Harry
Lewis, a professor and former dean of Harvard College, wrote
yesterday that the texts Harvard freshmen are reading this year “are more
politically correct and less challenging than they used to be.” Yes, it would
seem so. Here
are this year’s readings:
A More Perfect Union, Barack Obama
Whistling
Vivaldi , Claude
M. Steele
Choosing
the Color of My Collar, David Tebaldi ’10
Every
Asian American I Know Is Smart, Frank H. Wu
Who
Is the Surgeon? , Chris Barrett, GSAS ’12
Psalm, Wislawa Szymborska
Demographic
Snapshot of the Harvard Class of 2016
The
first thing to note is that the inclusion of President Obama’s famous speech
carries a political and partisan weight
this year that it would not have had last year or next. Lewis writes: “Was
there really no alternative to including the Obama text as required reading for
all freshmen, two months before the first election in which many of them will
vote?”
Worse,
this year’s texts give new Harvard students clear clues on what grievances they
ought to feel and which class and racial resentments are deemed proper on this famous
campus. And the emphasis on stereotypes is heavy: Claude Steele’s depiction of
stereotype threat as a reason for lack of success by many qualified women and minorities;
Frank Wu’s complaint that Asian-Americans are conventionally stereotyped as
smart and successful; David Tebaldi’s discomfort as a black student of humble
means at Harvard confronted by bewildering expectations and, yes, stereotypes;
and Chris Barrett’s rambling complaint that people always think of surgeons as
male and heterosexual.
These
readings are thin gruel indeed, saying the same thing over and over and shaping
discussions scheduled to be based on these readings the same way. Claude Steele’s
controversial theory of stereotype threat, to give one example, might have been
balanced by inclusion of a piece by his brother, Shelby Steele, an equally
prominent scholar who disagrees.
The last text on the list is a poem by the late Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska,
which begins (in translation): “Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!,” and
ends “Only what is human can truly be foreign. The rest is mixed vegetation,
subversive moles and wind.”
A
final note: though the readings were presented in the name of “diversity,” no
white male made the list.
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