/lit/ - Literature

There is a lot of Harvard shitposting here and not all of it is totally unreasonable (legacies, leftist drift of the university, and so on). The university is definitely coasting on its brand at this point, but it is still the greatest American university.
>>15899852 brought up what no one else has yet: Classes are all structured more or less the same at Harvard or at state college. Yeah, reading lists vary from school to school but you're covering more or less the same fundamental questions whether it's lit, other humanities, or especially STEM disciplines. You could have decent access to a lot of ideas taught in Ivy League classrooms by just downloading scans of books and discussing them with others.
The big difference is who you're discussing those ideas with and how serious they are about them. Despite all of America's whining about rich kids and insiders, Harvard still attracts a generally more competent class of students than other universities. That isn't to say there are students out there who are maybe smarter than the average Harvard student at state college, but the average Harvard student is better than the average student at pretty much any other university (maybe some exceptions some years, maybe MIT, maybe Princeton, maybe Oxford/Cambridge. fuck yale)
But you don't become the best in the world by learning with less serious or less capable academics. You do it by having to keep up with the best, and having an environment that encourages you to succeed. >>15899852 gets it
It says something that even if Harvard is coasting on its brand, it still attracts the most capable academics in the world. All it needs is the faculty and the students, which it has, even if the administration is just a leftist hedge fund at this point

The clown horseman took two pennies from his wallet and saddled up his horse before tossing them to the kid, "here kid", he said, tossing them to the kid standing in the corner of the stable gazing hesitantly at the horse in it's pale-as-death-itself white makeup and adorned with red nose like a gauche talisman.