Section 1: Values and Goals

To Retrieve and Guard the Soul of Higher Education(1)

An Interview with Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science Harry Lewis, Interim Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (2015. 1-6), Former Dean of Harvard College (1995-2003)

Haiqin Yu & Justin M. Thomas (Zheng Tao)

Interviewee profile　Harry Lewis began his undergraduate studies at Harvard College in 1964,where he eventually found his passion in the field of computer science. Having earned his bachelor’s degree in 1968, he returned to Harvard three years later and graduated with a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 1974. He then joined the Harvard faculty, and became Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science in 1981. From 1995 to 2003, he oversaw the Harvard undergraduate experience as Dean of Harvard College, and from 2003 to 2008, he was given the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his achievements in teaching. Lewis has authored or edited numerous books and articles on computer science and higher education, including Excellence without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education, Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion (2008, coauthored with Hal Abelson and Ken Ledeen), and What Is College for? The Public Purpose of Higher Education (2012, coedited with Ellen Condliffe Lagemann). Excellence without a Soul in particular has garnered widespread attention in China through its Chinese translation. Lewis often travels to Hong Kong, where he serves as an external examiner for the Common Core Curriculum of Hong Kong University, and he has written several articles for the South China Morning Post. Most recently, Lewis edited Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science, published in February 2021 by the MIT Press.

Interviewers’note　Professor Harry Lewis was the first Harvard professor that Haiqin Yu contacted when considering applying for the position of visiting scholar at Harvard. His book Excellence without a Soul had captivated her, and his encouragement is what made this visiting scholar’s dream of studying at Harvard come true. In this interview, Professor Lewis reflects on his days as an undergraduate at Harvard majoring in applied mathematics in the 1960s, and points out the three major issues he was dealing with in his senior year. He discerns two major changes in the roughly fifty years since he attended. First, the Harvard student body is now half women. Second, due in large part to the ease of communication with cell phones, college is no longer a place where students go in order to get away from their parents and grow up into autonomous individuals. He emphasizes that in addition to excellence in their major field of study, students should be encouraged to think of themselves as citizens responsible for the future of the world. He cites the example of one young woman who was very worried about the possibility of driverless cars replacing Uber drivers. Unfortunately, many other students are effectively being trained to become“refined pursuers of self-interest” rather than future leaders responsible for the common good, a problem which Lewis addresses in Excellence without a Soul. Asked about Harvard’s admissions criteria, he highlights good character, the desire to do quality academic work, and the ability to recognize and take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves. This latter quality was particularly evident in two of Lewis’ former computer science students, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Drawing inspiration from a quote from the Chinese classic the Lao Tzu (also known as the Daode Jing; Chapter 17)—a quote which he sent to Harvard’s President Faust—he shares his thoughts on the ideal leadership of a university, which fosters creativity and a sense of empowerment among professors. Finally, Lewis distinguishes among many concepts that may often cause confusion, such as “liberal education” “general education” “liberal arts education” and “humanities education”.

I. Harry Lewis’ Journey to Harvard

Interviewers　So, we’ll start. This is Justin Thomas (Zheng Tao) and Haiqin Yu, interviewing Dean Harry Lewis. Very good. First, I want to take this quote, from your book Excellence without a Soul (2006), to start off. You said: “I well remembered being left in Harvard Yard by my parents in September 1964 and realizing that I was, at last, free from their oversight.” Reading this, many people might think, well, if he thinks that way, maybe he had a wild and crazy college life. But you ended up graduating summa cum laude in 1968. It seems like you did very well. You graduated in applied mathematics. I just wondered if you could share a little bit about your experience as an undergrad here.

