Recruiting season

Recruiting can be a polarizing topic here. For many students, it is a busy, stressful time: info sessions are attended, hands are shaken, free food is accepted, and bonds that will last at least several minutes and at most a few weeks are forged. (This, I’m told, is networking, and there’s a chance that recruitees’ future happiness and success depend on it.) Other students spend recruiting season lamenting the fact that so many of their peers take jobs in finance and consulting, careers that ultimately, these students argue, offer high salaries but contribute little to society.

But there is yet another group of students who are often forgotten in the fray. You probably have not heard much from us, but that is only because we’re not saying anything. We are united only by our apathy, and although most of us have no interest in spending two or—god forbid—more years of our lives working in finance or consulting, we take no issue with the students who do pursue those careers. Let me explain why I count myself in this group.

We like to celebrate diversity at Harvard, and in many ways, this campus has become a much more diverse place over the decades. Still, for most undergraduates, getting into Harvard meant following the same path. We took the most advanced classes in high school, we excelled in them, we wrote good essays, we tested well, and we each had a handful of impressive extracurricular achievements to boot. There are exceptions to any rule, but for the vast majority of us, this was the path that took us to Harvard. It is an uphill, but well-marked, path, and for most—but certainly not all—of us, the question was not whether we would attend college, but where.

Senior year of college is the first time when most of us face truly uncertain futures. Of course, I’ve always known this day would come, but I had imagined it would be different. No doubt these past four years have been a formative time for me, but I had always thought they’d be more formative. I imagined that I would leave college knowing exactly what I wanted in life and exactly what I would need to do to get it. But I’m increasingly aware that the path to fulfillment—whatever the hell that is—is not a leisurely walk up a gentle slope. I look down the road, and I realize that on this path there is scrambling and rock climbing, wrong turns and backtracking. It is easy to get lost, and the farther I hike, I fear, the farther I might feel from my destination. (One day when I’m old and wise, I’m sure I will understand that the hike itself was my destination.) This is an exciting time of life, but it is also—and no one had properly warned me of this—incredibly scary. The world is a big, intimidating place, and it is hard not to feel a little small and confused and just overwhelmed by it all.

So what does any of this have to do with recruiting? We are often reminded that a Harvard education is a privilege, and with this privilege comes a responsibility to give back to our society. I believe this to be true, and I think that, ultimately, giving back will be an essential part of living a fulfilling life. But we seniors also face the stark reality of needing to find the trailhead at a time in our lives when, quite frankly, we are all pretty clueless about the world, in general, and what we want from it, in particular. If one of us thinks that his or her path to a fulfilling life might begin on Wall Street, at a consulting firm, in the Teach for America corps, at the White House, in Hollywood, or in a tent in Harvard Yard, who are any of us to say otherwise? At the end of the day, we’re all just trying to find our ways and make a difference in this crazy, scary world, and we should be supportive of our classmates’ endeavors as we begin our journeys beyond the gates.

Among other things, we may need to borrow money from our investment-banking friends some day. Let’s hope they’re well-networked.

Jeremy Patashnik ’12 is the Humor Editor and the U.S. Editor Emeritus.

Photo Credit: Tim Sackton, Flickr

But for all the pomp and circumstance, what truly amazed was the policy. Even in my relatively small office, the breadth and depth of policy-making was breathtaking. The issues that passed through were varied, meticulous, and eye-opening. The far-reaching policies get the front page of the New York Times, whether healthcare reform or Dodd-Frank, but what often goes unmentioned or under-examined is just as important, if not more.

From electric infrastructure grants to rules on federal loans for for-profit universities, these policies rarely rile up activists, or, for that matter, anyone really. But these are the countless policies that cross the desks of policy-makers at every level of government every day—and shape our daily lives.

Few know or care about the Department of Labor’s new rulemaking on whether retiree investment advisors should be held to higher “fiduciary” standards. But for our parents and grandparents, this rule could be worth thousands of dollars. Has your bank started charging you for debit card use? You can thank the Durbin Amendment of the Dodd-Frank Act and new rules from the Federal Reserve. Perhaps your doctor is keeping electronic health records or even using an iPad. That is the Department of Health and Human Services and their new incentives for using IT in healthcare.

