Harvard Student Quotes

My 'morals' were sound, even a bit puritanic, but when a hidebound old deacon inveighed against dancing I rebelled. By the time of graduation I was still a 'believer' in orthodox religion, but had strong questions which were encouraged at Harvard. In Germany I became a freethinker and when I came to teach at an orthodox Methodist Negro school I was soon regarded with suspicion, especially when I refused to lead the students in public prayer. When I became head of a department at Atlanta, the engagement was held up because again I balked at leading in prayer. I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war. I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools.

Professor Langdon,' called a young man with curly hair in the back row, 'if Masonry is not a secret society, not a corporation, and not a religion, then what is it?' 'Well, if you were to ask a Mason, he would offer the following definition: Masonry is a system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols.' 'Sounds to me like a euphemism for "freaky cult." ' 'Freaky, you say?' 'Hell yes!' the kid said, standing up. 'I heard what they do inside those secret buildings! Weird candlelight rituals with coffins, and nooses, and drinking wine out of skulls. Now that's freaky!' Langdon scanned the class. 'Does that sound freaky to anyone else?' 'Yes!' they all chimed in. Langdon feigned a sad sigh. 'Too bad. If that's too freaky for you, then I know you'll never want to join my cult.' Silence settled over the room. The student from the Women's Center looked uneasy. 'You're in a cult?' Langdon nodded and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. 'Don't tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh.' The class looked horrified. Langdon shrugged. 'And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion.' The classroom remained silent. Langdon winked. 'Open your minds, my friends. We all fear what we do not understand.

I remembered what Morrie said during our visit: “The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” "Morrie true to these words, had developed his own culture – long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted not time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities– conversations, interaction, affection–and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.

Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students—Mark Zuckerberg’s first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at

As Feministing.com commenter electron-Blue noted in response to the 2008 New York Times Magazine article “Students of Virginity,” on abstinence clubs at Ivy League colleges, “There were a WHOLE LOTTA us not having sex at Harvard . . . but none of us thought that that was special enough to start a club about it, for pete’s sake.

Farmer liked to tell his Harvard students that to be a good clinician you must never let a patient know that you have problems too, or that you’re in a hurry.

There was some point as a professor at Stanford and Harvard when I experienced being caught in some kind of a meaningless game in which the students were exquisite at playing the role of students and the faculty were exquisite at playing the role of faculty. I would get up and say what I had read in books and they'd all write it down and give it back as answers on exams but nothing was happening. I felt as if I were in a sound-proof room. Not enough was happening that mattered — that was real.

You cannot write an accurate history of The Holocaust without accounting for the Harvard students and professors that help make the science an acceptable world-wide movement.

One fall day in Boston, a tall mechanical engineering student named Joe entered the student union at Harvard University. He was all ambition and acne

A popular Harvard business professor urged his students to read the obituaries in the New York Times before they read anything else, in order to learn from the lives of great men.

Harvard students rallied on campus to offer formal, but “cordial,” congratulations to their fellow student, Robert T. Lincoln, son of the president-elect and newly dubbed—in honor of the Prince of Wales’s recent triumphant American tour—the “Prince of Rails.

I guess even smart students gossips just like regular people.

TEXAN: “Where are you from?” HARVARD STUDENT: “I am from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions.” TEXAN: “OK, where are you from, jackass?” —Variation on an old joke

Hi there, cutie." Ash turned his head to find an extremely attractive college student by his side. With black curly hair, she was dressed in jeans and a tight green top that displayed her curves to perfection. "Hi." "You want to go inside for a drink? It's on me." Ash paused as he saw her past, present, and future simultaneously in his mind. Her name was Tracy Phillips. A political science major, she was going to end up at Harvard Med School and then be one of the leading researchers to help isolate a mutated genome that the human race didn't even know existed yet. The discovery of that genome would save the life of her youngest daughter and cause her daughter to go on to medical school herself. That daughter, with the help and guidance of her mother, would one day lobby for medical reforms that would change the way the medical world and governments treated health care. The two of them would shape generations of doctors and save thousands of lives by allowing people to have groundbreaking medical treatments that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to afford. And right now, all Tracy could think about was how cute his ass was in leather pants, and how much she'd like to peel them off him. In a few seconds, she'd head into the coffee shop and meet a waitress named Gina Torres. Gina's dream was to go to college herself to be a doctor and save the lives of the working poor who couldn't afford health care, but because of family problems she wasn't able to take classes this year. Still Gina would tell Tracy how she planned to go next year on a scholarship. Late tonight, after most of the college students were headed off, the two of them would be chatting about Gina's plans and dreams. And a month from now, Gina would be dead from a freak car accident that Tracy would see on the news. That one tragic event combined with the happenstance meeting tonight would lead Tracy to her destiny. In one instant, she'd realize how shallow her life had been, and she'd seek to change that and be more aware of the people around her and of their needs. Her youngest daughter would be named Gina Tory in honor of the Gina who was currently busy wiping down tables while she imagined a better life for everyone. So in effect, Gina would achieve her dream. By dying she'd save thousands of lives and she'd bring health care to those who couldn't afford it... The human race was an amazing thing. So few people ever realized just how many lives they inadvertently touched. How the right or wrong word spoken casually could empower or destroy another's life. If Ash were to accept Tracy's invitation for coffee, her destiny would be changed and she would end up working as a well-paid bank officer. She'd decide that marriage wasn't for her and go on to live her life with a partner and never have children. Everything would change. All the lives that would have been saved would be lost. And knowing the nuance of every word spoken and every gesture made was the heaviest of all the burdens Ash carried. Smiling gently, he shook his head. "Thanks for asking, but I have to head off. You have a good night." She gave him a hot once-over. "Okay, but if you change your mind, I'll be in here studying for the next few hours." Ash watched as she left him and entered the shop. She set her backpack down at a table and started unpacking her books. Sighing from exhaustion, Gina grabbed a glass of water and made her way over to her... And as he observed them through the painted glass, the two women struck up a conversation and set their destined futures into motion. His heart heavy, he glanced in the direction Cael had vanished and hated the future that awaited his friend. But it was Cael's destiny. His fate... "Imora thea mi savur," Ash whispered under his breath in Atlantean. God save me from love.

Professor Langdon?’ A male student at the back raised his hand, sounding hopeful. ‘Are you saying that instead of going to chapel, we should have more sex?’ Langdon chuckled, not about to take the bait. From what he’d heard about Harvard parties, these kids were having more than enough sex.

A student once walked into the office of Harvard Dean LeBaron Russell Briggs and said he hadn't done his assignment because he hadn't felt well. Looking the student piercingly in the eye, Dean Briggs said, "Mr. Smith, I think in time you may perhaps find that most of the work in the world is done by people who aren't feeling very well

philosophical inquiries (the reflections of specially trained observers on the nature of their own patterns of thought) or the insights of great novelists, such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. Those are the readings that inspired my first years at Harvard. But, as I learned from Ernst Kris, neither trained introspection nor creative insights would lead to the systematic accretion of knowledge needed for the foundation of a science of mind. That sort of foundation requires more than insight, it requires experimentation. Thus, it was the remarkable successes of experimental science in astronomy, physics, and chemistry that spurred students of mind to devise experimental

From elementary school through high school, my siblings and I were hectored to excel in every class, to win medals in science fairs, to be chosen princess of the prom, to win election to student government. Thereby and only thereby, we learned, could we expect to gain admission to the right college, which in turn would get us into Harvard Medical School: life's one sure path to meaningful success and lasting happiness.

Langdon feigned a sad sigh. "Too bad. If that's too freaky for you, then I know you'll never want to join my cult." Silence settled over the room. The student from the Women's Center looked uneasy. "You're in a cult?" Langdon nodded and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Don't tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh." The class looked horrified. Langdon shrugged. "And if any of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion." The classroom remained silent. Langdon winked. "Open your minds, my friends. We all fear what we do not understand.

And there was some point as a professor at Stanford and Harvard when I experienced being caught in some kind of a meaningless game in which the students were exquisite at playing the role of students and the faculty were exquisite at playing the role of faculty. I would get up and say what I had read in books and they’d all write it down and give it back as answers on exams but nothing was happening. I felt as if I were in a sound-proof room. Not enough was happening that mattered—that was real.

