Word: douthat
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...recent piece in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Truth About Harvard,” Douthat reveals that in retrospect, he feels “cheated” by his undergraduate experience at Harvard, and proceeds to bash practically every aspect of academic life—the classes offered, what is expected of the students, the way grades are given—on his way to concluding that Harvard is, as its critics have long suspected, easy. Harvard students are “creatively lazy,” committing their considerable intellect to achieving the highest grades with...
...Douthat falls victim to his own college-era critique, generalizing the experience of a Harvard student from his own career, which was largely dependent on his personal choices. Perhaps the most vivid recollection in the article is the discussion of a “pathetically easy” paper, for which he apparently “didn’t need to do any reading, absorb any history, or learn anything at all.” One can only wonder why an individual with such a high commitment to academic rigor would have enrolled in such a course...
...proving—via his own example—that “gut” classes and delinquent students exist at even this great university, Douthat does no more than acknowledge that Harvard students are more normal than the traditional “egghead” stereotype might allow. And despite the fact that an exposé of this sort seems to pop up every few months, the article’s success proves that this sort of revelation is clearly still considered newsworthy...
...proves more valuable is in his discussion of the problems with Harvard’s current academic structure: there are major flaws in the current Core Curriculum, the academic advising system, and even the apathy of some professors and teaching fellows. But these descriptions succumb to an inherent bias. Douthat blasts the humanities for inflating grades—he argues that it’s a reaction to their “retreat into irrelevance”—and neglecting to prepare those students who are not headed for professorships of their own. Perhaps the history and literature...
...addition, Douthat is unabashedly Eurocentric. It is a tragedy, he claims, that an undergraduate might leave Harvard’s walls “unable to distinguish Justinian the Great from Julian the Apostate.” Instead, they’re more likely to be familiar with propaganda in Nazi Germany, the role of the samurai in Japanese culture, or the Castro regime in Cuba. Of all the things to criticize, why complain that Harvard is too successful in attempting to expand the cultural and intellectual horizons of its students...