Harvard Says It Loud and Clear
Ever since venturing into the subject when I wrote about Yale, I have maintained that the ideological impact of a college education is best understood by a close study of student experience, conducted, preferably, by students themselves, or by those intimately associated with them. Granted my thesis was self-serving when I first put it forward, for I was resisting a splashy (front page New York Times) counteroffensive by the officials of Yale University intended to discredit the principal contentions of God and Man at Yale. Yale’s answer to a simple book stating the obvious was to summon together a resplendent committee of sages including, if I remember right, the then Secretary of State, the leader of the Republican Party in the Senate, and a former president of the Union Theological Seminary, who were handed the assignment of unsaying my book. The fact that most of the gentlemen in question, who were to become Authorities on undergraduate academic experience, could probably not have made their way from Timothy Dwight College to Linsly-Chittenden Hall without asking directions, made no difference at all: as an exercise in selfexculpation, the operation worked. Yale was pronounced virtuous.
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