Posts with the tag Harvard

Poor Little Straight Boys

Dylan Matthews — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:13:31 EST

Another day, another major news outlet pretending it knows anything about ROTC at Harvard. This time, it's Michael Winerip and the New York Times Magazine. As anyone who's read a sentence or two about the debate at Harvard knows, allowing ROTC or any other recruitment program on campus that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation is a blatant violation of the university's non-discrimination policy. This was Harvard's reason for ending financial support of ROTC in 1995, and university administrators, including President Drew Faust, have consistently cited it ever since. No one in the debate disputes this fact. Even ROTC backers grudgingly acknowledge that one would have to gut the non-discrimination policy in order to allow the program back. Of course, their comfort with throwing LGBT Harvard students under the bus in that fashion is disturbing, but at the very least they acknowledge it.

So one would think that Winerip, being a responsible journalist, would cite this fact near the beginning of the article. Instead, it takes him twenty-five paragraphs to even mention the reason ROTC is not allowed on campus. And when he finally does so, he botches it:

If it’s not antimilitary sentiment, why is R.O.T.C. still banned at these campuses? Four words: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The law, adopted during the Clinton administration, excludes gay men and lesbians who are open about their sexual orientation from military service. Last month, President Obama renewed a promise to get Congress to overturn the law, but set no timetable
…
R.O.T.C. supporters complain that Harvard’s policy is full of contradictions.
Harvard will not pay the $150,000-a-year cross-registration fee that M.I.T. charges to have Harvard students take military science courses there. But university staff members are used to raise that money from wealthy alumni sympathetic to R.O.T.C. And Harvard accepts about $1 million a year from the military in the form of scholarships that cover the cost of tuition for cadets and midshipmen.
Further, while banning R.O.T.C., Harvard is a host to other military-oriented programs. The Kennedy School of Government there runs a yearlong National Security Fellows program for 20 men and women, a large percentage of them midcareer military officers.

I'll admit that using university staff members to raise money for the cross-registration fee is a violation of the non-discrimination policy, and should be stopped. Winerip's argument about accepting military scholarships and not rejecting military applications for fellowships out of hand, however, is just silly. Harvard accepts tuition payments from all sources, and I really don't see the difference between accepting a military applicant for a fellowship and accepting a freshman student who went to an anti-gay parochial school.

Really, people, the principle is simple. Non-discrimination means non-discrimination, whatever motives the ROTC advocates want to assign to Harvard's administration. The person with the power to bring ROTC back to Harvard is Barack Obama, and until he halts Don't Ask Don't Tell discharges ROTC has no place at a just Harvard.

Standing Ovation for Harvard & Yale?

pdelatorre — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:57:32 EST

The conservative Center for College Affordability and Productivity has a great post up explaining why we shouldn’t be overly impressed by Harvard and Yale’s recent decisions to spend more of their massive endowments on financial aid.

Harvard Crimson’s First Black President In Over 50 years

Justin Elliott — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:21:49 EST

It’s pretty well-established that being an editor at the Harvard Crimson is a meaningless, strictly resume-padding distinction. (The relevant headline: Harvard Crimson Has 800 Editors. Literally.) But being the president of the Crimson is, at least as far as these things go, significant. The Crimson reports (via Romenesko):

Malcom A. Glenn ’09 will lead the newly elected 135th Guard of The Harvard Crimson, the paper’s outgoing president announced Friday.

Glenn, a history concentrator from Denver, Colo. and Leverett House, has served as an associate on the Sports board since February … [and] will be the first black president of The Crimson in more than a half-century.

First off—and set aside the Crimson’s relentless pretensions (must a student newspaper have a frickin “Guard”?)—congratulations to Glenn on his ascension. Second, I’d like to underscore just how remarkable that last line is: “the first black president of The Crimson in more than a half-century.” This is a milestone, but, in some sense, a sad one. I wrote about this on CP over the summer:

Divesting from Sudan...kinda

Zach Marks — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 00:31:47 EDT

Getting universities to divest from companies doing business in Sudan in ways that support the genocide in Darfur has been one of the hottest campaign issues for student activists on campuses around the country. (It has also been one of the most closely watched topics on Campus Progress, which has published at least this, this, this, and this on student-led divestment movements.)

Bulletin on Harvard Resumes

Graham — Fri, 18 May 2007 12:08:48 EDT

Being an "editor" of the Harvard Crimson is no rare distinction:

The Crimson currently claims that about 800 undergraduates are Crimson “editors.” That’s because, until recently, it identified anyone who has ever joined the staff as an “editor.” Joining the staff involves writing a certain number of stories (or taking photos or designing pages as the case may be) and attending a few seminars, steps fully one in eight undergrads has taken.

h/t Romenesko.

Sex at Harvard

Dana Goldstein — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:36:34 EDT

Almost half of Harvard undergrads are virgins, while the national virginity average for college students is one-third.

This Crimson article is actually about abstinence ideologues on campus, but I thought that fact was funny.

Women's Leadership

Dana Goldstein — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 09:41:18 EST

Sure, academia often seems like a world unto itself. But with the announcement that historian Drew Gilpin Faust will be the next president of Harvard, women now account for a full 50 percent of Ivy League presidents (the others are Brown's Ruth Simmons, Penn's Amy Gutmann, and Princeton's Shirley Tilghman). That's called parity, and it's truly remarkable in a country where only 16 percent of the Congress is female, only 9 states are led by women, and only 10 Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs.

So thanks to Faust, Simmons, Gutmann, and Tilghman for proving this is bunk.