By DC standards, these are, in fact, wide-ranging and weighty rules. Far from minutia, they are worthy of hearing upon hearing and heavy lobbying from interest groups. Outside that realm, however, most of us would rather bury our heads in a problem set than learn more about the Appalachian Regional Development Initiative. Yet this “small stuff” is the stuff of everyday governance; it affects our lives in tangible and meaningful ways.

There is a propensity for all of us who fashion ourselves policy-minded or political to emphasize the big picture. Where has Obama left liberalism? How does the Paul Ryan budget refashion the American social contract? What does Occupy Wall Street say about Rawlsian fairness? Is American drone policy constitutional?

These are important questions of equality, history, and justice. But, we should not lose sight of what government actually does each and every day. Government is neither a theory nor an ideology. It exists to improve citizens’ lives, and much of that mission occurs in the details and the small bore. It is not particularly glamorous or exciting, but it is fundamental.

This focus on the particulars is sometimes mistaken for an argument of pragmatism over principle. President Clinton’s second term “triangulation” may have been the epitome of political pragmatism in its small uncontroversial initiatives, child gun trigger locks and school uniforms. But, if anything, the everyday consequences of policy minutia demand nothing less than principled debate. Indeed, we should encourage and expect ferocious wrangling over the details of government.

The fight to cap debit card fees charged to merchants, the Durbin Amendment, had been raging for almost a year, and finalized after a storm of comment and lobbying from Wall Street, credit unions, and retailers—the National Grocers Association included—over every last cent banks could charge per swipe. Though on a significantly smaller scale, these battles are waged month after month across the policy map. Added together, these increments change things.

These are the trenches where government—and ideology—matter and affect our daily lives. It is in the post-legislation regulation and the seemingly minor announcements where policy shines and governing is done. It is not grand strategy, and it will not change the world, but it is the foundational work of government. And it affects citizens’ lives. So while we strive to tackle the big issues and big questions, as we well should, let us not forget the small ones percolating in government offices that push policy forward every day.

Jonathan Yip ‘13 is the World Editor Emeritus.

My generation, having been born on the cusp of what some call our “holiday from history,” does not know the meaning of this. We were born at the end of history, in 1989.

Of course we were young, and only slowly becoming aware of the world beyond the cul-desac. But I remember the bombs over Belgrade, the Lewinsky scandal (how could any appropriately inquisitive 9-year-old forget?), and the starting lineup of the ’98 Yankees.

Then everything seems to fade away until that day in September, when my middle school classmates started getting called to go home on the P.A. system. I am from Rockland County, about an hour north of New York City, but I went to a middle school with 2,400 kids, and not everyone’s parents came home that night.

My mother let me finish the day at school. On the bus ride home I was sitting next to my best friend and next-door neighbor, a devout Muslim boy from Pakistan. At that point, we still didn’t know the details. But I remember him sighing and saying to me, “It was probably Arabs.” I shrugged it off, but he was right. My family met me at the top of the driveway. History had returned.

Like everyone else, I wanted to know why this had happened. Why “they” hated us. But I had a special interest in the Middle East.

Baghdadi Days
My grandmother had come to the United States from Iraq in the 1950s. During her childhood, she says, the Jews and Arabs of Baghdad were “like brothers,” but in 1941, a pro-Nazi coup overthrew the British-backed monarchy and initiated a pogrom that killed hundreds of Jews. Some years later, her father was arrested and thrown in jail by the new
authorities. He had received a letter from a family member in Tel Aviv, and he was accused of spying for the new Jewish state. To buy his freedom and his family’s safety, he had to give up his hundreds of acres of land, mostly farmland, and leave Iraq.

My grandparents and two uncles came to the United States, and my mother was born. Twenty-five years later she met my father, an immigrant from Israel with Iraqi parents, through a connection in the then large Iraqi community in New York.

After 9/11 and the War on Terror, politics became too interesting to ignore. And I had an interest, if only because the United States was the kind of country where the son of a kibbutznik and the daughter of an Iraqi exile could work hard, start a family, and, maybe, get a house out in Hackensack. I hadn’t learned to be cynical yet. I didn’t have a bohemian bone in my body.

