Writes Mr. Quenqua:

Two paragraphs later, though, the writer reveals just how "new" these sites are: "Typo Buddy started about six months ago and already has up to 80,000 visitors on a good day, said its president, Jonathan Lieberman, an Internet entrepreneur in San Diego"; "Joseph Mantha, the 19-year-old co-creator of Typo Bay, which started in 2007, said October was the site’s busiest month yet."

That doesn't sound very new to us. Then again, neither does the practice of fishing for typos to find good deals on eBay. In January 2004, The Times' Diana Jean Schemo offered In Online Auctions, Misspelling in Ads Often Spells Cash, which revealed "the eBay underworld of misspellers, where the clueless — and sometimes just careless — sell labtop computers, throwing knifes, Art Deko vases, camras, comferters and saphires."

In the newer Times piece, Mr. Quenqua acknowledges that this typo-shopping is "a well-known strategy among longtime eBay shoppers, but one that owners of these sites are hoping will translate into big business — relatively speaking — as shoppers look to save money this holiday season."

So, clearly, theirs nothing knew under the son.

According to the seller, 'almarg' of Bayside, Queens (who has 100% Positive Feedback) the lot, which went up today, contains:

(All caps, almarg's.)

Bidding starts at U.S. $35.00. There are currently zero bids.

According to the seller's description:

Perhaps the real miracle is that Mr. Stern now finds himself in the crusty company of various forms of Jesus toast and the Mother Theresa Nun Bun.

Bidding is now closed. Final price: $141.50 

Collecting isn’t what it used to be, and in cramped Manhattan, maybe it never was. These days everyone, including 8-year-olds, are madly collecting downloads of video and sound, even though there is no need to hoard because the video and sound will always be there—and because a larger entity, the Internet, is already doing the collecting. But the human impulse to gather is strong.

A young New York man claims to have a terabyte and a half (a trillion and a half bytes) of movies, music and television shows in his several hard drives. His father collects coins. The young man says he collects because he fears that one day someone will put a kibosh on the downloads. There is always a degree of anxiety and the accompanying urge to rescue for the hunters and the gatherers.

A New York mineral collector—who said that “of course people still collect” and, in fact, “there are more mineral collectors than ever”—got so annoyed at a further discussion of the Internet pushing out the three-dimensional world that the conversation became insulting and had to be terminated. (Though there is a financial component to mineral collecting, and eBay is the enabler.)

On a calmer note, Upper East Side architect and designer Stephen Miller Siegel, who has a vast collection of dog paintings, dog sculptures, dog photographs and even a dog letter holder—“It just all happened; they come to me”—said that, over 20 years, he has had only one client who collected anything, and that was paintings. “Either people collect or they don’t,” Mr. Miller said.

Mr. and Mrs. Bell’s collection is a celebration of the three-dimensional world in the oldest and truest sense. “They are all ordinary, utilitarian crafts, relatively contemporary, from the developing world,” said Mr. Bell. “Each one was personally collected by us, mostly sub-Saharan, Asian, Near East”—a total of 70 to 80 countries, he estimated. Mr. Bell, 71, an architect, is responsible for a number of the city’s nonprofit buildings: the Grolier Club meeting hall, the Columbia Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Studio in a School, the new addition to the Council on Foreign Relations. Mrs. Bell, 67, conducts vertebrate paleontology research at the American Museum of Natural History (which didn’t influence the couple’s collection, she said).

Walking the other day through their six rooms (or “staging areas,” one might say), all a blur of brown, red, rust, blood, earth and orange, the couple discussed how the collection began, the day after Mr. Bell’s divorce from his first wife in the early 1970’s, when he got a call from Susan’s roommate at Vassar saying they should meet. The conversation turned to foreign lands. “Susan always wanted to go to Mali to see the Dogon,” Mr. Bell said. “I always wanted—well, I had heard about Ouagadougou. We went collecting some sub-Saharan art. We noticed simpler things—pottery. We liked the crafts as much as the art.”

