Can Harvard Learn Anything From Ralph Waldo Emerson?
A university should be a home for those who seek truth, not a madrassa of the progressive left.
Jan. 9, 2024
The novelist Henry James said that Ralph Waldo Emerson—who was once the country’s beloved essayist-laureate, author of the iconic American effusion called “Self-Reliance” and the semiofficial philosopher of entrepreneurial individualism—suffered from a fatal flaw. Emerson’s disabling defect, James thought, was innocence: He had no “sense of the dark, the foul, the base.” The novelist said of the essayist: “A ripe unconsciousness of evil is . . . one of the most beautiful signs by which we know him.”
James and Emerson were giants of American literature long ago, but they belonged to different generations. Emerson (1803-82) wrote his important essays (those sun-shot prose miracles of the country’s morning energy) in the years before the Civil War, before that catastrophic crack in American history. James (1843-1916) composed his elaborately shadowed novels well after Appomattox. It was the Civil War that introduced the naive country to its fallen self. The conflict ushered in, among other things, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, the Gilded Age and the robber barons, mass immigration from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe. James and Emerson came of age in two different Americas. No wonder, then, that they had different ideas about the country’s capacity for good or evil.
Emerson graduated with Harvard’s class of 1821. James studied at the law school 40 years later, during the Civil War. I mention them because those sons of Harvard framed the issue that haunts the great university now. The controversy that divides Harvard in the 21st century is rooted in the question of American theodicy: How can the country’s evils be reconciled with its core Emersonian ideal of excellence, individualism, freedom of thought and speech, and other foundational notions that—not always honored but always implicitly there—are essential to the country’s future?
Emerson, the woke may say, was as white as a white man can be. Claudine Gay’s vision has never been impaired by his sweet, transcendental astigmatism. Ms. Gay came into office last summer as Harvard’s president with a “transformative” agenda that assumed the university’s—and the country’s—embedded evil: racism, white supremacy, oppression of minorities, especially of blacks.
It’s a moral question in a different key, but Ms. Gay and her supporters seem unfazed by this contradiction: If America is so oppressively evil, how did it happen that this black professor, with embarrassingly meager qualifications, found herself at the pinnacle of American academic life as president of Harvard? How is it that, having been forced to resign—not, as she claims, because of racism but because of her own shortcomings, including extensive plagiarism—she will stay on as a professor at the university with a salary of more than $900,000 a year? The cost of a four-year Harvard education these days is estimated at $334,000. Instead of firing her for cause, it will be as if Harvard had decided that a dozen undergraduates’ painfully assembled tuitions are to be allocated each year to finance Ms. Gay’s opulence and soothe her bruised feelings.
Harvard’s motto is veritas—truth. That was never meant to be a claim that Harvard already possesses the truth. Rather, it was a promise to struggle to search for the truth. The flaw in Ms. Gay’s vision—and that of the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy that she and her fellow ideologues have assembled—is that they do claim they already possess it. They set about trying to reorganize the institution to impose their party line. This defeats the university’s purpose, which is noble in itself and essentially self-effacing. Harvard has no business operating as a madrassa of the progressive left. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson wrote: “We are now men, and . . . not minors and invalids in a protected corner.” He would have scorned the woke hysteria over pronouns and microaggressions and the atmosphere of doctrinaire self-pity.
As another son of Harvard (class of 1963), I’d cast a vote for Emerson and a return of the university to its Emersonian self. Let it be morning again in Cambridge, Mass., and not the bitter ideological dusk of the woke, which feels like Walter Ulbricht’s East Germany in the 1950s, and where, in Emerson’s words, “the virtue in most request is conformity.”
Henry James was wrong about Emerson and evil, by the way. Emerson abominated slavery. He called the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 a “filthy law.” He was friendly to John Brown. Of New England fortunes founded on the slave trade, he said, “it is high time our bad wealth came to an end. I am sure I shall very cheerfully take my share of suffering in the ruin of such a prosperity and shall very willingly turn to the mountains to chop wood and seek to find for myself and my children labors compatible with freedom and honor.”
In the big realm of ideas and art, Emerson’s whiteness was no more disqualifying—let alone oppressive or evil—than William Shakespeare’s. To say otherwise is to embrace an ignorant, inverted racism that has no place at any university.
Mr. Morrow is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism.”
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Appeared in the January 10, 2024, print edition as 'Can Harvard Learn Anything From Ralph Waldo Emerson?'.