Professor Harry Lewis　So I had been to a very fine, but very structured secondary school, an excellent school, Roxbury Latin School, a very old, distinguished boys’school. And of course, I lived with my parents. They had very high expectations of my older brother and me. Therefore, I had not really had a lot of free time when I was in high school. Therefore, when I came to Harvard, I continued to be very, very studious. But I discovered that being the best student in a school that graduated only twenty-four students in the class was very different from trying to be the best student in a college of 1600 or however many freshmen there were. I tried to keep up my extracurricular activities; I did some theatre; I did some sports—not very well, in either case. And it actually took a while for me to find a subject that I was happy studying. And to be happy studying, I discovered it was important to me to be very good at what I was studying. But there were always much better students in mathematics, much better students in physics—my first two majors. So, I wound up in applied mathematics because I discovered computer programming and became very fascinated with that.

Now on the personal side, the period from 1964 to 1968 was, you know, the heart of quote-unquote “the sixties”, right? This was not quite...1969, after I left, was when there were all of the major protests and building occupations and so on. But, you know, there were lots of drugs on campus, and the various social revolutions were taking place. I was not an active participant in most of these revolutions, but it was going on all around me. You know, the Beatles were a different kind of music, particularly they were already into their psychedelic phase. So there was a kind of progressive atmosphere, shall we say, a socially progressive atmosphere at Harvard. And you couldn’t help but be affected by it.

The senior year, 1967 to 1968, was almost certainly the most important year of my life, because I was dealing with three things. One was that I was doing computer science research, which was very exciting, and I was spending, you know, hundreds of hours doing early work in computer graphics. I finally found that academic thing that, you know, I was totally in love with and I was getting lots of pats on the back, you know, a good reward. I was facing the prospect of being subject to the military draft and being sent to Vietnam. Because all men were…It was a bit of a random thing whether you were going to be drafted or not, but I was certainly in the eligible category and I had no obvious exemption, medical, or otherwise, so I had to think of that. And I had fallen madly in love and was trying to get married.

Interviewers　I knew that was going to come in!

Professor Harry Lewis　So, I was also sort of in a relationship, not just with my beloved, but with her parents, and my parents, and all of the complexity of that, which we don’t need to go into in this interview. But it made for a very complicated senior year. And it all worked out fine in the end, but for six months there from 1967 to 1968, while I was trying to be a student, trying not to be a soldier and trying to be an independent human being capable... who, I could persuade my parents, my prospective wife’s parents, you know, was capable of taking responsibility not just for my own life but for her life as well—or that we together could take responsibility for our lives... Those were exciting times. So I think that probably I was thinking of that... You know, that was a very different person who graduated in 1968 from the person who entered in 1964.

Interviewers　Yeah, it’s hard to believe that fifty years have passed since 1964...

Professor Harry Lewis　Exactly, it’s fifty years... In some ways, since I have been at Harvard most of those years, it is hard to believe that almost fifty years have passed since I entered.

Interviewers　Especially looking at you—you look pretty young!

Professor Harry Lewis　Thank you, I appreciate that. That’s good, that’s good.

Interviewers　No, it’s true—I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it!

Professor Harry Lewis　You know, it keeps you young to be in a university. Because you’re constantly working with young people. And one of the things I like about working with young people…There was actually a freshman in here this morning, and she was looking for advice on how to think about her studies, and which courses should she take and is it more important to take a slightly easier course so she could get straight A’s, because maybe four years from now, she will want to get into medical school. I am trying to talk to students about, you know, you should do things that you are going to get energized by, and have fun doing, and take some joy in doing. You shouldn’t be planning your life as though you can plot it out one step after another because things like these circumstances will affect you in ways that are completely fine if you are resilient and know how to take advantage of opportunities, but will not be according to any plan that you set out with when you were a freshman, saying “I’m going to do this and then this and then this…”, and that’s no fun.

Interviewers　Yeah, there’s a Chinese saying that means exactly what you just referred to, it’s “shun qi ziran”（顺其自然）. Follow nature, don’t force it.

II. Fifty Years at Harvard: Continuity and Change

Interviewers　So, in those fifty years, what do you see as some of the biggest similarities and differences on Harvard campus? And you could talk about any aspect.

