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Harvard University

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Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and among the most prestigious.

Harvard alumni, faculty, and researchers have included numerous Nobel laureates and Fields Medal recipients, and more alumni have been members of the U.S. Congress, MacArthur Fellows, Rhodes Scholars (375), Marshall Scholars (255), and Fulbright Scholars than any other university in the United States.

Fair Harvard! we join in thy Jubilee throng,
And with blessings surrender thee o’er
By these Festival-rites, from the Age that is past,
To the Age that is waiting before. ~ Samuel Gilman
O Relic and Type of our ancestors’ worth,
That hast long kept their memory warm,
First flow’r of their wilderness! Star of their night!
Calm rising thro’ change and thro’ storm. ~ Samuel Gilman
Farewell! be thy destinies onward and bright!
To thy children the lesson still give,
With freedom to think, and with patience to bear,
And for Right ever bravely to live. ~ Samuel Gilman
Let not moss-covered Error moor thee at its side,
As the world on Truth’s current glides by,
Be the herald of Light, and the bearer of Love,
Till the stars in the firmament die. ~ Samuel Gilman
We need independent universities. We need an independent press. And, of course, we need independent courts. And Trump doesn't like independence because independent institutions can say no to him. And the more he can weaken the independence of those institutions, the more he can make his agenda the dominant agenda. And ultimately, this is about Trump trying to impose his view of the world on everybody else. ~ Noah Feldman
This is the feeder school to the halls of power. There's good stuff happening there but, by and large, the culture is one of nepotism and cronyism, and the most overpriced, overprivileged frat clubs imaginable. ~ Daniel Goldhaber
I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.
The University is a school of liberty as well as of learning; and events of the last few years have driven home the lesson that only in an atmosphere of liberty, and in a body politic that practises as well as preaches democracy, can learning flourish. ~ Samuel Eliot Morison
Standing on the threshold of her fourth century, the University asks of the State, freedom; of her sons, loyalty; of God, grace that she may be saved from the besetting sin of pride, wisdom to do his will, and power 'to advance Learning, and perpetuate it to Posterity.' ~ Samuel Eliot Morison
What I disliked most about Harvard was was that smug assumptions were too often treated as substitutes for evidence or logic. The idea seemed to be that if we bright and good fellows all believed something, it must be true. ~ Thomas Sowell
Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they're doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They've got to behave themselves. You know, I'm looking out for the country and for Harvard. I want Harvard to do well. I want Harvard to be great again, probably. And Harvard has to understand, the last thing I want to do is hurt them. They're hurting themselves. They're fighting. You know, Columbia has been really - and they were very, very bad what they've done. They're very antisemitic and lots of other things. But they're working with us on finding a solution. And, you know, they're taking off that hot seat. But Harvard wants to fight, they want to show how smart they are, and they're getting their ass kicked. ~ Donald Trump


Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

Quotes

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B

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  • The Trump administration will appeal a federal judge’s order reversing billions of dollars in funding cuts to Harvard University, extending a standoff over the White House’s demands for reforms at the Ivy League school. The Justice Department filed a notice of appeal late on Thursday in a pair of consolidated lawsuits brought by Harvard and the American Association of University Professors. The case has tested the government’s power to sway the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, which has resisted a pressure campaign targeting elite colleges around the country.
    U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled in September that the Trump administration’s sweeping funding cuts violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights. The judge said the government put unconstitutional conditions on Harvard’s federal funding and failed to follow federal procedures allowing the government to sanction universities for civil rights violations.
    The Trump administration cut more than $2.6 billion from Harvard over allegations that it had been slow to deal with anti-Jewish bias on campus. Burroughs rejected that notion, saying the government was using antisemitism “as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
  • The notice of appeal is a first step in the government’s effort to have the ruling overturned. It does not provide legal arguments behind the appeal. Liz Huston, a White House spokesperson, said Harvard has failed to protect students from discrimination on campus. “Harvard is not entitled to taxpayer funding, and we are confident the university will be held fully accountable for their failures,” Huston said in a statement.
    Harvard officials said they’re confident in their case. “The federal district court ruled in Harvard’s favor in September, reinstating critical research funding that advances science and life-saving medical breakthroughs, strengthens national security, and enhances our nation’s competitiveness and economic priorities,” the university said in a statement.
  • Todd Wolfson, president of the AAUP, said the administration’s appeal is “just a continuation of their shameless campaign to halt critical research funding in an attempt to chill universities and faculty from engaging in any speech, teaching, and research that Donald Trump disfavors.”
    Harvard has been Trump’s top target in a campaign to leverage federal control of research funding to push for reforms at elite colleges he has decried as overrun by “woke” ideology. Harvard has put up a fight against the government’s wide-reaching demands, even as others like Columbia, Brown and Cornell universities reach deals with the government.
    Harvard and the White House have continued negotiations amid the legal battle, and Trump has multiple times indicated a resolution was imminent. In September, he said officials were close to a deal that would require a $500 million payment from Harvard to create a “giant trade school” to produce workers for American plants.
    The deal never materialized and Trump has been quiet on the issue since then.
  • Harvard has ruined more niggers than bad liquor.
  • I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
    • William F. Buckley, Jr.; 1963 statement, as quoted in The Quote Verifier : Who Said What, Where, and When (2006) by Ralph Keyes, p. 82
  • I was never fortunate enough to attend Harvard. Yet after the school’s stunning surrender to President Trump’s $500 million shakedown on Monday, I’m not sure the nation’s most venerated university has much to teach anyone. Back in April, Harvard President Alan Garber drew praise from civil society groups for urging the university to “stand firm” against Trump’s brazen extortion scheme. Harvard’s resolve didn’t even last the summer. Harvard’s elite administrators may think it’s easier to simply pay off the strongman at their gates, but giving the bully your lunch money only invites him to demand more.
    Harvard’s full-on retreat is the latest in a string of high-profile payments the White House has extracted from institutions it views as left-leaning, and its half-billion-dollar protection payment won’t be the biggest or the last. With a $53 billion endowment and towering cultural standing, Harvard had plenty of resources to challenge Trump’s lawless demands in court and in the press. Instead, university leaders kept the cash and sold out the students, teachers and administrators who had been counting on them to take a stand.
  • Americans across the political spectrum are realizing that for-profit universities and media outlets are anything but “independent,” despite what they might claim in press releases. That’s driving a historic collapse in public trust for the media and higher education — and making it easier for Trump to divide and conquer what were once the nation’s most-trusted safeguards of free expression and critical thought. It’s hard to blame the 56 percent of Americans who have lost confidence in higher education as a positive force in our culture. After all, if the best-funded independent university in the world can’t or won’t defend itself against blatant Republican authoritarianism, what good is its alleged independence?
    From the beginning it’s been clear that Harvard didn’t actually violate any laws, but institutions seen as left-leaning by the MAGA movement don’t need to do anything wrong to be targeted. Just ask Columbia University, which sent Trump a $221 million payoff after he threatened to cut off their federal funding, or Paramount, whose browbeaten executives gave Trump $16 million for airing news that offended him.
    But the size of Harvard’s payment boggles the mind. Half a billion dollars. For what?
  • Our founders praised the free press and free academic inquiry as on par with free elections in safeguarding the republic. Some, including Pennsylvania’s Dr. Benjamin Rush, Virginia’s George Wythe and New Jersey’s John Witherspoon, were themselves respected academics and classroom professors. They spoke with passion about protecting universities from federal pressure because they understood that the first act of an autocrat is to exert state control over the production of ideas. What’s unfolding at Harvard represents perhaps their worst nightmare — an American president trampling the intellectual freedom of his own people.
    As Trump’s pressure campaign against higher education shows, that threat is just as real today as it was when Rush used his academic post at the University of Pennsylvania to promote controversial ideas like the emerging science of vaccination. Prominent academics today are right to wonder whether their universities will stand behind them if their research angers the White House. The result will be a chilling effect that makes our country less intellectually dynamic and more susceptible to Trump’s dangerous illiberalism.
  • In the 160 years since the end of the Civil War, American institutions have largely fulfilled their job of protecting our republic by serving as vibrant, free spaces of intellectual thought, cultural criticism and political accountability. Harvard’s massive concession to Trump is a sign that the long era of American academic independence is drawing to a close. The cost of freedom — academic or otherwise — is constant vigilance. Harvard gave up the perception of its independence without a fight. More serious universities should resist the urge to follow their humiliating lead.
  • If future generations are to have that high regard for the achievement of the human mind which is essential to civilization, there must be a true reverence for learning in the community. It is not sufficient to train investigators and scholars, no matter how brilliant they may be; a large body of influential citizens must have a passionate interest in the growth of human knowledge. It is our ambition to inspire the undergraduates of Harvard College with an enthusiasm for creative scholarship and a respect for the accumulated intellectual treasures of the past. This is one way in which we perpetuate learning to posterity.
    • James Bryant Conant in his first annual report as President of Harvard, issued 8 January 1934, as quoted by by Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard (1936), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, seventh printing (1965), p. 485

