Re: Harvard’s Postmodern Curriculum

Rusty, that was a great piece on Harvard’s new curriculum. You did a fine job of identifying the ills afflicting modern collegiate pedagogy. To your analysis I would add a brief comment. The modern university can teach students to be critics, and indeed modern college students are very good at being analytical and critical. The problem is that because modern universities do not hold any coherent and functional systems of belief themselves, they end up teaching students nothing to fill the ideological void in their lives. When all philosophies are torn down and none embraced there is no victory won; there are only young people who are left looking at their lives, wondering if there is any purpose or meaning in them. It is no wonder, then, that when Billy Graham asked the then-president of Harvard Derek Bok what the greatest problem was for today’s students, Bok responded with one word: “emptiness.”