Ms. Bell chimed in, “We liked the miniature things that reminded us of the architecture.” Her husband proudly held up a mousetrap from Northern India that looked like a little house but is really a miniature prison. “Now an ideal craft,” he said, “is one which has almost finished its useful life and therefore shows all the usage. Often might find a repair or two,” he said, indicating a small scar on an urn. “That means you might get another craft in the same item.” The baskets, of which the couple has about 2,000, have in particular had their ups and downs. “We’re a little out of control when it comes to the baskets,” Mrs. Bell said.

“We didn’t start out to be collectors,” Mr. Bell said, “but—” People always say that, as well as deny that they are collecting to replicate and thus ensure eternal life, to soothe childhood trauma (who doesn’t have one?), to replace sex and so on.

It is said that people everywhere collect: the potter in Turkey who cannot read, the industrialist in Germany who can, the homeless person making sense out of his grocery cart. But collecting in recent centuries took on more formality as more travel opportunities opened up—and as more countries were taken over. White colonialists started bringing back elephant feet. Then collecting became a middle-class-encouraged pastime, starting with the Industrial Revolution, when work and leisure time were being separated. Inevitably, some panicked at the notion that an excess of leisure would turn people into morphine addicts, that traveling salesmen would turn to drink—they were the first spoon collectors, according to Steven M. Gelber in the book Hobbies. So collections were seen as constructive, as educational—the casual autumn-leaf collection, oak on one page, maple on the next.

Mr. Bell is, all in all, the classic humanist, who jumped up in the middle of an interview to play the piano. (“Lately, he has a crush on Hummel,” Mrs. Bell said. “He plays the piano to relax after coming home from painting scenery.”) The Bells’ two dogs, Wembley and Annie, were running in and out of doggie doors that led to a garden filled with Mr. Bell’s sculptures. He also makes sketches and watercolors while traveling—very Louis Kahn—and volunteers for the Blue Hill Troupe, an amateur theatrical group founded in 1924 that puts on two shows a year for charity, always a Gilbert and Sullivan in the spring and, this April, The Yeoman of the Guard.

The couple takes one or two trips a year. Last year they went to Mongolia, from which they sent back fully furnished yurts with red-and-blue-painted furniture inside for themselves and their friends to put on the grounds of their country houses. The Bells also have in their bedroom the largest collection of Lonely Planet guidebooks, except for the one in the publisher’s office. “It’s a wonderful way to travel,” Mrs. Bell said. “People are excited about what we’re doing. They say, ‘Come in, have tea.’ Instead of staring at the natives, you have some kind of connection with the people.”

They are the opposite of 1920’s explorers Osa and Martin Johnson, who took all those films of small tribes and jungle foliage and women with plates in their mouths (later used as footage in Tarzan films), and who were seen, looking back, as being earnest and enthused but rather politically incorrect. With the Bells, it’s all on the up and up: fastidious photographs of the objects in context—a man potting, a woman weaving, barefoot children watching—attached to four-by-six index cards, now some 8,000 in 18 categories, special numbers, with notes on the moment and process of discovery: “Large rectangular fish basket bought from young girl’s (father, friend?) near Mahasthangarh used often in a row across rice paddy or stream. 100 taka. 14Dec95.” Mr. Bell started to look for the dollar equivalent of 100 taka, but decided it wouldn’t be necessary.

During a tour of a wall’s worth of spoons and ladles, it was striking to see that every one of the Bells’ objects reflects the most fundamental human concerns, subsistence and survival—trapping animals, gathering seeds, spiky dog collars to fend off wolves. Would a collection of minutely jeweled Fabergé eggs, like the enameled one that opened up to reveal a golden chicken encased in a golden yolk, be at the opposite of the spectrum of use? On second thought, wooing the czarina with miniature fancies so she won’t kill you is just as much a survival activity as filling a pitcher with water. Perhaps everything that humans make—even jewelry to beautify and thus reproduce, or objects to delight or spiritually strengthen—is absolutely necessary and about survival.

Though as an acerbic friend in a bad mood said as he was being dragged through the DIFFA Dining by Design exhibit the other night (another story of congestion, though spirited): “One could say, useful objects or not, all collections are useless.”