But rumor had it he was exceptional. Word had spread that one of his professors at Harvard—the daughter of a managing partner—claimed he was the most gifted law student she’d ever encountered. Some of the secretaries who’d seen the guy come in for his interview were saying that on top of this apparent brilliance he was also cute. I was skeptical of all of it. In my experience, you put a suit on any half-intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers. I was doubtful he’d earned the hype.

I asked Hillary why she had chosen Yale Law School over Harvard. She laughed and said, "Harvard didn't want me." I said I was sorry that Harvard turned her down. She replied, "No, I received letters of acceptance from both schools." She explained that a boyfriend had then invited her to the Harvard Law School Christmas Dance, at which several Harvard Law School professors were in attendance. She asked one for advice about which law school to attend. The professor looked at her and said, "We have about as many woen as we need here. You should go to Yale. The teaching there is more suited to women." I asked who the professor was, and she told me she couldn't remember his name but that she thought it started with a B. A few days later, we met the Clintons at a party. I came prepared with yearbook photos of all the professors from that year whose name began with B. She immediately identified the culprit. He was the same professor who had given my A student a D, because she didn't "think like a lawyer." It turned out, of course, that it was this professor -- and not the two (and no doubt more) brilliant women he was prejudiced against - who didn't think like a lawyer. Lawyers are supposed to act on the evidence, rather than on their prejudgments. The sexist professor ultimately became a judge on the International Court of Justice. I told Hillary that it was too bad I wasn't at that Christmas dance, because I would have urged her to come to Harvard. She laughed, turned to her husband, and said, "But then I wouldn't have met him... and he wouldn't have become President.

The environmental movement has palsied two generations of American youth. It has diverted much of our high school curricula into the phony field of environmental science. (As legendary physicist Richard Feynman observed, “If a science has an adjective it probably isn’t science.”) At the same time, the movement has turned many universities into apocalyptic nature cults that divert money from education to an obscurantist debauch. Seventy-two percent of Harvard students in late 2012 actually voted to have their university disinvest from all fossil fuels. This movement has already corrupted most branches of government with a carbon dioxide fetish. Now it is debilitating America’s most precious venture assets.

Seeing the way leadership works in the real world is a tad more enlightening than reading case studies as an MBA student at Harvard Business School.

More than 50% of students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton gave the intuitive—incorrect—answer.

results are shocking. More than 50% of students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton gave the intuitive—incorrect—answer.

As good as following the rules and learning the Catechism are, they do not make sense without a personal relationship with Christ.

The important thing is that if you wish to grow in your spiritual life, you have to get used to saying no to yourself in small ways so that you can be open to God’s grace in big ways.

Afterward, I jokingly asked Salim why the children of Soweto were so weird. “They see schoolwork as a privilege,” he replied, “one that many of their parents did not have.” When I returned to Harvard two weeks later, I saw students complaining about the very thing the Soweto students saw as a privilege. I started to realize just how much our interpretation of reality changes our experience of that reality.

EXPECTATIONS ALSO SHAPE stereotypes. A stereotype, after all, is a way of categorizing information, in the hope of predicting experiences. The brain cannot start from scratch at every new situation. It must build on what it has seen before. For that reason, stereotypes are not intrinsically malevolent. They provide shortcuts in our never-ending attempt to make sense of complicated surroundings. This is why we have the expectation that an elderly person will need help using a computer or that a student at Harvard will be intelligent.* But because a stereotype provides us with specific expectations about members of a group, it can also unfavorably influence both our perceptions and our behavior. Research on stereotypes shows not only that we react differently when we have a stereotype of a certain group of people, but also that stereotyped people themselves react differently when they are aware of the label that they are forced to wear (in psychological parlance, they are “primed” with this label). One stereotype of Asian-Americans, for instance, is that they are especially gifted in mathematics and science. A common stereotype of females is that they are weak in mathematics. This means that Asian-American women could be influenced by both notions.

Hence a report from Harvard’s own “Committee on Raising the Standard”: “Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily—Grade A for work of not very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity. . . . One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work.” Except that report was written in—you saw this coming, didn’t you?—1894.

The secret of the Finland phenomenon, Wagner discovered, was a platform it built by elevating the education level of its teachers. Finland’s public school system was experiencing the same thing that made Harvard University’s curriculum and network the envy of the academic world: it hired only teachers with incredible qualifications and it had them mentor students closely. Thus, students who went to school at Harvard—or in Finland—started out a rung above their peers.

That was the old Ellen Gulden, the girl who would walk over her mother in golf shoes, who scared students away from writing seminars, who started work on Monday after graduating from Harvard with honors on a Thursday, who loved the moments in the office when she would look out at the impenetrable black of the East River, starred with the reflected lights of Queens, with only the cleaning crew for company, and think of her various superiors out at dinner parties and restaurants and her various similars out at downtown clubs or cheap but authentic places in Chinatown and say to herself, 'I'm getting ahead.' That Ellen Gulden, the one her boss suspected of using the dying-mother ploy to get more money or a better job title, would have covered every inch of [this datebook] with the frantic scribble of unexamined ambition.

By comparing various sources of data, moreover, it is possible to estimate that the average income of the parents of Harvard students is currently about $450,000, which corresponds to the average income of the top 2 percent of the US income hierarchy.32 Such a finding does not seem entirely compatible with the idea of selection based solely on merit. The contrast between the official meritocratic discourse and the reality seems particularly extreme in this case. The total absence of transparency regarding selection procedures should also be noted.33

Harvard was named after Rev. John Harvard. Its 1692 motto is: Veritas, christo et ecclesiae (Truth, for Christ and the Church). Harvard’s 1646 Rules and Precepts read: 2. Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisedome, Let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Proverbs 2:3).

There was much talk in the American press in the early eighties about the political cautiousness of a new generation of college students concerned mostly with their own careers. But when, at the Harvard commencement of June 1983, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes criticized American intervention in Latin America, and said, “Because we are your true friends, we will not permit you to conduct yourselves in Latin American affairs as the Soviet Union conducts itself in Central European and Central Asian affairs,” he was interrupted twenty times by applause and received a standing ovation when finished.

EVERY WEDNESDAY, I teach an introductory fiction workshop at Harvard University, and on the first day of class I pass out a bullet-pointed list of things the students should try hard to avoid. Don’t start a story with an alarm clock going off. Don’t end a story with the whole shebang having been a suicide note. Don’t use flashy dialogue tags like intoned or queried or, God forbid, ejaculated. Twelve unbearably gifted students are sitting around the table, and they appreciate having such perimeters established. With each variable the list isolates, their imaginations soar higher. They smile and nod. The mood in the room is congenial, almost festive with learning. I feel like a very effective teacher; I can practically hear my course-evaluation scores hitting the roof. Then, when the students reach the last point on the list, the mood shifts. Some of them squint at the words as if their vision has gone blurry; others ask their neighbors for clarification. The neighbor will shake her head, looking pale and dejected, as if the last point confirms that she should have opted for that aseptic-surgery class where you operate on a fetal pig. The last point is: Don’t Write What You Know. The idea panics them for two reasons. First, like all writers, the students have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, for as long as they can remember, to write what they know, so the prospect of abandoning that approach now is disorienting. Second, they know an awful lot. In recent workshops, my students have included Iraq War veterans, professional athletes, a minister, a circus clown, a woman with a pet miniature elephant, and gobs of certified geniuses. They are endlessly interesting people, their lives brimming with uniquely compelling experiences, and too often they believe those experiences are what equip them to be writers. Encouraging them not to write what they know sounds as wrongheaded as a football coach telling a quarterback with a bazooka of a right arm to ride the bench. For them, the advice is confusing and heartbreaking, maybe even insulting. For me, it’s the difference between fiction that matters only to those who know the author and fiction that, well, matters.

Most of the faces around us were young but not teenagers. A good portion of the country's universities and colleges had been temporarily shut down due to lack of funding, but if a few still had money left, I guess Harvard would have been one of them. WE ARE YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUDDLED MASSES. . . read the sign next to me.

