More about Ivy admissions and privilege

As a corollary to last week's post about the social roots of Ivy League elitism, here's an interesting article from the New York Post about how some ultra-privileged Manhattan parents are upset that their kids aren't getting into Harvard, Yale and Princeton as much these days. This is the heartwarming part:

it seems private schools are feeling the heat more than their public counterparts. “The Ivies are reaching out for a diverse economic background—even home-schooled students are becoming more of a thing,” says one guidance counselor at a private school in Manhattan. “They are interested in first-generation college kids, and few privates have that. The Ivies are still good to legacies [children of alumni] if their alums have been good to them. But it’s getting harder for private school students because it’s getting fairer for the rest of the world.”

“Our low-income initiative has repositioned us,” agrees Marlyn McGrath, Harvard’s director of undergraduate admissions. Harvard, Princeton, Yale and other top-tier schools have replaced loans with grants in financial aid packages, which has encouraged students who wouldn’t have been able to afford the schools in the past to apply. “A lot of people are starting to think about Harvard when otherwise their state university might have been on the top of their list.”

One local example of this brave new world is public school student Lukasz Zbylut, who just graduated from Brooklyn’s New Utrecht High School. After rejecting offers from 18 top colleges, including Yale, Princeton, Stanford and Dartmouth, he plans to attend Harvard University come fall. Lukasz’s parents are Polish immigrants, and his father works in construction in Brooklyn to support his wife and three children.

Now, one working-class student from Brooklyn does not a fair admissions policy make -- especially when we're still accepting (per this article) six from the Trinity School and eight from Horace Mann, which have graduating classes of 107 and 173 respectively, and which both cost around $30,000/yr. (Here's something that will blow your mind -- at Horace Mann, which costs $29,000/yr, only 18% of students get financial aid. Everyone else, one assumes, pays it out of pocket. My God.) The economic elite is still way, WAY overrepresented at places like Harvard.

But, even if it's not a substantial change, it's at least satisfying to read that people who spend $46,000 on admissions counseling -- I'm not making that up, it's in the article -- aren't automatically guaranteed a seat at the nation's best universities. (Don't expect me to have any sympathy for these people, either. They get into Johns Hopkins and they're disappointed? Fuck them.) Education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America, and any increase in meritocracy at these places is a good thing.

On William Deresiewicz's article & Ivy League entitlement

There's been a lengthy debate on Mather-Open, and maybe other email lists too, about this article from The American Scholar, in which Yale English professor William Deresiewicz decries how life in the Ivy League fosters classism and intellectual laziness among those who go there. Now, I'm sympathetic to this argument -- my regular readers will know that I've always believed Harvard is a sickening manifestation of the worst American elitism -- and most of Deresiewicz's article is a helpful reality check for those of us who live inside it. You should read it.

BUT, I submit, Deresiewicz has got his causation mixed up. This paragraph is the giveaway:

...it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

Okay, that is not a function of your education. That is a function of you being a douchebag. I'm sorry, but throwing up your hands and saying "The Ivy League MADE me an elitist! I couldn't help it!" is no excuse. There are plenty of us at Harvard who, for various reasons, manage to maintain an identity that's quite separate from the ruling-class Harvard Club sensibility, and the worst we suffer is a little bit of cognitive dissonance and a desire not to give any money to this place after we graduate. To be sure, arrogant, privileged douches who think in Deriesiewicz's terms are the overwhelming majority at places like Harvard, but that's not a reflection on the insitution itself, it's a reflection on its admissions policy.

So while Deriesiewicz is much more comfortable than most critics with the magic word that actually explains this problem -- class -- he still winds up overlaying it with a bunch of bunkum about how Ivy League schools somehow produce intellectual torpor in their students by the nefarious means of grade inflation and, wait for it, imposing architecture. (You must read this to believe it.) The argument is transparently ridiculous. Harvard, an institution where most of us barely go to class, would be well served if it produced ANYTHING intellectual in its students.

