Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Hugh Hewitt MEGA PING!

Morning John. My son just graduated from a Roman Catholic all male high school in New Jersey. An excellent place. Out of his class, the top twenty boys were outstanding. Among the top five, there were two with perfect 1600's on their SAT's. They had GPA's over 100% (weighted due to honors courses). They were good athletes and they had outstanding extracurriculars, including community service. Only one, the valedictorian, and a Jewish young man as a point of interest, was even wait-listed at Harvard. The whisper at guidance is, these boys are discriminated against because they are Catholic and overwhelmingly white males. But principally because the are Catholic Christians. Now, in my local public school, kids with less credentials have made it into Princeton and Harvard. The bias now is skewing towards the public schools. Of course at my son's school his peers made it into Georgetown, Holy Cross, Boston College, Amherst (outrageously hard to get into nowadays) Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, and Rice to name some. Frankly, I think schools like Rice are going to ultimately topple Harvard from their unique position. Although Harvard will perennially have a certain cache. Like Tiffany, Disney, and
Kleenex, Harvard has incredible branding but the style may outlast the substance. V's wife.

Here is my favorite Hahvahd story, even if it is NOT true. :o)

From http://www.harvard.edu/siteguide/faqs/fable.html:

The Harvard/Stanford Urban Legend

A lady in a faded gingham dress and her husband, dressed in a homespun threadbare suit, stepped off the train in Boston, and walked timidly without an appointment into the Harvard University president's outer office.
The secretary could tell in a moment that such backwoods, country hicks had no business at Harvard and probably didn't even deserve to be in Cambridge. She frowned.
"We want to see the president," the man said softly.
"He'll be busy all day," the secretary snapped.
"We'll wait," the lady replied.
For hours, the secretary ignored them, hoping that the couple would finally become discouraged and go away. They didn't. And the secretary grew frustrated and finally decided to disturb the president, even though it was a chore she always regretted to do. "Maybe if they just saw you for a few minutes, then they would leave. So in exasperation he nodded. Someone of his importance obviously didn't have the time to spend with them, but he detested gingham dresses and homespun suits cluttering up his outer office. The president, stern-faced with dignity, strutted toward the couple.
The lady told him, "We had a son that attended Harvard for one year. He loved Harvard. He was happy here. But about a year ago, he was accidentally killed. My husband and I would like to erect a memorial to him, somewhere on campus."
The president wasn't touched; he was shocked. "Madam," he said gruffy, "We can't put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard and died. If we did, this place would look like a cemetery,"
"Oh, no," the lady explained quickly, "We don't want to erect a statue. We thought we would like to give a building to Harvard." The president rolled his eyes. He glanced at the gingham dress and homespun suit, then exclaimed, "A building! Do you have any earthly idea how much a building costs? We have over seven and a half million dollars in the physical plant at Harvard."
For a moment the lady was silent.
The president was pleased. He could get rid of them now. The lady turned to her husband and said quietly, "Is that all it costs to start a University? Why don't we just start our own?" Her husband nodded. The president's face wilted in confusion and bewilderment. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford walked away, traveling to Palo Alto, California where they established the University that bears their name, a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about.

Back to Harvard/Stanford urban legend page

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Ivy League bias in ideology, admissions...
From http://etc.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Companion/ivy_league.html:

Ivy League
Ivy League is the name generally applied to eight universities (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale) that over the years have had common interests in scholarship as well as in athletics. Stanley Woodward, New York Herald Tribune sports writer, coined the phrase in the early thirties.
In 1936 the undergraduate newspapers of these universities simultaneously ran an editorial advocating the formation of an "Ivy League," but the first move toward this end was not taken until 1945...