Harvard Goes Egalitarian

THC was alerted to this breaking story by the Liberty & Law Blog on Harvard's actions to address this pressing issue:

In a move designed to foster diversity and to create a university that “thinks like America,” Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust, the President of Harvard University announced yesterday that the school will embrace egalitarian admissions. The school will no longer give priority to students with good grades, high SAT scores, and impressive extra-curricular activities. Such policies have, Dr. Faust acknowledged, created an “elitist” and “inegalitarian” atmosphere at the college. “It is unacceptable in 2014 to be favoring the intelligent over the unlearned, and the energetic over the slothful,” she proclaimed. Starting next year Harvard’s incoming class will have SAT scores ranging from six to sixteen hundred to produce, for the first time, a truly diverse freshman class. The class’ scores will resemble the distribution of scores across the United States. This mission will extend beyond admissions: “Harvard is now dedicated to fighting ‘thinkism” in all its guises".

The word is that Harvard is considering yet another daring step to address inequality.  According to US News & World Report, America's 1,141 universities and colleges have a total endowment of approximately $370 billion.  However, 10 universities (0.9%) have more than 35% of all endowments with Harvard alone accounting for more than 8% of the total!  Harvard's endowment is so large that it is almost 100 times the size of the average college endowment.  Sources are reporting that Harvard is planning to disband its endowment and distribute all of it to community colleges and trade schools across the United States with one Harvard insider reporting remarking "We simply must address this outrageous inequality - it's, it's unfair! ".  What a magnanimous gesture this would be!
(Harvard endowment)
Not to be outdone, Harvard's rival in Cambridge, MA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is launching an initiative under the leadership of Professor Jonathan Gruber, one of the policy experts behind the creation of the Affordable Care Act.  Gruber, who has been adamant in denouncing "winners of the genetic lottery", has decided to "walk the talk" and recently announced he is voluntarily giving up his tenured position at MIT and that the University has agreed to annually rotate in a new professor selected at random from the Boston phone book.  MIT and Gruber are urging other tenured professors to follow his noble example.       (former tenured Prof Gruber)


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