It used to be that women married for what was called “an establishment” in the 18th century: a house, a coach, staff and a social position. Now that we can get that without marrying, a fair number of “career women” turn out to be interested in being, well, housewives. (A touchy question I won’t get into here is how many women today would prefer to remain single if only they could earn enough to provide their fantasy “establishment.”)

I recognize some of the signs in myself. Without husband or kids, I married my house. By which I mean, a lot of the time that I would spend on wifely duties (other than sex), I devote to maintaining, upgrading and decorating my home.

I’m crazy enough to get the paint retouched every couple of months in the high-traffic rooms. The minute something breaks, it gets fixed. I’ve shipped antique tile from Italy and wood and lamps from Canada to adorn my place, and spent countless hours online sourcing everything from the perfect antique brass sink (only $60 on eBay) to the perfect waterproof patio coating.

My domestic obsession, like that of many of my husbandless or childless friends, is selective. I eat out as much as the next New Yorker, and I don’t do much of my own housework (though I do some of my own construction work; the heavier stuff is good exercise). I garden in the small way that my small outdoor space allows and am approaching self-sufficiency in cilantro, mint and basil. More to the point, the chief incentive in running my small business is to be able to pay for all of this.

Mainly, this is all a good thing. Since I work at home, it’s more important to me to live in a place that I find aesthetically pleasing. And I enjoy the compliments I get on my house, which (I am realizing at 48) will one day have to take the emotional place hitherto gratified by compliments on my looks.

(By the way, lest you wonder, my other domestic-fetishist friends are attractive people, some extremely so, and all started their obsessions with house and garden while still nubile.)

The only part that worries me is that I assume I’m single because I always put my career and adventures first—and precisely because I didn’t want to become a housewife. My late mother interrupted a successful career for 15 years to be a stay-at-home mom, which, she was finally able to admit, made her profoundly unhappy. Besides gardening, I don’t recall her liking much about her daily routine. She never enjoyed cooking, and I always thought she burnt the meat in revenge. Maybe, though, domesticity is another thing entirely when you get to choose it.

And maybe it is also a substitute for the sort of big family that few of us have anymore. Greta and David, friends from college (and married nearly that long), were childless for much of their marriage, until they adopted seven years ago. Now they are like other people and order take-out food frequently. But in their childless days, Greta made fantastic vegetarian meals—not a noun-adjective combo I often use—including, most elaborately, a seven-course vegan Seder. Decades before most of us had heard of microgreens, Greta was growing them at her Berkshires home. She also worked full-time in advertising.

Now she has her own small business, a 7-year-old, no nanny and no time to cook. But she doesn’t seem heartbroken about that.

Although she was single until 45, my friend Jane was the first person I knew who had several types of salt on the table. She’d designed her own exquisite—and huge—loft with the money she made as a film editor. She went to the 26th Street flea market every weekend and bought wonderful objects for her home, adding to collections of several different kinds of 50’s dinnerware and antique glasses. A spur-of-the-moment invitation to dinner meant a three-course meal with a choice of several gelatos or sorbets for dessert.

For a selection of homemade sorbets after every meal, though, you have to go to dinner at Patricia and Paolo’s country house. (Last time the flavors were basil, peanut butter and strawberry.) Patricia tends the enormous garden—30 types of tomatoes alone—while Paolo does the cooking. Every time I visit, I wonder how they do it. Each of the four guest rooms is exquisitely furnished and impeccably clean. Fluffy white terry bathrobes await in the wardrobe; fresh flowers are in the bathroom.

Patricia, a 50-year-old real-estate developer, admits that it’s costly: “It’s because I don’t have kids to send to private school and nannies to pay for that I can have the houses that I do.” But she and her husband and business partner do all the gardening and cooking themselves, and have a housekeeper come in only once a week.

Childless by choice, Paolo and Patricia aren’t building an estate for the next generation. The question is: Is their tending of house and garden and table a way of caring for themselves—maybe analogous to what others seek at spas—or is it more like being house-parents, in the way I sometimes consider myself a house-wife, with a beautiful building substituting for the kids they don’t have? Crudely put, is it a desire to care for themselves, or for something outside the self? Along with other cosseted house-guests, I’d answer that it’s a need to nurture.

