https://www.frontpagemag.com/goodbye-harvard/
I went to Harvard. I don’t remember exactly when. I visited Boston several times during the 1980s and 90s, and on one of those occasions I decided to take the appropriately named Red Line up to Cambridge and check out the campus of America’s oldest university. It was cute. It was certainly prettier than my own alma mater, Stony Brook, which at the time must have been one of the world’s premier showplaces of brutalist architecture at its most brutal. But on the other hand I’d seen a lot of campuses that were more beautiful than Harvard’s, among them Chapel Hill, Duke, Ann Arbor, Michigan State, Berkeley, and Stanford. Yes, the buildings – and the trees – were old and stately. But there was a stuffiness about the place. You could feel it. Or maybe I’m just guilty of committing the pathetic fallacy. Admittedly, a couple of my closest and very smartest friends went to Harvard; so did a few of the dumbest people I’ve ever met. You can get a great education there, but that’s true of a lot of places. What sets Harvard apart is that it inculcates in its students (not all, but many) an obnoxious sense of superiority, readies them to rise to the heights of the American establishment, and encourages them to subscribe to that establishment’s most cherished orthodoxies.
Pretty much every one of my closest friends in high school ended up at an Ivy League college. I had the highest SAT scores in my graduating class of more than a thousand, but partly because my father wasn’t eager to shell out Ivy-level tuition and partly because of what now seems to me an odd indifference to the whole business on my own part, I ended up at a state school. I’m glad I did. When an accreditation team came to check out our English department – that was the subject in which I received my B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. – they said it was better than Harvard’s. But who cared about things like that? Stony Brook, founded in 1957, was still half-finished, an active construction site where, when it rained, you had to slog through mud to get from one hideously ugly building to another. Harvard had over three centuries’ worth of cachet. Its name was synonymous the world over with academic excellence. However much of an idiot you might be, a Harvard diploma could take you anywhere. Even our own department chairman felt obliged to rub in the difference. When a bunch of us Ph.D. students got to the point at which we were supposed to start thinking about applying for jobs, our chairman gathered us together and explained how he and his faculty colleagues dealt with applications from newly minted Ph.Ds. “We put them in two piles,” he said. “Ivy and non-Ivy.” The next step for the latter, he made clear, was the trash bin.