If you find yourself in a leadership position in a Catholic organization on campus, you’ll need to accept that there are other ways of looking at the Faith apart from your own. If you try to force your views on everyone else, you will waste time and damage the community. Instead, try to appreciate the incredible diversity that comes from being part of the universal Church.

we discussed this dire problem with education and illusions of academic contribution, with Ivy League universities becoming in the eyes of the new Asian and U.S. upper class a status luxury good. Harvard is like a Vuitton bag or a Cartier watch. It is a huge drag on the middle-class parents who have been plowing an increased share of their savings into these institutions, transferring their money to administrators, real estate developers, professors, and other agents. In the United States, we have a buildup of student loans that automatically transfer to these rent extractors. In a way it is no different from racketeering: one needs a decent university “name” to get ahead in life; but we know that collectively society doesn’t appear to advance with organized education.

I'm gonna take all my sadness, frustration, anger and energy and channel it into becoming the best possible student. I am going to become a learning machine... Go ahead, go to all your parties. Go ahead and go home to your families and friends every weekend. You are probably smarter than me. But it doesn't matter. While you are goofing around, I'm gonna be studying, and I'm gonna catch you.

Introductory paragraph incorporating the thesis: After a challenging childhood marked by adversity, Adam Parrish has become a successful freshman at Harvard University. In the past, he had spent his time doubting himself, fearing he would become like his father, obsessing that others could see his trailer-park roots, and idealizing wealth, but now he has built a new future where no one has to know where he's come from. Before becoming a self-actualized young man at Harvard, Adam had been deeply fascinated by the concept of the ley lines and also supernaturally entangled with one of the uncanny forests located along one, but he has now focused on the real world, using only the ghost of magic to fleece other students with parlor trick tarot card readings. He hasn't felt like himself for months, but he is going to be just fine. Followed by three paragraphs with information that supports the thesis. First: Adam understands that suffering is often transient, even when it feels permanent. This too shall pass, etc. Although college seems like a lifetime, it is only four years. Four years is only a lifetime if one is a guinea pig. Second paragraph, building on the first point: Magic has not always been good for Adam. During high school, he frequently immersed himself in it as a form of avoidance. Deep down, he fears that he is prone to it as his father is prone to abuse, and that it will eventually make him unsuitable for society. By depriving himself of magic, he forces himself to become someone valuable to the unmagic world, i.e. the Crying Club. Third paragraph, with the most persuasive point: Harvard is a place Ronan Lynch cannot be, because he cannot survive there, either physically or socially. Without such hard barriers, Adam will surely continue to return to Ronan Lynch again and again, and thus fall back in with bad habits. He will never achieve the life of financial security and recognition he planned. Thesis restated, bringing together all the information to prove it: Although life is unbearable now, and Adam Parrish seems to have lost everything important to him in the present by pursuing the things important to him in the past, he will be fine. Concluding paragraph describing what the reader just learned and why it is important for them to have learned it: He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine.

Harvard Law School professor Jannie Suk writes about how hard it is to teach rape law in an era of trigger warnings. She explains how women's organizations now 'routinely advise students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence, and which might therefore be traumatic' as they might "trigger" traumatic memories'. She describes the way many students appear to equate 'the risk . . . of traumatic injury' incurred while discussing sexual misconduct as 'analogous to sexual assault itself'. As a consequence, more and more teachers of criminal law are not including rape law in their courses: 'it's not worth the risk of complaints of discomfort by students' and they fear being accused of inflicting 'emotional injuries' in classroom conversation.

Yale was founded by finicky Protestants who worried that the Puritans at Harvard weren’t puritanical enough. But the Revolutionary War brought the Age of Reason to New Haven, and Dwight inherited a student body full of deist beatniks on the Enlightenment highway to hell, which is to say, France. This generation did not just read Voltaire; they literally addressed each other as “Voltaire” the way kids today call one another dude. Like, “Voltaire, I’m so high right now.

Morrie, true to these words, had developed his own culture—long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted no time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.

a famous 1925 lecture given by Professor Francis Peabody to the Harvard medical student body:             The good physician knows his patients through and through, and his knowledge is bought dearly. Time, sympathy, and understanding must be lavishly dispensed, but the reward is to be found in that personal bond which forms the greatest satisfaction of the practice of medicine. One of the essential qualities of the clinician is interest in humanity, for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.

I’m here because, for the past ten years, I have been haunted by a murder that took place a few steps away. It was told to me my junior year of college like a ghost story: A young woman, a Harvard graduate student of archaeology, was bludgeoned to death in her off-campus apartment in January 1969. Her body was covered with fur blankets and the killer threw red ochre on her body, a perfect re-creation of a burial ritual. No one heard any screams; nothing was stolen. Decades passed, and her case remained unsolved. Unsolved, that is, until yesterday.

A senior partner asks if you’ll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who’s busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd one.

For example, the value of fertilizer for a farmer is likely to be higher if other inputs (seeds, irrigation, farming practices, etc.) are available. The value of a blackboard in a school will depend on the availability of other school inputs (such as chalk, teachers, classrooms, etc.). In economics terms, the situations described above exhibit positive cross-partial derivatives.[80] In fact, when Richard teaches this maxim to his students, he refers to it as “capitalize on positive cross partial derivatives,” a much more technical formulation intended to be playful and memorable.

This is the basis for the flipped classroom described by physics professor Eric Mazur in his book Peer Instruction. Mazur doesn’t lecture in his classes at Harvard. Instead, he asks students difficult questions, based on their homework reading, that require them to pull together sources of information to solve a problem. Mazur doesn’t give them the answer; instead, he asks the students to break off into small groups and discuss the problem among themselves. Eventually, nearly everyone in the class gets the answer right, and the concepts stick with them because they had to reason their own way to the answer.

I am skeptical that distance education based on asynchronous Internet technologies (i.e., prerecorded video, online forums, and email) is a substitute for live classroom discussion and other on-campus interaction. Distance education students can't raise their hands to ask instructors questions or participate in discussions, and it's difficult or impossible for them to take advantage of faculty office hours. Teaching assistants don't always respond to email, and online class discussion boards can be neglected by students and faculty alike. In this sense, the "process of dialogue" is actually limited by technology.

The US is a minimum of ninety-five thousand beds short of need. It’s now harder to get a bed in New York City’s Bellevue Hospital than it is to land a spot at Harvard University, wrote advocate DJ Jaffe in his devastating 2018 book Insane Consequences. Sixty-five percent of the non-urban counties in the United States have no psychiatrists and nearly half lack psychologists, too. If the situation continues as it is, by 2025, we can expect a national shortage of over fifteen thousand desperately needed psychiatrists as medical students seek higher-paying specialties and 60 percent of our current psychiatrists gray out.

Fatigue has built up after all this training, and I can’t seem to run very fast. As I’m leisurely jogging along the Charles River, girls who look to be new Harvard freshmen keep on passing me. Most of these girls are small, slim, have on maroon Harvard-logo outfits, blond hair in a ponytail, and brand-new iPods, and they run like the wind. You can definitely feel a sort of aggressive challenge emanating from them. They seem to be used to passing people, and probably not used to being passed. They all look so bright, so healthy, attractive, and serious, brimming with self-confidence. With their long strides and strong, sharp kicks, it’s easy to see that they’re typical mid-distance runners, unsuited for long-distance running. They’re more mentally cut out for brief runs at high speed. Compared to them I’m pretty used to losing. There are plenty of things in this world that are way beyond me, plenty of opponents I can never beat. Not to brag, but these girls probably don’t know as much as I do about pain. And, quite naturally, there might not be a need for them to know it. These random thoughts come to me as I watch their proud ponytails swinging back and forth, their aggressive strides. Keeping to my own leisurely pace, I continue my run down along the Charles. Have I ever had such luminous days in my own life? Perhaps a few. But even if I had a long ponytail back then, I doubt if it would have swung so proudly as these girls’ ponytails do. And my legs wouldn’t have kicked the ground as cleanly and as powerfully as theirs. Maybe that’s only to be expected. These girls are, after all, brand-new students at the one and only Harvard University. Still, it’s pretty wonderful to watch these pretty girls run. As I do, I’m struck by an obvious thought: One generation takes over from the next. This is how things are handed over in this world, so I don’t feel so bad if they pass me. These girls have their own pace, their own sense of time. And I have my own pace, my own sense of time. The two are completely different, but that’s the way it should be.