Or, more cynically, it may be the reflection of an increasingly common anxiety about parenting. They may be members of a vanguard that prefers the love of a house to the raising of children who would eventually move far away and resent even their weekly phone calls. After all, the house will increase in value, and comfort them in their old age.

Ann Marlowe is the author of two memoirs, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z, and The Book of Trouble: A Romance.

It used to be that women married for what was called “an establishment” in the 18th century: a house, a coach, staff and a social position. Now that we can get that without marrying, a fair number of “career women” turn out to be interested in being, well, housewives. (A touchy question I won’t get into here is how many women today would prefer to remain single if only they could earn enough to provide their fantasy “establishment.”)

I recognize some of the signs in myself. Without husband or kids, I married my house. By which I mean, a lot of the time that I would spend on wifely duties (other than sex), I devote to maintaining, upgrading and decorating my home.

I’m crazy enough to get the paint retouched every couple of months in the high-traffic rooms. The minute something breaks, it gets fixed. I’ve shipped antique tile from Italy and wood and lamps from Canada to adorn my place, and spent countless hours online sourcing everything from the perfect antique brass sink (only $60 on eBay) to the perfect waterproof patio coating.

My domestic obsession, like that of many of my husbandless or childless friends, is selective. I eat out as much as the next New Yorker, and I don’t do much of my own housework (though I do some of my own construction work; the heavier stuff is good exercise). I garden in the small way that my small outdoor space allows and am approaching self-sufficiency in cilantro, mint and basil. More to the point, the chief incentive in running my small business is to be able to pay for all of this.

Mainly, this is all a good thing. Since I work at home, it’s more important to me to live in a place that I find aesthetically pleasing. And I enjoy the compliments I get on my house, which (I am realizing at 48) will one day have to take the emotional place hitherto gratified by compliments on my looks.

(By the way, lest you wonder, my other domestic-fetishist friends are attractive people, some extremely so, and all started their obsessions with house and garden while still nubile.)

The only part that worries me is that I assume I’m single because I always put my career and adventures first—and precisely because I didn’t want to become a housewife. My late mother interrupted a successful career for 15 years to be a stay-at-home mom, which, she was finally able to admit, made her profoundly unhappy. Besides gardening, I don’t recall her liking much about her daily routine. She never enjoyed cooking, and I always thought she burnt the meat in revenge. Maybe, though, domesticity is another thing entirely when you get to choose it.

And maybe it is also a substitute for the sort of big family that few of us have anymore. Greta and David, friends from college (and married nearly that long), were childless for much of their marriage, until they adopted seven years ago. Now they are like other people and order take-out food frequently. But in their childless days, Greta made fantastic vegetarian meals—not a noun-adjective combo I often use—including, most elaborately, a seven-course vegan Seder. Decades before most of us had heard of microgreens, Greta was growing them at her Berkshires home. She also worked full-time in advertising.

Now she has her own small business, a 7-year-old, no nanny and no time to cook. But she doesn’t seem heartbroken about that.

Although she was single until 45, my friend Jane was the first person I knew who had several types of salt on the table. She’d designed her own exquisite—and huge—loft with the money she made as a film editor. She went to the 26th Street flea market every weekend and bought wonderful objects for her home, adding to collections of several different kinds of 50’s dinnerware and antique glasses. A spur-of-the-moment invitation to dinner meant a three-course meal with a choice of several gelatos or sorbets for dessert.

For a selection of homemade sorbets after every meal, though, you have to go to dinner at Patricia and Paolo’s country house. (Last time the flavors were basil, peanut butter and strawberry.) Patricia tends the enormous garden—30 types of tomatoes alone—while Paolo does the cooking. Every time I visit, I wonder how they do it. Each of the four guest rooms is exquisitely furnished and impeccably clean. Fluffy white terry bathrobes await in the wardrobe; fresh flowers are in the bathroom.

Patricia, a 50-year-old real-estate developer, admits that it’s costly: “It’s because I don’t have kids to send to private school and nannies to pay for that I can have the houses that I do.” But she and her husband and business partner do all the gardening and cooking themselves, and have a housekeeper come in only once a week.