Professor Harry Lewis　I’ve been asked that question before. This is a somewhat Harvard-specific answer, but it’s true at other universities too, which is that the single most important thing that’s happened in Harvard is that Harvard is now half women. When I was an undergraduate, it was a quarter women. And the women were not actually, in those days, selected on the same criteria that the men were. So the men were always selected to be a combination: some were scholars, and then there were people who were going to probably wind up in political careers, and there were lots of people who were going to be lawyers, and so on. Women, just because of the history of Radcliffe College, which was the women’s college, were always more literary, and artistic, and more narrowly scholarly.

So not only was it a smaller percentage of women, but the social mixing was on different terms. But just the mere fact of the disproportion meant that there were lots of behaviors around social life in those days that seem very strange to people today. So obviously, mores have changed as well, but the simple fact is if you have any mammal population, with a four-to-one gender ratio, the men go off elsewhere looking for mates, right? So, in those days the place would empty out on weekends, because people would go off to the women’s colleges or they’d find their old high school girlfriend who was in Vermont somewhere…So this place would empty out on the weekends.

Now, people come to Harvard, and they say, “Why go to Harvard rather than Yale?” And they say, “Well, Boston is a really cool place, and New Haven is not quite as interesting of a city.” New Haven is actually a pretty nice city, but it doesn’t have the cachet of Boston, you know. And Harvard is only eight minutes away from Boston on the subway. And then you talk to these kids senior year, and you say, “What’s it been like? How often do you get into Boston?” And they say, “Oh yeah, Boston! I should really go there sometime!” You know, because we are a very self-contained, self-sufficient community here now. So that’s kind of changed student behavior a lot. As well as, of course—on a more substantive level—it’s a more interesting place, because there are women in all of the roles that men have always had, and that didn’t use to be the case. These roles include those in athletics, in student leadership, in government, and so on. So that’s one change that’s happened that I think is significant.

Another change which I think is not for the good entirely, just referring back to my answer to the first question, is that there is less of a sense today than there used to be that college was a place where you went in order to get away from your parents and grow up and become your own person. The internet, cellular telephones, and so on have made it very hard for students to really become autonomous. There are family expectations sometimes that you should be checking in with your parents every day. And that is not healthy, I think, when students should be…You should be able to set aside the identity you thought you had when you came to college, and at least for a year or so imagine yourself doing something different or being open to the possibility of doing something different. For example, you do what your roommate is doing a little bit of. If your roommate’s doing ballroom dancing, go enjoy the ballroom dance club for a while. If your roommate is taking a course in Chinese, and you have to do a language, why not learn Chinese? This may have never occurred to you before. It’s not healthy, I believe. It does not encourage people to be creative, and imaginative, and to imagine themselves in different roles if they are constantly being pulled back to some norm that they had from their parents when they came to Harvard.

We are privileged to have very smart students who we believe are not only ambitious, but fundamentally ready and able to grow into responsible leaders of society. The society they are going to grow into should be the one they created, not the one that was necessarily what their parents thought was going to be the best. We see that all the time. I hate it when I deal with students who want to do one thing but can’t, because they think their parents won’t allow them to. In my day, by the time my parents found out what I was doing it was too late for them to do anything about it. We were friendly; I would see them maybe every two or three weeks because I lived not too far away. My home was not too far away from Cambridge. We didn’t spend much time on the telephone. Long-distance telephone calls were actually expensive, so for other students from places that were further away, you didn’t just talk on the phone all the time. So, I worry about that. Those are two things that have changed.

Interviewers　Yeah, that is a huge change. Where did you live by the way? Or where did your parents live?

Professor Harry Lewis　Wellesley.

III. The Appeal and Impact of the Book Excellence without a Soul

Interviewers　Well, let’s see. Let’s talk about your book, Excellence without a Soul.(2) It has very favorable reviews in The Boston Globe and The New York Times. And in China it’s huge. I didn’t realize that.

Professor Harry Lewis　I must say, it makes me want to go and write another book. I have to write another book. Unfortunately not while I’m in this job, but hopefully soon thereafter.

Interviewers　And so what do you think made this book so successful? I mean in America and in China, and other nations.

