<p>One of the highlights of the Opening Exercises for Freshmen, Class of 2010, during the Sept. 2006 move-in weekend for this month’s graduating Harvard College seniors was a brief but unforgettable address by Jeremy R. Knowles, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the elder statesman of Harvard. For me and for many Class of 2010 students and parents, the late Dean Knowles seemed the embodiment of the essence of Harvard.</p>
<p>Dean Knowles’ remarks that day about “talking rot” are reprinted below, courtesy of the Pfoho e-mail network. If you heard him that day, enjoy reminiscing. If not, try to imagine the comments below delivered in an immaculately precise British accent, with no hint of any smirk, but with tongue firmly planted in cheek:</p>
<p>"In 1914, when I was a good deal younger than I am now, there was a philosopher at Oxford called J. A. Smith. He used to start his first lecture by saying: “You are now about to embark upon a course of studies which will occupy you for [four] years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I’d like to remind you of an important point . . . Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in [later] life - save only this - that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot. And that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.”</p>
<p>"Professor Smith believed that the most important benefit of a college education was skepticism, and that - whatever we go on to do in life - the biggest danger is that of being taken in, either by knaves who have ulterior motives, or by fools who haven’t asked any of the right questions. All of you have emerged victorious from twelve, long, years of coursework and examinations, and you’ve arrived here bursting with all there is to know about everything from the sex habits of the mollusk, the socio-economic basis of the Russian revolution, and the religious imagery of Milton. [I can’t resist reminding you of an exasperated Harvard President who was asked why the University was such a marvelous repository of human knowledge. “Well you see,” he said, “the freshmen bring so much when they arrive, and the seniors take so little away when they graduate.”] But here you are, wonderfully informed, and hungry for more. So why am I worried about your skill at detecting people who talk rot?</p>
<p>"There are many kinds of rot, of course. Plenty of it occurs on the edges of the sciences. We’ve all heard about those people who bend spoons just by thinking hard about them, or how if you play Mozart to carrots, they grow faster. This kind of rot is not a problem for Harvard undergraduates. You all know exactly how to design and conduct a controlled experiment, so that you separate groups of carrots, for example, would experience Mozart, silence, and perhaps a tape of hungry carrot-eaters, and we should see which grew best.</p>
<p>"Nor am I going to worry about charming fantasy, such as Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. I’m not going to suggest that these whimsical inventions are rot, and in any case, most of us let go of them by the time we reach college. Indeed, if any of you have been admitted to Harvard still believing in the Tooth Fairy, I’m certainly not going to do anything about it now. Then there’s the kind of rot that’s relatively harmless pseudo-science, like that which fills the astrology columns of some newspapers, or that goes on when someone reads your palm. Most often, they predict that we are about to find great happiness, immense wealth, and the mate of our dreams, and I’m not particularly against any of those.</p>
<p>"No. The rot that Professor Smith wanted us to discern, is the kind that occurs in our daily lives, and that determines what we think and how we act. I’ll call it logical rot. When a respectable newspaper tells you that America’s children are undernourished because - can you believe it - exactly half of the nation’s children are below average height. That’s rot. When we’re told about the existence (or non-existence) of global warming, or about a new ‘miracle’ cure for AIDS, that’s when we’d better be skeptical and analytical. These are the kinds of things that affect our understanding of the world, and that affect the decisions that shape our lives. These are the things that we must think about. Bertrand Russell once said: “Most people would die rather than think, and many of them do.”</p>
<p>"I suppose I could leave you on this note, trusting that you’ll go through the next four years committed to challenging all forms of rot. But I must be careful. For while I’m encouraging you to scrutinize everything you read and hear, I also hope you’ll be open to new ideas, however bizarre they may first seem to be. Even if it’s very rare, it’s possible, you know, for Harvard students to be wrong. Error is much more common in Harvard Deans, of course, and I’m reminded that when I was about twelve, my mother commented that man would soon explore the moon. I knew that this was logical rot. I’d just read an analysis by a distinguished Nobel Laureate, who had calculated the energy required for an object to escape from the earth’s gravitation, and I told my mother that it’d need a rocket of 80 tons to put something the size of a tennis ball into orbit. Exploring the moon was therefore unthinkable. “Yes dear, I see,” she said. Two weeks later, Sputnik was launched, and my mother never believed me again. So do be careful, and scrutinize your own logical assumptions, just as thoroughly as you do everyone else’s.</p>
<p>"Finally, I ought to say a word to your parents. After so many years of affectionate attention, your dear parents are now wondering how Harvard can possibly replace them, in advising you about small matters like nuclear disarmament and social security, as well as really important issues like who gets the upper bunk and whether pizza is addictive. I hope that they’ve forgotten that Ogden Nash poem entitled: “The Parent.” Let me quote the whole thing:</p>
<p>‘Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore,
And that’s what parents were created for.’</p>
<p>"But it won’t be like that. For all of you will tell your parents - at least weekly - how happy you are, and how much you miss them. I recently had a moving letter from the parent of a rising junior, which ended: “My daughter is so looking forward to coming back. She just returned from a summer in Greece editing ‘Let’s Go,’ she goes tomorrow to lead a group in the Freshman Outdoor Program, and then she’ll visit the Business School for a week before classes begin.” The letter ended, wistfully: “She has, however, agreed to have one dinner, this evening, at home.”</p>
<p>"So, to the Class of 2010: be generous to your parents; be skeptical of everyone else; and watch out for anyone who talks rot.</p>
<p>“Welcome to Harvard!”</p>
<p>As a new Harvard parent, eagerly looking for what Harvard was all about, it seemed to me that the ability to combine brilliance, keen insight, wit, and warmth into a concise presentation that oozed charm was the true hallmark of the Harvard experience.</p>
<p>When my younger daughter was accepted two years later, her e-mail had a link to the Class of '12 Accepted Students video. Perhaps you’ve seen it - it’s wordless with a musical background, and features people turning over cards that have numbers, for which the caption then appears. Two people turn over cards that make “11” and then the caption “Minutes to Boston.” Some 10-or-so people turn over cards for a 10-or-so-digit number with the caption “Volumes in the Library.” At the very end after dozens of these people, numbers and captions, with the musical background winding down, the camera slowly zooms in on Dean Knowles - at that point, clearly near the end of his time - seated in his office, looking earnestly into the camera while holding a card that reads “4”. The caption “Centuries of Tradition” appears. You and the Dean stare eyeball-to-eyeball for several seconds, and then it dissolves to the words “Harvard University” - profoundly moving in a lump-in-the-throat kind of way. Dean Knowles passed away later in the week that the accepted students received that video. The entire sum of my interaction with him was that video and the “talking rot” speech, and yet his presence at the College made a major impression on me.</p>