My interest in world affairs might have stemmed in part from a typical teenage boy’s fascination with war, but I also felt a genuine sense of patriotism. I began subscribing to The New Republic when I was 15, along with Military History. I read the Koran and wrote a term paper senior year on Islam and the Crusades.

What Went Wrong
When I came to Harvard, I was sure I would study international relations and figure everything out. What Went Wrong? was the title of a book I read the summer before matriculating. I took courses in political Islam, American foreign policy, and a seminar on 9/11. I did what most Harvard students do when they aren’t sure what to make of the 3,000 courses in the catalogue: I took whatever seemed “relevant” to current events.

For the most part, that was not really a bad decision. I did figure a lot out. The conclusion I came to was that “they” really did “hate us for our freedom,” as our cowboy-in-chief had so crudely put it in the aftermath of the attacks. They were enemies of liberalism. And most liberals I met didn’t seem to care.

Even so, I found myself at a well-known liberal think tank the summer after sophomore year of college. I thought of myself as a “moderate,” and I didn’t really care much for “domestic issues” anyway. I researched foreign aid in fragile states. It was a good internship and a good summer. But I determined that perhaps I was not as “moderate” as I thought I was. If that was the Left, poring over survey results and sighing that Americans still liked the “free market” after the financial crisis, then maybe the Right was right.

When I came back to Harvard junior year, I resolved to take more classes in political philosophy. I had never learned Arabic anyway, so my plans to
become the next Kissinger now looked poorly laid. I took a seminar on conservative political thought in the spring. There I learned that “conservative political thought” was not necessarily an oxymoron, as liberals since John Stuart Mill have branded it. A putatively open-minded moderate like me at least had to grapple with it.

This past summer, I tried to decide whether I would write my thesis on neoconservative political thought or Tocqueville. I read Irving Kristol’s Autobiography of an Idea, and began to uncover the world of the New York Intellectuals, which eventually led me back to Tocqueville. Now I found that I really was just as interested in “domestic issues” as foreign policy. And most of all I began to see how they might be connected.

Boiled Little Rabbits
Orwell, the democratic socialist, tried to reconcile his patriotism with his left-wing views. But I am not sure that he succeeded. He ended his essay by calling the intellectuals of the Left “boiled little rabbits” who could not understand the “spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues,” for which “no substitute has been found.”

Although I cannot endorse such incivility, I cannot help but think that as long our rallying cry is race, class, and gender instead of God, family, and country, we will always see the essential public virtues through a distorted prism. From the vaunted viewpoint of the asocial socialist-with his peculiar mix of condescension and self-righteous compassion-religion, love, and patriotism will ever appear to be low superstition, selfishness, and chauvinism.

I met a lot of smart left-wingers at Harvard, but I think none as wise as Orwell, who saw some value in the traditional trifecta. If I may quote my favorite left-winger once more: “I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing” than be like “the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions.”

Alexander Sherbany ‘11 is a former Managing Editor

The Harvard Political Review presumes that students’ conclusions are at least somewhat interesting and relevant to other people—mainly other students. But I don’t think that the main purpose of this magazine is to provide political analysis to a waiting world. The HPR’s purpose is not primarily to educate our readers, though that would be a happy byproduct of publishing a magazine, but to educate ourselves. My four years with the HPR have been a continuing education, and not just in politics.

The first lesson I learned was that it can never hurt to ask. The HPR’s bread-and-butter articles—the news analyses that appear in the Covers, U.S., and World sections—require interviewing people much more knowledgeable and important than we are. In my first couple articles for the magazine, I resisted this requirement; I recall that one of my articles relied on only one interview. I thought as Singhal does: Why should anyone listen to my questions and contribute to my little article?

I got over those doubts—partly by failing to correct people who assumed I was a Kennedy School student, and partly by growing more confident that I actually had questions worth answering. Singhal would have us wait until some magical moment at which we become People Worth Talking To. But the process of becoming such a person is gradual.

