The Worst Class Evah?
Daniel Pipes graduated from Harvard in 1971, the same year in which Paul and I graduated from Dartmouth. To Daniel’s misfortune, one of his college classmates was Chuck Schumer. Schumer, the next year, was one of my law school classmates. Happily, I have no recollection of ever having met him. Daniel writes:
“The worst class ever”: that’s how Nathan Pusey, Harvard’s then-president, described my undergraduate cohort of 1971.
What a time, when a college administrator would say such a thing!
With a half century’s leisure to contemplate that bitter judgment, I’ve concluded that he was just about right. Of course, one can’t be sure, as no one can know all of Harvard’s 385 graduating classes. I can assert, however, that ours was not just feckless in college – what Pusey observed and condemned – but in the fifty years since, when it actively joined in the degradation of American higher education and culture.
The dismal legacy of Chuck Schumer and Harvard s class of 71 The university has been transformed from an institution encouraging free enquiry to one seeking to inculcate a message Follow Us
Question of the Day
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
“The worst class ever”: that’s how Nathan Pusey, Harvard’s then-president, described my undergraduate cohort of 1971.
With a half century’s leisure to contemplate that bitter judgment, I’ve concluded that he was just about right. Of course, one can’t be sure, as no one can know all of Harvard’s 385 graduating classes. I can assert, however, that ours was not just feckless in college what Mr. Pusey observed and condemned but in the 50 years since, when it actively joined in the degradation of American higher education and culture.
Harvard’s Counter Teach-In, 50 Years Later
How a student disruption prefigured the extremism of today’s college campuses
Fifty years ago, some friends and I had the audacity to sponsor what we called the “Counter Teach-In: An Alternative View.” It took place at Harvard University on March 26, 1971, and argued in favor of American involvement in the Vietnam War a position roughly as outrageous then on campus as arguing in universities now that Israel should defeat the Palestinians.
Opponents of the war disrupted the event. In doing so, they took the first step toward the cancel culture that has overtaken campus life, with faculty and students alike now being investigated by star chambers before being fired or expelled for the sin of holding the wrong views. Similarly, the strong words and weak actions of Harvard’s leadership foreshadowed cowardly conduct of university administrators who speak bravely but act with pusillanimity.