There's an interesting book about that called The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower, written by Stephen H. Norwood. It has a long discussion about Harvard, and indeed the school's president, James Conant, did block Jewish faculty. He was the one who prevented European Jews from being admitted to the chemistry department - his field - and also had pretty good relations with the Nazis.
I know of no title that I deem more honorable than that of Professor of the Harvard Law School.
You know, Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company - which is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard of.
If Moses had gone to Harvard Law School and spent three years working on the Hill, he would have written the Ten Commandments with three exceptions and a saving clause.
It is all one to me if a man comes from Sing Sing Prison or Harvard. We hire a man, not his history.
"Law professors were never like economics professors," a Harvard Law professor told me. "If you disagreed with someone, you didn't call him a fool. "
A Harvard education consists of what you learn at Harvard while you are not studying.
I ask you, how would you like your mom, your wife, your daughter to spend $100,000 to go to Harvard or some state school, and go out into the workplace, and you know she's great, and men are getting paid $200 per week more than her? Would that piss you off? What if you lost your job and you stay home crippled while she goes out, and she thinks she's going to get a good job, but someone male with the same level of experience and the same level of education gets paid more than her? You're going to get pissed. Until you walk a mile in someone else's shoes, I don't want to hear it.
If I had done everything I'm credited with, I'd be speaking to you from a laboratory jar at Harvard.
If you take a look at places like Harvard, it's striking. In the early ,50s, I think there were a handful of Jewish professors, three or four. But by the 1960s, there were Jewish deans and administrators. In fact, one of the reasons why MIT became a great university was because they admitted Jews whereas Harvard did not.
Harvard was an extraordinary window on the world.
It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.
Harvard just took that option out of our hands. He is truly on his own now.
I would certainly make the attendance in college paid for, at least at a community college level or a state - you know, a sponsored university level so that if you wanted to go to college and if you had the grades - you might not go to Harvard - but you went to college.
My father used to say, "Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellows grave, or the glass flowers at Harvard. "
My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.
I couldn't have gotten into Harvard with a crowbar.
I've lectured at the Harvard Business School several times.
The rank of a university is similar to an index number say like the NASDAQ index. I don't understand how you can take an institution like Harvard, Stanford, or Michigan, and represent it by an index number. The concept makes no sense.
When you think about Boston, Harvard and M. I. T. are the brains of the city, and its soul might be Faneuil Hall or the State House or the Old Church. But I think the pulsing, pounding heart of Boston is Fenway Park.