[lormand]

A few months ago, I was talking to this dingbat who told me that she was awakened into liberal politics by a Harvard degreed lawyer.

I quickly pointed out to her that such "qualifications" were a non-qualifier in fact.

How can such an elite, possibly know the subtleties of the "common man" whom the RATS and such claim to champion?

[Gay State Conservative]

My Dad supervised a number of Harvard and MIT grads during his career.His favorite saying about Harvard and its grads was "if you can't go to college,go to Harvard".

I regularly rubbed elbows with Harvard grads at the Harvard teaching hospital where I worked..but certainly not in any supervisory way.My favorite saying about them is "you can always tell a Harvard man,but you can't tell him much".

[A. Pole]

The institution of university derives from the Medieval Roman Catholic Church. As the Christian foundation of Western culture erodes so will the universities and science decline and fade away. You will have the dead shells with mere names.

Harvard started as a Puritan Seminary, then it became Unitarian, then it underwent secularization and commercialization. Political correctness will finish it off.

Here is the explanation of Christian origin of science

[Tax-chick]

bttt

(College article)

[shhrubbery!]

This is why the education offered at a school such as Grove City College is so vastly superior to Harvard's.

At Grove City College, unlike Harvard, there's

1) a fine core curriculum with unapologetic emphasis on Western Civilization
2) all courses taught by faculty, not by TAs
3) almost no 'research' taking up the faculty's time and attention
4) no faculty tenure.

At least, all of those things were true when one of my children went there.

[LS]

1) FWIW, I teach three (the standard at UD) and have a standing offer to teach an "overload" of four if the U. will simply pay me "overtime." Any course. They won't do it. They would rather hire a part-timer to teach a fresh class.

2) Here is something that should stun you about how it WASN'T THAT LONG AGO that Yale was patriotic:

In 1914, according to a book called "The Millionaires' Unit," Yale asked for volunteers for the then-state militia. The state hoped to get 150 Yalies: it got 900!!

Moreover, a group of ultra-rich students, recognizing on their own that aviation (including naval aviation) was going to be increasingly important, they bought with their own funds a large seaplane, paid for their own training, and still the Navy didn't support them. When war broke out, the Navy scrambled to make them all officers, and they all ended up serving, one was killed.

BTW, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Yale, Northwestern, Cornell all have college ROTC programs.

[Dumb_Ox]

Plug: Ross Douthat's book Privilege is an excellent memoir of his recent undergraduate years at Harvard.

[RoadTest]

Thought is alien to this place, which used to be supposed to be a citadel of the best thinking.

Well, it's fallen from its pedastle. As God sent the prophets to Israel to set them on the right course, so He sent Mr. Summers to give Harvard a chance to lead the other universities out of the fetid swamp of Leftist groupthink, with similar results.

Maybe now judgement is next. ?

[Iris7]

Observing the local "Big Ten" university for some decades I find the whole operation a huge "It's not my fault" finger pointing exercise. Those with the most power as a group say they are powerless and point fingers anywhere but at themselves.

The Legislature won't give them enough money. The Regents won't leave them alone. The students are a pain in the rear. They don't get no respect, as Rodney Dangerfield put it.

The place is a roaring torrent of money and self satisfaction, of fearful and timid second rate minds, and of snobbish intellectual and, especially, moral, vacuity.
There are many individual and some departmental exceptions. Most, however, are relieved that the students drink way too much and so are less demanding.

It is possible to get an education there, but, boy, do you ever need to know what you are doing. Most of the students are like thrown away plastic bags blowing across the desert until eventually hanging up on a barbed wire fence. They are not like gangbangers or stray dogs because they lack self direction. They have some use for others (but not to themselves) as they bring down the grading curve.

What a scam. What fools their parents are. What fools the kids are. Bunch of would be social climbers.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

"Does it matter that Harvard’s curriculum is a vacant vessel? It is no secret, after all, that to the Harvard faculty, undergraduate education is at best of secondary interest. What is laughingly called the Core Curriculum—precisely what Summers sought to repair—is distinguished by the absence of any core of studies generally required."

Any good lectures by Barbara Streisand recently?