Harvard Rules Read Online Free
Author: Richard Bradley
anxiety and doubts. All that money had brought tensions, conflicts, and questions. It was changing the very nature and identity of the university. How could Harvard be so rich and still teach its students that the life of the mind mattered more than the never-ending quest for cash? When your endowment grew at an annual rate of about a billion dollars a yearâand that was a conservative estimateâwhat differentiated you from the world of big business? And when a university had more money in the bank than any number of countries, did such wealth change the responsibilities of that institution? Its mission? How could a university be so rich without risking the corruption of its soul?
All that money, swirling through the air like what youâd imagine after the crash of an armored carâ¦
Maybe that was why, during the 1990s, Harvard endured a growing number of problems with graft and corruption, a string of embarrassing incidents involving both students and faculty. The same kind of thing happened to the rest of America, true, but Harvard wasnât supposed to be like the rest of America. What was it that its twenty-fourth president, Nathan Marsh Pusey, had said? Harvard âwas in society but it was set apart and better than that society, and not a corrupt creature of it.â You wouldnât know that from looking at Harvard in the 1990s. All that money. Nineteen billion dollars.
And Harvard had another problem, one that money alone couldnât fix: its undergraduate education was inconsistent, conceptually flawed, and sometimes just not very good. Harvard College had an aging curriculum that half of its students couldnât explain and still fewer liked. It had professors who didnât want to teach and, whatâs more, who frequently werenât required to teach, and so they spent their time consulting and lecturing and writing books, activities that garnered them more money and renown than the prosaic duties of instructing undergraduates. Harvard students were paying close to $40,000 a year for tuition, yet the bulk of their scholarly interaction was with teaching fellowsâgraduate students who, however well-meaning they may have been, werenât what you thought you would be getting when you mailed in that Harvard application. Was that why students were getting such high grades? Something like 90 percent of the undergrads were graduating with honors. No wonder the whispering had become conventional wisdom: it was tough to get into Harvardâbrutally toughâbut once you were inâ¦well, once you were in, you didnât have to work very hard at all if you didnât want to.
And while Harvard was unquestionably on top of the aspirational heap in the public psyche, other schools were catching up. Yale was always a competitor; even people at Harvard were admitting that the undergrad education at Yale was better. Thank God the latterâs hometown of New Haven was saddled with a reputation as a depressed and depressing city. That scared people away.
Beyond Yale, though, there was new blood that couldnât be easily dismissed. Some claimed that Princeton had the countryâs best undergraduate experience. Stanford and Berkeley and New York University were creating buzz. They didnât have the reputation Harvard didânot yetâbut they had energy and momentum; they had presidents with vision . And if Harvard was losing ground that it had always owned, what was all that money really accomplishing?
That was why the Harvard Corporation had chosen Larry Summers: to take charge; to fix what was embarrassingly wrong and make sure that the gap between the public perception of the university and the reality of Harvard didnât grow so broad that it became a chasm; to revive the image of the Harvard president as a national leader, a figure who spoke out not just to ask for money, nor even to voice his thoughts on higher education, but also to deliver his opinions on
All that money, swirling through the air like what youâd imagine after the crash of an armored carâ¦
Maybe that was why, during the 1990s, Harvard endured a growing number of problems with graft and corruption, a string of embarrassing incidents involving both students and faculty. The same kind of thing happened to the rest of America, true, but Harvard wasnât supposed to be like the rest of America. What was it that its twenty-fourth president, Nathan Marsh Pusey, had said? Harvard âwas in society but it was set apart and better than that society, and not a corrupt creature of it.â You wouldnât know that from looking at Harvard in the 1990s. All that money. Nineteen billion dollars.
And Harvard had another problem, one that money alone couldnât fix: its undergraduate education was inconsistent, conceptually flawed, and sometimes just not very good. Harvard College had an aging curriculum that half of its students couldnât explain and still fewer liked. It had professors who didnât want to teach and, whatâs more, who frequently werenât required to teach, and so they spent their time consulting and lecturing and writing books, activities that garnered them more money and renown than the prosaic duties of instructing undergraduates. Harvard students were paying close to $40,000 a year for tuition, yet the bulk of their scholarly interaction was with teaching fellowsâgraduate students who, however well-meaning they may have been, werenât what you thought you would be getting when you mailed in that Harvard application. Was that why students were getting such high grades? Something like 90 percent of the undergrads were graduating with honors. No wonder the whispering had become conventional wisdom: it was tough to get into Harvardâbrutally toughâbut once you were inâ¦well, once you were in, you didnât have to work very hard at all if you didnât want to.
And while Harvard was unquestionably on top of the aspirational heap in the public psyche, other schools were catching up. Yale was always a competitor; even people at Harvard were admitting that the undergrad education at Yale was better. Thank God the latterâs hometown of New Haven was saddled with a reputation as a depressed and depressing city. That scared people away.
Beyond Yale, though, there was new blood that couldnât be easily dismissed. Some claimed that Princeton had the countryâs best undergraduate experience. Stanford and Berkeley and New York University were creating buzz. They didnât have the reputation Harvard didânot yetâbut they had energy and momentum; they had presidents with vision . And if Harvard was losing ground that it had always owned, what was all that money really accomplishing?
That was why the Harvard Corporation had chosen Larry Summers: to take charge; to fix what was embarrassingly wrong and make sure that the gap between the public perception of the university and the reality of Harvard didnât grow so broad that it became a chasm; to revive the image of the Harvard president as a national leader, a figure who spoke out not just to ask for money, nor even to voice his thoughts on higher education, but also to deliver his opinions on
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