<p>Cue, I forgot you weren’t a prospective student! Tough to keep these screen names straight!</p>
<p>I think you are right that the strategy was essentially put in place under Sonnenschein (and probably much discussed during Gray’s presidency). Really, in retrospect there wasn’t much choice, but I think the various administrations have done a fine job of putting the college on much more favorable ground while preserving a lot of unique character. </p>
<p>Karabel is always pulling a “shocked! shocked!” at any departure from public values. My perspective is a little different – during all that period where he sees veiled anti-Semitism (and he’s not so terribly wrong), Harvard was educating my grandmother and her siblings/spouses, and then my parents and their siblings/spouses, all of them quite Jewish, together with all sorts of key figures who were the vanguard of the integration of the Jewish community into the American establishment. And I believe it continues to do that today with African- and Asian-Americans and Hispanics. If you look across a few generations, Harvard and its ilk (including Chicago) have done an incredible job of reshaping the American elite and its values, and bringing both progressively more in line with democratic ideals, while preserving and indeed increasing exponentially the strength of the institutions. Karabel seems to mind terribly that it didn’t happen all at once, and he loses sight of how thoroughly it did happen, and how in the process the elite American private universities became the best (and richest) educational institutions the world has ever seen. The President and Fellows of Harvard University have managed to be good revolutionaries and good stewards at the same time.</p>