I assume you know that a couple of days ago Harvard canceled all in house classes for the fall. All classes will be online. However, they will still charge the full $50,000 tuition. They clearly didn’t think this out because as I think Jesse Watters said yesterday they will just be the University of Phoenix, Cambridge campus. SNHU has to be thrilled that online is now as good as in person. It’s not and I will explain why.

Now as most of you know, I attended Harvard as a Senior Executive Fellow. It is a program where the best and the brightest, with the exception of yours truly, from the federal and state governments come together at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard to exchange ideas and information guided by the Harvard faculty.

Now as a humorous aside, on the first day there they introduced the Associate Dean in charge of the program as someone whose name sounded like a feminine deodorant. His name was Klitgaard. And the lady checking us in was named Wassermann. I told her that I flunked her dad’s test and she didn’t get it. First it’s not true, but Wassermann developed the test for syphilis.

Now for the real point of this rant. The professors at Harvard were mostly okay, but nothing to write home about and a few didn’t know what they were talking about. In one case when my fellow students started asking me about how you fire someone in the federal government, a subject that at least one of you know I am an expert on, the professor tried to turn the discussion back to him, and I shut him down by pointing out that his claim to fame was firing political appointees who can be fired at any time for any or no reason and what my fellow students were interested in was how you fired regular employees in the federal government where there are laws and regulations which apply.

So what’s my point? The real advantage of going to a prestigious institution is not the professors. If you know anything about academia it’s a fact that your reputation and standing is all about how much money you bring in for research and how much you publish. Being a good and effective teacher has little to nothing to do with your standing. In fact a significant number of undergraduate courses are taught by graduate assistants.

The real advantage, other than the undeserved resume value of the Harvard name, is the opportunity to interact with the best and the brightest student body. Exchange of ideas, networking and life long friends are the real benefits. If you remove that personal, face to face interaction and exchange of ideas, then Harvard is no better than SNHU and I suspect worse because SNHU has been doing it for a much longer time. There full tuition nonsense is unsustainable over the long term and based on the notion that some people will pay outrageous fees just to put Harvard on their resume.

Lest you think that I didn’t enjoy my time at Harvard, nothing could be farther from the truth. And in fact I was elected class marshal and gave the address on behalf of my fellow Fellows at the end of the program.