Professor Harry Lewis　I think—I don’t know. I can’t really speak to China…I mean, I can’t really say that, because I have been to China enough times that I do have some sense of what interests people. I think what I tried to do was to be idealistic about what a university is. Universities are so often seen today as transactional institutions. You know, you pay a certain amount of money;you get a degree back. People have the idea that this is where you have to go if you are going to get a career in law, or medicine, or business. And you choose between institutions depending on success rates of getting people into medical school, or law school. And this is coming back now even in the drafts of the Obama proposals for evaluating colleges, where they want to know what the median income, or the average income, is of college graduates. The goal of these proposals is to try to find some numerical measures of college quality. It’s not the way I think about what a university is, or what the college experience should be about.

So I think there is so much written and talked about the monetary value of higher education, and getting into the right school, and what the tricks and the strategies are. And I thought it would be good for somebody who had been in a leadership position in a respected university to try to take a step back and say, “Look, these institutions are the way they are because they represent some very high ideals of what it means to be a responsible member of society: a citizen who has responsibility not only to himself or herself, but to your fellow human beings in your own society and around the world.” And that if some certain very simple values, such as thinking about the long-run consequences of our decisions, and not just the next quarterly dividend…This is important particularly in this institution where so many of our graduates do move into powerful roles, either in the corporate world or in the political world. If our graduates aren’t thinking about these things…

I will tell you a story. I was talking to another advisee of mine who was reflecting on why she was glad to have been to Harvard and studied computer science here. She received a terrific computer science education and so on, but she also took some courses that made her think about non-technical questions. For example, she says: “I’m a big Uber fan.” You know what Uber is? She is a big fan of Uber, and she talks to these Uber drivers, and they all have such interesting stories. A lot of them are immigrants that have been able to get themselves on their feet and control their lives so they can be at home with their families in the evening, or whatever it is, and make money, make a good living, and be independent agents. And this has all been made possible by technology, and geo-location, and payment systems and so on. You know, it’s all fabulous.

And then she went into another course at Harvard where she learned that Uber and Google are talking about using driverless cars. So, maybe Uber doesn’t need the drivers at all. So how do we think about that? That’s also technological progress in some sense, right? It’s all the same technology tools—a different set of technology tools, these are more artificial intelligence and control, while the others are kind of networking and payment systems. But technology is morally indifferent, right? And here this first technology made her feel so good that it was empowering all of these people who didn’t have the advantages that she had, and enabling them to get on their feet. And then just like that, somebody makes the decision:“Wait a minute, we can get rid of all these people. Who needs them? We just do it all using the technology and forget about the human beings who drive the cars.”

So, it’s the responsibility of universities to society to make sure that our graduates think about questions like the second one. Is that really the society we want? Even if you are just being trained to be a computer engineer, right? Maybe that’s your major. But you should be in an environment where people ask those difficult questions…These are the people who are going to be running these companies and they’re going to be drafting the legislation, the regulations, and so on that will govern how these businesses operate. And I want them to think about these questions. Is the profit the only thing that really matters? Which is what you would think if all you were getting was a purely transactional education. I want people to think of themselves as responsible for the future of the world. And that was why I decided to write the book; that’s why I used that “soul”metaphor. Because I believe the institution has to nurture the sense that its graduates have a moral responsibility to keep the world going.

Interviewers　Yeah. Well it’s good that your student had that.

Professor Harry Lewis　Yeah, she got it! She got it! She didn’t know what the answer was, but she knew enough to think about it.

IV. Lewis’ View on “Refined Pursuers of Self-interest”

Interviewers　There is really the same awareness in China today of the role ethics plays in higher education. There’s a quote; I want to read just part of it to you. It’s a professor Liqun Qian from Beijing (Peking) University…In 2012 he said, “Some of our universities in China, including Beijing University, are training a group of ‘refined pursuers of self-interest.’”

Professor Harry Lewis　Pointing to the document from Beijing University on his office wall. You saw this, right? That’s when I lectured at Beida.