The Great Butter Rebellion, which took place at Harvard University in 1766, was the first recorded student protest in the United States. Since the opening of Harvard’s gates in 1636, food service had been an issue and the quality of the butter was exceptionally poor. Apparently one meal with particularly rancid butter led Asa Dunbar (the grandfather of Henry David Thoreau) to jump upon his chair and proclaim: “Behold, our butter stinketh!—give us therefore, butter that stinketh not.” The cry was adopted by fully half the student body as they rose together and exited the Commons in protest. They were subsequently suspended. Eventually the students were readmitted, but its unclear whether the butter continued to stinketh or not. —The Harvard Crimson

Harvard’s political culture in the early 1920s was decidedly conservative. Soon after Robert’s arrival, the university imposed a quota to restrict the number of Jewish students. (By 1922, the Jewish student population had risen to twenty-one percent.) In 1924, the Harvard Crimson reported on its front page that the university’s former president Charles W. Eliot had publicly declared it “unfortunate” that growing numbers of the “Jewish race” were intermarrying with Christians. Few such marriages, he said, turned out well, and because biologists had determined that Jews are “prepotent” the children of such marriages “will look like Jews only.” While Harvard accepted a few Negroes, President A. Lawrence Lowell staunchly refused to allow them to reside in the freshman dormitories with whites.

this reaction. This was on college campuses, exactly the kind of environment where I had expected curiosity, lively debate, and, yes, the thrill and energy of like-minded activists. Instead almost every campus audience I encountered bristled with anger and protest. I was accustomed to radical Muslim students from my experience as an activist and a politician in Holland. Any time I made a public speech, they would swarm to it in order to shout at me and rant in broken Dutch, in sentences so fractured you wondered how they qualified as students at all. On college campuses in the United States and Canada, by contrast, young and highly articulate people from the Muslim student associations would simply take over the debate. They would send e-mails of protest to the organizers beforehand, such as one (sent by a divinity student at Harvard) that protested that I did not “address anything of substance that actually affects Muslim women’s lives” and that I merely wanted to “trash” Islam. They would stick up posters and hand out pamphlets at the auditorium. Before I’d even stopped speaking they’d be lining up for the microphone, elbowing away all non-Muslims. They spoke in perfect English; they were mostly very well-mannered; and they appeared far better assimilated than their European immigrant counterparts. There were far fewer bearded young men in robes short enough to show their ankles, aping the tradition that says the Prophet’s companions dressed this way out of humility, and fewer girls in hideous black veils. In the United States a radical Muslim student might have a little goatee; a girl may wear a light, attractive headscarf. Their whole demeanor was far less threatening, but they were omnipresent. Some of them would begin by saying how sorry they were for all my terrible suffering, but they would then add that these so-called traumas of mine were aberrant, a “cultural thing,” nothing to do with Islam. In blaming Islam for the oppression of women, they said, I was vilifying them personally, as Muslims. I had failed to understand that Islam is a religion of peace, that the Prophet treated women very well. Several times I was informed that attacking Islam only serves the purpose of something called “colonial feminism,” which in itself was allegedly a pretext for the war on terror and the evil designs of the U.S. government. I was invited to one college to speak as part of a series of

If one group of young people approach adulthood as an aesthetic experience, another group tries to treat adulthood as much as possible like a continuation of school. These students usually went to competitive colleges and tend to come from the upper strata of society. They were good at getting admitted into places, so they apply to companies that have competitive hiring procedures. As students, they enjoyed the borrowed prestige of high-status colleges, so as adults they enjoy the borrowed prestige of high-status companies and service organizations. As students, they were good at winning gold stars, and so they follow a gold-star-winning kind of life when they enter the workforce, and their parents get to brag that they work at Google or Williams & Connolly, or that they go to Harvard Business School.

The New York Times recently reported that the most expensive schools are paradoxically cheaper for low-income students. Take, for example, a student whose parents earn thirty thousand per year—not a lot of money but not poverty level, either. That student would pay ten thousand for one of the less selective branch campuses of the University of Wisconsin but would pay six thousand at the school’s flagship Madison campus. At Harvard, the student would pay only about thirteen hundred despite tuition of over forty thousand. Of course, kids like me don’t know this. My buddy Nate, a lifelong friend and one of the smartest people I know, wanted to go to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, but he didn’t apply because he knew he couldn’t afford it. It likely would have cost him considerably less than Ohio State, just as Yale cost considerably less for me than any other school.

Any class, no matter how able, will always have a bottom quarter. What are the effects of the psychology of feeling average, even in a very able group? Are there identifiable types with the psychological or what-not tolerance to be 'happy' or to make the most of education while in the bottom quarter?" He knew exactly how demoralizing the Big Pond was to everyone but the best. To Glimp's mind, his job was to find students who were tough enough and had enough achievements outside the classroom to be able to survive the stress of being Very Small Fish in Harvard's Very Large Pond. Thus did Harvard begin the practice (which continues to this day) of letting in substantial numbers of gifted athletes who have academic qualifications well below the rest of their classmates. If someone is going to be cannot fodder in the classroom, the theory goes, it's probably best if that person has an alternative avenue of fulfillment on the football field.

Stand firmly rooted in your convictions, and eventually the whole world will come around to you. In 1838, Emerson delivered a lecture to the senior class of Harvard Divinity School. He had been a student there, himself, ten years earlier. Following in his father’s footsteps, Emerson was ordained as junior pastor at Boston’s Second Church in 1829. But just three years later, he resigned his position because he could no longer repeat the prayers and rituals of the past. “To be a good minister,” he wrote in his journal, “I must leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. We worship the dead forms of our forefathers.”  Emerson sought new insights, new revelations, and new words to express them. The “Divinity School Address” is an invitation for others to join him. It challenged religious orthodoxy, scandalized some in his audience, and was condemned by church leaders—including the college dean. Emerson wasn’t invited back to Harvard for the next thirty years.

The school you went to is the most important thing. They don’t recruit at less prestigious schools. I was lucky. I didn’t go to a great school. I mean in my analyst class, we had thirty from Harvard, twenty from Wharton[’s undergraduate program], and only five from [my top-fifteen school]. Once in a while, you see someone from a state school. But usually they’re there because of connections. The most common type of connection was a personal one—either a direct or indirect friendship—with an employee of a particular firm. Michael, also a banker, came from a nonlisted school. He used his own job search experience as an example of the usefulness of connections: If you’re not from the core, then it’s much more difficult to get a job here. All firms say that you can submit your résumé online, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard of someone who was successful this way. In my case, I had to come out here [to New York, from the South], work through friends and friends of friends, really use connections and be proactive.

Eleanor was a member of one of America’s great families, niece to Teddy Roosevelt and a distant cousin of her future husband. But she was not raised to be anyone significant. In fact, it’s surprising she survived her upbringing at all—one cousin called it “the grimmest childhood I had ever known.” Her father was an alcoholic who kept abandoning the family. One of her two brothers died when she was five years old, and her mother, who she remembered as “kindly and indifferent,” died when she was eight. Her father, who Eleanor worshiped despite his endless betrayals, died two years later. The orphan was sent to live with her grandmother, a stern woman with two alcoholic adult sons whose advances caused a teenage Eleanor to put three locks on her door. When she met Franklin, he was a student at Harvard and was known in the family as the not particularly impressive only son of a domineering widow. Eleanor got pregnant right after her wedding and spent the next ten years having six children and wriggling under her mother-in-law’s thumb. (“I was your real mother; Eleanor merely bore you,” Sara Roosevelt told her grandchildren.)

