Are Yale and Harvard Useless?
That appears to be the opinion of some of the posters below, who write....
What's going on here? Do people really believe that professors of the humanities at Harvard and Yale—which seems to be the group in question—are so unimportant, irrelevant, and useless? Is this why Harvard's new curricular reform plan is so practical-minded? Are Harvard lefties really "much more disingenuous" than socialists? And just what the heck does that mean, anyway?
It is not just Harvard that is bankrupt as a spring of political ideas. Have you seen the latest political diatribe between Bush and Kerry, two Yale graduates, over who said about the war in Iraq what and should apologize.... It is not apparent that there is more lux et veritas in New Haven than in Cantabrigia. Both seem to be pretty dark places these days.
9:50 PM
No, Harvard lefties aren't socialists, they're much more disingenuous.
And thank God that Yale and Harvard's influence on the world has been marginalized over the years. So things can be dark there and it means little or nothing to the rest of the country. Keep the lights on at HMS please, but perhaps the rest could use a nap for, say, twenty years.
11:05 PM
You raise an interesting point 11.05pm. What faculty do at Yale or Harvard is inconsequential to life in America or in the World.
Harvard has many more professional schools than Yale, so it stands to reason that it's global influence in Law, Business, Medicine, Public Health or Education is not trivial. The world would surely be a darker place if Harvard closed shop one of these days.