Posted on 03/01/2013 12:46:51 PM PST by nickcarraway
If you might want to insult Harvard down the line, go elsewhere
If you think Harvard is a revolutionary communist hotbed, don’t apply. If you think Harvard is full of “pinheaded” professors, don’t enroll. And if you think Harvard pollutes the minds of its students, don’t walk out of here with a degree—and certainly don’t get two.
You see, lately, there seems to be a pernicious trend of public figures—especially those on the right—falling in love with Harvard just long enough to benefit from its educational resources and, yes, its social prestige, before turning against our school. Just recently, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas affirmed his belief that Harvard Law School was, during his years as a student there, home to a cohort of “Marxists who believed in…overthrowing the United States government.” In November, Fox News pundit and Harvard Kennedy School graduate Bill O’Reilly glibly referred to Harvard professors as “pinheaded” while implying that the Harvard community is morally suspect for its acceptance of Harvard College Munch, a group for students who share an interest in kinky sex. And last April, presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who holds a J.D. and MBA from our fine institution, lambasted President Obama for having spent “too much time at Harvard.”
Such episodes of treachery are apparently attempts to curry favor with the more anti-intellectual members of our body politic. Yet it is finally time that we say enough is enough. We at The Crimson urge anyone who plans on one day scoring political points by maligning Harvard to neither apply, enroll, nor graduate from this fine institution.
If only we could have spoken to a young, wide-eyed Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, or Bill O’Reilly. We would have assured them that it was okay to be anti-intellectual, and that millions of people around the world do it every day. Although we didn’t share their dread of academia, we would have tried to make them feel comfortable with the lifestyle they were preparing to lead. We would have attempted either to disabuse them of whatever cognitively dissonant impulses gave them the urge to attend Harvard or, at the very least, try to prepare them for the potentially scary environment that awaited them. For one, we would warn them that Harvard has a few liberals. While they may seem strange and foreign to a young conservative, they are almost certainly not secret communists and probably actually less of a threat to the integrity of the United States government than some people back home. Second, we would warn them that education gives people new ideas that they might not have otherwise had. This may make them seem “pinheaded,” or it may even change them a bit, as Mr. Romney suggested about President Obama. But it probably doesn’t make them stupid.
If we could have spoken to these three young men, we could have spared them from the fear and anguish that must come part-and-parcel with seeing oneself as instructed by insurrectionists or buffoons. If we could have spoken to these three men, we would have told them never to come to Cambridge.
Who’s Bill O’Reilly?
You have an interesting concept of laughinstock. They control the United States, and by extension, the world. There is no one to question their authority.
If a young liberal were working from within to change a conservative church or college or if an older church member or alum bad mouthed such a church or school, if the Crimson cared or noticed it would probably applaud him or her.
But once institutions go liberal, dissent and criticism are discouraged by liberals or progressives.
There's also an absence of nuance here. I'm pretty sure Romney didn't attack all Harvard professors or students or alumni. I'm not sure his comments may not have been at least in part gentle tongue in cheek ribbing. I doubt O'Reilly said all Harvardians were pinheads, and the list of people he has called pinheads includes many non-Harvardians.
But it does look like the Crimeds were able to write a whole article on this topic without mentioning George W. Bush, HBS Class of 1975. A sign that things are changing?
The usual tactic of the left: call your opponents stupid. If you agree with them you are as smart as they are and must also be worthy of lording it over the rest of the world, which is what they would like to do in the end. This is how I believe they bully the college youth into agreeing with their ideas. Who likes to be thought of as dumb?
The endowment at Harvard has reached critical mass. The investment income from the endowment is sufficient to make the school tuiton free.
Havard grads will control and rule the NeoEuropa wasteland of the Northeastern states purged from America.
That huge endowment plus the huge tuition allows Harvard to overpay legions of profs and admins who to donate bunches of it to Democrats and progressive causes.
All part of the “big education” cycle and why Dems are so protective of student lending.
If the people aren’t completely somnambulant, they will eventually see through the sophistry of the marxist cabal at Harvard and other “ivy league” schools.
Those places have outlived their usefulness, especially since they are now applying an ideological litmus test. Shades of Soviet Russia, where Bible believing Christians were not allowed into universities.
Unfortunately, since Ivy League grads control so much of govt and business, they tend to promote and include only their own.
Filthy ivy-league locusts.
It is characteristic of young college students everywhere to edit their own words insufficiently, and to over-estimate how distinctive their thoughts and prose are. If you deleted the institution name in this little essay, you would be able to tell it was written by a 19-year-old. But you couldn’t tell if the university was Harvard, Concordia, or the University of North Dakota.
Christian at Harvard feels culture shock
by Chris King, 2005
"Harvard Crimson, the school newspaper ... had editorialized two years earlier that I was unfit to be elected the student body president because of my Christian faith.... cruel fliers had ... been anonymously placed slandering me and my Christian faith as I was locked in a campus election...I could not have done it without a praying family and a God who I found out...was also very much alive in Cambridge..."
Gee, I thought an intellectual was a person, who’s trade is, the examination of ideas, (at the least). I will stand corrected if a better explanation is presented, notwithstanding.
An intellectual, therefor should include those who are not usually included; the lumpen masses, lets just say it includes a lot of people who are excluded from the list of “elite intellectuals “ they are just the ordinary thinking sacred human being, and because they are untrained by a university, these very intellectual people are not considered serious, so I will not put too fine a point on that argument. [the-they], are certainly not anti-intellectual, they may be actually more ponderous of real life circumstances than the imagined life of a professional intellectual, [the-they], are certainly more interesting than the intense poseur, that you might chat with on the campus of Brown University, or Harvard. I’m thinking more of the people referred to in the commercial Richards Group Scores With Paul Harvey Ram Truck Commercial During Super Bowl
A critical debate involves the rigors of truth as determined by rational, logical participants, who acknowledge the premise that there is a truth to be discovered. “ideas” , the kernel of the intellectual inquiry is accessible to almost everyone, even those who are not approved to think for themselves. Furthermore, Ideas are the intuitions reified through the algebra of language, experience and tested within (language games), they are not facile proclamations made by the ministry of truth.
And certainly not the province of a princely class of mandarins living in sequestered towers at Harvard University.
Richards Group Scores With Paul Harvey Ram Truck Commercial During Super Bowl
that was supposed to be a link to the commercial. dang computers.
Wow, thanks for that link!!
Places like Harvard will soon become echo chambers where party loyalty is more important than innovation and free thought.
See how well that worked out for the Soviets.
When one of mine, who is very intellectually talented, called and said he was admitted to this and that and the other grad school -- but not Harvard -- my spontaneous response was, "Oh, praise Jesus!"
He didn't know whether to laugh or get mad!
Yep, I’m a pacifist and I’ll beat the hell out of anybody who says otherwise.
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