The problem is that a large, and socially dominant, proportion of our student body (and I am extrapolating here from Harvard to the rest of the Ivy League) was elitist and privileged well before it ever came here. They grew up in places like Westchester, went to school at places like Exeter, and spent high school summers driving one of their father's BMWs around places like Cape Cod. Of course a person with a background like that will wind up thinking and acting entitled. It'd happen to them at any college: the only difference at the Ivy League is, they reach critical mass here thanks to their built-in admissions advantages and subsume the rest of the student body. The subsequent failure of Harvard classrooms to produce a real liberal education is solely because Harvard has filled them with people who are incurious.*

Deriesiewicz has identified the right phenomenon -- his description of it as "entitled mediocrity" is absolutely perfect, and I'm going to start using that phrase -- but it's not, as he argues, an intellectual or institutional problem. It's a social problem. And you cannot sensibly analyze an Ivy League school until you recognize that fact.

Now, to lighten the mood, here is a dancing walrus.

*I should add, by way of a disclaimer, that I personally am also enormously intellectually lazy. My Harvard education is wasted on me; as far as I can discern, I'm here because the admissions office finds rural Canadians an amusing novelty. If I could restructure Harvard admissions to my own standards, I would not have accepted myself.

Jon Stewart Mentions Harvard!

If you don't wanna watch the whole thing, fast forward to about 2:15.

Huh?

UPDATE (1 PM): Cambridge Common knows more and has some discomfiting stories. I think there are two issues here; the first is the macro question, of whether HUPD and the authorities create an environment that welcomes dissent. (Fairly obviously not.) The second is the micro question, of whether our privacy rights are being directly violated, and whether (this seems to be the ACLU's concern) information is being fed by HUPD to the federal government, specifically the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. This second one is the potentially explosive issue we should focus on.

Nothing yet on the MA-ACLU website, I'll try to keep an eye on it. Hopefully this won't be a one-day story.

Crimson:

The nation’s preeminent civil liberties group is accusing the University of maintaining a political intelligence unit within the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD), an allegation that comes after two protesters were arrested during a demonstration in the Square.

The protesters allege that undercover HUPD officers were photographing the demonstration, according to John Reinstein, the legal director of the Massachusetts division of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“What we found really quite surprising and disturbing is that the Harvard police department has an undercover, plainclothes, political intelligence unit which so far as I know has never been acknowledged by them before,” Reinstein said.

...Reinstein said that the ACLU has filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act to discover whether Harvard shares the intelligence it gathers with the federal government. Other schools have connections with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), local teams of law enforcement and intelligence specialists formed to investigate terrorism...

Reinstein said that Nieves noticed a bystander in plainclothes taking photos of the protest and decided to go photograph him. When she did, the man informed her that he was an undercover police officer with HUPD and placed her under arrest for refusing to delete the photos. Kearney said that the officer would have to arrest him if he was going to arrest Nieves and so Kearney was also arrested, according to both Fam and Reinstein.

“It’s a little unnerving to find Harvard undercover police spying and taking pictures of Harvard students on public property,” Fam said.

WTF? Has anybody heard anything about this? I know Katie posted some questions back in March when those people got arrested, but... the ACLU? "Political intelligence"? The FBI? This is some weirdness. If HUPD (a private organization paid for by our tuition) is secretly monitoring student activism on behalf of the federal government, that's pretty obviously unacceptable...

Sarbanes Preview

So John Sarbanes is coming this Saturday! Yay! 5:30 P.M. in Ticknor Lounge.

He is a really kick ass Congressman. Here are a couple of highlights from his Freshman Term that point the intellect and integrity that make people so optimistic about his future.

First, (this made the daily show), he throws down on Bush appointee Lurita Doan about grammar! grammar! He is breaking out the "future pluperfect" and "hortatory subjunctive" in the middle of an Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing.

Awesome.

Second, this is his speech against the troop surge back in February.

