Harvard Rules Read Online Free Page B

scholarship. And in the 2002 comedy Stealing Harvard, a well-meaning uncle attempts to pilfer $30,000 so that his niece can pay Harvard’s costs.
    In the realm of nonfiction, there is a sizeable genre of “I spent a year at Harvard” books—memoirs of the law school, medical school, divinity school, and so on. In theme and structure, such chronicles—such as Scott Turow’s One L —constitute survival narratives. A year at the Harvard Law School is the academic equivalent of surviving a plane crash in the Peruvian Andes or being stranded on a deserted island with only a beach ball for company. As in most Harvard-themed works of culture, individuality is in short supply, spontaneity prompts rebuke, and love is an endangered emotion.
    Harvard’s administration devotes enormous amounts of time, money, and energy to generating more positive media coverage. The university seems to have more press secretaries than Congress, and they spend as much time shooting stories down as helping them get written. Much of their job involves getting faculty members quoted in newspapers and magazines on issues related to their expertise, and at this they are remarkably successful—helped, no doubt, by the prevalence of Harvard grads in the press. Some years back, a writer working on a book about Harvard asked a group of researchers to count the number of instances in which the New York Times cited Harvard over a period of several months. They expected the number to be large, but even to their surprise, they found that the Times mentioned Harvard more than all other universities combined .
    Of course, Harvard doesn’t rely on outside press organizations to advertise itself. It publishes dozens of reports, bulletins, journals, and magazines lauding the accomplishments of members of the Harvard community. There’s nothing sinister about this—all universities do it—but Harvard does it bigger and better. Among numerous examples, the Harvard University Gazette, a weekly newspaper during the school year, profiles Harvard faculty and lists the remarkable number of lectures, exhibits, and performances happening on campus in any given week. Harvard Magazine is a slick, professional magazine sent to all Harvard alums six times yearly. The university web page, a more recent innovation, projects a harmonious image of Harvard across the world, twenty-four hours a day.
    If, in the summer and fall of 2001, you had read the articles in Harvard publications and on Harvard websites about new president Larry Summers, you would have acquired a meticulously selected and oft-repeated set of facts about him. You would have known that Summers was energetic and “brilliant”—a word repeated so often to describe him that it became almost a third name. You would have known that Summers was an inspiring teacher, often mentioned as a likely winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. And that Summers had spent a successful decade in Washington, capped by his eighteen months as secretary of the treasury. From all the things written about him, you might have gotten the impression that Summers resembled TV’s West Wing ’s President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen—only smarter.
    All the promotion paid off. Summers received glowing treatment in the non-Harvard media, which proclaimed that he was just the man to restore the role of university president to its pre-Rudenstine standing. Larry Summers, wrote one Boston Globe columnist, “has the potential to be the greatest president of Harvard since Charles W. Eliot,” the nineteenth-century figure generally considered to be Harvard’s greatest president, period.
    True, it was occasionally mentioned that Summers was a fierce competitor on the tennis court. But if he had other hobbies or interests outside the realm of economics, they went undiscovered. Nor was there mention of Summers’ personal life, certainly not of the fact that he was in the