JFK's Application to Harvard
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I'm not questioning his intelligence, he was clearly brilliant. However, I find it interesting that he was an underachiever in high school (something I'm sure the HN community can empathize with).
The letter from his father (page 13) says:
"Jack has a very brilliant mind for the things in which he is interested, but is careless and lacks application in those in which he is not interested. This is, of course, a bad fault. However, he is quite ambitious to try and do the work in three years. I know how the authorities feel about this and I have my own opinion, but it is a gesture that pleases me very much because it seems to be the beginning of an awakening ambition"
I feel like this statement would've been equally accurate on my own college applications.
However, why would his father write things like that?
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/the-history-of-...
Clearly he got in because of family connections.
(Not saying that one is more difficult than another, as I honestly have no clue.)
Joe didn't care whether his kid was in Princeton or Harvard, as long as it was one of them. Once you've made more money than you can count, the next step is to focus on your legacy.
And oddly enough, JFK went to both Princeton and Harvard. He attended Princeton for six weeks before getting ill and withdrawing and then going to Harvard the next year.
Now, the other question, how much did academics matter in 1935?
The most popular colleges from 2008-2012: Georgetown University, 48; New York University, 40; Yale University, 38; Boston University, 32; Columbia University, The George Washington University, 31; Boston College, 30; Wesleyan University, 29; Cornell University, 24; Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, 21; Brown University, Trinity College, 20.
I suck at writing essays but it seems his reason for wanting to attend Harvard is incredibly trite and superfluous, especially coming from a man who would eventually be considered a great orator.
For example, he states that Harvard " is a university with something definite to offer." Yet gives no definitive examples. Why is "To be a 'harvard man' is an enviable distinction" in President Kennedy's mind? Essentially every sentence lacks justification and specificity.
Sigh. These sorts of materials at least provide fuel to refocus on work and studies. Being born outside a powerful family may lack certain advantageous but they can be overcome. Right?
- General reputation
- About famous people (or family members) that went there
- A brief visit to a few of them that you pick out of a hat
- How much it costs
What kind of non-superflous evidence do you expect him to be able to bring to bear?
http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPP-002-00...
Interesting that he was willing to contradict the letter of recommendation that you mentioned. However, it looks like the letter from his father was sent after he had been admitted, so maybe it didn't matter anymore.
People have many interests. Interest is not a binary term - One can be interested in varying degrees.
Perhaps he is interested in all presidents' admission records, but more interested in the current president because it is more relevant to his life than others. Just because there is relevance, does NOT imply partisanship.
By analogy I find operating system internals interesting. I am interested in how many of them do things. However I find discussions about Windows more interesting than those about multics. Not because I am a fan of windows (I am not) nor because I hate windows (I don't, it is a decent OS these days, I just prefer others), but because it is relevant to my life as a person living in the era where it is actually being used.
Note, this won't stop me from reading an interesting new article about the multics way, just that when offered a source with new (to me) insights on windows or multics, I would choose windows.
Somehow it is changed to a demand for documents from the current President in the middle of an election season.
If you are interested in all admission records, there is no reason to single out Obama... say you think all Presidents should have their admission records released.
This is more like 'look at this interesting snippet of code from CP/M' resulting in yelling about binary blobs in some modern OS. Totally irrelevant and political.
And your analogy is wrong too: It is like saying here is code from CP/M, and someone saying "how do modern OSes handle that feature?". That question is not advocacy for new OSes, it is a question of comparison between eras.
You are trying to ascribe motive and sinister desires to a neutral statement.
They're available, as were Gore's and Kerry's (both worse that W's) and McCain's. Bill Clinton's don't seem to be, but Hillary's are.
I think that Romney's are as well.
I am not a fan of all the political hogwash about Obama not being American etc. I have plenty of gripes with just about every president on their politics alone and he is certainly no different, so for me if I am going to complain it will not be about where he is from or speculation about his birthplace but about his Senate voting record or the fact that his healthcare bill has little to do with Healthcare for the majority of the 2,600+ pages.
But honestly there is no reason to get upset that people are asking. The entire time Bush was in office people were speculating he was a C student and wanting his transcripts, they talked about how he only got in because of being a Legacy etc.
The only real difference was that apparently it was ok to pick on Bush, just do not do it to Obama since that somehow is not fair?