It is one of the more eloquent articulation of a solid Democratic position on the issue that I have heard. Especially with the whole "Respecting ROTC" thing going down right now, this is a good example of how Democrats should talk about the military. That is why he is considered a rising star in the Democratic Party.

Be there on Saturday! 5:30, Ticknor Lounge, FREE GREEK FOOD

Life Lessons from the Harvard University Police Log, 2008-02-21

You can learn a lot from our Police Log, which is periodically published in the Crimson. For instance:

5:17 p.m.—Officer was dispatched the Yard to a report of an individual in the area riding a mini bike. Officer arrived and searched the area for the individual with negative results.

LESSON: If you ride a minibike in Harvard Yard, you will probably not be arrested.

4:43 p.m.—Officers were dispatched to Au Bon Pain to a report of an assault in progress. Officers arrived and spoke to the reporting party who stated that when they attempted to sit down at a table they were threatened by another individual. The reporting party states that the individual then kicked them and struck them in the knee.
7:01 a.m.—Officers dispatched to Au Bon Pain to a report that an individual reported threw a chair at another individual.

LESSON: There are clearly some bad vibes at Au Bon Pain.

3:22 a.m.—Officers dispatched to Lionel Hall to a report of an individual screaming. Officer arrived and spoke to the individual who stated that they were attempting to flag down a cab. Officers then transported the individual to their destination.

LESSON: If it's 3 AM and you need a ride, stand outside Lionel Hall and scream until the police come.

11:17 a.m.—Officers dispatched to the Murr Center to take report of a stolen brown Bottega Veneta wallet valued at $700.00 that contained identification cards, credit cards, a health insurance card, and $2,490.00 in cash.

LESSON: Do not walk around with $2500 in cash, you fucking moron.

8:11 p.m.—Officer arrived at Lowell House’s G entryway to a report of a fire alarm. Officer arrived and was informed that an individual attempted to light a fire in the fireplace and the smoke caused the alarm to activate.
2:46 p.m.—Officers were dispatched to Lowell House to take report of suspicious activity. Officer arrived and spoke to the reporting party who stated that an unknown individual(s) placed feces in their desk drawer.

LESSON: Lowell House is not a fun place to live.

My head says no but my heart says yes

Okay. I realize that this, from Machinists Union president Tom Buffenbarger, is a completely unfair, mean-spirited, borderline-bigoted ad hominem attack on Obama's supporters, and it has no place whatsoever in civil democratic discourse. I also understand, per Atrios and Kagro X among others, that this argument reinforces right-wing framing and does violence to the Democratic coalition. I also understand that Obama's support is not at all limited to bicoastal elites, and that he's gaining making gains every day among the working class. By NO means am I endorsing this shoddy, reprehensible line of argument. That being said:

“Give me a break! I've got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a round against the Republican attack machine. He's a poet, not a fighter.”

Doesn't some part of you just want to add "Harvard students" in there and run around the Square with a goddamn megaphone?

...UPDATE: Chris Bowers has a good commentary on this issue.

Clinton carries primaries??

After spending last night glued to an CNN internet feed and watching Obama and Clinton nearly evenly split the delegates, I was surprised to find the title "Clinton, McCain Carry Primaries: less than 'super' night for Obama and Romney in nomination contests" at the front of today's Harvard Crimson. While McCain certainly did carry the day and Romney is in a lot of trouble, I was shocked to see the note about Obama. Had they been reading the same 5 websites that I had open on my computer last night?

While rampant optimism had been running through the Obama camp in the last few weeks, realists were aware that it was unlikely that Obama would win a majority of states. His practical hope lay with the possibility of coming close enough to Clinton in terms of delegates that he could continue to compete in the following weeks. While Clinton may have had some surprisingly strong showings (Especially considering all the talk of the "Obama Surge") , Obama's victory in a majority of super Tuesday states was all that he could have pragmatically hoped for. As an Obama supporter, I was certainly satisfied.

