A friend of mine married a Japanese man and moved to Tokyo where she gave birth to twin girls. I hadn't seen her in a decade, but she dropped in to see me with her daughters, on a trip the US; they were on a college tour.
Her in-laws, she told me, wanted her kids to go to Tokyo University, but they were willing to consider two American colleges for their grand daughters.
"So, you're on your way to Harvard?" I asked.
She was a Harvard alumna.
"Oh, no!" she laughed. "The only two American colleges they would even consider allowing their grand daughters to attend are M.I.T. or Wellesley."
"What's wrong with Harvard?" I asked.
"Too soft. Too many kids who were selected to play football or ice hockey. Simply not academically pure enough. They want their girls to use their college as a springboard for their careers."
"But, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates went to Harvard."
"Exactly," she said. "And both of them looked around, concluded Harvard had nothing to offer them and they were gone after a year."
Growing up in Washington, D.C., in a place where and at a time when "credentials" were paramount, I looked to the "best schools" to punch my ticket at age 18, but I never considered Harvard, even after all the glamour which attached to that college during the Kennedy/Camelot years.
The fact is, judging huge New England institutions from 500 miles away was done pretty superficially. But we did have a local touchstone: we could see the kids who went to Harvard from our own high schools.
There was one person, Caroline Pope, who was in my classes, and when I read her papers I realized she was in another league altogether from me. The vocabulary, the insight, the mastery of her work, whether it was about James Joyce or Jane Austen or the significance of the Renaissance or the Bloomsbury set--she was simply of a different quality. She went to Harvard (Radcliffe, in those days) and she belonged at the best university in the country.
But all the other kids who shipped off to Harvard
who I knew were unexceptional, at least their talents were no greater than my own; they simply studied all the time. They were colorless, uninspiringly, asexual, boring and in some cases, not very smart.
One of them, Martha, showed up to our study group to discuss the assignment, "Discuss the use of 'Roads' in Dickens' 'Tale of Two Cities," and she stunned us, her classmates, by unsheathing a long list of the pages where the word 'road' appeared in that 400 page novel. This was long before you could do 'word search' on a computer, decades before home computers. She had simply gone through the book, page by page, and she tabulated the word 'road,' thoughtlessly, ruthlessly, studiously, to no point at all.
Another guy was the manager of the basketball team, and he kept meticulous records of how many shots each player had taken, how many had scored, and a lot of other statistics in days well before "metrics" were a thing in sport. I don't think he ever went out on a date in high school. At a class reunion, twenty years later he approached woman who had been a pretty, cheerful, nubile adolescent and he told her he had always longed to talk to her in high school, but he never had the nerve. She looked at him, still a blue eyed beauty, and said, "Well, then, you've come a long way. We're talking now."
So, apart from Caroline Pope, all the other kids who my high school sent off to Harvard were worker ants, reliable lieutenants for whom executing orders was their purpose in life, but they were just taking up space, living in the best spaces, comfortably, company men and women.
So, no, I never had any interest in Harvard.
Even in medical school, when we were applying for internships, I never considered any of the big Harvard Medical School programs--MGH, The Brigham, Beth Israel--because they did not offer housing for their housestaff, and because their clinical training was inadequate: an intern admitting patients at night was one of three other interns being covered by a single resident, which struck Cornell medical students as a sort of high wire walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Decades later, I was struck by the fact that if I sent a patient from Haverhill, MA, down to MGH for consultation or admission I never got a call from anyone down there asking for information (which I always sent in advance anyway) and never heard a word from the doctors about the patient, or what the staff at MGH thought about her.
That would have been an unforgivable sin at the New York Hospital, and certainly at Johns Hopkins. "A failure to communicate," was no joke at these places, but it was endemic to Harvard hospitals.
The Harvard hospitals have plenty of business, being the central magnet for patients from all over New England. They do not need "the business." But, if you are a university, you are supposed to be driven by values which go beyond business. You are supposed to be doing things right because it's the right thing to do.
At Harvard, it's now all about the money. Maybe it has been all about the money for years.
Now, of course, I get daily offers from Harvard, trying to sell me for $3,400, an online certificate or in some cases, an online "degree" embossed with the Harvard logo for having purchased a little piece of Harvard for my office wall. These Harvard paraphernalia are marketed on Linked In and through a lot of online agents who have my emails on their lists of nice names.
It's like those "Best Doctors" plaques marketed to doctors to display in their offices; for only $500 you can tell your patients that somebody "voted" you best doctor in your community.
Many businesses try to protect their brand name which they consider a key part of their companies' value. They don't want their brand, their logo associated with the wrong people, the wrong things. Reputation, "brand name," is difficult to measure. It's not something you can put in a bag, but it's considered so important, they employee a boatload of lawyers to protect.
Harvard, apparently, has not grasped that concept.
Jeffrey Epstein craved that validation from Harvard. Neither Yale nor Princeton would do.
Perhaps he needed to get a little farther away from New York City, because someone closer to his origins would have known a little too much about him.
And, according the New York Times, Harvard professors and officials were only too glad to sell the Harvard name without asking too many questions, as long as the money was good. Mr. Epstein donated $200,000 to Harvard and in return he got to be a "visiting fellow" in the Harvard math department.
And, of course, Epstein quickly appreciated how Harvard faculty (like those of other universities) were keen to spin off the discoveries they made at their universities into private companies for personal profit. In the information age, information and knowledge is where the dollars are. You might have a base salary, a lab and an office at the university, but anything you discover there, you can take outside the university walls and turn into personal profit.
Up here in New Hampshire now, we are just close enough to Harvard to know enough stories, enough people to be less starry eyed about Harvard. The institution is not some Disney castle, but more a work a day place where some people are truly remarkable and worth a trip, but many others are just grubby and repulsive.
Henry Kissinger, who needed the Harvard name to buff his personal image, was a loathsome character, who, even more than Larry Summers or Alan Dershowitz, did the world a ton of harm, parlaying a basso profundo voice and his Harvard creds into a guru status, enough to design and execute the immolation of innocent villagers on the far side of the world, because, you know, they were, in the end, just little people.
Large universities are cities behind walls and, as in every city, there are admirable people, some brilliant, talented people, but there are also the despicable creepy crawlies and then there is the lonely crowd of tourists, there for four years who then move on.
Donald Trump, evil genius that he is, has discovered you really can overthrow the empire, and you don't have to do it by a thousand cuts, of which the Jeffry Epstein story is just one: You can cut off government funding, on which Harvard has become dependent. It is as if Harvard, which was once an apex predator, has regressed to a suckling pig, unable to sustain itself without the government teat.
So, you have professors who criticize or question Mr. Trump or Mr. Vance or Kristi Noem? Then all those labs in your medical school devoted to fighting cancer, stroke and heart disease will just have to close down because they depend on government funding.
Control the gold--Make the Rules
And Harvard is not alone in that. At Yale Medical School, when I was there, it was the rare faculty member who derived his salary from Yale University--everyone else had to find a grant from the federal government for his salary.
What the Jeffrey Epstein/Donald Trump era has revealed is that Harvard, and other big institutions of higher learning, have gone after those bright and shiny things, but they discover they are attached to hooks and they got reeled in.
