Re: Being Smart

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Harvard is great--perhaps the greatest institution of intelligence today. Harvard has achieved this staggering degree of grandeur due to the efforts of the students and the administration to control the quality of what is taught here. We won't settle for second-rate. We will only permit that which is good, that which is smart.

One of the happy consequences of this quality control is that it is self-perpetuating. Have you ever noticed how few dumb people are on campus? This is not just because they aren't accepted, but because they don't even bother to try to come here. They know that they wouldn't make the grade, they know they wouldn't fit in. And when dumb people do come here, we generously instruct them. The smartest Harvard students and professors rally to the cause. With clever phrases and melodious hymns we gracefully expose their abysmal dumbness and assert our intellectual primacy. In this way either we gently persuade them and borderline students into being smart or we succeed in keeping them and their dumb ideas away.

The latest triumph of our quality control is the case of Jeane Kirkpatrick. Last week the Republican Club, itself marginal, asked her to speak here at Harvard. Without hesitation she declined. Why? She made it clear that she wouldn't appreciate our instructive hymns and clever slogans during her speeches. She actually questioned the good taste of this tradition. Imagine that! In short, she was too dumb--or rather too smart--no, too dumb to come. Well, at least she knows that if one doesn't have anything smart to say, one shouldn't come to Harvard. Old Cap Weinberger didn't realize this and we had to resort to ketchup to drown him out. And that Contra-guy, (what was his name?) it took him two visits here before he understood that he didn't fit in. Boy was he dumb! Thank goodness more people are getting the message these days. Pretty soon we won't have to be bothered with any of their dumb ideas at all, at least not here. We'll be one big happy homogeneous institution of smart people which will make Harvard's reputation rival the Sorbonne's at the height of its seventeenth-century intellectual glory.

Aren't we smart! Jonathan R. Nebeker   Harvard Republican Club Officer