Interviewers　OK, so you know Beida.

Professor Harry Lewis　Yes, I know. I’ve been there.

Interviewers　You have been there.

Professor Harry Lewis　I know it’s the premier university, yes. So what did he say?

Interviewers　Yeah. He said that he was worried that Beijing University was training a group of what he called “refined pursuers of self-interest”. And he continued to say, “These people are very good at using the system to reach their own goals. Once this kind of person is in power, he or she will be much more dangerous than your run-of-the-mill corrupt government official.”

Professor Harry Lewis　That’s true! That’s true! I agree with that completely. So that’s the sort of spirit in which I wrote Excellence without a Soul. And I kind of took it back to the beginning of the history of Harvard, because I like to see how the history evolved here. But I have a very acute sense in the United States that we are underinvesting in higher education and expecting higher education mostly to be a vehicle for economic advancement and not for lifting society as a whole into a more enlightened state. I worry about that, about the U.S. I’ve had the sense that the thirst in the Far East—not just China, but Singapore and other places—for liberal arts education, or the interest in it at least, should be a lesson to the U.S. not to let go of that tradition of ours, and to do what is happening in some of our state university systems, some of which are eliminating, for example the philosophy major to save money. By doing this you are ruining something that historically had this important social role.

One of the most astonishing things that happened in higher education which I mentioned briefly in the book was that the biggest U.S. federal level investment in higher education actually happened in the middle of the Civil War (the U.S. Civil War), when President Lincoln had other more pressing things to worry about than growing the American university system. But it was the 1860s, it was the early edge of the Industrial Revolution, and Congress recognized that scientific and technological education and just a greater level of general literacy was going to be important for the United States to continue to progress. And so there was this thing called the Morrill Land Grant Act, where there were lots of federal lands given out in every state to start state universities to educate the public. There were some state universities already. But it was like a major giveaway. Now here we are cutting our budgets in times actually of relative prosperity. Lincoln was trying to hold the country together at this time. People were being sent off to war…and right in the middle of that, the federal government has this enormous investment in higher education. It’s astonishing. I worry about our capacity to look beyond the next budget crisis, because universities take a long time to build up and they are very hard to rebuild, if they are allowed to run down.

Interviewers　Wow, I did not realize that! That’s amazing. So while we are still talking about Excellence without a Soul, you had written in another book that,“Somewhat paradoxically, the explosion in numbers of institutions of higher education resulted in institutional homogenization, not differentiation”. Is this related, or how is this related to the idea of “excellence without a soul”? You wrote this in the book What Is College for?.(3)

Professor Harry Lewis　OK, I wrote that in that initial essay about civic purpose. So, I guess…I don’t know what I was thinking about there. I think it’s true, though, that a few institutions, like my own Harvard University, kind of set the standard for what a college was supposed to be. And every place, or lots of other places decided they had to be like that in order to be a “real college”. You know, I probably wouldn’t have said it quite the same way now, because I wasn’t thinking enough about the role, for example, of community colleges and two-year colleges, which play a very important role. And it [the quote] probably also doesn’t grant enough respect to the institutions of higher education that are purely professionally oriented—nursing colleges, business colleges, and so on. So I probably had in mind the research universities and the colleges within research universities, and the liberal arts colleges, which are like those colleges in research universities, but without the professional and graduate schools.

There are a lot of similarities. I think that’s not necessarily a bad thing in the sense that I think an aggregate…If everybody thinks you can’t be a first rate university if you don’t have a philosophy department, and you don’t have some foreign language departments, and you don’t have a music department, maybe that will help keep philosophy and music and studying foreign language alive against these economic forces which may consider those frills that the state legislature with their razor blades can cut out of the budget. So, I hope that the places like Harvard, and Yale, and Stanford, remain things that other colleges will look up to and want to emulate in that sense. “Homogenization”—that’s a little bit of a harsh and pejorative term. I’d have to look back at the context to see exactly what else I was trying to talk about there.