Another lesson I learned from the HPR is that, if students are audacious enough to publish their work, they had better be prepared to defend it. Several times, we have had interviewees contact us and complain that we misrepresented their views. Sometimes we were totally in the wrong; sometimes not. It’s important to understand these experiences as educational, in addition to embarrassing. In Singhal’s view, student political expression is inherently arrogant and unproductive, but I think that these interactions were both humbling and helpful.

A final lesson arises from the fact that, believe it or not, sometimes people will actually like what students have written. In the Internet age, you can’t just put ideas out there without considering what will happen if they’re taken seriously. We learned this lesson last fall, when we published our report on the federal budget. We vaguely hoped that this project would get some mainstream attention, but it was still a shock to learn that we’d been invited to appear on Fox News. Rather than worrying about whether we deserve to be listened to, the more relevant issue for the student writer is how to react when we are, in fact, listened to. While I understand the impulse to wonder whether a mere college student has anything worthwhile to say about politics, the right response to that concern is to find something worthwhile to say, not to refrain from saying anything.

For most of us, our interest in politics began at a very young age; our first political expressions were no more profound than “My parents are Democrats/Republicans, so I am, too.” Since then, we’ve seen the Bush-Gore recount, September 11th, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 election, and health care reform. We have learned some things along the way, as all politically engaged citizens have. But it’s been a process—there were no sudden revelations that transformed us from political neophytes to first-class wonks. If students don’t talk to each other about politics, that learning process will be stunted, and apathy and ignorance can take hold. Surely a little presumption is a fair price to pay to avoid that fate.

Sam Barr ‘11 is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus.

Recently, President Obama has been severely tested in his conduct of the Afghan war, battered by his own party for his escalation of George W. Bush’s quagmire. Insurgents seem to be surging in province after province. Washington’s man on the ground, President Hamid Karzai, continues to siphon American aid and his own national treasury into his nepotistic coterie, and his people seems to be disaffected, to say the least, from his incompetent government. The national army is no match on its own for the insurgency, which makes American withdrawal either less likely or more costly. At home, speculation is rising that those mercurial “hearts and minds” have been won by the enemy.

Substitute Obama for Kennedy, and Afghanistan for Vietnam, and so forth, and you’ve got a near perfect match. In Vietnam, as in Afghanistan, the U.S. government and the press were enthusiastic about bringing human rights and democratic institutions to backwards Asia. But traditional anti-communist figures such as the Vietnamese emperor, Bao Dai, and tribal and religious leaders of the Cao Dai or Hoa Ho wouldn’t deliver on those goals. Instead, the U.S. preferred a well-spoken leader who could communicate with the West and assure us that political and social modernization would transform Vietnam. This new president, Ngo Dinh Diem, directly received millions of dollars in aid, enough to make up a majority of the national budget of the newly created South Vietnam. Mysteriously, to Americans anyway, the South Vietnamese despised their president almost as much as Afghans today detest Hamid Karzai. As Harvard seniors think about careers in journalism or the foreign service, it might be useful to think about America’s continuing problems with picking its friends abroad.

The last period of security and development in Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, was under the monarchy. Both Ngo Dinh Diem and Hamid Karzai started as loyal ministers to deposed monarchs, but went for the role of top dog once America decided democracy had arrived to stay. In this new iteration, the CIA has taken up the task of keeping the Karzai family well-funded. Hamid’s brother Mahmood, who has extensive experience as a Boston restaurateur, now holds down the national security council and oversees Afghanistan’s heavy industry. Afghans are so confused by our attachment to this corrupt government and by our tightly-written rules of engagement that rumors abound to the effect that the Americans must actually be aiding the Taliban insurgency. Afghan hearts and minds turn out to prefer Taliban law and order to Karzai corruption and inconsistent American protection.

Though there are fewer foreign desks these days, the media’s boosting of democracy and Karzai as the solutions to our problems in Afghanistan follows the same script as the one they followed when it came to Diem and South Vietnam. In 2004, the New York Times proclaimed Karzai the man to bring a “new chapter” to Afghanistan, the man who would eliminate the poppy fields within two years and set up schools for girls. In October of this year, American readers learned from the same source that Karzai depends not only on the American military presence, but on Iranian money. Most of the Afghan cabinet remains unfilled after the last shady election.

