et l’Esprit du Capitalisme” (“Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism”), and John Harvard was a young Puritan pastor at the beginning of the 17th century, it should be asked whether knowledge needs to undergo debt in order to blossom and bear fruit.

Mark Zuckerberg, the inventor of Facebook, did not find his inspiration in this type of economic masochism, but in another, happier impulse. Neither Marie Curie nor Louis Neels, nor Albert Schweizer nor Bergson nor Camus nor Sartre have run into debt creating their works. Given that we know French teachers nowadays are less well paid than their German or English counterparts, in order to reconsider the value of knowledge, is it really necessary to declare that they only deserve an increase in salary at the price of “Harvardizing” their teaching, that is to say by abandoning the free and disinterested educational relationship in favor of a seductive infantilization of the teacher, on the basis of consumerism? The idea is already in some minds and in some behavior.

But at a time when students from Quebec are protesting against a sharp increase in university enrollment fees, at a time when American student debt “has just reached a total of $1 trillion and constitutes the main cause of debt for Americans,” is it perhaps the moment not to “Harvardize” ourselves anymore and to invent less costly and less soul-destroying solutions? Let’s end with the following postulate: Knowledge is immaterial, abundant, communicable and not necessarily for sale. Let us remember that in Greek, school (Skholè) means neither client nor debt, but “leisure.”

By Emmanuel Jaffelin, philosophy professor, teacher at Lakanal High School, author of “Un Petit Eloge de la Gentilesse” (“A Eulogy to Kindness”) (Francois Bourin Edition)