In a paper called “The Economics of ‘Acting White,’” the young black Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. argues that some black students “have tremendous disincentives to invest in particular behaviors (i.e., education, ballet, etc.) due to the fact that they may be deemed a person who is trying to act like a white person (a.k.a. ‘selling-out’). Such a label, in some neighborhoods, can carry penalties that range from being deemed a social outcast, to being beaten or killed.” Fryer cites the recollections of a young Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, known then as Lew Alcindor, who had just entered the fourth grade in a new school and discovered that he was a better reader than even the seventh graders: “When the kids found this out, I became a target. . . . It was my first time away from home, my first experience in an all-black situation, and I found myself being punished for everything I’d ever been taught was right. I got all A’s and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk. I had to learn a new language simply to be able to deal with the threats. I had good manners and was a good little boy and paid for it with my hide.

Where is Florence’s imagination? He identified the most common and most functional uses for bricks and blankets and simply stopped. Florence’s IQ is higher than Poole’s. But that means little, since both students are above the threshold. What is more interesting is that Poole’s mind can leap from violent imagery to sex to people jumping out of buildings without missing a beat, and Florence’s mind can’t. Now which of these two students do you think is better suited to do the kind of brilliant, imaginative work that wins Nobel Prizes? That’s the second reason Nobel Prize winners come from Holy Cross as well as Harvard, because Harvard isn’t selecting its students on the basis of how well they do on the “uses of a brick” test—and maybe “uses of a brick” is a better predictor of Nobel Prize ability. It’s also the second reason Michigan Law School couldn’t find a difference between its affirmative action graduates and the rest of its alumni. Being a successful lawyer is about a lot more than IQ. It involves having the kind of fertile mind that Poole had. And just because Michigan’s minority students have lower scores on convergence tests doesn’t mean they don’t have that other critical trait in abundance.

The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.” Morrie, true to these words, had developed his own culture—long before he got sick. Discussion groups, walks with friends, dancing to his music in the Harvard Square church. He started a project called Greenhouse, where poor people could receive mental health services. He read books to find new ideas for his classes, visited with colleagues, kept up with old students, wrote letters to distant friends. He took more time eating and looking at nature and wasted no time in front of TV sitcoms or “Movies of the Week.” He had created a cocoon of human activities—conversation, interaction, affection—and it filled his life like an overflowing soup bowl.I had also developed my own culture. Work. I did four or five media jobs in England, juggling them like a clown. I spent eight hours a day on a computer, feeding my stories back to the States. Then I did TV pieces, traveling with a crew throughout parts of London. I also phoned in radio reports every morning and afternoon. This was not an abnormal load. Over the years, I had taken labor as my companion and had moved everything else to the side.

Eliot's own reflections on the primitive mind as a model for nondualistic thinking and on the nature and consequences of different modes of consciousness were informed by an excellent education in the social sciences and philosophy. As a prelude to our guided tour of the text of The Waste Land, we now turn to a brief survey of some of his intellectual preoccupations in the decade before he wrote it, preoccupations which in our view are enormously helpful in understanding the form of the poem. Eliot entered Harvard as a freshman in 1906 and finished his doctoral dissertation in 1916, with one of the academic years spent at the Sorbonne and one at Oxford. At Harvard and Oxford, he had as teachers some of modern philosophy's most distinguished individuals, including George Santayana, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Joachim; and while at the Sorbonne, he attended the lectures of Henri Bergson, a philosophic star in Paris in 1910-11. Under the supervision of Royce, Eliot wrote his dissertation on the epistemology of F. H. Bradley, a major voice in the late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century crisis in philosophy. Eliot extended this period of concentration on philosophical problems by devoting much of his time between 1915 and the early twenties to book reviewing. His education and early book reviewing occurred during the period of epistemological disorientation described in our first chapter, the period of "betweenness" described by Heidegger and Ortega y Gasset, the period of the revolt against dualism described by Lovejoy. 2 Eliot's personal awareness of the contemporary epistemological crisis was intensified by the fact that while he was writing his dissertation on Bradley he and his new wife were actually living with Bertrand Russell. Russell as the representative of neorealism and Bradley as the representative of neoidealism were perhaps the leading expositors of opposite responses to the crisis discussed in our first chapter. Eliot's situation was extraordinary. He was a close student of both Bradley and Russell; he had studied with Bradley's friend and disciple Harold Joachim and with Russell himself. And in 1915-16, while writing a dissertation explaining and in general defending Bradley against Russell, Eliot found himself face to face with Russell across the breakfast table. Moreover, as the husband of a fragile wife to whom both men (each in his own way) were devoted, Eliot must have found life to be a kaleidoscope of brilliant and fluctuating patterns.

Today Judith was dealing with the problem of grief. Her longtime editor at Harvard University Press who had published all her seminal texts and others not so seminal had died in a freak accident. He had gone out for a walk on the Cape (his second home) at the height of the afternoon, when the glare off the water was most intense. His foot had lost contact with the rocky footpath, sending his body over the edge. He was discovered the next day by a group of high school students who had gone to a cove to smoke angel dust, a fact that had come out when the parents took a closer look at why their children were on the shore in the middle of the day instead of in school. “Some people have been saying he did it on purpose, but that’s because they can’t accept the real tragedy: the accidental nature of the world,” Judith said, motioning to the waiter for another round of piña coladas. “It’s all very sordid.” Objectively that had to be so, although it was hard, while reclining in her luxuriously sturdy plastic chaise, poolside with a second piña colada on the way, for Dorothy to feel the impact of the story, to be there on the New England coastline with the angel-dust-smoking teenagers, the bloated editorial body, the cold gray ocean, the tragic inexorability of mischance. It wasn’t that the pool seemed real and the dead body seemed false; it was that nothing seemed real.

Many college courses in the humanities focus on discussion over lecture. Students read course material ahead of time and have a discussion in class. Harvard Business School took this to the extreme by pioneering case-based learning more than a hundred years ago, and many business schools have since followed suit. There are no lectures there, not even in subjects like accounting or finance. Students read a ten-to twenty-page description of a particular company’s or person’s circumstance—called a “case”—on their own time and then participate in a discussion/debate in class (where attendance is mandatory). Professors are there to facilitate the discussion, not to dominate it. I can tell you from personal experience that despite there being eighty students in the room, you cannot zone out. Your brain is actively processing what your peers are saying while you try to come to your own conclusions so that you can contribute during the entire eighty-minute session. The time goes by faster than you want it to; students are more engaged than in any traditional classroom I’ve ever been a part of. Most importantly, the ideas that you and your peers collectively generate stick. To this day, comments and ways of thinking about a problem that my peers shared with me (or that I shared during class) nearly ten years ago come back to me as I try to help manage the growth and opportunities surrounding the Khan Academy.

This excerpt from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, appeared in 2002 as part of Harvard Magazine’s coverage of recent books by Harvard affiliates. The excerpt concerns author Noel Ignatiev’s role in launching a journal “to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness.” … The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists. Of course, we expected bewilderment from people who still think of race as biology. We frequently get letters accusing us of being "racists," just like the KKK, and have even been called a "hate group." ... Our standard response is to draw an analogy with anti-royalism: to oppose monarchy does not mean killing the king; it means getting rid of crowns, thrones, royal titles, etc.... Every group within white America has at one time or another advanced its particular and narrowly defined interests at the expense of black people as a race. That applies to labor unionists, ethnic groups, college students, schoolteachers, taxpayers, and white women. Race Traitor will not abandon its focus on whiteness, no matter how vehement the pleas and how virtuously oppressed those doing the pleading. The editors meant it when they replied to a reader, "Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as 'the white race' is destroyed—not 'deconstructed' but destroyed.

When personal gossip attains the dignity of print, and crowds the space available for matters of real interest to the community,” future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, in a piece which formed the basis for what we now know as the “right to privacy,” it “destroys at once robustness of thought and delicacy of feeling. No enthusiasm can flourish, no generous impulse can survive under its blighting influence.” Brandeis’s words reflected some of the darkness of Kierkegaard’s worries from fifty years earlier and foretold some of that sullying paranoia that was still to come fifty years in the future. Thiel had read this article at Stanford. Many law students do. Most regard it as another piece of the puzzle that makes up American constitutional legal theory. But Peter believed it. He venerated privacy, in creating space for weirdos and the politically incorrect to do what they do. Because he believed that’s where progress came from. Imagine for a second that you’re the kind of deranged individual who starts companies. You’ve created cryptocurrencies designed to replace the U.S. monetary system that somehow turned into a business that helps people sell Beanie Babies and laser pointers over the internet and ends up being worth billions of dollars. Where others saw science fiction, you’ve always seen opportunities—for real, legitimate business. You’re the kind of person who is a libertarian before that word had any kind of social respectability. You’re a conservative at Stanford. You’re the person who likes Ayn Rand and thinks she’s something more than an author teenage boys like to read. You were driven to entrepreneurship because it was a safe space from consensus, and from convention. How do you respond to social shaming? You hate it. How do you respond to petulant blogs implying there is something wrong with you for being a gay person who isn’t public about his sexuality? Well, that’s the question now, isn’t it?

