This piece originally appeared in the American Conservative.
James B. Conant—first chairman of the National Science Foundation, scientific advisor to the Manhattan Project, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, and Harvard’s 23rd president—did much to make Harvard a recognizably modern, elite university. He introduced the SAT, dispensed with mandatory Latin, and built out professional schools around the undergraduate college. In his meritocratic ideals and insistence that it was better to “advance” than to “perpetuate” learning, as well as his application of his own learning to the scientific and political challenges of the day, Conant helped push the country’s top talent and institutions towards the uniting of technological achievement and the national interest.
As recent events have exhibited, Harvard’s 30th president had no such talent or intelligence herself. Nor is Harvard’s fall in the competence of its leadership, if not in its prestige, unique: every day brings further proof that our nation is run by fools, flying blind and making it up as they go along. But our top institutions haven’t seen a corresponding decline in their importance; how could they? Our government, schools, and military don’t stop mattering just because the people running them don’t know what they’re doing (until the whole system collapses, that is).
For those wishing we could ignore the latest scandal and get down to the task of making things work again, the ever-more apparent gap between the ability of those who built up America’s great institutions and that of those now managing their decline raises an uncomfortable question. How are we going to develop the next Manhattan Project, do the “hard things” President Kennedy called us to do, undertake the ambitious endeavors that figures like Conant made possible, when the very institutions that ought to be leading and staffing such projects are run by mediocrities? We won’t. The advance of new industries, the construction of new monuments, the realization of technological and economic breakthroughs—even just a return to a basic level of functioning across society—will not happen without a wholesale response to the competence crisis within our top institutions.
Continue reading in the American Conservative.