Childless by choice, Paolo and Patricia aren’t building an estate for the next generation. The question is: Is their tending of house and garden and table a way of caring for themselves—maybe analogous to what others seek at spas—or is it more like being house-parents, in the way I sometimes consider myself a house-wife, with a beautiful building substituting for the kids they don’t have? Crudely put, is it a desire to care for themselves, or for something outside the self? Along with other cosseted house-guests, I’d answer that it’s a need to nurture.

Or, more cynically, it may be the reflection of an increasingly common anxiety about parenting. They may be members of a vanguard that prefers the love of a house to the raising of children who would eventually move far away and resent even their weekly phone calls. After all, the house will increase in value, and comfort them in their old age.

Ann Marlowe is the author of two memoirs, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z, and The Book of Trouble: A Romance.

Some of my favorite books of the last five years have been family dramas told primarily through siblings: Maile Meloy’s Liars and Saints and its companion, A Family Daughter; Meg Wolitzer’s The Position; and, of course, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Not just two siblings, mind you; at least three or more seems optimal, both for storytelling and character development. After all, children who grow up in large families define themselves in relation to their siblings. Which leads me to wonder: Now that couples are having fewer children, will there be fewer novels about sibling friction?

Eliza Minot, herself the youngest of seven (among them Susan Minot, author of Monkeys), makes a great case for the emotional richness of large families in her second novel, The Brambles. The eldest Bramble, Margaret, is the moral compass of the family, the responsible and slightly overbearing sister who’s always asking incriminatingly, Did you call Dad? Her only vice, it seems, aside from thinking of everyone else’s needs before her own, is that she has an “eBay problem” that her husband Brian tolerates with amusement. Margaret and Brian are old-school breeders, New York City refugees with three kids under the age of 7 and a Honda Odyssey who have settled in a leafy suburb in New Jersey. “The days with small children, she has come to accept, blend. ‘Face it,’ Brian said to her when she complained years ago that she wasn’t getting any work done, ‘you’ve been thrown into neutral.’”

Next in Bramble birth order is Max, the handsome, slightly wayward middle child who is living on the upper-middle-class equivalent of “the down low”—he’s not gay, he’s just unemployed, a fact that he’s been hiding from his wife, Chloe. Max and Chloe have a kid too, but they have yet to figure out their escape from Manhattan, so little Rex’s crib takes up the entryway to their studio apartment in Chelsea. And then there’s Edie, the youngest sibling, in her late 20’s and supremely sarcastic, yet struggling mightily—with her weight, with men and with her own dark moods.

Ms. Minot handles the considerable angst of her characters with a deft, humorous touch. In a particularly fine section from The Brambles, Edie is on a solo road trip in California, eating bags of candy from rest stops and chain-smoking, when she gets overtaken by despair just as an Eminem song comes on. “She turns the radio up, crying still, and distractedly through tears sings along, shouting, ‘Can I get a witness?’ through her melting, crying face.” Just a sentence or two later, comic relief: “The huge Hearst mansion. Saint Elmo? San Remo? She can’t remember.”

Tragedy has struck the Bramble family: The mother recently died in a plane crash, one of those puddle-jumper flights from Maine to Boston. Now their father is stricken with cancer and moves in with Margaret for his final days. As oldest siblings often do, Margaret hogs the air space; much of the book is told through her frazzled, mother-of-three eyes. Thankfully, she stops fretting long enough to take in the charming interaction between her children and their dying Gramps. (Ms. Minot reserves some of her most beautiful and spare writing for the very young and the very old.) Max is wound up in his own marital problems, but Edie, the youngest, catches wind of a Bramble family secret that she manages to unearth and bring back to share with her sister and brother, a secret that was about to die with the Bramble patriarch.

And isn’t that, really, what siblings are good for—helping to process those scary, twisted moments of family drama that inevitably crop up even before your parents die? Dad’s had a mistress, or Mom gave away a baby for adoption before you were born, and all of a sudden there’s a perfect stranger wandering around out there who’s related to you, for God’s sake. Siblings help turn such revelations into inside jokes and help you take the news in stride, thereby reducing your therapy bills considerably.