Still, when Harvard said I wasn’t eligible for financial aid, and another university offered me a full scholarship, I thought I should go there. My mother became furious and said I was always sabotaging myself. She was proud of being able to borrow money at a loss from her own retirement fund, and give it to Harvard. I felt proud of her, too. But I did not feel proud of myself. It made the college application process feel, in retrospect, somehow hurtful and insulting: all the essays and interviews and supplements and letters seemed to be about you, about your specialness—but actually it was all about shaking your parents down for money. — Harvard seemed really proud of its own attitude toward financial aid. You were always hearing about how “merit-based aid,” which was fine for other schools, didn’t work here, where everyone was so full of merit. When your parents paid full tuition, part of what they were paying for was the benefit you derived from being exposed to people who were more diverse than you. “My parents are paying for him to be here, so I can learn from him,” my friend Leora said once, about a homeschooled guy from Arkansas in her history section who started talking about how the Jews killed Jesus. Leora had been my best friend when we were little, and then we went to different middle schools and high schools, but now we were at college together. She already thought every single person on earth was anti-Semitic, so she definitely hadn’t learned anything from that guy. To me, the part of financial aid that made the least sense was that all the international students got full scholarships, regardless of how much money their parents had. The son of the prince of Nepal was in our class, and didn’t pay tuition. Ivan had once caused me pain by saying something deprecating about “people whose parents paid a hundred thousand dollars for them to be here.” Did he not know that my parents were paying a hundred thousand dollars for me to be there? The thought that really made me crazy was that my parents had paid for Ivan to be there. It was another experience they had paid for me to have.

Robert Rosenthal found a way. He approached a California public elementary school and offered to test the school’s students with a newly developed intelligence-identification tool, called the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition, which could accurately predict which children would excel academically in the coming year. The school naturally agreed, and the test was administered to the entire student body. A few weeks later, teachers were provided with the names of the children (about 20 percent of the student body) who had tested as high-potentials. These particular children, the teachers were informed, were special. Though they might not have performed well in the past, the test indicated that they possessed “unusual potential for intellectual growth.” (The students were not informed of the test results.) The following year Rosenthal returned to measure how the high-potential students had performed. Exactly as the test had predicted, the first- and second-grade high-potentials had succeeded to a remarkable degree: The first-graders gained 27 IQ points (versus 12 points for the rest of the class); and the second-graders gained 17 points (versus 7 points). In addition, the high-potentials thrived in ways that went beyond measurement. They were described by their teachers as being more curious, happier, better adjusted, and more likely to experience success as adults. What’s more, the teachers reported that they had enjoyed teaching that year more than any year in the past. Here’s the twist: the Harvard Test of Inflected Acquisition was complete baloney. In fact, the “high-potentials” had been selected at random. The real subject of the test was not the students but the narratives that drive the relationship between the teachers and the students. What happened, Rosenthal discovered, was replacing one story—These are average kids—with a new one—These are special kids, destined to succeed—served as a locator beacon that reoriented the teachers, creating a cascade of behaviors that guided the student toward that future. It didn’t matter that the story was false, or that the children were, in fact, randomly selected. The simple, glowing idea—This child has unusual potential for intellectual growth—aligned motivations, awareness, and behaviors.

The biology of potential illness arises early in life. The brain’s stress-response mechanisms are programmed by experiences beginning in infancy, and so are the implicit, unconscious memories that govern our attitudes and behaviours toward ourselves, others and the world. Cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and the other conditions we examined are not abrupt new developments in adult life, but culminations of lifelong processes. The human interactions and biological imprinting that shaped these processes took place in periods of our life for which we may have no conscious recall. Emotionally unsatisfying child-parent interaction is a theme running through the one hundred or so detailed interviews I conducted for this book. These patients suffer from a broadly disparate range of illnesses, but the common threads in their stories are early loss or early relationships that were profoundly unfulfilling emotionally. Early childhood emotional deprivation in the histories of adults with serious illness is also verified by an impressive number of investigations reported in the medical and psychological literature. In an Italian study, women with genital cancers were reported to have felt less close to their parents than healthy controls. They were also less demonstrative emotionally. A large European study compared 357 cancer patients with 330 controls. The women with cancer were much less likely than controls to recall their childhood homes with positive feelings. As many as 40 per cent of cancer patients had suffered the death of a parent before the age of seventeen—a ratio of parental loss two and a half times as great as had been suffered by the controls. The thirty-year follow-up of Johns Hopkins medical students was previously quoted. Those graduates whose initial interviews in medical school had revealed lower than normal childhood closeness with their parents were particularly at risk. By midlife they were more likely to commit suicide or develop mental illness, or to suffer from high blood pressure, coronary heart disease or cancer. In a similar study, Harvard undergraduates were interviewed about their perception of parental caring. Thirty-five years later these subjects’ health status was reviewed. By midlife only a quarter of the students who had reported highly positive perceptions of parental caring were sick. By comparison, almost 90 per cent of those who regarded their parental emotional nurturing negatively were ill. “Simple and straightforward ratings of feelings of being loved are significantly related to health status,” the researchers concluded.

Berkshire is my first love and one that will never fade: At the Harvard Business School last year, a student asked me when I planned to retire and I replied, ‘About five to ten years after I die.’ ” -1991 letter   * * *

The fracas was frequently portrayed in the media as two world-famous Harvard professors brought low by a graduate student from a lesser-known, unorthodox department. This is largely hyperbole. But the clash did illustrate an import aspect of economics—something that the profession shares with other sciences: Ultimately, what determines the standing of a piece of research is not the affiliation, status, or network of the author; it is how well it stacks up to the research criteria of the profession itself. The authority of the work derives from its internal properties—how well it is put together, how convincing the evidence is—not from the identity, connections, or ideology of the researcher. And because these standards are shared within the profession, anyone can point to shoddy work and say it is shoddy.¶¶ This may not seem particularly impressive, unless you consider how unusual it is compared to many other social sciences or much of the humanities.## It would be truly rare in those other fields for a graduate student to get much mileage challenging a senior scholar’s work, as happens with some frequency in economics. But because models enable the highlighting of error, in economics anyone can do it.

Naperville Community Unit School District 203 in Illinois, profiled in John J. Ratey’s book Spark, is a particularly inspiring example of how physical movement enhances cognitive ability. School officials implemented a district-wide PE curriculum that focuses on fitness as opposed to sports, and then had students take some of their hardest subjects after exercising. As a result, Naperville students achieved stunning results on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), a standardized test administered every four years to students worldwide. In 1999 it was given in thirty-eight countries31, and Naperville students scored first in the world in science, and sixth in math—behind only math superstars such as Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. This is remarkable, since Naperville students are a cross-sampling of ordinary American students. The stunning results from Naperville echo other studies suggesting a strong link between exercise and learning. Researchers from Harvard32 and other universities reported in 2009 that the more physical fitness tests children passed, the better they did on academic tests.