There is something else which I may have been thinking about, which is also true, which you definitely see in the higher education system, which is destructive competition on things that don’t matter educationally. The University of Massachusetts did this. For example, one university has a 25000-seat football stadium. Your rival, you know…When State University A plays State University B, they all see that they have a 35000-seat football stadium. So State A thinks that they have got to have a 35000-seat football stadium, too. So, there is some destructive competition for status that winds up diverting dollars that are important educationally away from educational programs into frivolous residential and extracurricular programs.

Interviewers　Yeah. I actually went to Xaverian Brothers High School in Westwood. They just spent a large sum of money on this new athletic facility.

Professor Harry Lewis　So what they are worried about is that you wouldn’t have gone there if they had not built such an athletic facility, right? They are worried that if you were on an old run-down track, and that’s all they had, and you had the opportunity to go to Catholic Memorial, and Catholic Memorial does have something, that you would decide to go to Catholic Memorial rather than Xaverian, right? That’s the trouble because, in my opinion, we are all defined by the quality of our student body. Harvard faculty actually comes to Harvard, yes, to work with other Harvard faculty, but also for the opportunity to teach to Harvard students. And if you don’t have it in your blood that your mission is to teach whoever (for example, students who might not be able to afford, or don’t have good enough grades to go to another school with more amenities), it’s hard to hold back the forces that say, “For us to be as good as they are, we have to have these amenities”, even if per dollar, it doesn’t seem to produce that much educational improvement.

I think we’ve got an incredibly interesting student body here. People say, “Why are we playing football at all?” So, this is a piece of American culture. Harvard is thought of by everyone as different from…It would be thought of as a very different place if you didn’t have a sports program, right? And our basketball program got into the NCAA’s (the NCAA Tournament), and that’s good for us. And there are probably high school students out in Kansas that never thought of coming to Harvard but see it there now. I don’t know, what’s that worth? I don’t know, it’s hard to say. This will be hard to understand in China, I would guess! You know, how the sports thing plays into it. But it’s very American.

V. Harvard’s Admission Criteria: Bill Gates’ and Mark Zuckerberg’s Unique Paths to Success

Interviewers　In What Is College for?, you also talked about the moral development of individual students, and you mentioned parental responsibility for moral development of these kids. We just wanted to ask you: If parents want to send their children to Harvard, what should they cultivate in their children?

Professor Harry Lewis　Ambition, the desire to do really excellent work, not only academic work—obviously that has to be high quality. Good character is very important. Character flaws, if they surface are kind of…We take a dim view if we don’t think people are going to use the opportunity to be at Harvard for good purposes. So, raw ambition, where you have a sense that somebody is doing something just to get ahead, is not so good. The thing that is hard to describe is that we like people who are creatively different, who have done things that are different from what their classmates or other people have done. And so, all these questions that people all want to know, such as “What do I have to do to get into Harvard?” I sometimes say, you’ve got to be a good student, and you’ve got to have a good character, and it’s actually OK to be contrarian, nonconformist, and even naughty. Not naughty in the sense that you go around breaking rules all the time, but that you don’t do things exactly the way the social norms say they always have to be done. So, we actually value the capacity to defy authority sometimes.

My own experience is peculiar, and I’ve been profoundly influenced in the way I think about this because I’ve had the good fortune to have some extraordinary students. Your readers may know because it’s in my biography here that I’m the guy who had both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in class. They each took a course from me. So what does it say about you when your two best computer science students, or two most influential computer science students, are the two who dropped out as soon as they take your course? Is that a statement that they were fed up with sitting in your classes? Or that they knew everything they needed to know, and then could move on?

Interviewers　But they finished your course, right? And then they dropped out?