Are we at the end of the beginning, or the beginning of the end? Long years might await our soldiers in Afghanistan and our “non-combat troops” in Iraq, as they did for Kennedy’s so-called “advisors” in South Vietnam. Perhaps we have learned how to speed up history, and perhaps soon we can expect the last chopper from Kabul that Obama has promised. But he question of American military involvement in democracy-building and humanitarian intervention won’t go away: The executive director of Human Rights Watch proposed recently in Foreign Policy decisive action against rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army, in Uganda.

If you’re a Harvard student interested in foreign affairs, the good news is that the ranks of the political and journalistic establishment have never been more in need of well-educated young people interested in foreign policy—well, perhaps not since the ’60s, anyway. The bad news is that it’s up to you to think about the fruits of  promoting democracy abroad at the tip of a sword, to investigate our refusal to think about priorities, and to find out a way for us to pick better friends the next time boots hit the ground.

Daniel Barbero ’11 is a former Books & Arts Editor.

Photo Credit: Flickr – Steve Evans

President Obama is making education an economic issue. “When it comes to jobs, opportunity, and prosperity in the 21st century, nothing is more important than the quality of your education,” he asserted in his weekly radio address on October 9, 2010. Of course, for Obama, connecting higher education to the economy is a political imperative. Having proposed that the United States place a renewed emphasis on higher education and increase its proportion of college graduates—currently 40.4 percent, lower than eleven other countries—to a world-leading 60 percent by 2020, he now must demonstrate why this initiative deserves attention in the midst of America’s economic woes.

The moment is ripe to examine the politics and policy of higher education. Yet we might enter this conversation with some trepidation. This magazine is based at perhaps the world’s most iconic institution of higher education, but debates about undergraduate education at Harvard rarely focus on the economic value of a bachelor’s degree or the marketable skills it confers.

Instead, the discourse concentrates on questions like those raised by recent HPR endpapers, such as whether the West should have pride of place in the curriculum or whether Harvard students ought to eschew lucrative banking and consulting careers. These debates are often premised on the notion that what Harvard students learn or do in their formative years is especially significant because these students may go on to affect history. Rather than merely equipping the workforce of the future, Harvard imagines itself to be preparing the leaders of tomorrow.

Yet a conceptual divide between institutions that train workers and institutions that educate an elite threatens the fabric of democracy. In a country such as ours, all educational institutions in fact share at least one task in common: preparing every student to be a citizen. This responsibility is rarely discussed when it comes to higher education; we simply presume Civics has been taught in high school and leave it at that.

Just as the 21st century requires an increasingly educated workforce, however, it also demands a more educated citizenry. Citizens unfamiliar with statistics will be deceived by misrepresented data; those with no knowledge of the cultures, religions, languages, or even names of foreign countries can hardly parse international relations, while those who know very little of biology may find it impossible to take a position in bioethical debates.

Insisting that we should devote greater resources to the universal education of our citizens reflects genuine commitment to equality. Restricting certain areas of learning to a ruling class would be antithetical to the modern American system.

Not that it has always been so; Thomas Jefferson’s ideal of the gentleman farmer was someone whose leisure and comfort enabled him to study and judge from a position of detachment. But in embracing the universal franchise and the equal citizenship of everyone born in America, the United States has chosen a different path. Rather than cause us to decouple education from citizenship, however, this more inclusive model should prompt us to focus on education as the only way to move beyond formal equality and equip all citizens to actively exercise their rights. Again and again, elected officials stress that educational opportunity leads to economic success; we must become similarly preoccupied with its positive effects on democratic deliberation among all citizens, not just the elite.

For broad democratic citizenship itself is one of the assets American society brings to the 21st century. The more educated and empowered Americans feel as citizens, the more they will view the inevitable challenges ahead as obstacles to be jointly surmounted rather than problems that some distant government should confront. Improved higher education, therefore, may be an economic imperative, but it is also a democratic necessity.

Kenzie Bok ‘11 is a former Covers Editor.

Senior spring is a wonderful time at Harvard. Theses are done, coursework is light, and the weather has (finally) improved. I have enjoyed senior spring tremendously since turning in my thesis, and I am confident that it will be my best semester yet. But one thing still troubles me. As commencement nears, seniors are constantly subjected to the question, “What are you doing next year?” Many Harvard students have an answer by senior spring, even in this economic downturn, so perhaps the question does not bother them. For students like me, however, who can only answer with a shrug of the shoulders, the question can be a bit distressing.

