LL Cool J was one of eight winners this year of the Hutchins Center’s W.E.B. Dubois Medal, Harvard University’s highest honor in the field of African and African America studies. It is awarded to individuals “in recognition of their contribution to African American culture and the life of the mind.” We notice that many expected […]
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Harvard’s men’s cross-country team has been put on probation because members of the 2014 team made strong judgments on the sexual attractiveness of members of the women’s cross-country team. What? We wonder if male college students anywhere else have ever engaged in this kind of behavior—noticing that females often differ in their degree of attractiveness, […]
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Elle Woods, the sexy Harvard Law School student from la-la land in the 2001 comedy Legally Blonde, got a taste of what has become a daily diet of politically corrected speech. In that movie, Enid, the super-smart lesbian in the study group from which Elle was excluded, was lobbying to change the word semester to […]
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Harvard, which announced severe penalties on members of single-sex student groups in May, may have almost lived up to the ban in principle for as much as a couple of days. The Harvard Crimson revealed on August 15 that the College had assured the all-female Seneca organization in May that it could “continue to operate […]
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Richard A. Epstein, Defining Ideas, the Hoover Institution These final clubs enjoy widespread acceptance among their members because some young people prefer to organize their social lives around single-sex organizations. To a classical liberal like myself, these revealed preferences count a great deal…. But in the eyes of progressives like Faust, these preferences should be […]
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Harvey Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1962. He has written or translated works on Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke as well as a book on Manliness. His notable former students include: Andrew Sullivan, Alan Keyes, William Kristol. Clifford Orwin, Paul Cantor, Delba Winthrop, Mark Lilla, Francis Fukuyama, and Shen Tong. […]
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Since the dawn of time, humankind has sought an explanation for our being on this planet, and some have looked for an answer in “liberal arts” education. But now – at Harvard at least – this profound search for meaning has apparently been transferred from the liberal arts department, where definitive answers have been rare, […]
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A retired Harvard professor received this email today from Harvard’s Dean of Undergraduate Education, Jay M. Harris: “To Faculty of Arts and Sciences: I am writing to let you know that many of our students plan to leave their classrooms today at 3:15 in a show of solidarity with Black students nationwide. They will gather in the […]
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The conventional meritocratic recipe for success is simple enough: study hard in school, get good grades, be involved in one’s community, find an appropriate college, apply for jobs in your field of study, and everything else falls in place. But that’s not how it really works says Lauren A. Rivera, author of Pedigree: How Elite Students […]
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The Crimson published a lengthy study last week analyzing the contribution patterns of Harvard professors in recent campaigns (2011-2014). The tally: 96 percent of the donations from the arts and sciences faculty went to Democrats. These results shouldn’t come as much surprise at this stage, but they’re a reminder of just how limited the ideological […]
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On “Future of Capitalism,” Ira Stoll has excoriated two anonymous Harvard Kennedy School professors for their allegedly candid assessments of Paula Broadwell, who is at the center of one of those recurring sex and government scandals. Stoll’s account takes the anonymous professors to task for violating a trust, he insists, that is supposed to be […]
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By Harvey Silverglate and Zachary Bloom At first blush, the ongoing cheating scandal at Harvard College appears to raise serious questions about academic integrity at that fabled institution. If the allegations that 125 students inappropriately shared notes and answers for a take-home exam in violation of the exam’s rules prove true, the result will be […]
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Harry Lewis, a professor and former dean of Harvard College, wrote yesterday that the texts Harvard freshmen are reading this year “are more politically correct and less challenging than they used to be.” Yes, it would seem so. Here are this year’s readings: A More Perfect Union, Barack Obama Whistling Vivaldi , Claude M. Steele Choosing the Color […]
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The most shocking thing about the Harvard cheating scandal was not that 125 students out of a class of 279 were found to have “committed acts of academic dishonesty” on an exam last spring, or even that the exam was for a course that was supposed to be an easy mark. It was that it […]
Read MoreHarvard’s Dean of Freshmen Thomas Dingman has managed to circumvent the brouhaha he created last year with his “kindness pledge.” To recap: In the fall of 2011 Dean Dingman drew the wrath of former Dean of Harvard College Harry Lewis, as well as the mockery and criticism of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education(FIRE) […]
