Happy Birthday, Fair Harvard!

By Ezra Bowen.

It hardly seems the sort of thing that Harvard would do, but Harvard is surely doing it. Through four glittering days this week, the first and, by many estimates (including its own), still the finest institution of higher learning in America will revel through a 350th anniversary fete. There will be, expectably, a stately convocation and more than 100 symposiums on topics ranging from the U.S. Constitution to the structure of a Beethoven string quartet. But the overriding tone of the festivities is pure glitz, in which an illuminated gas-filled plastic rainbow will arch 600 feet across the Charles River from Harvard's campus in Cambridge to Boston. Along the riverbank, a larger-than-life marionette of the university's natal benefactor, John Harvard, will prance to the music of a female samba group called the Batucada Belles. Saturday night the fete will peak in a pyrotechnical dazzle put on by Tommy Walker, who helped stage the finale of the Statue of Liberty centenary. Skyrockets will spell out the name JOHN HANCOCK -- one of eight Harvard men, thank you, who signed the Declaration of Independence -- and at the climax a 700-sq.-ft. Harvard logo will be emblazoned on the night sky as the band plays Fair Harvard.

Such ostentation seems out of keeping with the solemnity and surviving Brahmin spirit of the university, whose early masters forbade the setting of "bonfires and illuminations" or "making tumultuous or indecent noises." And some Harvard faces have gone crimson at the prospect. Historian Oscar Handlin was quoted as saying, "I would have liked it to be more scholarly and less show biz." The hoopla and hustle will include the licensed sale of memorabilia like goldplated watches to pull a few more dollars into Harvard's $3.5 billion endowment (already the biggest of any private U.S. university).

But if any American establishment is entitled to celebrate itself, if ever a baby has come a long way from rustic origins, it is Harvard University. Despite the continuing challenge from such superb schools as Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard, under its patrician president Derek Bok, remains the gauge against which others are measured. As the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame, puts it, Harvard is "the standard bearer and symbol of excellence."

Because of this enduring preeminence, Harvard and the people drawn to it have imposed as powerful an influence upon the nation as has any other private institution. Six Presidents, from John Adams to John F. Kennedy, came from Harvard, bringing with them some potent Cambridge-bred notions and cronies. Franklin D. Roosevelt had his New Deal, whose underlying Keynesianism, says Harvard Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, was imported from Cambridge. J.F.K. had his best and brightest, including Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Harvard's Henry Kissinger surely was the most powerful figure in the Nixon and Ford Administrations.

A reception last winter in Washington honored 40 high-ranking presidential appointees with the Harvard connection. Among them: Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and five Cabinet members. Absent from the party were Chief Justice Nominee William Rehnquist (M.A., '50) and three of the Supreme Court's Associate Justices, all veterans of the Harvard Law School, where Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Felix Frankfurter learned their torts, and where a pragmatic innovation called the case-study system changed legal education in America. Says Alumnus Richard Darman, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury: "I cannot imagine the influence has ever been higher than it is now."

Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the only institution of its kind within a U.S. university, teaches governance to 700 full-time students and is host at any given time to some 600 government officials -- Congressmen, Governors, big- and little-city mayors and Cabinet members -- who flock there for guidance.

The Harvard business school has 32,000 M.B.A.s in the world of trade, where many have traded up: 45% of the class of '49 are either chief executive officers or chief operating officers. For anyone seeking access to such power, the Harvard ticket can be pure gold. "There is no question," says one Harvard administrator, "that you can get into doors that otherwise would be closed." Moreover, in the best business fashion the Harvard B school makes money by selling each year 2.5 million copies of its own celebrated case studies to 3,000 educational institutions and corporations worldwide.

The Harvard Medical School has been a principal colonizer of the profession's training centers. In the past two decades the deans of 36 other medical schools have taken their degrees in Cambridge. "Most medical schools have a single university hospital," notes former Harvard Dean Robert Ebert, whereas Harvard has affiliations with 13. These unexcelled facilities have helped generate such breakthroughs as John Enders' growing of the polio virus in a test tube, the first invitro fertilization of a human egg, the first successful kidney transplant and pioneering lab methods for growing skin and bone.

