Is Harvard’s reputation borne on a cliche’s repetition – with NYTimes et al helping out?
Ah, lovely memories arise of years long past, when as a callow reporter at the SF Chronicle one of the joys of the morning was reading in my own publication’s pages the wit of columnist Art Hoppe, gone for nigh on 11 years now. Among his zanier recurring characters: the Harvard-educated gorilla. This comes to mind on reading a tip from friend Rob Irion, head of UC Santa Cruz’s esteemed science communications training shop.
Harvard-educated is a cliche of course. At a guess, it is said about as often with a sneer or rolling of eyes as with awe and respect. But it looks like it pays off big for the school up Mass Avenue from overlooked-by-comparison MIT. Irion tells me that an acquaintance of his, a research scientist who wishes to remain anonymous (which means that this whole post is based on hearsay), mentioned to him a peeve regarding New York Times bias. What bias? Rob asked. Answer: an overwhelming tendency to mention an education pedigree if it happens to be Harvard. No other school gets such lasting gleam off its diplomas. Not just scientists, but across the board those people whose names get in the Times and who went to Harvard get a mention for that fact far more than does similar treatment be accorded the combined number of runners up: people who merely graduated Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, or Chicago. And it’s not just the Times – the informant and his daughter did some search-engine research and found the same pattern for the AP and the Wall Street Journal – not to mention a generalized Google search of the web.
The unverified, unblinded, un-peer reviewed plots of the results are assembled here. The pic there is cropped from the whole lot.
One concern is whether the search terms themselves were biased toward Harvard. Harvard-educated is a sort of meme, or standard of excellence for use in casual conversation and jokes. It comes off the tongue more easily than Yale-educated or Cornell-educated, thanks to its full-stop d at the end. Felicity of phrasing does not explain of course why Stanford is number four and MIT fifth. So whether a declaration such as “Joe Blow attended Duke before hitting the big time” would show up, while Duke-educated would not, may depend on how thorough the search engine work was.
Overall, the trend looks huge and rings true. Science writers tend to mention where a professor or other academic is at the moment, but not where he or she went to school. But Harvard? The knee jerks and the fingers type, carried off by the simultaneous synaptic flood in the cranium urging: Harvard-educated!
- Charlie Petit
January 2nd, 2011 at 6:53 pm
Brings to mind the term, “farm-raised” as just another commodity designed to sell at inflated prices.
January 3rd, 2011 at 5:21 pm
I suspect one reason that MIT is low on the list (a measly fifth out of some 2000 American colleges) is that it is not much covered by journalists outside the science realm. Science and engineering are about all they do at MIT. Science reporters, I think, are not inclined to such cliches.
When will somebody do a comparable study of academic affiliations of scientists and engineers cited in stories without cliche?