Professor Harry Lewis　That’s right. They both finished my class, right. Each of them finished the class. It wasn’t the same class. The important thing about those two guys is that they were ignoring the conventional wisdom about what it was worth spending time on. And Gates... There was nobody on the faculty in those days who took personal computers seriously. Writing software for personal computers was no big challenge. They were like miniature versions of big computers, and big computers have all kinds of problems that little computers don’t have. And so there were faculty who told Gates,“Don’t waste your time on those little toy computers. We’ve got all these problems with the big computers.” So, of course there was an opportunity where Gates knew that this was going to be important. He sensed that it was going to be important, and that it was worth taking the risk to be contrarian.

And Zuckerberg was spending half his time studying sociology and psychology, and half his time studying computer science. But I can just imagine—I’ve never discussed this, I don’t know—but I am guessing he knew about social networks from the social psychology world that he was inhabiting just a few blocks away. The empirical data that they had about social networks was very limited. And over here, we were studying computer networks, doing very good research on computer networks, but nobody was interested in social networking. And he kind of fused these two things together and it exploded. So, being able to take advantage of opportunities when you see them.

I think the most important thing that I hope Harvard students will have is a demonstrated capacity to take advantage of opportunities. And this is a trait that does not require that you have been to the best high school in America, that does not require that your parents be advantaged. It does require that you are able to recognize an opportunity when you see one, and do things that may take some courage, because the opportunity may be there because no one else has taken it, right? That requires some personal agency and autonomy. In my experience of students who have been successful—not in terms of how much money they have made, but how they have been able to move the trajectory of an institution or some part of society in which they are working—the most important value is that people are able to recognize opportunities, and then work very, very hard to take advantage of those opportunities.

It’s not very helpful to some poor parent who is trying to figure out how to prepare their student for Harvard, but it’s very much against those ridiculous photographs they have of Harvard students all studying in carrels, or the writings on the Harvard bathroom walls, or these phony pictures that I know they have had in China to try to get students to study hard, and they’re just trying to always get 100 percent on every test and so on. It’s not what’s the most important thing. Haiqin was very disappointed when I told her that this was completely bogus.

Interviewers　So we mentioned China. I guess I’ll ask you—I know you went in 1987.

Professor Harry Lewis　I did. And I’ve been back—to Beijing, Shanghai, Shantou, and Hong Kong. Many trips to Hong Kong.

Interviewers　What’s your impression of higher education institutions in China?

Professor Harry Lewis　Well, there’s actually quite a variety. I went to several of the normal schools in the 1990s. The research universities, of course, have great, great scientists. There are people that I have worked with there. Some of them are people I knew when they were younger, before it was as easy to go back and forth between China and the U.S. as it is now. We have, of course, many extremely good Chinese graduate students here in computer science in the School of Engineering. So they’ve clearly been extremely well-educated at the undergraduate level at those universities. I don’t know that I’ve got any other broad comments that I would want to make.

VI. Recommending Laozi’s Wisdom on Leadership to the President of Harvard

Interviewers　We’ve got time for one more question. Haiqin just saw that there was a quote from Laozi that you really liked. It was mentioned in Excellence without a Soul. It is the quote in which he said that the good ruler, basically, is one that the people don’t know even exists. Could you expand on that and tell us how that relates to university leadership?

Professor Harry Lewis　It’s really important in universities. And now that I’m back being a dean again, I’m reminded of it. It’s very frustrating to people from the business world, when they think universities are very inefficiently organized. And they say, “Why do you do things like that? You should just say what should happen, and then other people can tell the next people down the organizational chart to do it, and then the people at the bottom will just do it!” And I say, “Well, the people at the bottom of that organizational chart are the professors, and the professors won’t just do it if you just tell them to.” Professors are free agents. They actually have to believe in the mission of the university. You can’t tell faculty that they should weave ethical lessons into their mathematics classes, or whatever. They won’t do it under instruction. They only will do it if they believe that it is an important thing to do. And the best way to get them to believe it’s an important thing to do is to get them to believe it was their own idea, and not yours! If it was your idea, they are going to be resistant to it! When Drew Gilpin Faust was made President of Harvard, I actually copied that out and I sent it to her.

Interviewers　Oh, you sent the quote?

Professor Harry Lewis　The quote. I sent the quote to the president.

