mni magazine in 2005, “I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk.” Likening Columbia to a monastery was a common joke at the time: Between the high tuition and the all-male policy, it was said, students had to take vows of poverty and chastity. Nonetheless, every Columbia student reveled in his “we bad” New York attitude, and even the nerdiest pre-med secretly envisioned himself passing the bottle of Thunderbird around a trash-can fire with the squatters on the Lower East Side.Truth be told, there was good reason for our anti-snob attitude: We had very little to be snobbish about. The usual conversation starter with someone you’d just met was, “What college was your first choice, http://www.saclongchamppasicher.com - sac hobo longchamp pas cher ?” Columbia’s most cherished gimmick has long been its Core Curriculum, in which its students are made to read great works of philosophy and literature by Socrates, Hobbes, Locke, Aristophanes, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and all those guys. It sounds like a great idea in principle. The reality can be seen by what happened one day in my Contemporary Civilization class: the professor spent half an hour growing increasingly annoyed at our vague and evasive answers to basic questions, http://www.saclongchamppasicher.com - sac longchamp pas du tout chere , until he finally polled the class to find that none of the dozen or so who had bothered to attend had actually done the reading.Things are much better at Columbia today than they were in the early 1980s. They have girls now and everything; for most students, Columbia was probably their second choice, instead of their third or fourth. There’s even a decent chance that people outside New York will have heard of it. (I still recall going to my high school, about 60 miles east of the city, shortly after I got accepted and proudly unveiling my Columbia T-shirt to a classmate. She said: “You’re going to Columbia? Congratulations! Where is it?” A friend from South Carolina said that whenever he told people back home that he went to Columbia, they assumed he meant the state university; I imagine Columbians in Missouri had the same problem. Within the Ivy League only Penn, which is constantly mistaken for Penn State, http://www.saclongchamppasicher.com - longchamps pliage pas cher , has a less distinctive brand name.)For a contrast, consider National Review managing editor Jason Steorts, a Harvard graduate. He speaks fluent Chinese, discourses learnedly about harmonic structures in Bach fugues, and unwinds after a hard day of work by reading Wittgenstein. He has a right to be snobbish — a right he very rarely exercises, though I must admit that he doesn’t perform “blackness” very well either, probably because he’s white.So you can understand why journalists seize upon Harvard to explain why Barack Obama is so out of touch with Earl and Gladys and the kids. Even though he spent his time in Cambridge studying torts and contracts instead of Cicero and Swinburne, and even though his professors were more Duncan Kennedy than Charles W. Kingsfield Jr., the very name of Harvard lends Barack Obama a tweed-jacket image that no amount of community organizing, hip-hop gesturing
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