How did Harvard gain its reputation and prestige?

JHS
Wed, 04 Aug 2010 15:28:28 +0000

I thought bclintonk’s post above pretty much nailed the most important factors. Lost in all of the Karabell hoo-ha is the fact that Harvard under President Eliot was the first of the traditional establishment universities to adopt a meritocracy approach, even if it wasn’t an absolute value, and that had a whole heck of a lot to do with Harvard’s prominence in the mid-20th Century.

A couple of other factors play in, too:


Real estate. Over the past 50 years, urban and suburban universities have consistently gained in prestige as a group, and rural universities declined. But in the 70s and 80s some of the “very urban” universities were harmed terribly – especially insofar as the attractiveness of their undergraduate programs was concerned – by the free-fall that was going in their neighborhoods. Places like Hopkins, Chicago, Columbia, Penn really got kicked in the teeth by that, and it sure didn’t help Yale. (When I was looking at college in the mid-70s, Columbia and Penn were seen as far less desirable than Cornell and Dartmouth, for just this reason. And I was a city kid.) Harvard was hardly immune to the problem, but Cambridge in general, and especially the part around Harvard, maintained its general desirability. (Some of that was due to canny real estate investing by Harvard, of course.)


The bottom line was that Harvard had the real estate sweet spot – a vibrant, non-depressed neighborhood in a vibrant city. Other universities had similar advantages – Brown, NYU, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Emory, Rice – and, guess what?, all of them had major advances in prestige over the past 50 years. But Harvard started out way ahead of them.


Until recently, there really weren’t many, if any, truly national universities. Harvard has always had a special mission to New England, but it was one of a handful of universities that really tried to be national institutions long before that became common.
Schmaltz raises a good point about Harvard’s brand recognition on the street, not just in elitist circles. A lot of that has to do with Hollywood (and to the very strong Lampoon-Crimson-Hollywood pipeline). Love Story, The Paper Chase, Harvard Man . . . there has been a drumbeat of promotion for Harvard for decades, far more than for any other college (although Stanford gets its share now, and Yale and Princeton get tastes). Rory Gillmore may have gone to Yale – she had to if they didn’t want to get all new sets – but she spent four years talking about how Harvard was the bestest. JFK’s glamor also contributed to the Harvard mystique.


The point is that Harvard has been the clear winner in the pop culture arena over the past generation. The Teamsters I worked with in my midwestern city in 1975 had no idea what Yale OR Harvard were. Today, I’m certain their kids know what Harvard stands for.


And you can’t underestimate the importance of the still-gargantuan, unprecedented-in-the-history-of-the-world endowment, which doesn’t even take into account the incredible value of its tangible and real estate capital in service.