Interviewers　The Chinese one, or the English translation?

Professor Harry Lewis　I don’t remember what exactly I did. I think I might have had an edition where it had the Chinese and the English, and I think I might have sent that to her. But I said, “This is it! You can’t give orders. You have to get people to believe that it’s a good idea, and the best way to get them to believe that whatever you are trying to get them to do is a good idea is to make them believe that it was their own idea.” So, I thought that’s a very important quote in academia. And it’s very frustrating to people who come from the corporate world. They don’t understand what it’s like to have…You know they might say, “There are so many good professors, therefore tenure is a terrible idea; you should have these annual reviews, or five-year reviews, and get rid of the ones that aren’t productive”, and all the rest of that…And I say, “The only way you are going to have real creativity, real imagination, is to have people who continuously feel empowered to do these things that are not the way things have been done before, and to mix together ideas that no one has mixed together before.” And where you have to make systemic changes, you have to get people to buy in. Because if they just think it’s what you’re telling them to do, they won’t do it. It will be more trouble than it’s worth to get them to do it. So, I do like that quotation.

VII. Distinguishing Among Educational Concepts

Interviewers　There are many concepts, such as “liberal education” “general education”“liberal arts education” “humanities education”, etc. What are their connotations and connections in your opinion?

Professor Harry Lewis　A liberal education is the education of a free person—that’s the root in Latin. In Roman times, a liberal education was what free men received—as opposed to the education you might give a slave, or a woman. So, a liberal education was what a Roman citizen needed to learn to assume the adult responsibilities of citizenship. That would include reading and writing, but also oratory, geometry, and the transmission of culture, including poetry and music. This is the way I use the term. In those days, it was not in contrast to practical education—you needed to learn arithmetic and geometry, because you might be called on to pay taxes or build bridges. (By the way, some slaves actually were taught to read and write—commonly they were the tutors of the children of free men.)

Now in medieval times this all hardened, and became a canon, the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music); you can google those terms. Those were the liberal “arts”. But now another point of linguistic confusion creeps in. The term “art” here is just a rendering of the Greek techne, meaning any kind of creative skill. The classic text in my field used the term in that sense—Donald Knuth’s monumental The Art of Computer Programming.Alas, a lot of people use “liberal arts” very differently now, to mean the humanities (because when you say that someone is “taking art lessons”,that invariably means painting or drawing—“art” has come to mean mainly things like that). And when people refer to a “liberal arts college”, the suggestion is that it doesn’t teach anything practical, in contrast to a technical institute. That’s a mistake. The root of “technical” is that Greek word for “art”, after all!

So I tend to use the term “liberal education” and “liberal arts education”interchangeably, but sometimes I have to say “liberal arts and sciences” because the people I am talking to think the “liberal arts” don’t include science or technology. The “humanities” are the things that make us human—so the creative arts, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, etc. The things that distinguish us, in some cognitive or spiritual sense, from other living things.

And “general education” would require an essay of its own. It is a fraught question whether it means more than “subjects other than your major”. I tend to think so, and to think that general education is, like liberal education, the part of a college education where students learn to take responsibility for the future of the world. But you could go to any number of committee reports and get contrasting definitions.

Interviewers　Thanks again for granting us this interview!

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(1)　This interview was carried out on April 9, 2015, at Pierce Hall room 217, 29 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. It has previously been published in the Chinese language, Helen Haste is the corresponding author for the Chinese version. The citation information for the Chinese version is as follows: YU H Q, THOMAS J M, HASTE H. To retrieve and guard the soul of higher education—Interview with Harvard University Professor Harry Lewis[J]. Research in Higher Education of Engineering, 2017(3): 53-59. (In Chinese)Shuangchen Yu is the transcriber.

(2)　LEWIS H R. Excellence without a soul: How a great university forgot education[M]. New York:Public Affairs Press, 2006.

(3)　CONDLIFFE LAGEMANN E, LEWIS H R. What is college for? The public purpose of higher education[M]. New York: Teachers College Press, 2012.