4.0
Excellence Without a Soul
ByPublisher Description
America's great research universities are the envy of the world -- and none more so than Harvard. Never before has the competition for excellence been fiercer. But while striving to be unsurpassed in the quality of its faculty and students, Universities have forgotten that the fundamental purpose of undergraduate education is to turn young people into adults who will take responsibility for society. In Excellence Without a Soul, Harry Lewis, a Harvard professor for more than thirty years and Dean of Harvard College for eight, draws from his experience to explain how our great universities have abandoned their mission. Harvard is unique; it is the richest, oldest, most powerful university in America, and so it has set many standards, for better or worse. Lewis evaluates the failures of this grand institution -- from the hot button issue of grade inflation to the recent controversy over Harvard's handling of date rape cases -- and makes an impassioned argument for change. The loss of purpose in America's great colleges is not inconsequential. Harvard, Yale, Stanford -- these places drive American education, on which so much of our future depends. It is time to ask whether they are doing the job we want them to do.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesExcellence Without a Soul Reviews
4.0
““The role of moral education has withered, conflicting with the imperative to give students and theirs what they for the money they are paying.”
If you look at the history of higher education, you would see a clear decline in moral education. Colleges and universities of the past were tied very close with the church thus moral teaching came directly from the church’s teachings. As time progress the connection between higher education and the church digressed.
In many ways the university has deviated from its original goals. The curriculum from the 17th century would be completely alien to professors and students today. As the years progressed, the goals and curriculum has changed, and in his book Excellence without a Soul, Harry R. Lewis retells the history of Harvard and the issues confronting the renowned school. As the former dean of Harvard College, Lewis was involved in plenty of faculty feuds, student protests, and national scandals. Many times he saw the school take the easy way over the smart route. Many times he saw the school bend to pressure instead of standing firm on values. He states late in the book, “The college is more interested in making students happier than making them better.”
This is a very interesting book. There are plenty of resources criticizing higher education, but rarely are those criticisms written by someone with such high credentials as Lewis.
When I picked up this book I was really looking for a book that addresses the university’s need to approach morality. Though a lot of the book is dedicated to the history of Harvard and its challenge in every aspect, Lewis does spend a bit of time confronting the issue of morality.
He says it bluntly, “Harvard today tiptoes away from moral education, little interested in providing it and embarrassed to admit it does not wish to do so.” Schools have completely abandoned the idea of morality, mainly because in a postmodern culture morality is a questionable idea.
I found this book to be extremely interesting. I never would have thought working at a prestigious school such as Harvard would be that difficult, but it actually sounds worse.”
About Harry Lewis
Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Harvard College professor, has been on the Harvard faculty for thirty-two years. He was Dean of Harvard College between 1995 and 2003 and chaired the College's student disciplinary and athletic policy committees. He has been a member of the undergraduate admissions and scholarship committee for more than three decades. Lewis lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
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