Such discoveries have swelled Harvard's string of Nobel prizes to 29, of which 25 have been won by the scientific and medical departments, whose scholarly explorations Harvard contemplates with special pride. Among the others: significant discoveries in the fields of chemical bonding, laser spectroscopy and quantum electrodynamics. President Paul Gray of M.I.T., Harvard's great scientific rival and neighbor on the Charles, twits Harvard for its emphasis on esoteric research. "M.I.T.," Gray says, "is more at ease with the real world." To which Paul Martin, dean of Harvard's Division of Applied Sciences, replies with a seigneurish thrust: "The kind of research done here is not on the one-to-three-year payoff plan. We can't rely on places like M.I.T. to represent this part of civilization."

The Harvard hauteur annoys outsiders, including, perhaps, the present White House, which last March announced that Ronald Reagan would not appear at this week's gala after Harvard made known that the President would not be given an honorary degree. This monumental snub, say critics, came from a university whose sons hold themselves in too high esteem. Secretary of Education William Bennett (J.D., '71) claims he was influenced more by Washington's Gonzaga High and Williams College than by Harvard, and doubts there is a Harvard network or indeed a Harvard point of view. "You will find Harvard men on all sides of an issue," says Bennett, "and sometimes all those sides are in one Harvard man."

Yet few others deny that the school's reputation still flourishes, if only as a mystique accumulated through time, like the water particles that make up an imposing cloud. "The very name Harvard has a kind of resonance," says Alumna Hanna Holborn Gray, president of the University of Chicago. Harvard is, after all, the school that educated Cotton Mather and Robert Oppenheimer and whose former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Henry Rosovsky, turned down the presidency of Yale in 1977 because he had important work to do at Harvard. It is the university where a student named Henry Thoreau pronounced himself bored, but where such creative successors as T.S. Eliot, Eugene O'Neill, Philip Johnson, Leonard Bernstein and Norman Mailer found inspiration.

It is the sort of place where Author George Plimpton remembers Classmate Bobby Kennedy's "coming to parties with a book under his arm, going off to a corner and ignoring the din and chaos as he read." It is the kind of place too where a visiting student, Edward Lewis, now president of St. Mary's College of Maryland, recalls a lecture given by Professor Paul Tillich that ended with 800 students rising to applaud the theologian. Says Lewis: "That's earned mystique."

The scholars on today's faculty are no less impressive, e.g., Harvey Cox at the Divinity School, Robert Coles in psychiatry, Martin Feldstein in economics. "The critical mass of talent there is stunning," says Chancellor Joseph Duffey of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Faculty ideologies range from the Marxism of Historian John Womack to Galbraith's liberalist economics to the conservative political science of James Q. Wilson to the libertarian ruminations of Philosopher Robert Nozick. "This," says John Shattuck, vice president for government affairs, "is a very dynamic and chaotic institution."

That is also the conviction of President Bok and Dean Rosovsky, to whom the diversity of the faculty they have helped build is perhaps Harvard's greatest strength. "There aren't many universities in the United States that can cover the same range," boasts Rosovsky. Bok describes the faculty as the "building block on which everything else rests." Harvard's president has a time trying to stand on that block. In one of his first meetings with the faculty, Bok began to explain his view of the role of the university. From the back row came a whisper: "We are the university." Observers such as John Rosenblum, dean of the University of Virginia's business school, marvel at "how little power Derek Bok has" to deal with these baronial scholars. Bok acknowledges the situation: "Nothing works around here," he says, "without faculty cooperation." Cooperation is no easy thing to win in Balkanized Harvard, where each of the graduate schools controls its own endowment and budget, hires its own people and sets its own agenda.

