Some of the biggest assholes I know wasted time at Harvard

Let me just preface this with saying that not everyone who went/goes to Harvard is an asshole. There are nice people that go to Harvard. However, it's like saying that there were free African-Americans in the South before the Civil War (i.e. a small minority).

Currently watching The Social Network while reading through the pdf version of the Kaplan/PMBR study outline for the MPRE. I'm taking it in just over a month because I'm currently learning all of the rules for my Professional Responsibility Class, which is being taught by a guy who went to Harvard, and not good-ol'-boy Harvard, but Harvard entering into the new Millenium, which is a whole new level of money-poor but just as self-entitled (if not moreso) "elite." This makes the whole thing a joke, as he is so very much the product of this attitude. Everything, and I do mean everything, revolves around the almighty dollar sign for him, and who he has to step on and what laws he has to "bend" to get that money as easily as possible (as in with as little effort exerted on his part) doesn't matter. The money is important because it allows him to justify his pompous self-absorbed attitude.

It's a phenomenon that I've found to be unique to Harvard. There are a few at the other Ivies, but Harvard seems to draw these people in with a magnet. How have I come about this conclusion, having not attended an Ivy myself? I've been surrounded by alums, current students, and future students all my life. My father would routinely drag my brothers and myself to a "The Game" party at which there would be multiple tvs broadcasting "The Game" because, if one thing could be said about my father, it is that he is a proud Yalie (mind you this alone does not make me biased against Harvard). Naturally, there would be a number of Harvard grads there as well, some nice, but many were not. Many of my peers (both from high school and crew, which was a club sport and therefore attracted teens from schools other than my high school) went to the Ivies, and the Chair of the History Department at Brown even sent me a nice email when I was a senior in high school asking me to consider applying to Brown (my parents thought that I would hate going to an Ivy and thus forbade me from even applying). My least-favorite cousin (the one who once chased me around her house with a hammer while trying to hit me with it when we were very young) went to Harvard (and she's just as evil now as she was then). Finally, even though I try to avoid meeting new people my own age who went to an Ivy (as it puts my mother into a "You should try to marry him" state of mind...having married a Yalie makes her biased), I still run into them from time to time, mostly at events that my parents drag me to. So I know the kind of people they are as a whole group based on an objective opinion.

Why is this? Who really knows. Point is, thank you, Harvard, for essentially giving us a way to weed out the self-absorbed pricks in America. Saying that you have spent time at Harvard or, worse, that you graduated from Harvard is a quick way for the rest of us to immediately figure out that you're not the kind of person that we want to touch with a ten-foot pole. Of course, the damn shame of it all is that those at and from Harvard take pride in this attitude. Mind over matter, if you will. If they think that they deserve all that comes with this self-entitlement, then they blind themselves into believing. And, of course, Harvard, the institution, fosters this blindness because it refuses to be seen as what it really is, the dumping ground of the Ivies, where those who are too conceited, too unfocused, and too lazy due to having mommy and daddy pledge their support no matter what happens or what they choose to do with their expensive educations are allowed to act as if they have never left junior high...scratch that, the first kegger that they went to in junior high. Harvard hasn't done anything remarkably beneficial for the world since it got rid of Bill Gates, which then freed up his time so he could eventually give us Microsoft.