However, whoever came up with the Crimson front page article apparently felt that Obama hadn't performed up to expectations. The title was clearly picked by either A) an overly optimistic Obama supporter or B) a Hillary supporter seeking to stress her candidate's achievements. While I'm not suggesting that the title was maliciously unfair, it clearly was a mis-characterization of the night's occurrences, and apparently the Crimson Staff agreed (or at least got enough complaints from Obama supporters that it decided to change the article). The article's title now reads (on the crimson website) "McCain Carries Primaries, Clinton and Obama Trade Victories", which I believe that Obama and Hillary supporters can agree is a fairer description of the night.

The Crimson clarification reads as follows:

The Feb. 6 story "McCain, Clinton Carry Primaries," was put to press before full results became known from California. As a result, it said that Senator Hillary Clinton of New York had outperformed Senator Barack Obama of Illinois in yesterday's "Super Tuesday" contests. In fact, while Clinton won the major states of New York and California, the complex manner in which delegates are awarded means that the Clinton now has only a narrow lead in the total number of delegates. Additionally, Obama won 13 states yesterday, while Clinton won just nine.

I don't know at what hour the Crimson goes to press, but I still feel that even before the California results came in that it was clear that the delegate difference would not be so big. However, considering my bias, there's a limit to how much as I can argue. Either way, I'm glad that they decided to insert that clarification, and I hope that Harvard students will pay attention. The quest for the nomination still continues.

The triumphant return of the Sunday Screening

Ha ha! You thought I'd given up, didn't you? Just because the last Sunday Screening was all the way back in November -- well, seven thousand pages of academic writing later, I'm back and ready again to subject you all to mind-numbingly obscure bits of YouTube irrelevancy. Like the above -- do you realize what an enormous selection of TV signon/signoff clips YouTube has? Unbelievable. Every era, every location. I considered devoting an entire post to them, but then I decided I should at least make an effort to retain my tiny, precious audience... if you're interested, though, start at these nuggets of pure gold and work your way out from there. Nothing captures the aesthetic of a given time and place quite so perfectly, I contend, as its incidental TV graphics.

But what I've been fixated on lately is this fascinating footage of Mitt Romney arguing with a reporter. Look:

Now, leaving aside the factual content here (and the press secretary's incredibly douchey reprimand at the end), my question is: WHY would Romney's people put him in front of a rack of office supplies? My God are they trying to make him look like a bland corporate automaton? BALLPOINT PENS, for crying out loud. Not even an aisle of cool office supplies, like printers. No. PENS. You could not ask for anything more banal. The obvious allegory here is The Office--

--which perfectly captures just those mindless, soulless Ward-Cleaver-with-a-low-IQ tendencies that Romney's working so hard to hide. (I wish there was video somewhere of the scene from Season 3 where Michael confronts Dwight in an actual Staples; the aesthetic is just perfect.)

Speaking of The Office, I want to promote this video made last year by the Harvard undergrad Government Department. I'm late to this party (h/t: Dani Rodrik back in December), but it's well worth your time; who knew that Gov had so much deeply rooted anxiety?

...Really that's what The Office, and its derivatives, are about: anxiety. These are programs about people who are unsure of their places in the world, lacking confidence in the structures that are supposed to support them. In the Scranton, Pa., that The Office shows us, life is basically meaningless; Jim Halpert, the "beta male" hero, always gives that Kafkaesque look to the camera that asks -- both hilariously and heartbreakingly -- "What am I doing here?" We haven't seen this kind of ennui creeping into the popular culture since the paranoia films of the 1970s. It's an indicator of a nation, and particularly an economy, in serious trouble.

Mitt Romney's campaign, it seems, does not recognize this. They certainly are not playing the symbological game very well (as vs., for instance, Obama); he's running a nice conventional GOP campaign that will win him a nice conventional 40%. And meanwhile they've got Mike Huckabee, who I'll leave you with, nipping at their heels making just this argument -- don't let anybody tell you America's not a class-conscious society...

Important advice for people buying food at the Science Center

(We interrupt our political coverage for this public service announcement.)