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There are certainly some good reasons for some people to take the U.S. News college rankings seriously. Presidents of schools that went up a notch or two can trumpet the fact to their trustees while noting modestly, of course, that “we don’t really pay them any heed.” But if you are a college-bound student or […]
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After pushing freshmen to “pledge” to official Harvard values last year, this year the college is training students that there is One Right Ethical Way to Live Here at Harvard. “We did not have [freshmen] sign pledges,” Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman told The Harvard Crimson for a Sept. 7 article, “but we pushed every bit as hard on how […]
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Yesterday Harvard University announced its investigation of about 125 undergraduates who are believed to have improperly collaborated on a take-home final examination last spring. It is tempting to use this case to generalize about an Ivy League sense of entitlement, declining student morals in general, or perhaps the failure of Harvard and other universities to […]
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The Boston Globe recently reported that the journalist Fareed Zakaria delivered very similar if not identical addresses this commencement season at Harvard and at Duke. Zakaria was perfectly within his rights to imitate himself on the podiums of higher learning. He did nothing wrong. The article reporting his “sin” was intended, however opaquely, to rap […]
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The Boston Globe has a long article revealing in excruciating detail the extent of Harvard’s publicizing of Elizabeth Warren’s self-identified Cherokeness, as well as her lame claim that she was oblivious to the use and usefulness of her alleged ethnicity to her employer. The article reveals one delicious new item, namely that “[t]he administrator responsible […]
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Here’s the answer to the Elizabeth Warren problem: DNA testing. If you believe you are just 1/32nd or 1/64th minority, a simple test–costing just $195–could garner you that elusive admission to an elite college that you may not be qualified for at all. Several commercial products are on the market including Ancestry by DNA and […]
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Seemingly lily-white Elizabeth Warren’s supposed claim of Cherokee heritage may make for good campaign fodder–incumbent Senator Scott Brown has gone so far as to demand that Warren apologize for allowing Harvard to claim her as a minority–but the real lesson in this latest of partisan battles has more to do with university rather than electoral […]
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Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced yesterday that they will partner in a collaborative new higher-education venture, to be called EdX, that will offer a range of online courses to potentially tens of thousands of student worldwide, most of whom will not be enrolled at either Harvard or MIT. The EdX courses, […]
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The Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School has weighed in on the long Associated Press series of articles attacking the New York Police Department for its surveillance of Muslims. This series has won a Polk Award, a White House Correspondents Association award, a Pulitzer Prize and now $25,000 from the Shorenstein Center for excellence […]
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http://www.examiner.com/article/elizabeth-warren-milked-racial-preferences-for-her-own-gain
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From what has been revealed so far, it appears that Elizabeth Warren, Harvard law professor and likely Democratic candidate against Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, gave herself status as a Native American in the past, which led Harvard and a leading legal directory to identify her as such, but recently she has claimed that she […]
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By any standard, including the misguided behavior of Western elitists, Bo Guagua is a bon vivant with a penchant for sports cars, equestrian sports, alcohol and women. His father Bo Xilai, faces charges in China of corruption and abuse of power in what has become a case receiving worldwide attention. His mother, Gu Kailai, is […]
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We missed this unusual column when it appeared in the Harvard Crimson two weeks ago, but it’s worthy of comment even at this late date. It begins with Olympia Snow’s complaint that the Senate is not a place “that ensures all voices are heard and considered,” then moves swiftly to argue that Harvard isn’t such […]
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This is the text of a speech given March 28, 2012 at a Manhattan Institute luncheon in New York City. *** I began representing students in 1969. A group of Harvard students took over University Hall in an anti-Vietnam War protest. There was a lot of violence, President Pusey called in the police, and […]
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When I read this article in today’s Harvard Crimson, asking for a shorter school year, I couldn’t figure out if it was a parody. At first I laughed, but then it occurred to me that the Crimson editorialists are likely serious. I would love to see a comparison done of the length of the academic […]
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