However, Bok appoints the deans and has a yea or nay on tenure decisions after the faculty has voted -- powers that provide him with some leverage. In fact, tenure is notoriously tough to win at Harvard, with the result that many promising untenured faculty members migrate out. Last year, for example, Bok vetoed tenure for Sociologist Paul Starr, whose 1982 book The Social Transformation of American Medicine had won a Pulitzer. The apparent reason: Starr was judged to be weak in the quantifiable data research deemed appropriate for a Harvard scholar. He is now tenured at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study.

Bok and the university seem not significantly diminished by such academic brush fires. Notre Dame's Hesburgh attributes Harvard's continuing eminence in part to the strength of Bok's reign. "He certainly has been critical of his own institution," says Hesburgh, "which you can afford to be when you're that good." Mary Patterson McPherson, president of Bryn Mawr, deplores the 1- to-20 ratio of women on Harvard's tenured faculty after a decade of coeducation ("Just deciding to educate girls ain't coeducation in my view," she snaps). Nevertheless, she admires Bok's administrative style. "He's managed to give real leadership in some areas of great importance," McPherson says.

Despite such tributes and honors, however, the persistent question plaguing many minds on the eve of celebration is whether Harvard may be flaunting yesterday's gardenias and still merits the rank of premier U.S. university. The question arises in part because of Harvard's eminence. "Harvard does tend to live in the spotlight," observes Berkeley Chancellor Ira Michael Heyman. By the same token, Harvard may be more closely scrutinized because the challenges confronting it are those confronting most major universities; how Harvard copes may point to the future direction of much of higher education. Says Christopher Fordham, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: "When a glitch develops, it sort of becomes a national problem. Everybody wonders what they are going to do about it."

By one measure of quality -- the caliber of students it attracts -- Harvard remains in front. Typical freshmen this fall ranked in the top 3% of their high school classes. Even more impressive to admissions officers, 73% of the 2,184 accepted by Harvard (from 13,500 applicants) agreed to attend. This percentage, called the yield ratio, is the surest barometer of where the best students want to go. "We're disappointed, selfishly, because those students aren't enrolling here," says Jean Fetter, dean of undergraduate admissions at Stanford, whose yield of 60% is second to Harvard's. A Harvard admission can be regarded as such a prize that one Wall Street lawyer, though he chose not to attend, keeps his framed acceptance on his wall so that other people will know he could have gone there.

To help assure that its top choices show up, Harvard, whose annual cost runs to $16,145, provides more financial aid (an average of $7,500 per recipient) to a larger proportion of students (66%) than any other university. In fact, notes James Miller, director of financial aids, "50% of the students wouldn't see the front door if it weren't for financial aid." The struggle is not so severe for that blessed crew known as "legacies" -- youngsters like Michael Mailer, son of Norman, and Caroline Kennedy, daughter of J.F.K. -- with family members who went to Harvard. At least one in three of these slides under the rope, in contrast to one in six among ordinary applicants.

The reasons given by the chosen few for going to Cambridge, at either the undergraduate or graduate level, seem to vary. Freshman Anh Hguyen-Huynh, a Vietnamese now living in Cleveland, says he was drawn by the mystique: "It is something in the air, something in the spirit of the place." M.B.A. Wendy Roylo Hee, a regional planner in her native Honolulu, picked Harvard "because it was tough. I felt like I was being prepared for whatever was out there." Sarah Keller, Ph.D. '79, now teaching anthropology at Eastern Washington University, agrees that the Cambridge mystique remains as powerful as ever: "You say 'Harvard' and there's this pause," she says. However, she still shudders a bit at some of the memories: halfway through her grueling Ph.D. oral, her inquisitors abruptly invited her to join them for a tea break and informal chat. "I think they wanted to see if you could be graceful even when your life was passing before your eyes," she says.