If you're buying a snack or meal at the Greenhouse Cafe in the Science Center, you may see a package of "Feng Shui" brand Hot Wasabi Rice Crackers. They look like this:

and appear to a healthy, tasty, slightly spicy treat. This is a lie. DO NOT PURCHASE FENG SHUI HOT WASABI RICE CRACKERS. You are better off paying $4 to be repeatedly punched in the face. I am sitting here, at my library job where I am supposed to be helping people; but instead I am struggling not to emit sinus fluid all over everything while screaming "Oh God! My precious head!"

I feel as though someone ground up a Jalapeno pepper into fine powder, then rubbed it into my eyes, using sandpaper.

You know that guy who poured bourbon into his nasal cavity? I know what that's like now.

Long story short: THESE THINGS ARE FUCKING SPICY. DO NOT EAT THEM.

That is all. Continue going about your business.

UPDATE (January 24): It has been a week now, and I still get an unpleasant feeling in my nose and throat whenever I so much as look at this blogpost. I reiterate: DON'T BUY THESE CRACKERS.

Coming back to Harvard after a couple weeks with your family, you notice--

--how utterly repulsive Harvard Square actually is. Jeebus. I guess we get inured to it, but JFK Street seen through clear eyes is a hellscape of fashion boutiques, redundant banks, overpriced restaurants with names like "Z-Square", and all the other hideous blight that comes from living with pretentious wealthy people. You can't walk down those sidewalks without bumping into either a douchebag or a hipster, usually both, and you can't buy a cheap hamburger to save your life. This is supposed to be a college town! What the hell?

I think I would have liked Harvard Square better when it looked like this:

or at least this:

(Dig the tiny snowplow in front of the bus there. That was really the best they could do?) (Both these pictures are from the Cambridge Historical Commission, by the way, and their history of Harvard Square is worth reading if you're bored.)

That's all I have to say. How was your vacation?

Awesome

From the AP wire:

Harvard University Boosts Financial Aid

[...] The university said it would replace all loans with grants, and spend up to $22 million more annually on aid, mostly targeting middle- and upper-middle class students. Families earning under $60,000 already pay nothing to attend the world's richest university, with an endowment of nearly $35 billion. [...]

Harvard also said it would take home equity out of its wealth calculation in financial aid, which should provide a greater boost for students and parents. Overall, Harvard said a typical family earning $120,000 would pay about $12,000 next year, down from $19,000 under current award policies. For a typical family earning $180,000, the bill would drop to $18,000, from more than $30,000.

[...] University officials said their surveys showed even students from well-off families were feeling the pinch by having to work outside jobs and not being able to fully engage in the life of the university. Harvard officials also worried prospective applicants were scared away by the school's cost.

Dean of Admissions and Financial aid William Fitzsimmons said Harvard had grown concerned students were having an ''Upstairs, Downstairs'' experience. ''On the one hand the more affluent students had full access to the full Harvard experience in its totality. But this chunk of people ... 53 percent of the population, we felt were having a diminished experience.''

This rocks so, so much. While we may never be able to eradicate the problem of economic privilege that's so fundamental to Harvard, every move like this is a big step in the right direction. And seeing the administration publicly recognize the class division among our student body is very encouraging -- "Upstairs, Downstairs" is a typically dorky way to put it, but Fitzsimmons is basically making a Two Americas argument. Good for him.

In particular I'm excited to see the change in the home-equity rules. For middle-class students like me it was always awkward that the value of your house counted as part of your assets; like we were somehow expected to sell bits of it in order to pay for Harvard. (A second mortgage is not exactly an option, and it's not like we have a beach house we can rent out.) This change is welcome and long overdue.

(Much of the media attention will probably focus on the elimination of loans -- I ought to point out that that's a fairly small change for Harvard, since in my experience the amount of loan aid given out was already tiny compared to the amount of grant aid. My aid is almost entirely grants. We're lucky on that front; most members of our generation will be saddled with enormous student debt.)

So kudos to the College, and hopefully over time they will continue to work towards an even more progressive financial aid system.