The Brambles ends with Margaret, Max and Edie looking on as their father’s coffin is lifted into a crematorium that, they can’t help but notice, looks remarkably like the ovens at the neighborhood pizzeria they frequented when they were kids. “The three of them look straight ahead, watching the digital temperature on the furnace rise. With their mother, they didn’t stay to see this happen. Margaret takes Edie’s hand. ‘Jesus,’ says Margaret softly, squeezing it. On her other side, Edie takes Max’s hand and squeezes it, passing it on.” There is strength, ultimately, in numbers.

Ruth Davis Konigsberg, former deputy editor for features at Glamour, is at work on her first book.

The phrases mostly appear when Mr. Lewis is excerpting material he’s acquired from the Harvard Archives (and on eBay, as he revealed at a talk delivered at Harvard’s Memorial Church last month). They include presidential annual reports, speeches delivered by various Harvard leaders and working papers submitted to the faculty during one of the school’s periodic curricular reviews—documents that serve as the backbone to Mr. Lewis’ argument. Over the course of 268 dentist-office pages, he makes a plea for Harvard (and the rest of the higher-education community) to pull itself together and come up with a sentence or two to sum up its responsibility to students—and, generally speaking, its raison d’être.

We used to know, Mr. Lewis writes, but lately, our consumerist tendencies and our preoccupation with immediate success have made us forget. Harvard has given into students’ demands for total academic freedom—not by opening the curriculum in the manner of Brown University, where students can just take whatever they want, but by refusing to take a stand on what they expect from them. Instead of teaching, Harvard professors and administrators coddle, Mr. Lewis argues, pointing to the recent establishment of the “Fun Czar” position at University Hall and the ongoing construction of a student pub.

Many students, meanwhile, are graduating without learning anything Mr. Lewis considers important.

For the sake of keeping your attention, I’ll spare you examples of the kind of bureaucratic jargon Mr. Lewis favors. Suffice it to say that the task of translating such phrases as “the mere acquisition of information” into “learning,” and “the broad basis of understanding” into “competence,” is consistently left up to the reader.

It should be noted that Mr. Lewis turns out to be a master of free indirect discourse: His imitation of the tedious, empty language of the source material is uncanny. “The way to make the university experience more satisfying is to recognize and support its larger educational purpose.” Indeed.

As a rising Harvard senior, I’ve been receiving this kind of garbage in my e-mail inbox for the past three years, not least of all because of the stalled curricular review that started a year before I arrived.

Under Harvard’s current, soon-to-be-gutted curriculum, everyone is required to take a number of “Core” classes that are supposed to teach us how to think, respectively, like humanists, philosophers, mathematicians and scientists. Provided the Curricular Review resumes and sets out again on the same path—not a guarantee now that Harvard’s presidency is vacant—the Core, conceived in 1974, will soon be replaced. As Mr. Lewis points out in Excellence, course offerings have grown too esoteric, and students have started passing out of their history requirements by taking classes on the Japanese samurai and never learning a thing about European history.

We shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this, Mr. Lewis argues. He wants us to try harder and think deeper, but at the same time he realizes that “there is no better student body anywhere,” and that we’ll never be “inspired” to raise our game until Harvard presents us with a clear pedagogical agenda. The university can’t keep up this wishy-washy back-rubbing (“The next Harvard president must help the Faculty develop a shared sense of educational responsibility for its undergraduates”), because, as it stands, we the kids are just coasting, taking random classes until we pass “Go,” collect our $200 and buy apartments in Murray Hill.

“Will Harvard students of the future have any common knowledge, any shared educational experience, any particular point of view from which they will all have seen the products of civilization?” Mr. Lewis asks, referring to departing president Lawrence H. Summers’ 2001 inaugural address. Not unless parents and pedagogues buck up, stop giving in to the whims of children and take back the lectern. To this end, he advocates a brand of paternalism based on the old business of “self-reliance”: Adults are supposed to foster independence in children by telling them exactly what they should do, what books they should read, and what streets they should avoid at night so they don’t get raped. (See chapter seven, which bears the unfortunate title “Independence, Responsibility, Rape”). In one particularly troubling passage, Mr. Lewis suggests that Harvard’s tenure committee should make its decisions based on a candidate’s moral worth—quantified, in Mr. Lewis’s example, by the number of divorces he or she has under his belt—so as to infuse the faculty with more role models for the undergraduates to admire.