C

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  • President Donald Trump has boasted that Harvard University is on the brink of capitulating to a deal with the administration after months of government attacks and moves to pull funding from the storied institution. But according to The New York Times, recent email communications show the talks are going nowhere.
    A huge sticking point, according to reporter Michael Schmidt, is that the administration wants to shake down Harvard for $200 million, which university officials consider to be out of the question. Furthermore, according to the report, Harvard was well on its way to agreeing to a deal in August, but things fell apart after Trump strategist Stephen Miller took a more active involvement in the proceedings.
  • A message on Saturday, "from Linda McMahon, President Trump’s education secretary, conveyed an understanding of an emerging deal between Harvard and the White House that flew in the face of the terms the university had been insisting on," wrote Schmidt. Harvard President Alan Garber "felt he had made clear in recent negotiations that the university would not agree to pay the federal government to settle a monthslong battle with the Trump administration over antisemitism on campus and other matters." However, McMahon's message "thanked Dr. Garber for what she portrayed as his commitment to sending $200 million to the government as part of a deal."
    The president has previously suggested Harvard will agree to invest $500 million in a giant nationwide network of AI-focused trade schools. Administration negotiators, however, want $200 million of that to be a civil fine to the government, which Harvard rejects.
    When Garber pointed out Harvard hadn't agreed to the $200 million payment, per the report, Trump administration officials responded with a set of new terms that would give them greater oversight over Harvard and erode the university's academic independence, alarming school officials and causing further divides on how to get the deal resolved.
  • "Harvard officials, already anxious about the prospect of backlash to any settlement with a president many on campus see as autocratic, are sensitive to the details of any agreement. For months, they have viewed an accord between Brown University and the Trump administration as a model," said the report. "Under that agreement, Brown agreed to spend $50 million on state workforce development programs over a decade. The university did not have to enter into a rigorous monitoring agreement, and it secured a provision that Brown leaders viewed as safeguarding academic independence."
    Trump kicked off his new term in office by demanding several legal agreements with groups that have opposed him in the past, including several law firms that agreed to spend millions of dollars on Trump-approved legal causes. A report in August revealed many of these law firms are now simply ignoring some provisions of the agreements.
  • The facilities for student dining, athletic activity, and classroom learning that existed 30 years ago at Harvard University were Spartan compared to the opulent facilities that today’s students enjoy. Harvard has no option but to keep ratcheting up its attractiveness and, therefore, its cost structure in order to compete successfully against the likes of Stanford and Yale.
    • Clayton Christiansen, et al. Disrupting College How: Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education. The Center for American Progress, February 2011