Economist, Analyze Thyself

Nothing scares an ivory-tower liberal like facing the reality of a failing economy. Today's example: UC Berkeley's Brad DeLong, a gifted and insightful "reality-based" econoblogger who took quite a leap -- off a cliff -- the other day in trying to criticize the NYT's Bob Herbert.

Herbert wrote a typically understated column (and if you don't read him regularly, you should; he and Paul Krugman are usually the only voices of sanity on the Times editorial page) arguing that the economy is in severe trouble, and that Washington's statisticians and Fed functionaries are in abject denial about it. This is self-evidently true to anyone who's been to the Midwest lately (or really, anywhere other than Cambridge, Manhattan/Westchester, northwest D.C., and coastal California); but it prompted DeLong to call (quite literally) for Herbert's forcible retirement.

Specifically Herbert wrote this:

Bankruptcies and homelessness are on the rise. The job market has been weak for years. The auto industry is in trouble. The cost of food, gasoline and home heating oil are soaring at a time when millions of Americans are managing to make it from one month to another solely by the grace of their credit cards. The country has been in denial for years about the economic reality facing American families. That grim reality has been masked by the flimflammery of official statistics (job growth good, inflation low) and the muscular magic of the American way of debt: mortgages on top of mortgages, pyramiding student loans and an opiatelike addiction to credit cards at rates that used to get people locked up for loan-sharking...

All of which is true. DeLong, however, wants to argue that "this is at most one-quarter true", and goes on to rebut exactly one of Herbert's points (on weakness of the job market, which is endlessly debatable) as well as a couple things Herbert never said (DeLong is right, real disposable income is not falling, though it's not exactly growing like gangbusters either -- and yes, inflation has been low, but Herbert's not talking about 2002). DeLong never discusses bankruptcies, homelessness, the auto industry, cost of food & fuel, the debt crisis, falsification of statistics, or any of the other inconvenient truths Herbert raised; instead, he adds a pedantic note about defining the word "recession" (missing Herbert's point entirely), smugly points out that Herbert confused CPI with core inflation (a mistake two degrees from a typo), and calls it a rebuttal. Convincing it's not.

As for the statistical reality of the situation, DeLong's commenters do a much better job of discussing the details than I could, so I'll just refer you there. Except for this one graph (from the Economic Policy Institute), which basically sums up the problem:

So if you're in the top quintile -- which means, as of 2004, that your family earns over $88,000 a year -- things are peachy keen. But everybody else has been seeing their income slide; and the poorer you are, the faster you're sliding (and thus more likely to get buried under mountains of debt just to keep your house, car and fridge). Households in the bottom quintile, which earn under $18,500, are on a steady and steep path downwards. (To underscore the gravity of that: 41% of the bottom quintile households are families with children. The poverty line as of 2006 for a family of three is $17,170, which is just below the maximum for that quintile. So yes: the fastest-declining group in our society is families in poverty.)

This divide is a serious problem, because the vast majority of our policymakers and opinionmakers fall into that top quintile; somehow I doubt there are very many members of the Fed who make less than $88,000/yr. And (more importantly), these elites inevitably surround themselves with more of the same; people like Brad DeLong in Berkeley or Ben Bernanke in Washington, D.C. are highly unlikely to ever see economic instability firsthand. To compound the problem, the purported empirical reality-check for these segregated elites -- statistics -- are unfailingly skewed by self-interested administrations in order to minimize or hide whatever problems may arise (and sorry folks, Clinton was just as shameless about this as his Republican counterparts). The result: nothing exists to force our policymakers out of their economic bubbles, and meanwhile working Americans suffer in silence.

(Don't get too cocky, Harvard students: this place is an egregious example of precisely the myopia we're talking about. Did you know that, as of 2004, over 85% of our student body came from the top two income quintiles? Summers' financial aid reforms helped, I'm sure, but it's telling that among the Class of 2011 -- "the most economically diverse to date" -- just a quarter of students were eligible for the financial aid programs given to households under $80,000/yr. Besides, Harvard is incredibly bubbled-in; I realized a while ago, and this blew my mind, that I don't know what the price of gas is anymore because there's not a single gas station in Harvard Square. Nor do we buy our own food; I doubt that many of us could pass the gallon of milk test. And we're the people who are supposed to graduate and lead the nation's economy? God help us.)

