Neil Rudenstine was born in 1935 and grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. His father was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant who became a prison guard; his mother was the daughter of Italian immigrants. He attended Princeton, became a scholar of Renaissance literature, and served as president of Harvard University from 1991 to 2001. His new book, written in the year he turned ninety, is the very timely Our Contentious Universities. We talked in April.
Mark Oppenheimer: When did you start this book?
Neil Rudenstine: I started about four years ago. I got interested, because during my years as president of Harvard, I began to notice student demonstrations seemed to me rather different from the 1960s. That intrigued me. I didn’t have a sense of why they were different yet, so I started exploring.
MO: How were the protests different?
NR: In the 1960s, virtually all the students were in agreement that the war was a bad thing, and they wanted to get rid of the war and the draft. And they were against universities insofar as they thought they were supporting the war. But students were not aligned against one another. In the nineties, because they were so diverse, students were protesting against one another—not against the university itself always, but against one another. For example, at Harvard, very conservative students put out a big issue of a magazine attacking gay students, and black students attacked Jewish students, and so on. The scene seemed different. The students were not united against one thing but were getting at one another. And when the Hamas invasion occurred, that only became more ferocious.
MO: Where did students get the idea that they should protest?
NR: It started in the mid-sixties at Columbia. There are different views about where it came from; some think it was the disruptions in Europe. Others think the free speech issue at Berkeley set things off. There is no single explanation. But it started in the mid-sixties and reached a crescendo in ’69 and ’70. It was definitely new, though. And it never went away. It faded in the eighties, but even then there were some protests about apartheid, and in the nineties it came back strong, then later on more strongly.
MO: Is it a good thing?
NR: There’s no question you get a lot more studying done during times like my Princeton undergraduate days. I feel very ambivalent about the protests, because I was against the war in the late sixties, just as the students were, but I did not think the disruption of the institutions was in any sense a good thing. So I had mixed feelings about the whole episode, because I thought the Vietnam War was a disaster myself, so I could understand why the students were as upset as they were. At the same time, I didn’t think blowing up the universities in any sense of the word was the right way to solve the problem. I benefited from my own Princeton days in the 1950s; there is no question that one had a sense of being able to learn anything and think about the future in a special way at that time. That was dramatically different from what people obviously were able to do in the late sixties and seventies.
MO: Is diversity a problem for learning? Do they learn more as a more homogeneous group?
NR: What one hopes is if there is greater diversity and difference among people, they will learn more from one another. But alas, that isn’t always the case. Sometimes it happens. My own view is that probably one has to think in terms of decades. That is, the people who are perhaps antipathetic to one another as students, if you look at them ten or twenty years later, they have a greater understanding than they did at eighteen, or nineteen, or twenty. That may be the best payoff there is. I know lots of people who were either black or gay or whatever as students and did not get on with one another, and twenty or thirty years later, as adults, they were mature and grateful for having gotten to know one another. One needs a different kind of perspective to appreciate what’s happening.
In other words, the response to universities and the education they offered shifted steadily from the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties. In Otto Butz’s volume, some students wished to become university faculty to escape suburbia’s conformist society. The Beats, meanwhile, dropped out of universities and conventional society altogether.
MO: Why did that happen? That faculty became a site of nonconformity?
NR: That is a really difficult question. When the institutions expanded so dramatically after the war, it took a while, but the people who became academics in the seventies, eighties, and nineties were very different from people who became academics in the forties, fifties, and early sixties. The earlier group came mostly from boarding schools, intensive places like Exeter, Andover, and Deerfield; they were more conservative, they came from single-sex institutions, and they had a very different sense of what it was to be an academic. Later on, people came from all kinds of institutions, including co-educational institutions, institutions that were public rather than private, not boarding schools. The nature of the professoriate changed quite dramatically after the seventies. That led to a different kind of faculty altogether. More liberal, more open in certain kinds of ways. Less conservative in a traditional sense of the word.
MO: As an administrator, were you nostalgic for less radical faculties of your undergrad days?
NR: In the nineties when I was at Harvard, the faculty was fairly in tune with my own views of things. It was the students who were very different, rather than the faculty. That was a bit of a shock in a way. I didn’t expect it. It turned out to be more difficult to deal with than I expected.
The scene seemed different. The students were not united against one thing but were getting at one another. And when the Hamas invasion occurred, that only became more ferocious.
MO: Why did you take a leave as president?
