Who Will Speak For Harvard?

The Trump Administration has attacked one of my alma maters. I rise stiffly to its defense

In the most disgusting display of disgustingness since the previous moment of disgustency, this week President Donald Trump (I shudder to type those words) issued the most vile attacks on Harvard University imaginable. He painted it as an overpriced, elitist institution that hires sham professors and issues worthless degrees, subjecting students to ideological capture of their professors, a sinister cadre of privileged, over-credentialed pseudo-radical careerists.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I have several degrees and honorary degrees from Harvard, as I do from every Ivy League institution. But Harvard, like dear Wally Trumbull, who I held dying in my arms in that Iwo Jima surf so very long ago, remains my first love. When I was an undergraduate there during the first Coolidge Administration, on recommendation of my uncle T. Boone Gore Pollack III, I studied at the knee of some of the finest educators of the time, like John Dewey, Long Henry Wadsworthfellow, Oliver Wendell Homie, and my personal golfing instructor Ben Hogan. I read widely in the classics, and spent my classical evenings going wide in the readings.

My extracurricular activities were just as fruitful. In those days, it was acceptable for red-blooded heterosexual men (and me) to dress in female garb. I participated in an all-male female review called “The Charming Milkmaids,” where we gave our fellow undergraduates a tantalizing glimpse of thigh peeking up just above our garter hose. I also was a member of a choral group, short-lived, called the “Whiffy Poo-Poos,” as our chosen name was already taken by a group at a lesser Connecticut institution that shall not be named. We composed an a cappella ode to Harvard, which I still hum to myself these days as my beleaguered manservant Roger (third of his name), injects me with the collagen solution underneath the ultraviolet lighting that keeps my skin young and supple. The song went:

Harvard, sweet Harvard

Lady near the sea

I’m never far from you

You’re never far from me….

I left Harvard that summer to join my fellow literary hopefuls in Paris, where the typewriters were cheap and the prostitutes were cheaper. But my heart never strayed far from the shores of Cambridge. From time to time, I would return. The scarves got longer, the skirts got shorter, but the essential Harvardness of the place never waned.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, I was part of a cabal of sinister young-seeming men who met in various basements beneath the Harvard quad, plotting how to simultaneously extend and extinguish U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. We were called the “Presidential Council on Physical Fitness,” a convenient cover name. We disagreed on many things, such as whether we should kill everyone in Cambodia, or no one. But we always enjoyed a sherry in the Pudding Club after our meetings, because despite our ideological differences, we were all Harvard men (and one woman, Madeline Albright).

That was then, this is now. While we used to study political science, Latin, and Euclidian Telemetry as part of a well-rounded undergraduate education, now Harvard offers such sources as “Literary Semaphors of Anti-Zionist Resistance,” “Deconstruction: A History of Oppression,” and, at Harvard Business School, “How To Disguise Your $100 Million Pyramid Scheme As A Benevolent Non-Profit Focused on Developing World Health Outcomes.”

As they used to require us to write in our newspaper editorials, plus ca qua tout le change. It’s still the same old Harvard, and I’m proud to join them in resisting the fascist demands from the bloated human snack pack who calls himself our “President”. Harvard is my friend and my rock. That will never change. I shall always hum its praises in the key of C.

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