What's wrong with Harvard?

Parents Forum
1

<p>Don't know how you forum folks feel about Camille Paglia, but she had an interesting op-ed piece in The NY Times today: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/opinion/06paglia.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/06/opinion/06paglia.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>An excerpt:</p>

<p>Hence more is at stake in the Harvard affair than merely one overpriced campus with an exaggerated reputation. Support for Larry Summers was strong among Harvard undergraduates and outside the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which constitutes only one of Harvard's many colleges and professional schools. The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz protested that Mr. Summers had been removed by "a coup d'</p>

2

<p>How did "What's went wrong at Harvard?" become, "What's wrong with Harvard?" Big difference! So Summers was a highly qualified abrasive jerk that did some very good things but rubbed too many people the wrong way so they got rid of him. So what? </p>

<p>Far more interesting is that they are now investigating Andrei Shleifer for things he did when? 10 or 15 years ago? If Summers was shielding this guy, that alone would have been sufficient reason to get rid of him</p>

<p><a href="http://news.ft.com/cms/s/4bd56f12-acb6-11da-8226-0000779e2340.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://news.ft.com/cms/s/4bd56f12-acb6-11da-8226-0000779e2340.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

3

<p>The answer to your question is...PLENTY.</p>

<p>As we used to say on Morningside Heights, "the hardest thing about Harvard is getting in."</p>

4

<p>The press is, of course, having a field day with this. I wonder, though, if their reporting is any more accurate than it was w/r/t GWB and the lead up to the Iraq invasion.</p>

<p>To listen to editorials like the one above, you would think a small constituency, FAS, rolled the rest of Harvard. Of course, the truth is that FAS is the biggest and most powerful faculty in Harvard (OK, Harvard Med has more faculty, but most of them are actually employed by the various affiliated teaching hospitals like MGH). FAS also has most of the Harvard endowment credited to it.</p>

<p>In many ways, FAS is the core of the university.</p>

<p>Student support of Summers? Since when does any college seriously listen to its students? (only slight sarcasm here. mostly true.)</p>

5

<p>The Paglia piece, it made me smile. Of all universities, Harvard has not been known to be the place where trends starts. So, if it suffers from fads in the humanities departments, it shares that malady with many other peer institutions.</p>

6

<p>In any school teachers, when offended, band together and make things very unpleasant for those in charge.</p>