F

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  • Terry Gross: "Are you playing any official or unofficial role on Harvard's legal strategy or decision-making?"
    Noah Feldman: "No. The university follows a good policy of creating a wall between its lawyers who represent it and its law faculty who have lots of ideas about how it should be represented. So my primary role is as a constitutional scholar, analyzing the issues, writing about them, speaking about them. And that's the right job for me in this moment."
  • A year ago, Harvard's commencement, our graduation, was really, in a significant way, disrupted by students protesting, including some faculty protesting, marching out of the graduation, speakers denouncing the president and the corporation of Harvard, which is what we call our board of directors. This year, commencement was pretty much the polar opposite. There was literally a standing ovation for our president, Alan Garber, when all he had done was come up to the podium. And speaker after speaker hinted at the importance of supporting the university. So what's happened is that Donald Trump's assault on the university has led to a deep unification of the campus. And that's an important transformation from a year ago. I would say it's a fundamental transformation.
  • Terry Gross: "The attacks on Harvard started with the task force commissioned by Trump to address antisemitism on campus. And, you know, this has led to cancellation of billions of dollars in grants and contracts to Harvard. But didn't Harvard reach a settlement with Trump over antisemitism?"
    Noah Feldman: "No. Let me tell the story a little bit differently. I think, really, what we're facing now started with the testimony in Congress of Harvard's president and a couple of other university presidents in which they were pushed very hard on a series of hypothetical questions about how the campus manages free speech in the context of protests. That put a target on Harvard's back, and the Trump administration has been pushing very, very hard since they came into office to exploit the perception - in my view, the incorrect perception - that Harvard is some sort of hotbed of bias, antisemitism and Islamophobia in order to bring about a fundamental attack on higher education with the stated goal - this is their stated goal - of making the university align itself with the administration's beliefs and priorities, which is a clear violation of the First Amendment.
    What's more, Harvard hasn't reached any settlement of any kind with the Trump administration. There was a lawsuit brought by a small number of students alleging that Harvard had not sufficiently protected the environment against antisemitism. And that was settled by the university before the Trump administration even came into office."
  • Terry Gross: One of Trump's justifications for canceling government contracts is that he accused Harvard as being a breeding ground - I'm quoting here - "breeding ground for virtue signaling and discrimination." How do you interpret that?"
    Noah Feldman: "Well, first thing I would say is that it's wrong. You know, it's always hard to understand exactly what is meant when you're being maligned, but, you know, you know the feeling. You know the idea that even a dog knows the difference between being tripped over and being kicked? Well, that's someone kicking us. One piece of relevant background here is that Harvard was one of the parties in the Supreme Court case - the SFFA case - in which the Supreme Court, for the first time in nearly 50 years, overturned the idea that racial diversity was a permissible rationale to use in college admissions. And the Trump administration, in all of its rhetoric, has been referring, subsequently, to the perfectly lawful use of diversity as it existed from 1978 and really before then, until just, you know, a year or so ago as, quote-unquote, "discrimination." I think that's the rhetorical move there.
    And Harvard is no more a breeding ground for that point of view than all of the other universities in the country, essentially all, which used exactly the same admissions procedures. It's just that it's easier for Trump to make headlines by attacking Harvard over that."
    Terry Gross: "That's probably part of the reason why many other universities are worried right now."
    Noah Feldman: "There are a lot of reasons for universities to be concerned. If Trump can go after the oldest university in the United States, one of the most significant in terms of its endowment and its academic legacy and its prestige, then he can really go after any similar university. And so all universities, I think, have very, very good reason to be concerned because going after a university is one of the things in the playbook of someone who's trying to erode democratic values and who wants to be at least dictatorial, if not a dictator.
    Universities are a place for the preservation of free expression, free ideas and free beliefs. They've always been that. And so in any country where someone is trying to break that norm of freedom, the universities are a very important target, and that's been true historically."
  • Terry Gross: "So what do you think Trump's attacks on Harvard are really about?"
    Noah Feldman: "Donald Trump usually has a kind of short-term self-interest objective and then a broader-term aggrandizement objective. In the short term, his self-interest is to make a headline, to make a populist headline that says, Donald Trump is going after those liberals at Harvard University, which might please some of his supporters and, probably more important to Donald Trump, is intended to shed fear or to cast fear on everyone in higher education and, more broadly, everyone who doesn't agree with his policies. You know, it's part of the idea that every day we should wake up and listen to the radio or look at the newspaper and discover that the Trump administration has gone after some opponent in some way that makes it really hard to stand up to Donald Trump. So I think that's the short-term objective.
    The longer-term objective, though, is part of Trump's overall assault on our democratic values and institutions. And you can see that the institutions that he likes to go after are places like universities, institutions like the press and the courts, which are institutions that are all devoted to independent judgment and independent thinking. We need independent universities. We need an independent press. And, of course, we need independent courts. And Trump doesn't like independence because independent institutions can say no to him. And the more he can weaken the independence of those institutions, the more he can make his agenda the dominant agenda. And ultimately, this is about Trump trying to impose his view of the world on everybody else."

