Some went to a university North Carolina. Others might have graduated from institutions in the Northeast, while a number may have received their sheepskins from the school of hard knocks.
Though the variety of schools of higher education is significant, few in the village have the privilege of saying they graduated from Harvard or Yale. Those two institutions boast that they provide the most prestigious of educations, and their reputations reinforce that assertion.
(I can boast that I visited Harvard Yard on a number of occasions while I pursued a degree at Boston College, but those visits were predicated on meeting members of the opposite sex and/or visiting the pubs of Cambridge that surround the celebrated campus on the Charles.)
Admittedly, educators who know better point out that many other schools provide collegiate training that matches and even surpasses the teachings of either Harvard or Yale. Stanford, the University of Chicago and Duke, to name just three, can match the Ivy schools in many disciplines. MIT, Wharton and Carnegie-Mellon top the Eastern giants in specific areas of matriculation.
Still, rightly or not, being able to say that you graduated from Harvard or Yale will always place you on a pedestal that towers over your peers.
Maybe those schools have reputations that are justified, but two recent stories passed to me by a Whispering Pines neighbor suggest that it might be time to think again.
The dean of Yale University’s Berkeley Divinity School decided to leave his position in December after being criticized in an audit of the school’s finances.
Dean Ralph Franklin used school funds for personal expenses including — would you believe? — his daughter’s tuition at Harvard Medical School. (Nothing like an old boy network at work!)
Though the Divinity school administrators insisted that Franklin had “conducted himself with the utmost professionalism,” the audit found that the dean spent school funds for a family trip and personal dry-cleaning and took thousands of dollars in “loans” that he repaid only after auditors confronted him.
Meanwhile, Harvard has been having its own problems.
The world’s wealthiest institution of higher education has been paying its lower-wage workers such a pittance that many are having difficulties paying their routine bills and cannot afford basic necessities like health insurance. A university advisory committee released a scathing report that says 302 workers — custodians, service personnel, and security staff — earn less than $10.68 per hour, the official “living wage” in the city of Cambridge, Mass.
Harvard custodians are paid $9.65 at entry level, while employees in similar positions at other colleges in the Boston area start at $14 per hour.
The committee report stressed that the current university practice fosters a climate that suggests there are “two Harvards,” one of haves and one of have-nots.
After being told of the negatives that have surfaced about Harvard and Yale, one village resident said he was happy that he didn’t go to either.
Admittedly, the shenanigans involving the two schools’ administrations would not have affected him if he were a student, but he would not have been comfortable having his family shell out 20 grand or more to the universities and then find out that some of that money went to help a dean put coins into the Boola Boola Laundromat down the street from the Yale dorms.
Another villager said going to Harvard or Yale would have been a stretch anyhow, since the alphabet doesn’t reach down to the level of his grades and that his SAT numbers doubled would still be short of the total points scored by both teams in the Super Bowl.
The bottom line, it appears, seems to be that most of us in Whispering Pines are more than happy with the educations we got, the schools we attended, and the integrity of the universities where we spent some of our younger years.
You can have those multibillion-dollar institutions up North. We may not have gone to them. We may not be able to plaster our walls with diplomas from those schools. But we can be proud that we got where we are today because of the schooling we were fortunate to get.
It may have been from Canisius or Virginia Tech or Morgan State. It could have been obtained from Boston University or East Carolina or Clemson. Wherever it was, it got us to living the good life in a great village in a wonderful area. And we had fun getting here.
The longnecks at our school pubs were probably cheaper, the Saturday night parties were probably louder, and the experience was surely more memorable.
Take that, you Harvard Crimson and Yale Bulldog guys and gals!