Harvard students are neurotic, and so I attribute part of my unease to a crisis of confidence. If other students have successfully courted an employer or a graduate school, why haven’t I? And what does that say about me? This is indeed troubling, but I think something else is at work too. Lately I have started to think that I dislike the question not only because of the uncertainty in my future, but also because of what the question typically implies. When someone asks, “What are you doing next year?” at Harvard, there is a good chance the answer will be finance or consulting. In the last few years, anywhere from 20 percent to nearly half of all seniors entered one of those two professions.

Harvard students’ affinity for investment banks and consulting firms is unsettling because it suggests that the leaders of tomorrow are choosing their careers in a moral vacuum. The more we learn about the financial sector, in particular, the clearer it becomes that it is comprised largely of vulgar con artists. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has written a number of damning exposés demonstrating that financial firms routinely resort to fraud, bribery, and anything else that increases their profits. Most recently, evidence is emerging that “synthetic rate swaps” by Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan are behind much of the crippling debt owed by cities, states, and countries, from Chicago to Mississippi to Greece.

I suspect that, by and large, the bankers and consultants of tomorrow are not asking themselves, “What can I do for my community?” They are instead asking, “How can I most profitably sell my labor?” Harvard students know that they have the skills that financial and consulting firms desire, and these companies spare no expense when courting in Cambridge.

As a result, for many of my peers their career choice is a decision between competing offers to do different versions of the same thing: make a very small group of extremely wealthy people even wealthier, often at the cost of everybody else.

Too many students are willing to ignore questions like “Is this ethical?” and “Who will benefit from my work?” They ignore these questions on the false premise that the private sphere is devoid of moral considerations. When I ask friends what they think about their future in banking or consulting, they typically acknowledge the improprieties while conceding that it does not bother them; it is as if the moral character of their work were irrelevant.

Yet your career choice is a moral decision, perhaps the most significant moral decision we will make. Students should reject the false notion that their career choices have no bearing on society and embrace the social responsibility that comes with the influence and prestige that a Harvard degree affords.

I have no doubt that my peers will be the leaders of tomorrow, but I worry about where they will lead us. Rather than lining up to serve those who need no assistance, my fellow seniors and I should search for where we can make the greatest difference. This will be difficult and will surely produce uncertainty, but I can live with uncertainty if it means I do not have to compromise my values. This comforts me every time I admit that I do not know what I am doing next year, and I hope that more of next year’s seniors will take comfort in it as well. Harvard students are diligent and talented, and the world can be a better place if we decide to make it so.

William Leiter ‘10 is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus

Photo Credit: Flickr (laverrue)

The idea of a Western canon has become unfashionable. When I arrived at Harvard in the fall of 2006, the university offered a course on celestial navigation but no survey course in British history. The English Department recently eliminated its required course in major British writers, which included Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Romantic poets. In those courses that have insisted on the usefulness of a Western canon, in fields ranging from art history to classical music, professors have felt the need to explicitly defend their approach in lecture.

I understand that this trend away from the canon is an attempt to remedy a perceived bias in higher education toward the Western tradition, taught to previous generations of students to the exclusion of all else. I am hardly in a position to say whether a pro-Western bias exists or whether changing course offerings to combat it is a successful remedy. But what I can say is that I have always found value in the Western tradition, and that there is a compelling argument to be made that the Western—in particular the Anglo-American—tradition is uniquely relevant to American students.

From a historical standpoint, shifting the focus away from the West creates an incomplete picture of global affairs. Imagine teaching a world history course that portrayed Britain and America as two countries like any others. Such an approach would make little sense, since the international affairs of the past two centuries—at the very least—have been largely dominated by those two countries. When the British Empire was at its peak at the turn of the 20th century, a quarter of the world’s population was under British rule. No other country in modern history has been able to make that claim. As two world wars crippled British power, Britain passed the torch of international hegemony to its former colony across the Atlantic. Churchill famously pleaded with  Roosevelt to enter World War II, knowing that Britain was unable to singlehandedly defend Western civilization from the terrorizing march of the Nazis. In this and so many subsequent world conflicts and events of the 20th century, American involvement has been vital to success.  To deny the monumental and disproportionate impact of these two countries would be to ignore historical fact.

