[Brass Lamp]

I wonder if Harvard had a companion school? Surely those enlightened Puritans must have been doing that sort of out reach, while the Southerners were cultivating the sort of people who would give us Know-Nothings (that is sarcasm-—and for full disclosure I had people on the Mayflower, and also some in Virginia dating back at least before the founding of Harvard)

I am sure you'll be pleased to learn that Harvard was a desperate "buzzer beater" shot at depriving William & Mary of the claim of being first. Harvard was a ridiculous laughingstock institution hosted in a barn and stocked with a curriculum of store-bought pedestrian books taught by a founding generation of semi-literates having no degrees. Harvard's first round of graduates were just a bunch of self-promoting midwits who granted degrees upon each other. At the time of its founding, William & Mary greatly surpassed Harvard in quality and reputation.

[Hieronymus]

One of the Presidents of Harvard is quoted as saying “The reason why Harvard is such a great repository of knowledge is that the students come with so much and leave with so little.”

The bits of your observations that I was not already aware of do not surprise me. Harvard’s founding has long sounded to me like an overgrown home-school co-op, which is better than nothing—and a definite start

At the time, its best days were still ahead. That is no longer the case.

As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

(If you’ve been to Rome, Oregon, it may have been built in a couple of hours . . . .)