Adam Cohen, current president of the Harvard Law Review and a 1984 magna cum laude at Harvard, came because "there's so much here." Cohen comments, however, that the students tend to be a "very careerist group with a bloodthirsty desire to get ahead." Bok agrees, not happily. He reports that the stated goals on the applications of incoming freshmen were "money first, followed by power and then making a reputation." Once new students are safely aboard, Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett notes that they acquire a certain "smugness" and "arrogance" -- as witness a cheer that goes up when the Harvard football team, per custom, is being crunched by an opponent with less academic panache: "That's all right, that's O.K., You're gonna work for us someday!" This attitude seems even more pronounced in the graduate schools, whose degrees can be a passkey to a fat job. Harvard M.B.A.s are getting as much as $80,000 a year in starting salary.

The sense of swimming in a school with high-I.Q. piranhas can be too much for new arrivals. Senior Joseph Connolly of Selbyville, Del., recalls his first test in freshman year. "I just choked, I was so scared," he says. "Everybody seemed so smart." Connolly has since earned honors. But Jewett concedes, "The first year and sometimes the first two years are traumatic" -- so traumatic that 1,000 students a year seek psychiatric counseling from Harvard's Mental Health Service.

Despite the angst, many people feel the contact with brilliant and diverse students is the most important aspect of an education in Cambridge. Says Cohen: "You know when you come that you have joined the company of some very, very select people." Grant Colfax, a senior biology major who never went to school but was educated at home in California by his parents, says, "The student body here has been every bit as influential as any of my classes, possibly more influential." His brother Drew, also educated at home, is a freshman this fall. Among Drew's arriving classmates will be Horia Mocanu, who fled Rumania to Turkey with his family in a small boat, taught himself English and, after his U.S. arrival in 1982, earned straight A's at a Cleveland high school, became editor of the paper, founded a chess club and set up an alliance of area high school newspapers. Frederick Rudolph, emeritus professor of the history of education at Williams and onetime visiting lecturer at Harvard, calls these undergraduates "the best students in the world" and suspects that for such a brilliant corps of young men and women, "classes aren't the primary experience." As one Harvard professor puts it, "They come in good, and they go out good."

This may be just as well, for there is evidence that they pick up precious little in four years from some of the school's world-class scholars. Many top Harvard faculty, say critics, tend to be too engrossed in their own research, too busy with outside consulting or just too lordly to bother with anything so trivial as an undergraduate. One eager junior, preparing to write a paper on relations between the U.S. and China, asked for an appointment with Ross Terrill, then director of Harvard's East Asian Studies programs. After a long delay (standard heel cooling for an interview, claims one source, is two weeks), the youngster got in to ask advice. "Rather a waste of our time," said Terrill brusquely. "Why don't you read my congressional testimony?" The student did and wrote so well that his paper was sent to the State Department for study.

Tough stuff, but not uncommon at Harvard, where William Hawkins, '76 and now head of his own California computer-software firm, recalls battling for two years for permission to design a specialized computer-science major for himself alone -- with which he earned magna cum laude. "Harvard was a real sink-or-swim environment," he says. "I learned to be totally self-reliant. The university's idea of personal counseling was, 'What can we do to make you study?' "

The obvious answer to that one -- provide better teaching -- is not always a priority at Harvard. As Shawn Rose, a senior from White Township, N.J., puts it, "All-star professors aren't necessarily all-star teachers." James Q. Wilson, for example, teaches a small section of his course on American politics but does so as if addressing the House of Lords. At a table of 15, he gazes over the heads of students, indulging the musty convention of calling them by their last names only. Yet Wilson is considered sprightly compared with peers like Economist James Duesenberry, dubbed the "Human Quaalude" in the lively if erratic Confidential Guide issued by the campus newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.

There are some outstanding exceptions. Nobel Physicist Carlo Rubbia takes on freshmen in a seminar program. Nuclear Expert and Political Scientist Joseph Nye dines informally with undergrads and hosts small discussion groups. Alan Brinkley, son of TV Commentator David, teaches an oversubscribed course on the Viet Nam War and a lecture series in American history. He does so with such fine basic organization that students claim their notes write themselves. Physics Professor Gerald Holton has punctuated his lecture on dynamics and energy by strapping on a helmet, jumping into a go-cart powered by a fire extinguisher and jetting out through a swinging door.