In short, Mr. Lewis wants to be Big Daddy to a campus full of children all hungrily pursuing various aspects of knowledge and absorbing diverse, rewarding experiences with a common foundation of excellence.

I doubt Mr. Lewis will ever find out whether his exhortations have had any effect. Listening to his winding abstractions—superficially and cloyingly attached to his actual observations as dean—one gets the sense that no Harvard student has ever been honest with him. (At one point he tells the story of a boy in his computer-science class who blamed his poor grades on a pregnancy.)

In his chapter on grade inflation, he claims that junior faculty members are compelled to give higher grades because tenure committees pay such close attention to the teaching evaluations that students hand in at the end of every semester. In fact, in my experience, most Harvard students don’t hate teachers who hand out tough grades—it’s the only thing many of us respect about some of them. Just about the only defensible cause championed by Harvey (Manliness) Mansfield is his quest to end grade inflation.

Mr. Lewis, too, is right from time to time. For example: Some, maybe even many, Harvard students are not curious scholars. Some, maybe even many, professors would rather read than teach. And adolescents have been conditioned, by various socio-historical forces, to shirk responsibility at every opportunity.

Mr. Lewis’ global solution to these problems is ideology. He wants purpose and resolve—a charter full of 10-letter words and Big Ideas that would rally professors and inspire disillusioned students. In the book’s introduction, Mr. Lewis writes, “Presidents, professors, deans, and students have thought about these issues before and have had things to say—sometimes wiser words than those we hear today, if at other times even more absurd.”

That last clause probably refers to the homophobic, racist and bigoted policies enforced by Harvard presidents such as Abbott Lawrence Lowell. Actually, Excellence could have used more absurdity and less boring topic-sentence argumentation and hollow, impotent vocabulary. For a man so critical of others’ inability to think adventurously, Mr. Lewis has managed to produce a document that shows us precisely why most Harvard professors are so reluctant to get involved—or, as he might say, “engage” with curricular review.

To make the obvious joke, Excellence Without a Soul would be an excellent book if it hadn’t been written by a robot.

Leon Neyfakh (Harvard class of 2007) is majoring in history and literature.

The phrases mostly appear when Mr. Lewis is excerpting material he’s acquired from the Harvard Archives (and on eBay, as he revealed at a talk delivered at Harvard’s Memorial Church last month). They include presidential annual reports, speeches delivered by various Harvard leaders and working papers submitted to the faculty during one of the school’s periodic curricular reviews—documents that serve as the backbone to Mr. Lewis’ argument. Over the course of 268 dentist-office pages, he makes a plea for Harvard (and the rest of the higher-education community) to pull itself together and come up with a sentence or two to sum up its responsibility to students—and, generally speaking, its raison d’être.

We used to know, Mr. Lewis writes, but lately, our consumerist tendencies and our preoccupation with immediate success have made us forget. Harvard has given into students’ demands for total academic freedom—not by opening the curriculum in the manner of Brown University, where students can just take whatever they want, but by refusing to take a stand on what they expect from them. Instead of teaching, Harvard professors and administrators coddle, Mr. Lewis argues, pointing to the recent establishment of the “Fun Czar” position at University Hall and the ongoing construction of a student pub.

Many students, meanwhile, are graduating without learning anything Mr. Lewis considers important.

For the sake of keeping your attention, I’ll spare you examples of the kind of bureaucratic jargon Mr. Lewis favors. Suffice it to say that the task of translating such phrases as “the mere acquisition of information” into “learning,” and “the broad basis of understanding” into “competence,” is consistently left up to the reader.

It should be noted that Mr. Lewis turns out to be a master of free indirect discourse: His imitation of the tedious, empty language of the source material is uncanny. “The way to make the university experience more satisfying is to recognize and support its larger educational purpose.” Indeed.

As a rising Harvard senior, I’ve been receiving this kind of garbage in my e-mail inbox for the past three years, not least of all because of the stalled curricular review that started a year before I arrived.

