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.

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.

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.

Sometimes you open up the Harvard Crimson--

--and a smile comes to your face, because you have glimpsed something so incredibly asinine that the blogpost practically writes itself. Read:

The parade that wound its way down JFK Street in celebration of Oktoberbest last weekend was an altogether standard procession, featuring energetic marching bands, costumed dancers, awkward stilt-walkers, and left-leaning political dissent. Nothing unusual or controversial—just jovial calls for the impeachment of the President, signs to the effect of “Honk if You Think Iraq is the Greatest Travesty in the History of the World,” and other meaningful jabs at our evil Commander-in-Chief.

[...]Unfortunately, this attitude points to a troubling dilution of political protest and a lack of serious dialogue in Cambridge and in many parts of this country today. There is a fine line between amusing political satire and impassioned political statements, a line which is frequently and haphazardly crossed.[...]

The parade participants last Sunday were not informed and serious political dissenters—or if they were their discourse gave no indication of it. But their approach was problematic and narrow-minded: “We Are All The Same,” one banner proclaimed, implying that no one could possibly disagree with them. As long as we are all the same in our opinions, the expression of them amounts not to protest but to a shameless venting of sentiment.

Those bastards.

[...]The protesters clearly viewed themselves as innocuous jesters, and certainly many of the spectators viewed them the same way. But, intended or not, this message was an aggressive political protest, and a completely inappropriate abuse of the public arena.

If we have learned anything from the shocking images of brutality in Burma it is that our right to publicly disagree with our leadership is an extremely precious one, a privilege that we too often take for granted. We must exercise it responsibly lest it lose its power.

I will leave aside for the time being the question of how something is simultaneously a "right" and a "privilege"...

...it's kind of stunning how easily this piece falls right into blogosphere stereotypes about mainstream media attitudes. It is actually -- not even obliquely, but literally -- an argument that, while we presumably do face an irresponsible president causing continued deaths of innocents in an unjustified war of choice, what's most offensive is that protesters are having too much fun. "Shameless venting of sentiment". "Abuse of the public arena." Dude even uses the word "serious" without a trace of irony (paging Joe Klein!). This reads like something from, I don't know, Harper's circa 1967 -- "we might have concerns about President Johnson and the war in Vietnam, but nobody wants to be one of those rude unwashed radicals with their long hair and their 'rock' music." And it's of course the same reasoning that led all such "sensible" people to support the Iraq War in the first place, because all those No Blood For Oil types were clearly just protesting for kicks. Silly hippies!

Plus, check out the aversion that's on display here toward the intersection of humor and politics. "There is a fine line between amusing political satire and impassioned political statements" -- huh? Satire is political argument, in one of its most refined and powerful forms. Besides, who declared that protests weren't allowed to be any fun? How is that possibly a good idea? If modern protests (especially student protests) were really as pompous and ponderous as this op-ed seems to demand, maybe they'd attract more Crimson writers, but they'd be insufferable and they'd accomplish nothing. Real change requires you to motivate people, which in today's world requires you to be entertaining and (yes) a little bit radical. But instead from the Crimson we get an attitude that, all too typically, confuses the appearance of gravitas for actual intellectual value and promotes reflexive moderation over real productive thought. Sound familiar?

Yes, what we have here is Harvard pseudointellectual elitism in its purest form, I-Banker Journalism in the flesh. No matter what the topic, these people must keep up appearances; they cannot possibly associate with the mob, and uncomfortable things like irony simply cannot be permitted. In this rather extreme case, even public protest is apparently reserved only for the qualified, educated elite; and if the rabble continues to misuse it, then -- presumably by the sovereign authority of the Harvard Crimson -- it will somehow "lose its meaning" and have to be taken away. No ice cream until you eat your vegetables!

...I feel bad for this writer, and for the sake of Google I won't reprint his name; he's just a comper, and for all I know this op-ed might just be some crap you have to do to please the Crimson's overlords. But it's just such a perfect example of the toxic establishmentarian culture that pervades this place, and the extent of our journalists' disconnect with the real world; these are the Pundits of Tomorrow, friends, better learn to deal with them.

I-Banker Journalism

Coming to this a bit late, but Tyler Cowen has an interesting post responding to Henry Farrell on economic biases among journalists. Farrell mentions (in the context of a larger discussion) that the media tends to swing right on economics, citing some Jon Chait work; Cowen, a libertarian, responds with some cogent points as to why journalists would swing more left on the issue. As follows:

2. Journalists are more likely to be suspicious of corporations and indeed more likely to be suspicious in general. People lie to them every day, repeatedly and often without shame.

[...]4. If anything, it is the odd mix between cynicism and idealism that defines the journalistic political point of view.

