British Journalist Attends HBS, Tastes Frat Life
If we were all given a time machine and a fat envelope from Harvard College, chances are that many of us would take it. Because when it comes down to brand appeal, endowment size, and ability to inspire a tangled matrix of envy and admiration, Harvard is king. But since most of us will never know the Yard from the inside, we must content ourselves with denigrating it in public and obsessing over it in private, through books like Ahead of the Curve by Philip Delves Broughton.
The memoir, which was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, traces the two years Broughton spent as an MBA student at Harvard Business School. What seems especially interesting about Broughton’s book is that he entered HBS not as a businessman but as a journalist; before entering the Class of 2006 he was Paris Bureau Chief for the London Daily Telegraph.
As the WSJ reviewer notes:
Some of what he found won’t be surprising, particularly the sense of entitlement for which its students and faculty are famous. The self-regard must get handed out with the matriculation packets. Most graduate business schools, you might have noticed, award MBAs. HBS, according to the dean, specializes in “transformational experiences.”
It’s fitting that “transformational experiences” sounds a lot like freshman convocation jargon since Broughton makes HBS sound a lot like college. The MBA’s “had two modes: deadly serious and frat boy, with little in between.” More titillating details after the jump.
The future titans of American industry celebrated the end of their first week of classes with a party at which everyone was expected to dress as his favorite hip-hop star. The central attraction was a “booze luge,” an ingenious and super-efficient means of chugging vodka. At midsemester came the Priscilla ball. “The men were to dress as women and the women as sluts. . . . One man looked like Virginia Woolf in a white boa and black wig . . . while another wore a skimpy Heidi outfit and women’s underwear, which failed to contain his errant . . . ” — well, you get the idea. And it cost only $120 to attend.
But unlike college everyone has worked for a few years - many, I’m assuming, on Wall Street - so dropping $120 to gulp down top shelf liquor while masquerading in drag must be a cinch.
I don’t know about you, but chugging Grey Goose through a booze luge sounds a lot better than doing keg stands in the basement of a roach-infested frat house. Who’s ready to apply to HBS?
5 Comments | 
Digg This | 
Share on Facebook | 
Print This Post
| 
Email This Post
Read more: b-school, books, drag, Harvard, wsj
Search
Email
About
Report a bug
Archives
RSS Feed
August 7th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
“Like our common language, like our love for baseball and bleached flour, our resentful mistrust of Harvard is one of the things that have traditionally bound Americans to one another, from the snootiest Yale graduate to the lowliest stevedore. Meanwhile, everybody is trying to get in.”
Still trying to decide what I think about this paragraph. Then again, I don’t really like baseball either.
August 7th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Sad but true. There is a scorn for Harvard that Yale and Princeton will never experience. Doubly sad because Yale and Princeton have plenty more douchebags. It only proves that deep down inside, America hates nerds more than it hates privileged WASPS. We can explain away the success of the landed elite as due to being a landed elite, but the nerd, he just proves that we are lazy and dim-witted.
August 8th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
@Tully
are you really trying to say that Harvard doesnt have as many WASPs or douches than Princeton and Yale? All school-pride aside, I think that all three have about the same amount of these types. Harvard certainly has no less, if not more than Yale and Princeton.
August 8th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
^^please excuse the horrible sentence structure
August 13th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
How many Princetonians does it take to change a lightbulb?
Two - one to call the electrician, and one to mix the martini.