Unis are in a ‘moment of crisis’. Now is not the time for authoritarian control

I began my PhD in English at Harvard back in 1996, after a BA at the University of Sydney. Harvard’s president then was Neil Rudenstine, an English professor whose research had been on Shakespeare and Keats. It was Keats who coined the term “negative capability” in a letter to his brother, which he described as the state “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. This condition of open-minded, curious, creative doubt underpins all great universities and is a crucial pathway to knowledge.

Universities such as Harvard consist of communities working to make knowledge from a collective dedication to not knowing and not being right all the time. Credit: AP

Harvard University has not always been a beleaguered underdog. With the world’s news cameras trained on the colonial brick facades and leafy greens of Harvard Yard, it’s an ideal moment to reassess what makes Harvard exceptional, and what social purpose is met by having outstanding universities, worldwide.

One of my first memories of being at Harvard is of attending a small poetry reading given by Seamus Heaney in a swimming pool under an undergraduate hall of residence. The pool had in fact been drained a few years earlier, after one Suetonian free-for-all too many, attended by smoking, fornicating, pontificating future New Yorker writers. By the time I got there it had been converted to a decorous small theatre.

Heaney had won the Nobel Prize the year before and was a member of the Harvard English department. He read that evening from something new he was working on, a verse translation of the Old English masterpiece Beowulf. Heaney’s Beowulf is now a classic of a classic. Its brilliance was to couple the sounds of mainstream English lyric (e.g. Keats and Shakespeare) with rhythms and dialects that are distinctively Irish, Welsh and Anglo-Saxon, reminding readers that Britain’s history is shaped by invasion, resettlement and language displacements, over many centuries.

Beowulf is a contentious poem. Its aggressive tone and intensifying mood of sadness let us glimpse imaginative residues of Anglo-Saxon migrations, which displaced native Britons and old Roman settlements. Heaney’s translation is a reminder not to oversimplify this story into a simple invasion and erasure narrative. It’s asking us to think about national identity as changeable, volatile and complex.

Later in my degree, I was a teaching fellow for Stephen Greenblatt’s classes on Shakespeare. His lectures were about how the power and beauty of Shakespeare depends on the plays’ continuous experiments with wildly different, colliding systems of imagination and belief. Shakespeare was purposefully provocative, reminding audiences of the most debated topics of his time: still-unsettled conflicts between Protestantism and Catholicism, rifts between monarchy and parliament, conflicts between nation states and threats to political authority. His writing was always at the very edge of what was permissible.

Anyone who’s been an international student in a great university will have their own versions of these memorable encounters. I couldn’t have put my finger on it that night down in the Adams House pool, but it was when I first sensed what is truly remarkable about Harvard and other great universities. The brilliance of its faculty and students comes from being unafraid of new and different ways of thinking. There’s a crucial institutional pressure to keep broadening perspective and learning from other deeply creative, thoughtful people in other disciplines.

It doesn’t work perfectly all the time. As with any complex institution, Ivy League universities struggle with internal problems and conflicts that need fixing. They need to keep draining the pool. But at their best, universities such as Harvard are international communities of extraordinary teachers, students and scholars working to make knowledge from a collective dedication to not knowing and not being right all the time. The questioning of beliefs and assumptions is undergirded by deep expertise.

About halfway through my time at Harvard, I became a resident tutor in one of the undergraduate houses. The housemaster was a renowned oceanographer named James McCarthy who made key contributions to understanding the impact of climate change in the arctic – Jim had been the oceanographer on the trip to the North Pole that led Al Gore to make An Inconvenient Truth.

Each month, Jim invited all the house tutors to a talk by a distinguished professor. One of these was E.O. Wilson, the legendary evolutionary biologist who had just published a book called Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Consilience is a form of knowledge that depends on evidence taken from different, distinct sources and disciplines. It boils down to the idea that for knowledge to be resilient, it needs to hold true across several fields of inquiry.

Al Gore in a scene from his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Credit: AP

Whether you’re analysing global markets, ecological disasters or works of literature, problem-solving gets better if you look both within and beyond a single discipline, making inductions that are consistent across many fields.

The examples I’ve mentioned here resonate because work that was then still in progress has subsequently become very important. The thread tying all this together is that great research and teaching show the complexity and fragility of humanity’s place in the universe. The best research reveals stories that have always been present but hitherto invisible. This kind of work takes time; it needs disciplines to collide and collaborate; it takes chance meetings and contingencies. It requires courageous, committed funding.

The very nature of university research and teaching is to train in embracing uncertainties, tolerating disagreements and using different viewpoints to make complex knowledge. As the current president of Harvard, Alan Garber, and many others, have recently pointed out, universities are uniquely set up to do just that.

We are all in a moment of crisis in higher education. It’s not the time for top-down, authoritarian control. It’s a time to let universities be what they were created to be, complicated, fragile communities where ideas – wrong ones, right ones, contradictory ones – can coexist and coalesce into the truth.

Sophie Gee holds a PhD in English from Harvard, teaches in the English Department at Princeton University and is inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney. She is co-host of The Secret Life of Books podcast.

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