Isn’t Harvard Just the Worst?

That certainly seems to be the opinion of a few journalists recently. Wait,  seems to be? With a headline like "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education," you just know the author is not too keen on the Crimson. The author is none other than our old friend Cockmaster D (William Deresiewicz for our forgetful readers). Goold ol' Cockmaster D recently discovered that he was too elitist to interact with a plumber, so obviously the rest of us are just as bad.

Because we're coddled with extensions on papers and rampant grade inflation, we grow up to be the worst people ever. Also, it's because we have gates:

The physical form of the university—its quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and wrought-iron portals—is constituted by the locked gate set into the encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of governing metaphor—because the social form of the university, as is true of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect.    

He's right. Gates might be cool when every other college does it, but how dare we use them to keep people out!

He also points out that George Bush went to Yale, so take that, Ivy League! Yeah that's right one of the dozens of presidents who went to elite universities isn't so awesome! Clearly we have no defense to these accusations, but are we really that bad?

No, we're worse! After the jump, Harvard is destroying the world (and bruising the butts of old ladies).

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What Does A Liberal Look Like? According to Lucy Morrow Caldwell, A Harvard Student (UPDATE)

Caroline GiulianiLucy Morrow Caldwell.

Just yesterday, this name elicited a firestorm across teh_interwebs when Slate ran a "report" showing that Rudy Giuliani's 17-year-old daughter Caroline, Harvard '11, was a de facto member of the "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)" Facebook group.

Links were exchanged, hatred spewed forth like only the 'Net can provide and backlash -- yes, backlash -- ensued, offering up the idea that Ms. Caldwell turned a blind eye to news integrity and unleashed this bit of "breaking news" on the world.

Did Lucy Morrow Caldwell invent breaking news for her own benefit?

According to multiple sources, she just may have. Why? Let us ask you this: Is the joining of a Facebook group by a minor who is not eligible to vote truly a reason to get CNN's news ticker all ticked-off?

For the record, we at IvyGate think Caldwell's motives are suspect. After all, how long was Giuliani a part of that group? Was it breaking just because someone who is not one of her friends on Facebook noticed? Remember -- the noose-tightening line in Caldwell's piece is that she removed herself from the group at an otherwise-uncollegiate-for-the-summer 6:01 a.m. But where was the news when she originally had joined it?

We're actually on the side of Insider Chatter on this one:

If Slate's Lucy Morrow Caldwell is aware of corporate owner WP's Pentagon Papers and Watergate investigative heritage, it is NOT evident in her "undercover" Facebook reporting. Howard Kurtz is billed as the Washington Post media critic, but he is content to regurgitate a college intern's inept public posting of a fellow Facebooker's profile."

Ouch, and that's coming from an editor who's actually been billed as "Howard Kurtz, Jr."

Do we really care about Caroline Giuliani's political views? Here's a little justification to how little this matters for her, thanks to a blistering New York profile of Caroline's stepmother Judith:

When I ran into Rudy at the White House Correspondents Association Dinner in late April, he told me Judith skipped the event because "she's up taking care of our daughter [Whitney] at Skidmore." The locution "our daughter" was hardly calculated to repair his frayed relations with the biological children he shares with [Donna] Hanover, especially 17-year-old Trinity-prep-school senior Caroline, who uses Donna's surname and reportedly didn't bother telling him when she was accepted recently by Harvard. ("In the next few months, Rudy really has to repair his relationships with Andrew and Caroline," says a Republican strategist. "He can't be the Republican nominee and have his kids estranged from him. That ain't gonna cut it.")"

So when the scrutiny comes down on the younger, collegiate Giuliani's profile, which reveals a "liberal" slant -- the most popular of political views on Harvard profiles, and for that matter, Facebook in general -- IvyGate smells some agenda-setting.

Allow us to take a look at the even-handed journalistic history of one Ms. Lucy Morrow (that's with an "o", not a "u", as in Edward R.) Caldwell:

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