G

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  • People have asked me where we stand. So, let me be clear. Our University rejects terrorism — that includes the barbaric atrocities perpetrated by Hamas. [...] Our University rejects hate — hate of Jews, hate of Muslims, hate of any group of people based on their faith, their national origin, or any aspect of their identify.
  • [Harvard] rejects the harassment or intimidation of individuals based on their beliefs [and] embraces a commitment to free expression.
  • That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous. We do not punish or sanction people for expressing such views. [...] But that is a far cry from endorsing them.
  • [Rep Elise] Stefanik: ... And Dr. Gay at Harvard? Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?
    [Dr Claudine] Gay: It can be depending on the context.
    Stefanik: What's the context?
    Gay: Targeted at an individual targeted, as at an individual?
    Stefanik: It's targeted at Jewish students, Jewish individuals. Do you understand your testimony is dehumanizing them? Do you understand that dehumanization is part of antisemitism? I will ask you one more time. Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment? Yes or no?
    Gay: Antisemitic rhetoric when it crosses into conduct, that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation, that is actionable conduct, and we do take action.
  • William F. Buckley, Jr. once made the famous pronouncement that he would rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phonebook than by the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT. Now that we are ruled by the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT, you can see what he meant.
  • Fair Harvard! we join in thy Jubilee throng,
    And with blessings surrender thee o’er
    By these Festival-rites, from the Age that is past,
    To the Age that is waiting before.
    O Relic and Type of our ancestors’ worth,
    That hast long kept their memory warm,
    First flow’r of their wilderness! Star of their night!
    Calm rising thro’ change and thro’ storm.
    • Samuel Gilman, Harvard Class of 1811, in the first verse of "Fair Harvard", the alma mater of Harvard University, written in 1836 for Harvard's 200th anniversary.
  • Farewell! be thy destinies onward and bright!
    To thy children the lesson still give,
    With freedom to think, and with patience to bear,
    And for Right ever bravely to live.
    Let not moss-covered Error moor thee at its side,
    As the world on Truth’s current glides by,
    Be the herald of Light, and the bearer of Love,
    Till the stars in the firmament die.
    • Samuel Gilman, Harvard Class of 1811, in the fourth verse of "Fair Harvard". The final line of the fourth verse originally read "Till the stock of the Puritans die", but was revised in 2017.
  • It takes quite a bit of work (and a lot of luck) to acquire a level of fame. The question that might be worth asking is whether or not that effort is related to the quality of ideas underneath. Harvard has been around for nearly 400 years. That doesn't mean the brand name is worth as much as we might be inclined to believe.
  • The Trump administration has frozen between 2 1/2 and $3 billion in Harvard grants and contracts, and President Trump intends to cancel any remaining financial contracts. The administration is also trying to stop the university's ability to enroll foreign students and to end Harvard's tax exempt status.
    Harvard is facing about eight investigations from at least six agencies, including the Justice Department, the Department of Education, Homeland Security and Health and Human Services. In response, Harvard is suing the Trump administration. This all began with a task force commissioned by President Trump to investigate if Harvard was doing enough to combat antisemitism on campus. During the on-campus protests against Israel's bombing of Gaza last year, some of the protesters and some of the slogans chanted were accused of being antisemitic, and many Jewish students said they felt unsafe.

K

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  • Transforming hereditary privilege into ‘merit,’ the existing system of educational selection, with the Big Three [Harvard, Princeton, and Yale] as its capstone, provides the appearance if not the substance of equality of opportunity. In so doing, it legitimates the established order as one that rewards ability over the prerogatives of birth. The problem with a ‘meritocracy,’ then, is not only that its ideals are routinely violated (though that is true), but also that it veils the power relations beneath it. For the definition of ‘merit,’ including the one that now prevails in America’s leading universities, always bears the imprint of the distribution of power in the larger society. Those who are able to define ‘merit’ will almost invariably possess more of it, and those with greater resources—cultural, economic and social—will generally be able to ensure that the educational system will deem their children more meritorious.
    • Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Houghton Mifflin: 2005), pp. 549-550
  • Communism in the United States would hardly be identified with the slums of lower Manhattan, the dust bowlers of Kansas, or the miners of Pennsylvania. The word communism rather evokes associations like professors of state colleges with thick lenses in their spectacles, parlor pinks with Harvard accents, bored Park Avenue hostesses, anemic little East Europeans in public libraries, "progressive" and "advanced" psychologists specialized in sexual disorders, and unbearably conceited "foreign" correspondents.
    • Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, writing under the pen name Francis Stewart Campbell (1943), Menace of the Herd, or, Procrustes at Large, Milwaukee, WI: The Bruce Publishing Company, p. 294