But the trend away from canonical teaching in higher education is founded more on academia’s unwillingness to assert that different cultures have unusual relevance or value to American students. To insist on the equality of all traditions is to deny the inheritance that has been passed down to Americans from the earliest civilizations. Knowledge of the Western tradition contextualizes our own country and society in an historically illuminating way: our legal system, our liberal political philosophy, and many of our social norms and cultural values were developed in the West, specifically in Britain, centuries before America’s birth. Britain, in turn, had built on traditions handed down from antiquity. This cultural chain links America to previous epochs of world history, but higher education seems increasingly reluctant to acknowledge this reality. Inconveniently for academics, America falls on a historical continuum that does not touch all nations of the world.

In earlier eras, Harvard had no trouble establishing this hierarchy of relevance. Reading knowledge of Latin and Greek was once a requirement for entrance to the college, with the understanding that classical knowledge, recognized as the foundation of our society, was best imparted by reading seminal ancient texts in their original languages. I would not argue that Harvard should reinstate these requirements, nor, of course, would I say that the university should go back to denying admission to women and minority groups. But in academia’s attempt to erase all traces of its canonical, male-dominated past, we have gone to the other extreme, so eager to include that we minimize what is of greatest value.

We cannot become global citizens if we do not first understand our own national heritage.  In minimizing the value of our own history and traditions, American colleges and universities are doing students a disservice. Hopefully Harvard is not condemning us to prove the truth of the George Santayana adage: “those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

Zoey Orol ’10 is the Managing Editor Emeritus.

Photo Credit: Flickr (Hlkljgk)

This has not always been the case.  In 1945 President Harry Truman proposed a system of universal health insurance similar to the Canadian model, a radical change from the status quo ante.  Of course, some things stay the same; Truman’s initial proposal claimed bluntly, and unconvincingly, that, “This is not socialized medicine.”  Truman’s healthcare innovation was part of a proud bipartisan tradition of bold leadership and radical change.  President Roosevelt was unabashed about trying to completely reshape the relationship between the government and private industry, and Nixon in trying to reshape the Cold War by forging a relationship with China.  In contrast to the bold policy initiatives even in the postwar era, it is not hard to see American politics since 1992 as static and small-bore.

Despite a marked difference in rhetoric, the similarities between the policies of Democrats and Republicans can be striking.   Both parties are committed to maintaining the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, preventing a nuclear Iran, ensuring a “pro-business” regulatory environment, protecting the employer-based health insurance system, continuing the War on Drugs, cutting taxes, subsidizing agriculture and feeding the military-industrial complex.  In the most recent Presidential campaign, only two candidates seriously addressed any of these key issues, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, and were laughed at for their trouble. For making the commonsensical statement that perhaps Muslims resent a half-century of American meddling in the Middle East, Ron Paul was resoundingly booed.  For suggesting that the U.S. scale back its massive network of military bases around the world, Kucinich was ridiculed.

This political complacency suited a world where America was the unchallenged hegemon.  During the Cold War, politicians could not avoid trying to tackle tough issues, not with the Soviet Union waiting to pounce on American weakness.  The fall of the USSR left the United States free to languish in the status quo, and our apparent triumph left the American model politically unassailable.  Perhaps this is the best light in which to understand the conservative response to Obama’s agenda as “socialism”; that any challenge to the status quo is a rejection of everything that differentiated America from its Cold War foe.  Unfortunately, America did not win the Cold War because of its complete perfection.

America needs policy innovation today more than ever. The long-term deficit is a very real concern.  There is no way it can be addressed when entitlement and defense expenditures are politically untouchable; non-defense discretionary spending is a mere 17% of the federal budget.  The War on Drugs is stuck in the trenches.  The War on Terror is even worse, and certainly more costly.  Populists left and right rage against the seeming capture of the government by Goldman Sachs and other big banks.  America’s wars overseas seem to be going nowhere fast, soaking up endless amounts of money and continuing to kill American soldiers.  And Iran is inching ever closer to a nuclear weapon.  It should be clear that the conventional wisdom is bankrupt and, as they like to say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “Our best thinking got us here.”