capital expenditures required in Clean Technology are so incredibly high,” says Pritzker, “that I didn’t feel that I could do anything to make an impact, so I became interested in digital media, and established General Assembly in January 2010, along with Jake Schwartz, Brad Hargreaves and Matthew Brimer.” In less than two years GA had to double its space. In June 2012, they opened a second office in a nearby building. Since then, GA’s courses been attended by 15,000 students, the school has 70 full-time employees in New York, and it has begun to export its formula abroad—first to London and Berlin—with the ambitious goal of creating a global network of campuses “for technology, business and design.” In each location, Pritzker and his associates seek cooperation from the municipal administration, “because the projects need to be understood and supported also by the local authorities in a public-private partnership.” In fact, the New York launch was awarded a $200,000 grant from Mayor Bloomberg. “The humanistic education that we get in our universities teaches people to think critically and creatively, but it does not provide the skills to thrive in the work force in the 21st century,” continues Pritzker. “It’s also true that the college experience is valuable. The majority of your learning does not happen in the classroom. It happens in your dorm room or at dinner with friends. Even geniuses such as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, who both left Harvard to start their companies, came up with their ideas and met their co-founders in college.” Just as a college campus, GA has classrooms, whiteboard walls, a library, open spaces for casual meetings and discussions, bicycle parking, and lockers for personal belongings. But the emphasis is on “learning by doing” and gaining knowledge from those who are already working. Lectures can run the gamut from a single evening to a 16-week course, on subjects covering every conceivable matter relevant to technology startups— from how to create a web site to how to draw a logo, from seeking funding to hiring employees. But adjacent to the lecture halls, there is an area that hosts about 30 active startups in their infancy. “This is the core of our community,” says Pritzker, showing the open space that houses the startups. “Statistically, not all of these companies are going to do well. I do believe, though, that all these people will. The cost of building technology is dropping so low that people can actually afford to take the risk to learn by doing something that, in our minds, is a much more effective way to learn than anything else. It’s entrepreneurs who are in the field, learning by doing, putting journey before destination.” “Studying and working side by side is important, because from the interaction among people and the exchange of ideas, even informal, you learn, and other ideas are born,” Pritzker emphasizes: “The Internet has not rendered in-person meetings obsolete and useless. We chose these offices just to be easily accessible by all—close to Union Square where almost every subway line stops—in particular those coming from Brooklyn, where many of our students live.

As the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard, a powerful Washington insider and advisor to two Republican presidents, Martin S. Feldstein was accustomed to being taken very seriously. He taught Ec 10, the introductory economics course at Harvard, for twenty years and this made some of the most powerful people in the USA his former students. So it might have come as a rude shock for Feldstein to be told in Spring 2003, not merely by a bunch of rebellious students but some of his fellow faculty, that his course was not only not good enough, it was misleading. This disturbance was triggered by Students for a Humane and Responsible Economics (SHARE), a Harvard-based off-shoot of the Post-Autistic Economics Network. But significantly, the actual petition demanding changes in Ec 10 was drafted by one of Feldstein’s colleagues, Prof. Stephen A. Marglin, himself a Harvard graduate and a veteran member of the faculty. The petition asked: If this course is meant to be an introduction to basic economic principles and methods, why is its content limited to the neo-liberal variety of economics? Why does it create the impression that there are no other models in the field of economics? Why isn’t there a plurality of approaches adapted to the complexity of objects analysed? By not providing a truly open marketplace for ideas Harvard failed to prepare students to be critical thinkers and engaged citizens, alleged SHARE. Its mission statement went on to argue that the standard economic models taught at Harvard were loaded with values and political convictions which inevitably influenced, if not defined, the students’ worldview as well as their career choices. Above all, said the petition, ‘ . . . by falsely presenting economics as a positive science devoid of ethical values, we believe Harvard strips students of their intellectual agency and prevents them from being able to make up their own minds.

HARVARD DIVINITY School was proud, and justly so, of what it called its pluralism—feminists, humanists, theists, liberation theologians all pursuing truth together—but the price that pluralism can cost was dramatized one day in a way that I have never forgotten. I had been speaking as candidly and personally as I knew how about my own faith and how I had tried over the years to express it in language. At the same time I had been trying to get the class to respond in kind. For the most part none of them were responding at all but just sitting there taking it in without saying a word. Finally I had to tell them what I thought. I said they reminded me of a lot of dead fish lying on cracked ice in a fish store window with their round blank eyes. There I was, making a fool of myself spilling out to them the secrets of my heart, and there they were, not telling me what they believed about anything beneath the level of their various causes. It was at that point that a black African student got up and spoke. “The reason I do not say anything about what I believe,” he said in his stately African English, “is that I’m afraid it will be shot down.” At least for a moment we all saw, I think, that the danger of pluralism is that it becomes factionalism, and that if factions grind their separate axes too vociferously, something mutual, precious, and human is in danger of being drowned out and lost. I had good times as well as bad ones that winter term. I was able to say a few things that some of my students seemed to find valuable, and some of them said things that I value still, but if there was anything like a community to draw strength and comfort from there at Harvard as years before there had been at Union, I for one was not lucky enough to discover it.

Harvard was started as an institution to train up Christian ministers. Matter of fact, their motto was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae, which means ‘Truth for Christ and the Church.’ Yale University was started when ten ministers thought Harvard had become too liberal, so they started their own college! Students who attended Yale were required to ‘live religious, godly and blameless lives according to the rules of God’s Word, diligently reading the Holy Scriptures, the fountain of light and truth; and constantly attend upon all the duties of religion, both in public and secret.’ They were also instructed to ‘… consider the main end of his study to wit to know God in Jesus Christ’ and ‘to lead a Godly, sober life.’ Princeton University was founded by seven ministers after the Great Awakening to train ministers and offer other fields of study, as well.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” There are no means available to measure the intellectual impact and the far-reaching effects of his influence on the minds of his students. For this reason it is impossible to give Dr. Quigley recognition commensurate with his value to thousands of Georgetown students since his arrival here from Harvard in the Fall of 1941.

With practice, you will learn to understand yourself better and increasingly learn what conviction feels like. As you search for it, you will get better at gearing your efforts to work in a way that will help you get to that feeling. Leaders don’t look for excuses for why they can’t act like an owner. Instead, they embrace the challenge of ownership and encourage their teams to do the same. It helps if, as subordinates, they were regularly encouraged and empowered by their bosses to put themselves in the shoes of decision makers. “Superb professionals define their jobs broadly,” one of my former bosses regularly said to me. “They are always thinking several levels up.” This may explain why many business schools, including Harvard, teach using the case method. This approach certainly can be used to teach analytical techniques, but, for me, it is primarily an exercise in learning to get to conviction. After you’ve studied all the facts of the case on your own, and after you’ve debated those facts in study groups before class and again in class, what do you believe? What would you do if you were in the shoes of the protagonist? The case method attempts to simulate what leaders go through every day. Decision makers are confronted with a blizzard of facts: usually incomplete, often contradictory, and certainly confusing. With help from colleagues, they have to sort things out. Through the case method, students learn to put themselves in the shoes of the decision maker, imagine what that might feel like, and then work to figure out what they believe. This mind-set is invaluable in the workplace. It forces you to use your broad range of skills. It guides you as to what additional analysis and work needs to be done to figure out a particular business challenge. Leaders don’t need to always have conviction, but they do need to learn to search for it. This process never ends. It is a way of thinking. Every day, as you are confronted with new and unexpected challenges, you need to search for conviction. You need to ask yourself: What do I believe? What would I do if I were a decision maker? Aspiring leaders need to resist the temptation to make excuses, such as I don’t have enough power, or it’s not my job, or nobody in the company cares what I think, or there just isn’t time. They must let those excuses go and put themselves mentally in the shoes of the decision maker. From that vantage point, they will start to get a better idea how it feels to bear the weight of ownership.

Just as our view of work affects our real experience of it, so too does our view of leisure. If our mindset conceives of free time, hobby time, or family time as non-productive, then we will, in fact, make it a waste of time. For example, many of the business leaders and Harvard students I work with exhibit the telltale symptoms of the “workaholic’s curse.” They conceive of all the time spent away from actual work to be a hindrance to their productivity, so they squander it. As one CEO of a telecommunications company in Malaysia told me: “I wanted to be productive because that’s what makes me happy, so I tried to maximize the time I spent working. But, as I later realized, I had too narrowly defined what ‘being productive’ was. I started to feel guilty when I did anything that wasn’t work. Nothing else, not exercise or time with my wife or relaxation, was productive. So I never had time to recharge my batteries, which meant that, ironically, the more I worked, the more my productivity plummeted.

