Interesting. Here’s a contrary perspective from a former graduate teaching assistant at Harvard who says the professor overseeing the third-year Latin class she was teaching pressured her to change a wealthy and well-connected student’s grade to A after the student complained bitterly about getting an A-minus. Apparently the professor didn’t even bother to review the student’s work before siding with the student against the TA’s grading decision. The TA says the student was “coasting” through the class, doing work that would have merited a grade of C “at an ordinary institution” but “Harvard undergraduate courses aren’t set up that way.” She expressly uses the term “coddles” to describe the kid-gloves treatment Harvard gives the wealthy and well-connected. Indeed, she goes so far as to say that the “real institutional mission” appears to be not education, but “instilling in the elite an innate sense of superiority.”
I’m agnostic on this. I’ve been to Harvard to present papers and participate in academic conferences, but I don’t have any first-hand experience with undergraduate education there. I’d be interested to hear from others whether, and to what extent, this sort of thing goes on