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"The Homespun Business" on Larsen, Third Floor No one works in a vacuum, of course, nor does an institution. The atmosphere of the Ed School, of Harvard as a whole, in the late sixties and early seventies pulsated with energy and angst, with a sense of urgency and a belief in the possible. The era's events—civil rights and the women's movement, Kent State and Vietnam—shaped Kohlberg and his contemporaries in ways still being felt and comprehended.
Responding to the demand of undergraduates in 1970 that their education directly address their moral and political questions, Harvard College, for instance, asked Kohlberg to teach a course on moral and political choice. Carol Gilligan taught a section of that course. "I remember a young woman raising her hand in class one day to ask Larry what his theory said about what she should do, knowing that people were starving," recalls Gilligan in "Remembering Larry." "Her moral anguish filled the room." The Ed School responded in fits and starts to the cultural demands on it, believes Bob Selman. "At HGSE the seventies were the ripple effect of what we think of as 'the sixties.' This was a time when academics tried to become activists, when the energy was around bridging; Larry Kohlberg was a big part of that." Drawn in part by Kohlberg, scholars from around the country and the globe converged upon the Ed School. The ethos of the place—dynamic and occasionally chaotic, tolerant and often trusting—made for a few slips. Such as a visiting professor whose credentials, it turns out, were all made up. Doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows in the Human Development area like Selman, Bob Kegan, and Gil Noam recall a palpable excitement generated by Kohlberg. "From my very first meeting with Larry, I was struck by his strong and powerful curiosity, his extreme respect for other people's ideas," says Noam, associate professor of education at HGSE. "There were times that we sat in my apartment, discussing everything from German philosophy and Judaism to longitudinal research. Larry never noticed my rickety chairs, because he was totally focused on the conversation." Kohlberg gathered together an intellectual community that was "unusually inclusive" on a number of levels, Bob Kegan says."The 'Larsen Hall third floor' expanded into other areas of the School and all over the world. You would be in Berlin and find yourself connected to the third floor, or you'd turn the corner on the third floor and run into someone from Jerusalem or Switzerland." Gil Noam laughs as he recalls "the homespun business" that developed on the third floor of Larsen Hall, then home to Human Development, as demand for Kohlberg's articles grew. "For a while, Larry needed a part-time position just to keep up with requests for reprints." Friday afternoon gatherings on the third floor, marked by spirited discussions and the sipping of sherry, became a tradition. And, Kegan says, the differing nationalities of folks attracted to the floor was not the only thing that accounted for the diversity found there. "The people that Larry brought in did not necessarily agree with him. He would bring in critics. You never felt an 'us/them' or 'either/or' approach with him." Robert A. LeVine, the eminent cultural psychologist, now retired from HGSE, agrees. "Even though Larry and I never saw eye to eye on anything in the field of human development, but were part of fundamentally different approaches, he initiated the Ed School's interest in bringing me here," LeVine says. The two had taught in the University of Chicago's "Committee on Human Development" from 1962 to 1968. "Although Larry became a kind of guru at the Ed School who was surrounded by followers, he did not try to stack the HGSE Human Development program with people who agreed with him," says LeVine. Jerome Kagan, a child psychologist and professor at both HGSE and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, co-taught a seminar with Kohlberg and remained close to him—despite the fact that as academics they didn't agree on much. "Larry helped developmental psychologists to understand that a child's moral development doesn't spring forth fully developed at three or four years old," Kagan says. But Kohlberg's reliance on children's verbal responses to moral dilemmas, in order to measure their stage of development, didn't make sense to Kagan. "I could imagine a child who could not put into words, or into coherent sentences, his or her take on a moral problem, thus scoring at a lower stage than is actually the case," says Kagan. But the two men were good friends, and so were their families. Whatever disagreements colleagues had with Kohlberg, some remember him as an inspired teacher who insisted that students be active learners. "Larry truly believed that the knowledge-constructing activities of students should be respected," Bob Kegan says. Kegan adds, "Larry would stand in front of 120 students and fearlessly—and often successfully—attempt to conduct dialogue. He had a talent for turning comments that ranged from inane to incomplete into something interesting and contributive." But Kohlberg as a teacher and a researcher, according to Carol Gilligan, "ignored some vast cultural silences." By listening to certain voices—first of young men facing the Vietnam draft and then of women facing abortion decisions—Gilligan moved, in her words, to "fill that silence with experience." Next page: A Voice with the Ring of Truth HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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