[Leica] Re: Harvard is left?

[lrzeitlin at optonline.net (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

On Aug 30, 2006, at 2:06 PM, Scott wrote:

>>> While the media seems to characterize Harvard as a "lefty"
>>> place, it's actually a wonderful place to meet bright young  
>>> people who
>>> are so RICH that they will *NEVER* have to work a day in their lives
>>> (like most of their parents before them).
>>> I recall 18 to 21 year old boys crying in the Dunster House  
>>> courtyard
>>> the day the market crashed in '87, including Robert Ziff (largest
>>> t-shirt
>>> collection I ever saw), one of the heirs to the magazine fortune  
>>> (he and
>>> his brothers sold it off - why concern themselves with mere  
>>> business?).


Your Harvard and mine were quite different places. I went in the  
years just following WW2 when half of the student body was made up of  
vets using the GI Bill education benefits. Rather than wanting to  
revolutionize the system, they wanted to get their piece of it as  
soon as possible. The school was almost conservative in its outlook.  
Yale as well. That was the era of Bill Buckley at that lesser  
institution. My professors had actively aided the WW2 war effort and  
were proud of it. Chemistry Prof. Louis Fieser invented Napalm.  
George Kistakowski and others took a leave of absence to work on the  
atomic bomb. (They claimed it was a Sabbatical.) The room sized  
mechanical digital computer in the Aiken Computer lab earned its keep  
by calculating artillery trajectories. Harvard tuition at that time  
was $8000 a year. A princely sum but one that was affordable even  
under the GI Bill. I earned half my tuition taking pictures of the  
burlesque cuties in Sculley Square. A tough job for an 18 year old  
but someone had to do it.

Larry Z (Harvard '51)