Via Arts & Letters Daily, take a few minutes to read this piece from the British counterpart to the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s a bit of a screed, though genteel and professorial, about the rich douchebags and over-entitled princesses who make up the undergraduate population at Dear Old Harvard. The writer, John H. Summers, taught and advised Harvard undergrads for several years (he’s now at Boston College), and he’s more than willing to share his less-than-flattering assessment of them.
There are, he says, three kinds of Harvard undergrads: the rich kids who are already set for life because of Daddy’s money, the ambitious kids who know they’re going to be successful just because they are at Harvard, and the ironic hipster slacker kids who will fuck up for a while in their 20s then settle down to become successful rich people later on anyway, That third group, by the way, never really leaves Harvard. They’re the ones who end up living in Cambridge or Arlington or Somerville and turn into the pretentious yuppie twats who infest the Whole Foods market and become “helicopter parents”. Of the three, he seems to have a sort of begrudging admiration for the ambitious kids, even if he finds them dreadfully unimaginative and soulless.
He also spends some time on the grade-inflation situation, which turned into something of a minor scandal in these parts when the Boston Globe ran a story about it. The “Gentleman’s C” that got George W. Bush through Yale in the early 1970s is a “Gentleman’s B” if you slack your way through Harvard today. Since the real value of a high-caliber liberal arts education is pretty much lost on the majority of the undergrads anyway, he reasons, the smart instructor just goes along for the ride and doesn’t make waves, lest he be disinvited from the faculty dining rooms. To wit, the final two paragraphs:
Should I say I am grateful for the chance to teach at Harvard? I am. Should I acknowledge the many fine exceptions it was my privilege to instruct? I do, with pleasure. But the sedulous banality of the rich degrades teaching into a service-class preoccupation whose chief duty is preparing clients for monied careers. The liberal flattery of the student is both sentimental and irrelevant. If youth is wasted on the young, is teaching wasted on students?
Teaching on the part-time staff at Harvard is a little like visiting Disney World. The magic dust induces a light narcosis. The mind goes incontinent in the presence of paradox and conflict, and it is tough to tell how much fun you are having from how much you are having to pretend. The important thing is never to become the screamer who ruins the ride for everyone. The line is long.