As at many large universities, however, most top professors generally | confine their undergraduate lectures to survey courses of perhaps 1,000 students, with smaller sections being handled, typically, by unevenly trained teaching fellows. David Leviatin, section leader in a U.S. social history course, claims the system works very well. "First you get the word from on high," he says, "and then you get the word from one of the disciples." Many students would have it otherwise.

The situation is neither recent nor the product of Cambridge conceit. It is part of a legacy from President Charles Eliot, who, starting in 1869, remade Harvard with a new emphasis on research and graduate study, and, among his faculty, strongly encouraged these scholarly pursuits. At Harvard, as at other institutions, the compass needles of many ambitious academics swung toward research. One result is that complaints about poor undergraduate teaching, lofty and inaccessible scholars, huge impersonal survey courses and cold university bureaucracies are heard on campuses from Maine to California. Like Harvard, most institutions of higher learning are wrestling with the question of how to teach undergraduates and what to teach them. Eight years ago, in reaction to the freewheeling 1960s, when course requirements were far less focused, Harvard voted to implement a so-called core curriculum. Largely the handiwork of Rosovsky, the core today is a collection of nearly 150 courses drawn from six broad academic areas, including science, literature and the arts and foreign cultures, from which undergraduates must select 25% of their baccalaureate studies. Rosovsky believes the core assures common immersion in great currents of world knowledge and "develops a student's powers of reasoning and analysis." Moreover, it is designed to prevent scattershot course selection or its opposite, one-dimensional curricula including little but a student's major.

But little and scattered is what many educators feel Harvard's core provides. The University of Massachusetts' Duffey describes its effect on learning as modest. Harvard, he says, does not "seem any closer to making judgments about the qualities of an educated mind." Others note that with the core, a student may graduate from Harvard without having read a word of Shakespeare, the Bible or the U.S. Constitution.

Furthermore, as Hanna Gray points out, "not all the reforms in higher education have come from Harvard . . . Chicago has sustained a core curriculum over a very long period of time." So has St. John's College at its Maryland and New Mexico campuses, and in 1981, Brooklyn College brought in a core that some educators find more focused and demanding than Harvard's. Still, notes Gray, "the interest in the core curriculum as an innovative thing came to be expressed when Harvard used that term."

Like other top schools, Harvard is struggling to find more good black students, who now account for only 7% of Cambridge undergraduates. One key reason for the shortage: substandard elementary and secondary schools, which tend to breed in major cities and rural areas, cut their pupils' chances for entry into a top college. "There is no way," says Jewett, "that we can make up for twelve missed years of education." The problem is intensified by the fact that a bare 1.4% of university faculty -- prime role models -- are black. This too is typical of many other universities. But Harvard faced the special difficulty this year that nearly half of the qualified black applicants offered admission chose not to attend, in part because of a perceived racial coolness in the Boston area.

Very much like its brother and sister colleges, Harvard is not happy with the reduced social commitment among undergraduates. Though virtually no one wants to go back to the bad old days of the tumultuous 1960s, morally concerned faculty and students deplore the cautious, somewhat self-centered mind-set that seems to have invaded the campus. However, Senior D. Joseph Menn of Los Angeles, a socialist, makes the point, "There's been too much made of apathy. A better word is disillusionment. People have to worry more about paying off student loans when they get out and competing in a tougher job market."

Some even more intensive concerns, both moral and academic, have invaded Harvard's graduate schools and advanced-study centers. Last year a mini scandal at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies raised new questions about whether Government funding of university research might encroach on academic freedom. The center's director, Professor Nadav Safran, broke university policy by planning a conference on Islamic Fundamentalism without first notifying Harvard or participants that it had CIA underwriting, and further offended colleagues by publishing a book on Saudi Arabia that contained no acknowledgement of similar financing. Safran has since resigned as director. "These are serious issues and involve many facets of the university," says Shattuck, who contends that he is worried about these "pressures on faculty to serve interests that are other than academic."