Of course politicians don’t want to address hard questions, for hard questions demand difficult answers. Ultimately, though, if the status quo is unsustainable, it will not be sustained.   The time of complacency has passed, and even the somewhat incoherent Tea Party movement shows that voters have begun to demand serious change of some kind.  Counterintuitively, the slow deterioration in the American way of life may create the conditions for its renewal.

Pundits are fond of drawing comparisons between John F. Kennedy and Barack H. Obama and, indeed, there are many parallels to be found. Like JFK, Obama captured national attention as a junior senator and ran for president without a great deal of governing experience. Like JFK, Obama campaigned as a liberal Democrat committed to bringing change to Washington. Like JFK, Obama possesses a disarming ability to galvanize and inspire Americans with his rhetoric. And, like JFK, Obama is a young president who shares the White House with his children and sartorially idolized wife.

But somehow, in focusing on these superficial similarities, commentators have almost entirely neglected to draw meaningful and instructive connections between Presidents Kennedy and Obama’s transitions to power. More nuanced reflection on the 1960-1961 Eisenhower-Kennedy transition, and especially the Bay of Pigs invasion, reveals lessons that Obama would do well to heed throughout the remainder of his transition.

In the realm of foreign policy, Kennedy’s first 100 days are remembered as a disaster. JFK’s first major national security decision, to launch the Bay of Pigs invasion, ended in perfect failure. When Kennedy took office, he inherited a CIA plan to overthrow Fidel Castro, including a few thousand Cuban exiles secretly training in Guatemala. Wary of reneging on his campaign promise to support democratic anti-Castro forces in exile, Kennedy authorized continuation and acceleration of the preparations in late January. JFK was never fully comfortable with the operation, however, and he demanded modifications to make it “quieter” and “less spectacular.” He wanted to maintain plausible deniability of American involvement. Ultimately, the CIA convinced the president that they had a plan that could work and on April 16, 1961, a Cuban exile brigade landed at the Bay of Pigs.  Within four days, 89 of the invaders were killed, and 1,197 were taken prisoner.

After the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy asked his close advisor Theodore Sorensen, “How could I have been so stupid to let them go ahead?” The various answers to this question offer valuable lessons for President Obama, as he crafts a foreign policy and reckons with the many covert programs — only some of which are publicly known — passed on by the Bush administration.

First, beware inherited policies. The new administration should neither a priori accept nor a priori reject programs inherited from the prior administration. Kennedy made the mistake of carrying out the Bay of Pigs invasion partially because Eisenhower told him it was his “responsibility.” While it is unlikely Obama will do anything just because Bush told him to, he must be aware of the challenges of continuing inherited policies. All major policy initiatives should be subject to a strategic review in which the Obama administration ensures the policy’s assumptions align with their envisioned strategy and objectives.

Second, always ask critical questions, especially to military and intelligence experts. As Kennedy reflected after the Bay of Pigs, “If someone comes in to tell me this or that about the minimum wage bill, I have no hesitation in overruling them. But you always assume that the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.” Obama, who assumed the position of commander-in-chief with less military experience than Kennedy, should be wary of deferring to expertise, especially on such complex questions as “AfPak,” Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and the War on Terror.

Third, be willing to modify campaign commitments. During his long path to the presidency, Obama made many statements on foreign policy. Though his political capital may suffer, the president must be willing to revise, and even reverse, these statements. Since a president does not have full access to intelligence until January 20, it is critical that his policy positions reflect the best available information, rather than commitments made with incomplete information during the campaign and pre-inaugural transition. Kennedy made a serious mistake in allowing campaign statements to dictate his Cuba policy once in office, and Obama should be careful not to do the same.

President Obama must keep this advice in mind as he re-charts America’s course in Iraq and Afghanistan, and defines the next stage in the War on Terror. But the lessons of the Bay of Pigs are not limited to foreign policy; in effectively responding to the financial crisis, Obama’s success will equally depend on avoiding these transition pitfalls.