Hispanic Business reports:
Until recently, Harvard University has been perhaps the most glaring example of an elite college’s failure to welcome low-income students. With an endowment of $25.9 billion — far larger than that of any other university in the U.S. or abroad — Harvard clearly has the resources to educate the poor.
Yet only about 10% of its undergraduates are eligible to receive federal Pell Grants, which are usually awarded to students from families earning less than $40,000 a year. At Amherst, 15% of the students get Pells, and President Anthony Marx is aiming to boost that to 25% of future classes.
But now, Harvard’s controversial president, Lawrence Summers, is on a campaign to give low-income students far greater representation at America’s most prestigious university. “If Harvard is only for the children of those who have been successful, we will lose the social mobility that has always been America’s strength,” argues the former U.S. Treasury Secretary. “I’d like Harvard to look as much like America as possible.”
Unfortunately, the left-wing faculty at Harvard thought otherwise, and pushed Larry Summers to resign.
The WSJ writes:
Mr. Summers’s fate has unfortunately become all too typical at elite schools in recent decades. The Dartmouth faculty looked down on David McLaughlin as an “anti-intellectual” (he had an M.B.A. instead of a Ph.D.); he was run out of Hanover in 1987 over bitter quarrels over ROTC and disinvestment from South Africa. Benno Schmidt left Yale in 2001, saying his six-year tenure had been marked “by more argument . . . than I would have wished.” Donald Kagan, the dean of Yale College who had handed in his resignation a few weeks earlier, was franker, noting the threat from an “imperial faculty.”
As some of my liberal friends like to say, McCarthyism is alive and well, and it is especially strong at elite schools where liberals control what can and can’t be said.
Paloma Zepeda, a student at Harvard, has more and Thomas Sowell has more.
Update: Thomas Sowell has more.
Funny, I never thought of Harvard, or any other Ivy League school as liberal. All of the Ivy Leaguers I have ever met from age 18 to 80 are died in the wool Republicans. I know there are the Kennedy’s and all, but there are plenty of Bush’s etc who go to Ivy’s also. Just on a personal level, the state schoolers are more liberal.
Summers had the liberty to say what was on his mind.
His opponents had the liberty to say what was on their mind.
Summers had the liberty & choice to stay or resign.
To blame it on elite faculty members is to say that Summers did not have a choice.
Summers did not have a choice, it was a well known fact that the faculty was about to have a no confidence vote roll call, so it was either he resign or get forced out by the faculty.
What a shock, Harvard has elitists in its organization and this is different than it has been for the past 350 years in what way?
“Summers did not have a choice, it was a well known fact that the faculty was about to have a no confidence vote roll call, so it was either he resign or get forced out by the faculty.”
Get forced out by the faculty? What a baby!