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an aside to the central argument in this thread:
it is a wonder that harvard has to spend any money on marketing ever, because you have comercials for it floating out of films (good will hunting) and new stories...
in the current academic job market, harvard is not that different from any number of other schools in that you do not have a particular concentration of good faculty there as over against other places---partly as a function of harvard's particular tenure system, partly as a result of the distribution of endowments across universities in general. fac migrates where the cash is, frankly. it is quite the paradigm of an oppositional culture. o yes it is.
i really detest the whole legacy thing. the motivations are obvious: alumni families can buy lowered admissions standards for their kids by playing the possibility of future donations to the university. universities are interested in the money. families are interested in cultural capital.
the lowering of admissions standards for legacies is a routine bit of class-based privilege--one that i rarely hear conservatives whining about (tho the one thing bush said his entire first administration i agreed with was an offhand remark about this subject)....conservatives in the main have no problem with class privelege--they just prefer to privatize it. the worldview you run into in conservative media-land militates against being able to even raise the matter--because wealth is associated with higher virtue, the results of wealth in skewing processes like admissions to university can only be understood as following logically from the wealthy possessing higher virtue than the rest of us.
i assume the same foul tracing of market ideology applies at some level in their understanding of obvious, systemic inequalities in public education that follow from tying funding for schools to local property taxes--if the right was serious at any level at all about eliminating discrimination, they would start by flattening funding to public schools. but they dont--they want private schools, so the problem of class can be exacerbated on the one hand, while pundits on tv and radio can say, at the same time, that the problms are being addressed on the other.
given this, that the same ideology would work so hard to fashion arguments against affirmative action is surreal.
anyway--on the question of the "c" being understood as failing in the ivies: i do not know where this idea comes from, but at the undergrad level it is simply false.
at the graduate level, things are otherwise. but you can get bounced out of grad school for fucking things up with your committee just as easily. in many ways, grad school is a kind of extended lesson in deference-formation, in developing new and improved ways of instrumentalize social relations, etc. that is not all it is, of course...but this is a non-trivial element of it.
end digression
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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