When you take the highest office in the land you open yourself up to scrutiny if you or your supporters cannot handle that then simply do not run.
President Obama was one of the MOST critical people of Geroge W Bush as a sitting president, he of all people should understand people reserve the right to be critical of him as well.
They're hardly relevant anyways as whom someone is when they apply to college (typically 17-18 years old in the US) than whom they are as an adult.
I hope you'll understand why I struggle to believe that this singling-out is purely coincidental in the context of an election season where rhetoric about Obama being 'the least transparent in history' is abundant, on the same weekend as a new movie which claims to dig up sinister anti-American mysteries from Obama's past. It is just terribly convenient to bring up such issues as a topic change.
In any case I find it very irritating that almost any HN article tangentially touching on the government is co-opted for some kind of biased political propaganda, however subtle.
"Several reasons: Harvard is cool. Harvard is really cool. My dad went to Harvard. And then I could name-drop Harvard too."
We should be creating institutions that have systems which will not respond to nepotism. Harvard is the precise opposite of this, with nepotism being one of its most sacred causes.
Lots of people go to Harvard, ordinary (my niece) and priviledged. Those with money and power, use it to get good things for their progeny.
Else why gain money and power? Its not just scorekeeping. If I can't work hard to get better things for my children, then its all a game.
In a free market things are for sale, and good things cost more. Harvard is a private institution. They use legacy, money, ability about equally as admission standards. And it has served them well.
No they don't. Harvard, like just about every university these days, has need-blind admissions.
http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/inde...
As a middle-class high school senior, I would like to point at that Harvard's net price per year for me would be ~$13,000, or roughly half the in-state price of my local state school, the University of Wisconsin (~$24,000). The notion that Harvard favors the rich is BS as far as I can tell. I think it's a bit more likely the rich more consistently pressure and enable their children to prepare.
> No they don't. Harvard, like just about every university these days, has need-blind admissions.
"Need blind" doesn't imply "legacy blind" or "blind to the political connections of the applicant's family". Harvard may not distinguish between someone who can pay and someone who can't, but I would be surprised if they didn't distinguish between someone who can pay for tuition and someone who can pay for a new wing of the library.
The interesting thing is that, whatever political interests they want to indulge, they need not be swayed by a potential student's family's ability to fund a new building any more than they need be swayed by a poor but gifted student's inability to pay full tuition. Their endowment is the largest of any university in the world, at $26 billion, and there is no shortage of people willing to give them more.
If $60k feels like a burden to you, imagine what it would be to the child of a single parent making $35k. If everyone were charged the same price, only the very rich could afford it.
What number out of 110 students is he? 85th
What honors has he won in literary or scholastic pursuits? None
So JFK was basically just George W. Bush. Interesting.
That said, Harvard, 1935 was far different from Harvard 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/books/review/06brooks.html
According to Robert McNamara, JFK's ability to empathise with the Russians' position was very important in resolving the cuban missile crisis. As was his courage in facing down the military who wanted to attack cuba.
Presumably he had also learnt from his mistake in authorising the Bay of Pigs invasion, a project he inherited on coming to office.
I always thought of JFK as more like Obama (or rather, I thought of Obama as like JFK). As in, a genius. It is pretty clear from this application that a genius he was not.
I would have thought the beer thing was a colloquialism for approval rating. If that's so, you're incorrect: at 22% his final approval rating was the worst in history, since they began recording such things in the thirties.
The day after election day, you're probably going to be telling us that 45-55% of the voters were idiots. Today, we can find large fractions which believe all sorts of idiocy (such as "think happy thoughts to help you get pregnant").
Combine that with a press that campaigned against W for his 2 terms while he stopped campaigning after his first and it's surprising that he was at 22%.
Today's happy fact, national "income" dropped more during "the recovery" than during the recession.
You replied to me but I really don't know where you were trying to go with this. I assure you, I think way more than half of voters are idiots. ;)
(at least in their capacity as voters)
That characteristic may or may not have anything to do with how good you think they are doing being POTUS. I thought he was a terrible President but still would love to have a beer with him and shoot the breeze.
I might be selling the sophistication of the electorate short but I think this attitude is probably a little unusual. I suspect for most people likability, approval, and electability are all rather synonymous. Difficult to prove since the polls don't include the beer question, just the questions related to actual approval.