NR: I had taken on the responsibility of the campaign to raise $2.1 billion, and I had insisted that it had to be a university-wide campaign, unlike previous Harvard campaigns, which were by school—the law school had one, the business school had one. I said, “No, no, the entire institution has to be involved.” Since so many people were abroad, it meant a tremendous amount of travel and a great deal of strain—the goal was so high. I made three trips to China, and we went to South Korea. We went to Taiwan. We went to Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, not to mention all over the U.S. The effort to do the international all-Harvard campaign—we had to raise an average of $1 million a day to meet the goal. I just got exhausted trying to run the institution at the same time as trying to raise the money. It took a tremendous amount to pull it off.
MO: What do you make of the accusations of antisemitism?
NR: I find them very difficult to actually get a handle on. Because I have no doubt there is some antisemitism, and there has been some. That has been terrible. At the same time, I do have the feeling some of what has been called antisemitism is not that; I think it’s anti-Israel, which is quite different. And sometimes it’s just the sense people are afraid, without necessarily being taunted in any way. I find reality difficult to penetrate.
MO: What did you think watching the college presidents in Congress?
NR: I thought they were badly prepared. I thought they had been prepared by lawyers and given the wrong kind of reasons to put forward in their testimony, so they made a bad showing. I don’t blame the presidents as presidents, but I do think they were ill-prepared and wrongly prepared…. And I think the people like [Elise] Stefanik were absolutely awful.
MO: Do you think you would have done better?
NR: That’s a very difficult question. I don’t think I would have listened to the lawyers. I don’t know whether I would have done better. I would have done it differently. I would not have been bound by legal advice. I feel [Columbia] probably made a mistake in calling the police to clear Hamilton Hall. They didn’t have to do that, and it probably led to more problems than it solved. Once you call the police, you have lost your power to do anything properly.
MO: So what do you do when students won’t leave a building they are occupying?
NR: In Columbia, there were quite a few students in the building who did want to leave. They called the police too soon. There are a couple of options. If they are not hurting one another—and that is a different issue altogether—or pillaging the place in some terrible way, you can wait them out. People sitting in a building that is empty—who cares? Obviously people get upset about it; they want action. But you don’t have to listen to people who want immediate action. At Princeton, when they took over Nassau Hall, we listened to them for two or three days, talking to them about the war, and they finally left. Not all students will do that, but there are options. You can call the court, and the court can come, and if the students don’t leave when the court tells them to leave, they can be held in contempt.
MO: What should we do about the collapse of the humanities?
NR: I don’t think there is a solution. It just is the case, unfortunately, that people are much more career-oriented, and that the humanities don’t offer much in the way of identifiable careers. That has been true for a good twenty or thirty years, and it’s getting worse. It’s a low point and is quite upsetting, especially if you think there is so much to be gained by studying the humanities, as I do. There are lots of experiments going on to try to find different ways of teaching the humanities to appeal to career-oriented people. But I think it’s only a slim hope. Unfortunately, I doubt there is a solution in the near run. I think we have to live with what we have.
MO: What else?
NR: Remember, the universities themselves changed quite a bit—they got bigger, they got more decentralized, and had more debts, initiatives, professional schools, and programs. And the larger they got, the more decentralized they got, the harder they were to run, and the harder it was for the presidents to oversee them as unified institutions. That made a big difference when the students got diverse and began to get at one another. The institutions were harder to run, and it was harder for the students to get to know one another. So two things were going on: one had to do with diversity, the other had to do with the larger, more complicated university.
MO: If an undergraduate science major came to you and said, “I want to read one book of fiction or poetry before I graduate,” what would you recommend?
NR: Assuming they want to read something they can understand, I would give them a book of Robert Frost. If they wanted something more challenging, I’d give them something by Robert Lowell or Wallace Stevens. I might tell them to try a couple of them.
MO: What would you do if you were president of Columbia now? What advice would you have for a president of Columbia?
NR: Talk about difficult questions! I think they need a better system than they have had in terms of choosing their presidents. They have not done a good job for quite a while. That is issue number one. I don’t mean to be overcritical, but they have slipped from one person to another without a real search, without a real sense of what they wanted and how to get it. That is one big problem. Without the right leadership, it’s difficult to give them advice. I’d be very reluctant to give in to Trump’s demands. But I’d need to know more about the actual finances of Columbia to know what their reservoir of money is. But if I could resist Trump I certainly would.
MO: Do they need to be expelling more protesters?
NR: Expelling them? I don’t think so. That would depend on minute knowledge of who did what that I don’t have myself. I don’t think expulsion—as far as I can see—is the real issue.