5. Most journalists work in a declining sector -- newspapers or TV -- and this does not augur well for their belief in progress and the virtues of economic growth. They are not well-positioned to enjoy "creative destruction."

6. Not many top journalists are "far left Democrats." But most are Democrats. I also do not think many journalists would endorse the economic proposals of the rational wing of the Republican Party, say Greg Mankiw or Martin Feldstein. Journalists are likely to think those proposals do not show enough concern for the poor.

[...]In sum, the left-right spectrum is not the best way to understand the economic views of journalists. But, when it comes to economic issues, it is hard for me to put journalists on the right side of that line.

Fair enough. But there's a distinction to be made, that I don't see Farrell or Cowen picking up on: between journalists as individuals, and the people who shape opinions and reporting in media organizations (that is, owners, editors, and commentators). Journalists may have these characteristics that make them more skeptical of free-market economics, but I certainly don't think the opinionmakers do.

At Harvard we are privileged to observe these people in their larval stage, where their thought processes can be easily analyzed. They are the people who hang around the Crimson and the IOP, and who enjoy things like "networking"; they will on graduation almost immediately aquire jobs at prestigious publications or think-tanks. You know exactly the type of person I'm talking about. (In my experience, they have a sizable but shrinking representation in the Dems; and they are almost completely absent from the Harvard Republican Club, which is greatly to the HRC's credit.) If they were less intellectual they'd be future consultants hanging out in final clubs; if they were more intellectual they'd be those annoying people in section who never stop talking. As it is they're able to interact quite well with the rest of us, but their motivations are the same: they want prestige and they want attention, and that -- though of course they'll tell you otherwise -- is what drives their politics.

These people -- let's call them I-Banker Journalists -- are often brilliant and tremendously fun to argue with, but their thinking (especially on economics) is establishmentarian and elitist, as befits someone who's trying to to get ahead. And this kind of status-quo triumphalism is it's a natural fit for Harvard College, where everyone is either already fabulously wealthy or assumed to be on the way towards it; the IOP, where calm, placid centrism has been elevated to an art form; and the Crimson, which reads less like a student paper than a wannabe Washington Post. It is a whole self-reinforcing world that is convinced of its own power and infinite wisdom, Harvard uber alles. Things like the Stand for Security campaign -- which called all those precious assumptions into question -- frightened and confused these people, which is why they all (including so many Dems, look at the mailing list archives if you don't believe me) reacted violently against it. We are talking about people who are unfailingly SERIOUS, as Atrios would say, and they feel obligated to look "sensible" by distancing themselves from radicals in their own parties. They simply know better, after all. Here is their platonic ideal:

You see what I'm saying. This is a class of people who pursue a certain kind of un-provocative intelligence, one that can be found only in the Ivy League and our elite media. (Anywhere else, of course, these people would be immediately recognized and beaten up by unwashed Middle American hoodlums, or at least that's what I assume they're afraid of. No other reason to stay in those godawful places like Manhattan and Georgetown all the time.) Unlike regular journalists, I-Banker Journalists carry none of the traits Tyler Cowen writes about; addicted to power and prestige, they naturally lack any kind skepticism or cynicism. They are certainly not "suspicious" of corporations or the elite, since they ARE that elite, and they have no reason to worry about economic fairness ("creative destruction" to them only means a generous severance package from whatever conglomerate they're currently at). They take the free market as absolute gospel, prompted by -- just as Cowen mentions -- Marty Feldstein and Greg Mankiw. (After all, how could two such SERIOUS Harvard professors possibly be wrong?) We are not talking about Woodward and Bernstein here; we are talking more about Chris Matthews.

And the end result is a tangible bias toward establishment economics in our media -- cloaked in limousine liberalism sometimes, of course, but still ultimately in the mode of Ec10. Think about it; how many pundits can you think of that really question economic orthodoxy? Other than populist bomb-throwers like David Sirota (who now has a column, incidentally, not yet widely syndicated), you're pretty much out of luck. The closest mainstream pundit I can think of is the excellent Paul Krugman, and even he still works largely within a free-market mindset. Real economic dissent is pretty much confined these days to places like the World Socialist Web Site, which (while often insightful and valuable) is not really something you want to be citing in a argument.

Garrett wrote a while ago about Harvard's "liberal" mentality, and he's quite right, but I submit that there are specific people who drive this mentality -- through Harvard and right out into our media, dominating the discourse no matter how tiny a minority they may be. Whether this can be stopped, and whether it's a problem of the people or the environment, are questions for another post, but the trend is worth noting and worth observing if you want to really understand our college and our media climate.

