Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they're not known for educating large numbers of poor young people.
I wanted to get out of Ashland, and I thought it would be pretty cool to go to school in the East. So I asked my guidance counselor what Ivy League schools were. And I applied to Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth - that was it. My guidance counselor told me I wouldn't get into an Ivy League school. So as my act of resistance, that's all I applied to.
Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.
When one considers our nation's educational foundations - Harvard, Yale, Princeton and most of our respected institutions were originally Christian - it becomes evident why we, as Christians, maintain a passion about remaining true to the foundations of Scripture.
Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.
Everyone praises Harvard 'for the students.' But what makes Harvard's students so great is that they are, in many ways, a cross-section of the larger world. They are normal people who happen to be excellent, and this sets them apart. People who go to Yale go because they want to attend Yale. People who go to Harvard go because they can.
I'm a graduate of Princeton, and I just want to say you don't have to go to an Ivy League school to be on the Supreme Court.
I went to college at Harvard, then did three years of graduate school at Yale. At both places I studied comparative literature. People find it odd that I went to both Harvard and Yale, and I guess it is odd, but that's just what people did where I grew up.
It seems to me that large numbers of people are now paying attention to poverty and that large numbers now understand that blaming the poor and the insecure for being poor and insecure is as unseemly as is schoolyard bullying. In that realization lies hope for a reinvigorated discourse around poverty and inequity in modern-day America.
Back in Kansas City, I associated Harvard with sort of gnarly guys who wore capes for effect in a kind of Oscar Wilde scene. Even though I also knew there was such a thing as the Harvard-Yale game, I was still a little surprised that Harvard had a football team. I just assumed if there were such a thing as gay people, that they were nothing like us. Little did I know that probably half the swim team at Yale was gay.
When Princeton plays Harvard, I'm rooting for Princeton, of course. Go Tigers!
But to do it professionally is a quantum leap difference and my father had to be persuaded by these kind of Ivy League professors that I should go to the Yale Drama School, another one of the stories in there.
I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton. But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition... Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.
I never graduated high school; they had to change the Ivy League rules. During my tenure at Brown, I helped them become the number one Ivy League school.
I didn't know Penn was an Ivy League school - I didn't know what the Ivy League was. When I got in, they sent me the package, and the tuition was my mother's salary for a year. My mom said, 'We can't afford it.' So I went to the library and found several scholarships and grants and was able to cover 90 percent of my education that way.
It's the nature of government, to build enduring institutions, structures that stay long after their purpose is over. If you pay people to help the poor, you have people who won't be paid if there aren't any poor, so they'll be sure to find some.
The New York Times is filled with Ivy League graduates and so is the Washington Post. I mean, it's all the same club. They may be Ivy League educated, but they're not smart. Their minds are closed. They actually are mind-numbed robots. They have been programmed all their lives. They're not even thinkers. These are people who have been programmed to believe what they believe. They are committed believers, not thinkers.