Such pressures appeared to be a factor last spring when Graham Allison, dean of the School of Government, announced the awarding of five public service medals. One was to Attorney General Edwin Meese. Many Harvard voices protested that the Meese medal was a transparent currying of favor with the Reagan Administration. But the award stood.

The law school, meanwhile, is recovering from a guerrilla war among some of its faculty. On one side stand old-liners who teach law as a pure discipline, without value colorations. Attacking them is a rebel cadre under the banner of Critical Legal Studies, a left-leaning doctrine that claims the law is no impartial instrument but serves principally, and in partisan fashion, to maintain the status quo in society. Beneath the spoken issues lies a suspicion that the law school may have become too inbred and is not as concerned with legal ethics as it should be.

At one point the battle came down to blocking tenure for rivals. Bok, normally protective as a tiger of Harvard's own, concedes, "There are clearly some problems among the faculty." The uncontentious hiring last spring of three neutral and distinguished professors from the outside and tenure grants -- also peacefully engineered -- to two talented junior faculty have been hailed as signs that the storm is passing.

The business school too has been grappling with some troubles, though nothing quite so anguishing as the law school's. A 1985 poll of 134 national companies measuring employer satisfaction with M.B.A.s dropped the business school from its longtime rating of national leadership to third place, behind Northwestern's Kellogg School and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. One shortcoming that some critics perceive: although business-school alumni still rate first in management skills, they may not be on the cutting edge of economic and market theory. Bok seems to have agreed with this assessment. In a 1979 report he noted that "the case method actually limits the time available for students to master analytic techniques and conceptual material." The B-school agreed and has been ventilating the case method while essentially defending it. Says Senior Associate Dean Joseph Bower, with pride in his school's management training: "One can be effective by working with and through people and not exclusively doing lonely work in the library."

, Another question about the B-school is why it has not been more outspoken on issues like business ethics. Indeed, the school has suffered a few ethical embarrassments of its own. Last spring academic eyebrows went up when it was revealed that a business-school professor gave a slide presentation at a seminar to National Football League executives, allegedly on a strategy for putting the United States Football League out of business, which seems to have happened. The Harvard seminar was cited as evidence in the recent and largely unsuccessful antitrust suit brought by the U.S.F.L. against the N.F.L. Nor was Harvard flattered in 1982 when students playing a business game hacked into their opponents' computer to steal inside data. "We never had a meeting over whether it was right or wrong," said one of the hackers. Still, well- informed observers, like Virginia's Rosenblum, himself a business-school alumnus, argue, "It's not fair to tar Harvard M.B.A.s as being set apart from other M.B.A.s in ethical considerations."

In much the same way, Chicago's Gray urges tolerance toward Harvard, even of the university's dismal record on hiring and promoting female faculty, an imperfection she sees as generic to U.S. universities. With so many fine schools in America, Gray says, there is no way that even Harvard can in everything "be dominant or that in every area it will maintain the same degree of excellence." In fact, she has little patience with the question of who may be No. 1. "The competition is tougher than it was, say, 50 years ago. It doesn't mean Harvard isn't what it used to be."

Bok, of course, remains proud, if discreetly critical, of his elegant academic republic. Contemplating the spectrum of improvements that might be made, he asks "What doesn't need work?" A fair question, especially since a university's reason for being is to improve and disseminate a thing called knowledge, which can never be either properly gauged or made perfect. Perhaps Harvard's students provide the best measure of their own learning experience. If the heart of a young person's education is to know who he is and where he is going, then the oldest and richest U.S. institution of higher learning may still be doing as fine a job as ever. And, after all, Harvard can be indulged for writing its name against the sky, although it may no longer belong there alone.

With reporting by Joelle Attinger, Robert Cunha/ Cambridge and John Edward Gallagher/New York