M

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  • Contrary to Indians’ self-congratulatory notion that India is vishwa guru (guru to the world), in reality it is Harvard that is the vishwa guru. And India is vishwa shishya (student), with many of its people serving as vishwa coolie (laborer), and vishwa sepoy (soldier) in this ecosystem.... What starts at Harvard does not stay at Harvard. It spreads deep into intellectual and policy institutions everywhere.
    • Malhotra, R. & Viswanathan V. (2022). Snakes in the Ganga : Breaking India 2.0.
  • Harvard blacklisted Narendra Modi before he became India’s prime minister, and continues to slam him personally as well as his party, the BJP, for every imaginable kind of human rights violation, even when he has been cleared by Indian courts. Another hypocrisy is Harvard’s claim to champion free speech, an argument it used to terminate Indian economics professor, Subramanian Swamy. Harvard’s complaint against him was over his statement that India’s Muslims had Hindu ancestors. This should have been debated at Harvard to nurture free thinking among its students. After all, Indian Muslims do not prefer calling their ancestors foreign invaders from the Middle East. Hence, who else could have been their ancestors if not the natives of India, i.e., Hindus?
    • Malhotra, R. & Viswanathan V. (2022). Snakes in the Ganga : Breaking India 2.0.
  • Challenging is the note of freedom that still rings out from the Harvard Yard, into a world by no means so eager to hear it as a century ago. The University is a school of liberty as well as of learning; and events of the last few years have driven home the lesson that only in an atmosphere of liberty, and in a body politic that practises as well as preaches democracy, can learning flourish. Standing on the threshold of her fourth century, the University asks of the State, freedom; of her sons, loyalty; of God, grace that she may be saved from the besetting sin of pride, wisdom to do his will, and power "to advance Learning, and perpetuate it to Posterity."
    • Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard (1936), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, seventh printing (1965), p. 489

N

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R

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  • Punishment for uttering politically incorrect ideas, often with little regard for fair procedure, has plagued Harvard students, faculty members, and even, in the eyes of some, one now-former Harvard president over the past two decades. The disgraceful action taken against Professor Swamy is par for the course.

S

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  • Beneath these specifically religious forces and permeating the whole community there is, I think, a vaguer but deeper religion- the faith in enlightenment, the aspiration to be just, the sympathy with the multiform thoughts and labors of humanity. This is surely the noblest aspiration, and one which unites us to all ages and places in which men have cultivated reason. No one, I am sure, who has felt this high passion and freely fostered it in these halls, will put any place above Harvard in his affection. Some universities have greater beauty and a richer past, some have maturer scholars and more famous teachers, Yale herself has more unity, more energy, and greater fitness to our present conditions. Harvard, instead of all these advantages, has freedom, both from external trammels and the pleasant torpor of too fixed a tradition. She has freedom and a single eye for the truth, and these are enough to secure for her, if the world goes well, an incomparable future.
    • George Santayana, in Harvard Monthly in 1892, as quoted by Samuel Eliot Morison in Three Centuries of Harvard (1936), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, seventh printing (1965), p. 484
  • What I disliked most about Harvard was was that smug assumptions were too often treated as substitutes for evidence or logic. The idea seemed to be that if we bright and good fellows all believed something, it must be true.
    • Thomas Sowell, on his undergraduate studies at Harvard, in 'A Personal Odyssey (2000), The Free Press, p. 122

T

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  • Ivy League universities are becoming in the eyes of the new Asian upper class the ultimate status luxury good. Harvard is like a Vuitton bag and a Cartier watch.
  • The heuristic here would be to use education in reverse: hire, conditional on an equal set of skills, the person with the least label-oriented education. It means that the person had to succeed in spite of the credentialization of his competitors and overcome more serious hurdles. In addition, people who didn’t go to Harvard are easier to deal with in real life.
  • Have you heard the latest wisecrack about Harvard? People are calling it a hedge fund with a university attached. They have a point—Harvard stands at the troubling intersection between higher education and high finance, with over 15 percent of its massive $38 billion endowment invested in hedge funds.
  • Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they're doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They've got to behave themselves. You know, I'm looking out for the country and for Harvard. I want Harvard to do well. I want Harvard to be great again, probably. And Harvard has to understand, the last thing I want to do is hurt them. They're hurting themselves. They're fighting. You know, Columbia has been really - and they were very, very bad what they've done. They're very antisemitic and lots of other things. But they're working with us on finding a solution. And, you know, they're taking off that hot seat. But Harvard wants to fight, they want to show how smart they are, and they're getting their ass kicked.

W

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Y

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