Harvard: Overrated

For those of you who have a dog in this fight, yet another reason to feel validated in your contempt for the grade inflated prima donnas with a penchant for crimson and crow’s feet – Harvard grads.

<>MICHAEL STEINBERGER sets the record straight in his WSJ editorial.

Take politics. Harvard has long prided itself on being an incubator of political talent, and for good reason: It has educated seven U.S. presidents, more than any other university. But only two Harvard graduates have been elected president in the past 45 years, and one of them, the current occupant of the Oval Office, holds a Harvard MBA. By contrast, four of the six most recent presidents earned degrees from Yale, and two Yalies squared off in the past election. Moreover, for Democratic office-seekers at least, a Harvard education, with its suggestion of Eastern privilege and liberal elitism, is probably more a liability than an asset nowadays.

Harvard also matters less in the business world. It is true that a few Harvard graduates (and one dropout, Bill Gates) have figured prominently in the digital revolution--unquestionably the biggest business story in the past decade--but Stanford is a much more prolific supplier of its brainpower. Google, Yahoo!, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and a raft of other marquee tech firms were partly or wholly incubated on the Stanford campus.

Harvard is also a much less important intellectual hub than it once was. The University of Chicago, for one, has wielded much more influence in recent decades. It is no exaggeration to say that Chicago laid the intellectual foundation for the conservative ascendancy and nurtured the ideas that now drive the debate over economic policy, legal theory and foreign affairs. The key ideas of the so-called Reagan Revolution, including monetarism and deregulation, trace their origins back to the free-market theorizing of Chicago's economics department. (One striking measure of the department's clout: Of the 55 economists awarded the Nobel Prize since 1969, when economics was added to the roster, 10 have taught at Chicago and an additional 13 either trained at Chicago or had previously taught there. Harvard, by contrast, has had four faculty winners.)

One of those Chicago Nobel laureates, Ronald Coase, is acknowledged to be the godfather of law and economics, unquestionably the most influential branch of legal theory in the past quarter-century. (It applies economic reasoning to legal questions.) And while Harvard certainly has its superstars, when you look at the people who have taught at Chicago in the past 40 years or so--Milton Friedman, Richard Posner, Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss, Robert Lucas, Albert Wohlstetter, Richard Epstein, Leon Kass, Saul Bellow, Martha Nussbaum--it is pretty clear which school has been giving off more heat.