Thus, I think, we see the extent to which someone like Brad DeLong will repress his considerable intellect in order to ignore the reality of economic collapse -- since, absent clear and tangible evidence to the contrary, it's MUCH more comfortable to assume that everything is fine and the country is functioning properly. (This is especially likely to happen to economists, since the facts on the ground stand in direct opposition to so many of their discipline's basic principles. The cognitive dissonance must be awful.) But it is absolutely critical to defeat that assumption -- especially for Democrats, not only because of our ideological obligation to economic fairness (we are, after all, the party of the working American), but also because if we fail to recognize this disastrous economic situation before it metastasizes, we will be right there with all the Republicans on the list of its political casualties. And we cannot let the biases that affect Brad DeLong -- and the Harvard Economics Department -- get in our way.

As Goes Harvard...

“The faculty retreat was a bit of a disaster,” one [Expos] preceptor said. “David Pilbeam came in and gave an obviously unprepared speech where he talked about how we shouldn’t be worried about losing our jobs, that everything was okay, and that everything would stay the same in Expos. I think that was the moment that suddenly we preceptors saw ‘behind the curtain’ what a mess everything is in, how no one knows what they’re doing, and how we’re in more trouble than any of us realized.”

Chadbourne also said that administrators appeared to be inauthentic in their reassurances. “I don’t understand it. I feel that we keep hearing from people saying, ‘We care. We care.’ It seems a case of ‘the lady doth protest too much.’ It is frustrating.”

Pilbeam declined to be interviewed about Expos. Administrators maintain that they are committed to the writing program.

“David Pilbeam cares deeply about our Expos Program, and effective teaching of writing and speaking in our undergraduate curriculum,” Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs Georgene B. Herschbach said in a written statement.

Every now and then you get a glimpse of Harvard without the usual mountains of accompanying bullshit -- this, from the Crimson, is such a glimpse (and it's the best thing I've read in the Crimson for some time). Get it through your head: we go to a university whose one and only priority is keeping up appearances...

Since when is teaching an alternative?

Today's Crimson included coverage of a talk by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, under the headline "Teaching: A Viable Alternative".

I don't mean to fault the Crimson for what amounts to no more than a moderately awkward headline, but I think it does accurately reflect the sentiment of most Harvard students, which rubs me the wrong way. Since when is teaching an "alternative"? I know I grew up thinking of it as a pretty honorable profession. At least in part this is because I come from a public school system where the teaching is, frankly, not systematically good; so the teachers who knew what they were doing and loved their jobs made a tremendous difference in my life (and exam scores), while the ones who were there because they sort of fell into the job were pretty easy to pick out. Consequently I have a fairly strong belief in the power of a good teacher.

So the question becomes: since teaching is such a valuable and important profession, since teachers have more direct influence on more people's lives than any investment banker I can think of, why do Harvard students overwhelmingly go for i-banking over teaching? I see two possibilities: either Harvard students are all crass resume-obsessed materialists, or there's something deeper at play in society at large that makes us devalue teachers.

Wishy-washy liberal that I am, I tend to opt for both answers. In part there must be something about being in the Ivy League that makes you really value your Ivy League education; whether it's pressures from the parents or guilt that every year you spend here costs as much as the median American household makes in a year, there is some force that makes lots of us believe that we have to employ our Harvard degrees to the fullest - which means pursuing occupations that would be difficult to get without a Harvard degree. But I also think that most people in the outside world also tend to devalue teaching, for whatever reason, and to a certain extent Harvard students' unwillingness to regard teaching seriously as a respectable career choice (which is to say, for us, not just for other people) is simply a reflection of that bigger conception.

Thoughts?