Under Harvard’s current, soon-to-be-gutted curriculum, everyone is required to take a number of “Core” classes that are supposed to teach us how to think, respectively, like humanists, philosophers, mathematicians and scientists. Provided the Curricular Review resumes and sets out again on the same path—not a guarantee now that Harvard’s presidency is vacant—the Core, conceived in 1974, will soon be replaced. As Mr. Lewis points out in Excellence, course offerings have grown too esoteric, and students have started passing out of their history requirements by taking classes on the Japanese samurai and never learning a thing about European history.

We shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this, Mr. Lewis argues. He wants us to try harder and think deeper, but at the same time he realizes that “there is no better student body anywhere,” and that we’ll never be “inspired” to raise our game until Harvard presents us with a clear pedagogical agenda. The university can’t keep up this wishy-washy back-rubbing (“The next Harvard president must help the Faculty develop a shared sense of educational responsibility for its undergraduates”), because, as it stands, we the kids are just coasting, taking random classes until we pass “Go,” collect our $200 and buy apartments in Murray Hill.

“Will Harvard students of the future have any common knowledge, any shared educational experience, any particular point of view from which they will all have seen the products of civilization?” Mr. Lewis asks, referring to departing president Lawrence H. Summers’ 2001 inaugural address. Not unless parents and pedagogues buck up, stop giving in to the whims of children and take back the lectern. To this end, he advocates a brand of paternalism based on the old business of “self-reliance”: Adults are supposed to foster independence in children by telling them exactly what they should do, what books they should read, and what streets they should avoid at night so they don’t get raped. (See chapter seven, which bears the unfortunate title “Independence, Responsibility, Rape”). In one particularly troubling passage, Mr. Lewis suggests that Harvard’s tenure committee should make its decisions based on a candidate’s moral worth—quantified, in Mr. Lewis’s example, by the number of divorces he or she has under his belt—so as to infuse the faculty with more role models for the undergraduates to admire.

In short, Mr. Lewis wants to be Big Daddy to a campus full of children all hungrily pursuing various aspects of knowledge and absorbing diverse, rewarding experiences with a common foundation of excellence.

I doubt Mr. Lewis will ever find out whether his exhortations have had any effect. Listening to his winding abstractions—superficially and cloyingly attached to his actual observations as dean—one gets the sense that no Harvard student has ever been honest with him. (At one point he tells the story of a boy in his computer-science class who blamed his poor grades on a pregnancy.)

In his chapter on grade inflation, he claims that junior faculty members are compelled to give higher grades because tenure committees pay such close attention to the teaching evaluations that students hand in at the end of every semester. In fact, in my experience, most Harvard students don’t hate teachers who hand out tough grades—it’s the only thing many of us respect about some of them. Just about the only defensible cause championed by Harvey ( Manliness) Mansfield is his quest to end grade inflation.

Mr. Lewis, too, is right from time to time. For example: Some, maybe even many, Harvard students are not curious scholars. Some, maybe even many, professors would rather read than teach. And adolescents have been conditioned, by various socio-historical forces, to shirk responsibility at every opportunity.

Mr. Lewis’ global solution to these problems is ideology. He wants purpose and resolve—a charter full of 10-letter words and Big Ideas that would rally professors and inspire disillusioned students. In the book’s introduction, Mr. Lewis writes, “Presidents, professors, deans, and students have thought about these issues before and have had things to say—sometimes wiser words than those we hear today, if at other times even more absurd.”

That last clause probably refers to the homophobic, racist and bigoted policies enforced by Harvard presidents such as Abbott Lawrence Lowell. Actually, Excellence could have used more absurdity and less boring topic-sentence argumentation and hollow, impotent vocabulary. For a man so critical of others’ inability to think adventurously, Mr. Lewis has managed to produce a document that shows us precisely why most Harvard professors are so reluctant to get involved—or, as he might say, “engage” with curricular review.

To make the obvious joke, Excellence Without a Soul would be an excellent book if it hadn’t been written by a robot.

Leon Neyfakh (Harvard class of 2007) is majoring in history and literature.

- Riva Froymovich