The Bad News Is...
...that after reading the Harvard Crimson, those accepted students might not want to come to Harvard.
This story reports that the curricular review's committee on general education has abandoned its plans to release a report this year, because the response to the report it had planned to release ranged from disbelief to disdain.
(How curious that two of the committee members, Steve Pinker and Luke Menand, are proteges of Larry Summers, recruited specifically by him to come to Harvard. They have, collectively, about three years of Harvard institutional knowledge.)
Meanwhile, this story reports further on Harvard's 27th-place ranking out of 31 peer institutions. Key quote: <<
Despite Harvard’s reputation as the gold standard of education, the University in many ways fails to meet the needs of its [undergraduates].>>
The question is will these pieces of substantively bad news affect whether all those newly admitted students decide to come to Harvard? My guess: probably not. The brand is still too strong.
But it's also possible that I'm wrong, and that this bad news, coupled with Larry Summers' controversy, creates an aura of decline for the university....