(Feeling bad about Harvard economics? Remember, we may be stuck with Mankiw, but we also have Dani Rodrik. Read his blog.)

(h/t Reihan Salam pretending to be Ross Douthat)

Would you like a little school with your elitism, racism, sexism, etc.?

Harvard senior seeking female companion- 22

This was recently posted to Craigslist today. And here, I was stressing about which Lit. and Arts A to take on my first day of classes...

(The post is reprinted below in case of deletion/broken link.)

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A Friendly Note to My Buddy Noam Scheiber

Noam Scheiber of the New Republic:

It's pretty clear that working-class voters favor Hillary over Obama largely because they value experience. But it's the reason they value experience that's so interesting: Working-class Democrats, and particularly unionized Democrats, tend to see seniority as the only acceptable way of divvying up sought-after work. (And what is the presidency if not the most sought-after job on the planet?) For them, the problem with an inexperienced candidate isn't that he or she is unprepared to be president. It's that such a candidacy flies in the face of their basic sense of fairness...

Many of Hillary's most loyal supporters lack college degrees and toil away at low-skilled jobs. Now if you happen to be a poorly educated worker who's nonetheless eking out a decent living, no prospect is more alarming than the thought of losing out one day because someone a little younger, a little flashier, leapt ahead of you in line. There is a comforting order to the world you know. And that order demands that people pay their dues before getting promoted. The alternative is a bitter competition between you and your co-workers — and who knows how you'll fare in that?

In the eyes of working-class Democrats, Hillary is someone who's paid her dues — first in the White House, where she weathered a terrific, eight-year assault from conservatives, then as the scrupulously dependable senator from New York. If, after all this, Hillary doesn't win the nomination, then the system they've bought into their entire working lives will have been turned upside down.

Dear Noam Scheiber,

Take your stupid, patronizing generalizations about how "working people" think and shove them up your ass. While you're at it you can do the same with your M.A. from Oxford, you arrogant, pompous, elitist twat.

Thanks,

Markus.

Elitism is Everywhere These Days

Three examples.

1. Libertarians: "See, the public at large is stupid, because it rejects the ideas of economists and economists are always right. Democracy sucks."

2. Conservatives: "You know who deserves more credit for their dedication and hard work? People who inherit boatloads of money."

3. TIME Magazine: "Look! A rich guy and a celebrity! I wish they ran our government." (swoon)

I don't know about you, but I'm getting a little tired of this. Money is not the arbiter of intelligence, capability, or merit, nor does it necessarily flow towards people who display those qualities -- yet we see the above kinds of arguments in our public discourse all the time. I'm not sure whether they come out of a misguided faith in market capitalism or a fetish for money (if there's a difference); but it's damn time we stopped listening to people who consistently glorify the most powerful at the expense of everyone else.

--
(big h/t to Sadly, No!, which is always good at pouncing on this stuff)

Another Trip to the 08 Websites (or, Nightmare In The Intertubes)

Three months ago, a few of us looked at logos from presidential websites, and were all appropriately repulsed. After reading today that Chris Dodd (of "Dodd Squad" fame, also a presidential candidate) has hired a real blogger and redesigned his site, I decided to bounce around and see what the various campaign websites were doing. Not much has changed -- except that they are all still abominations against all that is good and true.

Join me after the jump for a post heavy on images and low on analytical value of any kind. Whee!

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Seriously, Crimson? Seriously?

Editorial, today:

[T]here is no way to extend dining hall hours without increasing the $4,618 per semester board fee paid by each student... We’re willing to pay a bit more for better service, and we’d hazard to guess that a vast majority of students would agree... We could stick with the current system, and continue to complain about irrational and restrictive mealtimes indefinitely, or we could bite the bullet, pay the cost, and reap the benefits.

Yeah, because you know, we don't pay enough in tuition. Hell, why don't we hike it up to 80 grand and get every student a personal valet? That'd be nice, wouldn't it? Go Harvard!

For Chrissake, we're already shelling out exorbitant amounts of money in order to have waffle-makers with the Harvard logo on them. The Shuttle buses have custom-made upholstery with that crest in a repeating pattern. This place uses $100 bills for goddamn wallpaper, and the editorialists want to increase our tuition so some pampered rich kid can have his Baked Ziti at 8 PM? Meanwhile we can't pay our security guards or biolab workers a decent wage? Get the fuck off my lawn.

I'm all for extending dining-hall hours. But we already have an insanely luxurious cafeteria system compared to every university ever; and unless the Crimson editors want to pay for it themselves from their magical Plympton Street Money Tree, raising costs for an expansion is just absurd. It's things like this that make we wonder just how in-touch our Prestigious Student Newspaper really is; we don't all have trust funds, you know.