The long-awaited political news of the year is here. Malia Obama, perhaps the coolest Obama, has announced her university pick, that bastion of crimson smugness, Harvard University.
After spending the last week arguing that allowing women into all-male Harvard secret societies would only increase their chances of being sexually assaulted, all-male Harvard secret society member Charlie M. Storey today resigned from his post as graduate president of the very gravely important Porcellian club.
A secretive men’s-only club at Harvard this week broke its decades-long silence to explain its gender policy: Women shouldn’t be allowed in for a myriad of reasons aside from not having a penis, chief among them that they might be sexually assaulted by one of the club’s members.
Outside a room in Wasserstein Hall on the campus of Harvard hang framed photographs of every tenured law professor in the school’s 198-year history. When students and faculty walked by those photos this morning, they that tape had been placed on each photo of a black professor, obscuring their faces.
I graduated from Harvard in 2006, and have spent eight of the last nine years working as an admissions officer for my alma mater. A low-level volunteer, sure, but an official one all the same. I served as one of thousands of alumni volunteers around the world—a Regional Representative for my local Schools Committee, if you want to get technical. And, as a Regional Rep, my duties fell somewhere between Harvard recruiter and Harvard gatekeeper.
Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon, a favorite scientist of climate-change deniers for his theory attributing global warming to variations in the sun's energy and not human activity, has accepted more than $1.2 million from the fossil-fuel industry in the last decade, the New York Times reports. He also failed to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his published papers.
Harvard professors are no longer allowed to engage in "sexual or romantic relationships" with undergraduates or with grad students under their direct supervision, Bloomberg reports. Previously, student-teacher relationships were frowned upon, but only officially prohibited when the student was in the professor's class.
The 1%-vs-99% inequality dynamic that plagues America's economy as a whole extends to the world of higher education. And the richest universities in America had a great year last year.
If a restaurant overcharges you by $4, there are two reasonable options: You could 1) not worry about it—it's only four dollars, after all, or 2) politely ask for your money back. If you're a huge asshole, there's a third option: You could write five emails—totaling hundreds of words—over three days demanding a refund of $12, a price increase you calculated using your dick-ish understanding of obscure Massachusetts law.
The New Yorker website, not to be confused with the New Yorker print magazine, is thinking about status today. In an item on its "Currency" vertical, the online New Yorker introduces us to researchers who have gained fascinating insights into how people police the abstract status identities they've constructed around their preferred "brands"—or else (maybe?) how people who have attained the factual condition of attending Harvard or of running long-distance obstacle courses disdain people who claim to have done those things without having done those things:
