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Monday, April 04, 2005
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HARVARD’S WALLIS SIMPSON PROBLEM How do you make happy a man who has given up the throne of England for you? In her autobiography, Wallis Simpson claims that she knew her life would be a nightmare because of this impossibility. Indeed, she says, it was largely for this reason that she asked the prince not to marry her. Simpson understood that she had sold herself too well. She was a victim of her own success. And, as she anticipated, she spent her life vainly trying to be adequate to the life-destroying faith the prince had placed in her. Harvard, which hawks its supremacy to America’s high-achieving high school students, to its alumni, and to anyone else who will listen, has a similar problem. UD lives with someone who got his undergraduate degree at Harvard, and she can tell you -- Harvard is an inexhaustible generator of self-adulation. And the world is only too happy to applaud along with Harvard. Yet the acknowledged preeminence that Harvard enjoys has, strangely, provoked an escalation, rather than a slackening, of its self-marketing. Harvard’s problem is that once it decimates and then decimates again its Harvard-solicited applicant hordes, the tiny number of survivors is above all aware of Harvard’s astounding rejection figures, aware of their own divine election. So… off they go. Maybe a rather grim campus in a dark cold climate, a campus whose long seasonal darkness is deepened by the clustering of dark brick buildings into tight little quads, is not in fact the right school for them to attend. Maybe they would have been happier at the University of Southern California, or Williams. But that cannot be thought of once they have been admitted to Harvard… Maybe as they brood in their room they think about the fact that had they gone to the honors college of their excellent state university, they’d have saved their parents $150,000 and done just as well in terms of admission to law or medical school... Meanwhile, the snow keeps falling, and even though it’s three in the afternoon, it looks like midnight. All of which is UD’s way of explaining, at least in part, the following: ‘ Prevalent stereotypes about how Harvard undergraduates have less fun than their peers found empirical confirmation last Tuesday, when the Boston Globe reported that Harvard students gave lower ratings to their college experience than students at other elite schools in a 2002 survey. An internal Harvard memo analyzing data from the survey found that Harvard students rated their overall satisfaction at 3.95 on a five-point scale, compared to an average of 4.16 at the 30 other schools surveyed, the Globe reported. Harvard students gave lower ratings than students at peer institutions to the level of interaction with faculty members and the quality of social life. This satisfaction rating placed Harvard fifth from the bottom in the survey of the 31 colleges in the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE). The COFHE includes all eight Ivy League schools, other top research universities such as MIT and Stanford University, and leading small liberal arts schools such as Amherst College and Williams College. ’ |