Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education

The author has been a Harvard professor for over thirty years and Dean of Harvard College for eight, and uses his experience to explain how his and other universities have lost sight of their educational objectives. EXCELLENCE WITHOUT A SOUL: DOES LIBERAL EDUCATION HAVE A FUTURE examines educational standards, objectives, and new challenges to the higher education goals and marketplace, considering major issues from grade inflation to date rape and how values translate in the college environment. It's a key consideration for any library strong in liberal education analysis, and for college-level education collections. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

Dr. Young-Gil Kim, President of Handong Global University, Pohang, South Korea (www.handong.edu) and the author of "See the Invisible, Change the World" published in 2006 by Xulon Press in the USA. "Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education" by a former Dean of Harvard College and Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science for thirty-two year has greatly attracted me as the founding and incumbent university president trying to practice the whole-person education of a new revolutionary higher education with global perspective demanded in the 21st century. Dr. Lewis's book should be required reading for every college/university presidents academic deans, and professors, who want to find out the true meaning, purposes, and values of higher education. Professor Harry Lewis points out that "education is not the same thing as classroom teaching. ... The professors have become more and more narrow in expertise in order to secure tenure.... In recent years, university has had its head turned ever more by consumerism and by public relations imperatives, to the detriment of its educational priorities for its students. Money and prestige rule over principle and reason." He drew from his experience that how our great universities have abandoned their mission. While striving to be surpassed in the quality of its faculty and students, universities have forgotten that the fundamental purpose of undergraduate education is to turn young people into adults who will take responsibility for society. I would like to expand on the concept of "society". We now describe the scale and scope of our society as "global". The internet and IT revolution have "connected" every aspect of our lives to an unprecedented fashion. World markets and currencies rise and fall not only on military conflicts, but now on simple climate to regulatory changes in local regions. Therefore the definition of leadership has also expanded from a local to a global scale, and it is imperative that the universities and education system equip the future leaders of the 21st century. How do we equip these leaders? This has been the focus and mission of Handong Global University (HGU). The three important components of global leadership education are global communication ability, global character, and global professional capability. The global leadership education of combining the following: professional capability, character education, and global perspective education. On a final note, the global leadership education is not an "option" or "nice to have" education philosophy, but a "must" and "need to have" for the future leaders of the 21st century.

My best friend from first grade went to Harvard College in 1971. Since the Ivy League at that time was still all-male, I went to Mount Holyoke College. We met again at Tufts, him in the Medical School and myself in the Dental School. Don said the hardest part of Harvard was getting in; no course he took in the pre-med department could hold a candle to the AP Chemistry course he took at our public high school. I feel he sold out his considerable abilities as a paper-pusher for an HMO, but he may disagree. But the fact remains that although he has an MD he doesn't see many patients. Classmates of mine who spent semesters at the Ivy League schools also commented on the easy courses and high grades.Granted, at MHC some students took the easy way out; our class valedictorian was a French major who was from France! And for that you paid what?This book doesn't tell other college grads anything they didn't already suspect. My daughter graduated from Quinnipiac, and my son is a sophomore at Centenary College in New Jersey. The only parents I met who wanted their son to go to Harvard weren't interested in what he wanted or if he belonged there.That's the trouble with being Harvard: so many people just want the name. Both my kids had interests and looked for the schools that had the programs they wanted.The book is well-written and a good read, and it will make you glad your kids didn't want to go to Harvard!

I have felt for some years that the big American universities have been short changing their students, especially their undergraduate students. While to a large extent the student will get out of the school what they put into it, the large research universities are concentrating so much on research that they seem to forget their basic role. It is quite possible to go through any of these big schools and get an undergraduate degree without ever having a class taught by a professor. Instead they are taught by teaching assistents, with little, if any, teaching experience. The smaller undergraduate only schools such as Dickinson (Carlisle, PA), Reed (Portland, OR) and of course many others provide an undergraduate program where the student meets real, honest to God professors, and even can work with them on things like their research. The student is even likely to get named on papers he writes. At the big schools, no way. Of course what you get at Harvard and the others, is membership in an exclusive group. If your goal is Wall Street, Washington, or a big law firm, a Harvard degree gets you an introduction that can't be beat, regardless of how good an education you received. It will be interesting to watch what happens to these schools in the coming years.

The author makes a refreshingly candid appraisal of how higher education, specifically Harvard College, has been dealing with critical issues affecting the lives and educations of undergraduates. In doing so, he exposes the hypocrisy of political correctness, the vapidity of "consumer oriented" higher education, and, above all, the smugly arrogant attitudes that are held by too many who direct today's institutions of higher learning. Throughout, the writing is clear and often blunt. This book is especially fascinating in its explanations of the historical background that created many of today's policies and procedures at Harvard and elsewhere, and the cases examined are presented in a lively and interesting way. Lewis makes his points efficiently and effectively, provoking the reader's interest throughout. This is a book that raises important questions about the overall purpose of higher education in a societal context. Perhaps there could have been a bit more argument as to why the production of thinking, conscientious citizens is so critical in today's world, but I suppose that goes beyond the scope of the book. Yet, if Harvard is indeed the trendsetter for academic policies in the 21st century - - as few of us would deny - - then all Americans should take time to reflect on Lewis's wisdom. There's a lot of important stuff here.