Two weeks after the trial, the battle takes place between Harvard, who did not want a battle, and the Trump administration who asked him. A major concern among the Trump administration is the lack of diversity of Harvard’s point of view.
Harvard’s unilateral tenderness for the left, complete and prolonged, caused – or even invited – the shock. He also revealed a deeper division between science and the human sciences – calm now but with a story of Harvard.
The diversity from a point of view means wanting more conservatives, not another pinch of extreme shirts. Mailing a good mixture on the left and right is not legally a crime – so we assume that Goes Harvard is reasonable in the battle – but it is a massive error, which forced Harvard in the courts. Speating in the courts to defend its independence is still dependent, and it only offers tenuous relief from a siege in Trumpist.
If Harvard wants to avoid other problems with the Republicans, he must change his attitude. As the Harvard administration began to see it, this free partisan attitude does not preserve Harvard’s independence – it endangers it. There is much to gain and little to lose in welcoming curators to share our business.
Who most risks in the battle of Harvard? Scientists, who need government money. This fact opens up a second problem of diversity of point of view within universities which is not so easy to solve: the gap between scientists and humanists.
Harvard scientists will undoubtedly admire the impressive decision of its president to verify Trumpist’s attempt to take control of the university, but some of them will reflect that it is Harvard humanists who cause problems while scientists pay the cost. A more in -depth examination of the difference between science and the humanities will help to understand this second division.
When I arrived in the first year in Harvard in 1949, I took a science course, Natural Sciences 4, who did not taught by a professor but by the former president of the University James B. Conant. He was a scientist who had been part of a committee for the recommendations concerning the Manhattan project during the Second World War who produced the atomic bomb. Absorbed by the question of whether it was a good thing for humanity, he inspired a new program at Harvard called “General Education”, of which this course was one. To make education “general”, including science and human sciences, seemed to be the goal.
After this course, the differences between them have become clearer for me. Science deals with numbers, human sciences with people – particular human beings whose science sums up. If a course takes proper names like Shakespeare and Goethe, it belongs to the humanities; If it concerns impersonal objects as common names, it is science.
Our names are essential to us. Each human being has a proper name, all different, to respect the human desire for self-importance. However, a doctor using medical science does not need to know your name in order to treat your human body. Science is an unnamed collective company of what “we know”, while inconsistently allowing the pursuit of Nobel Prize. Teachers in the humanities write their own books and make “contributions” to Shakespeare’s literature.
Science is hypothetical (Nat SCI 4!) And progresses by throwing the old hypotheses and finding new ones. The human sciences do not progress – which is now equal to Homer and Shakespeare – and they offer an overview of the permanent human truths of honor and beauty that the scientific method cannot discern or recognize.
Unlike the human sciences, which is pore on books and dusty archives, science, with its “pioneer research” (as the president of the University Alan M. Garber ’76 said in his response to Trumpists) can offer manifest advantages, especially in modern medicine. But science (or its technology) also offers risks to the humanity of the atomic warfare possible and changes in climate. Maybe science has remedies for the dangers it brings, but perhaps not.
In addition, science must approach and convince the non -scientific public that its research deserves funding. This is difficult because the accuracy of modern science stems from its use of mathematics, which keeps it at a distance from the vast majority of human beings who are not suitable for numbers – including myself. We must be approached with rhetoric – inaccurate and often too promising. Our experience shows that science is hypothetical and open -minded, while the transmission of science can be partisan and closed in mind.
Science dominates the university, but it cannot defend itself or be explained without deviating from scientific rigor. There is no scientific evidence that science is good. Of my memory of “the structure of scientific revolutions“” By Thomas S. Kuhn – Formerly instructor of Nat SCI 4 – Scientific progress is more a change in rhetoric from one normal paradigm to another (which is politics) than the pioneer discovery of truth.
However, when we go from science to human sciences, we encounter postmodern arguments such as Kuhn’s helpless relativism. Far from giving reasons why science could be good, the human sciences are not justified. They know that they are not science, but what are they, and what do they know?
Why should Harvard be independent? Because it helps society; It’s worth the money! This answer made Harvard the expert part of the company. Does it not need a standard of external society to justify itself as independent? Something like Veritas This combines science and human sciences – a Harvard who seeks wisdom that makes science precious for human beings.
A political scientist myself, I like to think that this wisdom focuses on politics. A wiser policy than dedication to a single party would have protected scientists and corrected humanists.
Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 is the Kenan research teacher in Harvard.