Harvard is Overrated, or, Why I'm Glad I Studied Here...

As an institution, the university is the result of the intellectual triumph of the west in the aftermath of the so-called Dark Ages. The university then was not just a place of training (there were many such training and licensing institutions in the wider world, from the administrative training schools in China to Al Azhar in Egypt), but a community of scholars and masters whose goal was not just to license new masters as per the guilds of the age, but to learn for the sake of learning and to pass these cultural gifts down to the next generation.

The university as an institution faced many shifts, but had always maintained its integrity as an institution of learning and culture. While the shift of focus from philosophy and the arts to the hard sciences as precipitated in the 18th and 19th centuries seemed like it would sidetrack the university as a place where one learns of culture and the humanities, it only resulted in universities further segregating the two tiers of undergraduate and graduate programs, with the implicit understanding that the students need first be formed as human beings and citizens before they withdraw into the heart of academia to dedicate their lives to research and the pursuit of knowledge.

The perceived destruction of the university as an institute of learning and culture did not come with August Comte and his new scientific religion. It came first with Dewey and his philosophy of educational pragmatism, which turned the university into a diploma mill, and was followed closely by J. Hendrix, the Beatles, hippies, and that gigantic miasma known culturally as "the 60's".

It was a civilization-wide phenomenon that destroyed university learning in the West, from Europe to the US. The rise of "vocationalism" certainly meant that we now have stricter, better development programs for the professions: medicine, law, business and the hard sciences. However, it meant that the university has been reduced to training center and licensing authority. The profound learning of what constitutes the human condition all but atrophied, and eventually disappeared. The 60's had questioned learning right out of existence, most magnificently concretized by the student riots of 1968. (A curse on that decade and its malcontents!)

The result is that when it came to the liberal arts and the humanities, the culture by which Western civilization propagates itself, the university all but gave up.

Today a young person does not generally go off to the university with the expectation of having an intellectual adventure, of discovering strange new worlds, of finding out what the comprehensive truth about man is. This is partly because he thinks he already knows, partly because he thinks such truth unavailable. And the university does not try to persuade him that he is coming to it for the purpose of being liberally educated, at least in any meaningful sense of the term — to study how to be free, to be able to think for himself. The university has no vision, no view of what a human being must know in order to be considered educated. Its general purpose is lost amid the incoherent variety of special purposes that have accreted within it. Such a general purpose may be vague and undemonstrable, but for just this reason it requires the most study. The meaning of life is unclear, but that is why we must spend our lives clarifying it rather than letting the question go. The university's function is to remind students of the importance and urgency of the question and give them the means to pursue it. Universities do have other responsibilities, but this should be their highest priority.

- Alan Bloom, Our Listless Universities

What we have now are universities so hollowed out of human substance that they replace virtue with knowledge. Welcome to the modern "research" university, where the community of scholars of old hold no interest in passing on knowledge, but in merely gorging in its pursuit. Chief of these is the #1 university in the world, Harvard University, a research university par excellance.

A simple overview of the methodology of ranking universities already makes clear this egregious surrender of the university's greatest responsiblity. The greatest weight is placed, not in learning, but in what other researchers have to say about said university. The rest of the criteria only reinforce the notion of the university as a distributor of diplomas and licenses, with the wider and more diverse disbursment of licenses as an apparent condition for excellence.

But what galls about Harvard is that it was supposed to be the best. And what is the best university in the world up to?

If you want to learn about modern Czech fantasy novels, Harvard is an excellent place to be. The same goes if you want to study women writers from the Caribbean or elementary particle physics (where the particles, not the physics, are elementary). But where should you go if you want to become an educated person? What fun Socrates would have had at Harvard, the supposedly preeminent educational institution in the world.
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Harvard began as a school for Puritan settlers in the New World, meant to ensure that ministers were literate and somewhat learned; it has since grown into a world-renowned research university. Its professors are scholarly specialists whose interests have little to do with those of most students. Not that its undergraduates are particularly concerned about getting an education. Many treat college as one more rung on the ladder, and they inevitably have time-consuming extracurricular pursuits. Some indeed are academics in the making, yet, as can be seen from their professors, this has little to do with being well educated. So Harvard College ends up being little more than a collection of specialized, expert professors who lecture to, but otherwise try not to interfere with, their ambitious, talented students—a generalization, to be sure, to which there are numerous exceptions, but it is true enough.

Maximilian Pakaluk, Without the Point

Here's more:

Academic prestige is based mostly on the research achievements of the faculty. Places like Harvard or Stanford have many professors who are among the leading experts in their respective fields, including some who have won Nobel Prizes.

Good for them. But is it good for you, if you are a student at Prestige U.?

Big-name professors are unlikely to be teaching you freshman English or introductory math. Some may not be teaching you anything at all, unless and until you go on to postgraduate study.

In other words, the people who generated the prestige which attracted you to the college may be seen walking about the campus but are less likely to be seen standing in front of your classroom when you begin your college education.
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By contrast, at a small college without the prestige of big-name research universities, the introductory courses which provide a foundation for higher courses are more likely to be taught by experienced professors who are teachers more so than researchers.

Thomas Sowell, Choose Wisely

This is a betrayal of learning on a massive scale. So many great institutions have gained their funding and their government grants, but sold their souls in the process. Whoever coined the phrase, "money is the root of all evil" was wrong, but he would be excused if it was universities he had in mind. A university may live or die on research, but it is not a university if it cannot teach. One might as well just call it a scholar's union, or a training center, but it is not a university.

Some people are slowly beginning to recognize this phenomenon, where education gets in the way of learning, as Mark Twain once put it. So, what are they doing?

They're going elsewhere.

What else can they do?

This is why I am glad I stayed here to study. Here, the decay is slower, and I still see professors and scholars of great reknown taking the time to teach and form the next generation to the best of their ability. Some are great teachers, like Dr. Dumol of UA&P. Some may not be the greatest teachers. I've heard horror stories about Fr. Arcilla from Ateneo University, who seems to be the dullest teacher this side of living despite being one of the best scholars in his field. But what inspires me is that they are compelled, still, to form the culture around them and to imbue their students with the knowledge of what it means to be human. They carry the spirit of those masters of the Middle Ages, when all the world was young, driven to shine the light over every mind seeking in the dark. More so than their colleagues up in the so-called greatest "universities" in the world.

I suppose it is ironic that the light of the humanities shines stronger in the margins than in their once-vaunted center.