Seriously, Harvard? Seriously? You have this guy as a professor for six years and not one of you has anything to say about it on ratemyprofessors.com? My disappointment is only rivaled by Associate Professor Summers’ disappointment in the “post-pubescent children of notables� (i.e. bitterness toward his self-chosen path of academic poverty—the non-tenure track).

In a ridiculously self-masturbatory opinion piece for the Times Higher Education, John H. Summers, Harvard history professor, whines about how his wealthy students “worked exceptionally long hours, [and] were aggressive in exercising their talents.� Wait, there’s more! Summers moans, “I had to grade the students, and I had to grade them well. Everyone expected a recommendation letter.�

Wow, really? Hardworking and talented Harvard students expect good grades and recommendation letters? Madness, I tell you. Don’t do it, Professor Summers! Don’t give in to the temptation.

Well, he didn’t. Summers goes on to criticize Harvard’s grade inflation as taking away the “one instrument of power [he] wielded,� calling the “tacit� expectation that students earn no lower than a B “a sign of corruption� that “abridges the academic freedom of the teacher.�

Personally, I feel awful. I had no idea that expecting to continue doing well in school takes away a poor man’s freedom. Wait, it gets worse: Summers slips us a heartbreaking anecdote to drive home the point that he is but a victim of a corrupt system which “[wages] political reprisals against the B-minus grader.� Here’s what went down:

A judge and his wife went to my supervisor to complain about a grade I had assigned to their child in a senior oral examination. They rested their complaint on the fact that I was not yet in possession of the all-encompassing credential, the PhD. They pointed out that the second examiner in the room had assigned the exam a slightly higher grade, and that this second examiner was, in fact, a PhD. The judge and his wife did not know, nor did they care to discover, that I was by far the more experienced of the two graders.

Oh, snap! Had this couple troubled themselves to look into Prof. Summers’ street cred rather than academic credentials, they would have realized that of course their student deserved the grade he or she was given, what could they have possibly been thinking to question it?

Without a doubt, the most entertaining part of this article (and the part that Gawker picked up on) was Summers’ shock at the self-entitlement of capital-savvy, wealthy Ivy Leaguers. And, in case you were wondering, it gets personal. Jared Kushner, the 27-year-old Harvard grad who notoriously purchased the New York Observer for a cool $10 million, was a student of Summers’. In an interesting twist, when Kushner bought the Observer, he reduced the pay for book reviewers—reviewers who included poor, slighted Professor Summers. Get ready to feel pangs of sympathy: Summers had been writing reviews for the Observer in order to supplement his meager salary of $15k and pay off his debts.

Can’t a guy get a break around here? Apparently not, especially in an educational system where “the sedulous banality of the rich degrades teaching into a service-class preoccupation whose chief duty is preparing clients for monied careers.â€? Anyhow, if you’re a Summers fan, fear not: the guy has a book coming out next month called “Every Fury on Earth”. Now who wants to make pennies reviewing it in the Observer?