Prescott's life was changed from the accepted norm of a proper Bostonian by that crust of bread. While in his junior year at Harvard,the students one day,while eating in the Commons, turned the room into pandemonium by bombarding each other with food;in the midst of it Prescott, who turned at the call of his name, was struck by a crust of bread accurately thrown. It hit him in the open left eye,striking the unprotected pupil;it had the effect usually attending a brain concussion. When he recovered he was made instantly aware that he had lost sight of his left eye.

ac·cept   v. [trans.] 1 consent to receive (a thing offered): he accepted a pen as a present.    agree to undertake (an offered position or responsibility).  give an affirmative answer to (an offer or proposal); say yes to: he would accept their offer and see what happened | [intrans.] Tim offered Brian a lift home and he accepted.  DATED say yes to a proposal of marriage from (a man): Ronald is a good match and she ought to accept him.  receive as adequate, valid, or suitable: the college accepted her as a student;credit cards are widely accepted.  regard favorably or with approval; welcome: the Harvard literati never accepted him as one of them.  agree to meet (a draft or bill of exchange) by signing it.  (of a thing) be designed to allow (something) to be inserted or applied: vending machines that accepted 100-yen coins for cans of beer.

The quality of students wasn’t an issue; Tsinghua and nearby Peking University attracted the highest-scoring students from each year’s national examinations. But the SEM’s curriculum and teaching methods were dated, and new faculty members were needed. To be a world-class school required world-class professors, but many instructors, holdovers from a bygone era, knew little about markets or modern business practices. The school’s teaching was largely confined to economic theory, which wasn’t very practical. China needed corporate leaders, not Marxist theoreticians, and Tsinghua’s curriculum placed too little emphasis on such critical areas as finance, marketing, strategy, and organization. The way I see it, a business education should be as much vocational as academic. Teaching business is like teaching medicine: theory is important, but hands-on practice is essential. Medical students learn from cadavers and hospital rounds; business students learn from case studies—a method pioneered more than a century ago by Harvard Business School that engages students in analyzing complex real-life dilemmas faced by actual companies and executives. Tsinghua’s method of instruction, like too much of China’s educational system, relied on rote learning—lectures, memorization, and written tests—and did not foster innovative, interactive approaches to problem solving. Students needed to know how to work as part of a team—a critical lesson in China, where getting people to work collaboratively can be difficult. At Harvard Business School we weren’t told the “right” or “wrong” answers but were encouraged to think for ourselves and defend our ideas before our peers and our at-times-intimidating professors. This helped hone my analytical skills and confidence, and I believed a similar approach would help Chinese students.

Prof. Louis Menand of Harvard, in a May 5 statement, argued that an education focused on narrow academic disciplines was inadequate: “Less than 20 percent of our students go on to get Ph.D.s,” he said. Many students end up in the business world, broadly construed, not in academia. In a separate May 5 statement, Prof. Sean D.

a young Harvard student, traveled west to Oklahoma to live among the Kiowa and participate in the solemn rites of the peyote cult. In one photograph the land appears as a blur of dust, the sky fading to gray, the air darkened by soil worked loose by the wind, the farmhouses

But how shall an Occidental mind ever understand the Orient? Eight years of study and travel have only made this, too, more evident that not even a lifetime of devoted scholarship would suffice to initiate a Western student into the subtle character and secret lore of the East. Every chap- ter, every paragraph in this book will offend or amuse some patriotic or esoteric soul: the orthodox Jew will need all his ancient patience to forgive the pages on Yahveh; the metaphysical Hindu will mourn this superficial scratching of Indian philosophy; and the Chinese or Japanese sage will smile indulgently at these brief and inadequate selections from the wealth of Far Eastern literature and thought. Some of the errors in the chapter on Judea have been corrected by Professor Harry Wolf son of Harvard;

Harvard is like a Vuitton bag or a Cartier watch. It is a huge drag on the middle-class parents who have been plowing an increased share of their savings into these institutions, transferring their money to administrators, real estate developers, professors, and other agents. In the United States, we have a buildup of student loans that automatically transfer to these rent extractors. In a way it is no different from racketeering: one needs a decent university “name” to get ahead in life; but we know that collectively society doesn’t appear to advance with organized education.

Also, he had short black sideburns with streaks of gray in them, a boxer’s build, a Ph.D. in English literature from Harvard, and no wife or girlfriend. These qualities made Douglas a font of intrigue for the all-female population of St. Agnes—both the lay faculty and the students—but in truth Douglas led a sedentary life. He loved books, he was a passionate, solitary filmgoer, and he got his hair cut every four weeks by Chiapas, whose father ran a barbershop down the block.

It’s helpful to know that Eden drew his inspiration from a classic study led by the Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal, who teamed up with Lenore Jacobson, the principal of an elementary school in San Francisco. In eighteen different classrooms, students from kindergarten through fifth grade took a Harvard cognitive ability test. The test objectively measured students’ verbal and reasoning skills, which are known to be critical to learning and problem solving. Rosenthal and Jacobson shared the test results with the teachers: approximately 20 percent of the students had shown the potential for intellectual blooming, or spurting. Although they might not look different today, their test results suggested that these bloomers would show “unusual intellectual gains” over the course of the school year.

As the joke about the MIT-Harvard divide went: A popular grocery store is situated about halfway between the two schools. A sign in front of the store advertised, “5 Cans of Soup for $1.” A student walks in and asks, “How much for 10 cans?” The clerk replies, “Are you from Harvard and can’t count or from MIT and can’t read?

The world is moving from the scientistic guilds and sects of yore toward the new sciences of information. Fragmented and futilitarian, the academic sciences are turning to politics, panics, and cartels to preserve their old privileges. Decades ago I pored through the Harvard catalogue and concluded that 80 percent of the courses stultified their students. Now those stultified students are running the country. Most of the courses they took were either self-evident or wrong, ideological or tautological, twisted or trivial.

Since a lot of people in the know knew who he was, it wasn’t all that difficult getting the students who were socialist Democrats, Communists, and Greens to show up to his meeting. It was harder to convince the minor political groups with their somewhat inane grievances to show up, but they did. Once they were gathered in an auditorium that the Dean of Students let Michael use, Michael began, “My fellow Harvard students, thank you for coming. I’m sure a few of you know who I am, but let me introduce myself anyway. I am Michael Evans, my family basically runs everything from behind-the-scenes. I’m next in line to run the family business, so I thought I would get to know my future partners while we were still in college. I want to talk to you about the future of the United States and where I want to take it.

As a graduate student Nathan Nunn, now a Harvard economist, began to compare different economies in modern Africa, and he found that the countries that lost more people to the slave trade were also the poorest countries today. How

That's the second reason Nobel Prize winners come from Holy Cross as well as Harvard, because Harvard isn't selecting its students on the basis of how well they do on the "uses of a brick" test—and maybe "uses of a brick" is a better predictor of Nobel Prize ability.

I used Harvard’s computer system only once as an undergraduate, to run regressions for my senior thesis on the economics of spousal abuse. The data was stored on large, heavy magnetic tapes that I had to lug in big boxes across campus, cursing the entire way and arriving in a sweaty mess at the sole computer center, which was populated exclusively with male students. I then had to stay up all night spinning the tapes to input the data. When I tried to execute my final calculations, I took down the entire system. That’s right. Years before Mark famously crashed that same Harvard system, I beat him to it.

The Porto Ricans at Harvard University believe that the crime was a horrible one and it should be punished, but death penalty would add to, and not detract from, its horrors,” the Harvard students wrote. One of the student signatures on the letter was by Pedro Albizu y Campos who would later become a Puerto Rican promoter of ideals for the island’s independence from the United States.

But that was thirteen years ago. Today, the crème de la crème flock to younger, more vibrant companies, in both entry-level and much higher positions. The brightest students tend to not want to work for large companies anymore, and McKinsey is a large company. In the 1970s every smart student received an offer from Arthur Andersen, then about ten thousand strong. The more adventurous went to McKinsey, which employed a paltry four hundred by comparison. Today Arthur Andersen is gone, and McKinsey has taken its place in the student imagination. It’s for the average Harvard Business School graduate, not the Baker scholars. And, as has always been the case, McKinsey consultants continue to leave for big positions elsewhere. Among others, Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg is a McKinsey alumnus, as is Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette. McKinsey may be a career firm for some, but it tends to lose its best people.