Author Profile

Harry Lewis

Harry R. Lewis was dean of Harvard College from 1995 to 2003. He is the author of Excellence without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education, published in 2005, and coauthor of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Revolution. Lewis has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard. He became the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard in 1981 and in 2003 was named Harvard College Professor. During the Vietnam War, Lewis served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service and also worked at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on computer science. He received the Pope Center’s Caldwell Award for Academic Leadership in October 2007.

Articles by Harry Lewis

Derek Bok’s Higher Expectations – Our Colleges Should Accomplish More

Jun 30, 2021 · · Comments Off on Derek Bok’s Higher Expectations – Our Colleges Should Accomplish More

Former Harvard president Derek Bok has long lamented that our institutions of higher education largely underperform in their missions. He has now written another book making that argument. His Higher Expectations is a coolly rational analysis of what needs to be done to improve American undergraduate education. He uses as his frame a study by … Continue reading “Derek Bok’s Higher Expectations – Our Colleges Should Accomplish More”

Overlapping Magisteria–A Review of Anthony Kronman’s ‘The Assault on American Excellence’

Oct 2, 2019 · · Comments Off on Overlapping Magisteria–A Review of Anthony Kronman’s ‘The Assault on American Excellence’

In his new book The Assault on American Excellence, Yale law professor Anthony Kronman traces many of the current woes of American universities back to the use of one word in one opinion in one court case. That word is “diversity” and the opinion was Justice Lewis Powell’s in the 1978 Bakke case about minority … Continue reading “Overlapping Magisteria–A Review of Anthony Kronman’s ‘The Assault on American Excellence’”

Losing Trust in Higher Education

Jan 15, 2014 · · Comments Off on Losing Trust in Higher Education

College leaders and professors who appear more interested in themselves than in education are doing great harm.