Obamaville, February 21 - Obama's Higher Education Dilemma

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Life as an Ivy League Elitist from Harvard not Yale

The world is a strange place indeed.  A little over three years ago Barack Obama was sworn in as the eighth U.S. president to have graduated from Harvard University.  Thus he is faced with the suspicion of being an Ivy League elitist, aristocrat, privileged or whatever you may think of Harvard, this bastion of liberalism.

In all fairness, I spent several years going through the tests, stress, interviews, etc., while trying to get into Yale, another one of those Ivy League elitist schools, before finances stopped my dream and I went to the University of Arizona to play basketball.

But the Ivy League certainly has a right to seem conceited or arrogant, I mean every list of the top universities in the world shows about the same thing.  Here are the top five universities in the world.

1.  University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

2.  Harvard, University, United States

3.  Yale University, United States

4.  University College of London, United Kingdom

5.  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States

The third Ivy League school in this story is Princeton from New Jersey and it ranks number ten in the world.  So these three schools are all in the top ten, and two of the top three universities in the world.  It is pretty impressive.

President Obama is a 1991 graduate of Harvard Law School. He joins former President George W. Bush (M.B.A. ’75) and Presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy as Harvard graduates chosen to serve as the nation’s chief executive.

You don't hear a lot of talk from the eastern establishment about Bush being a Harvard graduate and he does seem a rather odd fit with the likes of John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, not to mention the Adams family.

However, Obama also ended 20 straight years of Yale presidents from Bush senior to Bush junior.  The three straight presidents, Bush, Clinton and Bush, gave Yale three of their four presidents in our history.

Now some of you may wonder how Bush, Jr. could be the last Yale president and still count as a Harvard president.  That is a  real dilemma, explaining how George Bush, Jr. is the only president in our history who graduated from Harvard and Yale.  So he counts as both.  Once again you seldom hear eastern elitists talk about this fact.

Two Ivy League institutions with twelve presidents between them, not bad.  For purposes of discussion and as a matter of loyalty to New Jersey where I lived longer than any other place during my life, I must add Princeton University, the third major Ivy League school that has produced two more presidents.

So Harvard 8 (counting Bush), Yale 3 (not counting Bush) and Princeton 2 have produced a total of 13 of our 44 total US presidents.  It gets better.  Of the 44 presidents, ten never graduated from college, or as we say out east, from an institution of higher learning.

Ironically, leading the pack are the two most popular and beloved of all presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  Neither attended any institution of higher learning and in Lincoln's case he only had one year of formal education at an institution of lower learning.

For education purposes, the rest of the presidents not graduating are Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland and Harry S. Truman.

So for purposes of comparison, 10 of our 44 presidents did not graduate from college.  Of the remaining 34 graduates, 13 came from three Ivy League schools, Harvard, Yale and Princeton, meaning the remaining 21 presidents came from the 5,755 other institutions of higher learning in America.

Statistically speaking that means almost 40% of all our graduating presidents (34) came from the elite three Ivy League schools, Harvard, Yale and Princeton.  Nearly four out of every ten graduating presidents are from these three.

The second half of the 20th century has been even more dominated by the elite Ivy League schools.  Since Franklin Roosevelt and World War II there have been 13 presidents.  One did not graduate, Truman.  Seven of the remaining 12 were from Harvard or Yale with little old George Bush, Jr. again representing both.  That means 58% of our graduating presidents since WWII  came from Harvard or Yale.

I say when two schools can dominate the leadership of our nation about 60% of the time, then they must be the cause of our problems brought about by their presidents.  If you do such a good job of molding the minds of our youth, then accept responsibility for the consequences of those minds you so successfully molded.

Just kidding.  But it does raise a few questions.  Still, I would never hold the Ivy League responsible for the minds it molded.  Certainly not any more than I would hold the Nobel Peace Prize committee responsible for giving Harvard's Obama the Nobel Peace Prize and watch him triple the troops fighting in Afghanistan.

Then there is Mount Rushmore National Park.

In 1927 Congress authorized this epic sculpture featuring the faces of four exalted American presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.  Two were dropouts (Washington and Lincoln), one from Harvard (Roosevelt) and one from William and Mary  (Jefferson).

Since this was before FDR and JFK, both Harvard grads, watch for a new Mount Rushmore East, maybe along the  Appalachian Mountains.  I prefer a site in the Montes Agricola mountains, an elongated range of mountains near the eastern edge of the central Oceanus Procellarum lunar mare.  It lies just to the northwest of a plateau containing the craters Herodotus and Aristarchus.  On the moon my friends.

Imagine that, a story about Harvard and no mention of Jeremy Lin.

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It's Time for the NCAA BCS National Digital Football Championship - MIT #1!

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Move over college football jocks and fans, because after decades of outright bias against those who are too smart to play football fisticuffs, we at the Coltons Point Times are calling for the establishment of the NCAA BCS National Digital Football Championship to be fought out among the top two colleges or universities in America in terms of the combined poll standings in computer science, engineering and overall quality of education.

Today we are prepared to release the first BCS National Digital Football top 25 Poll of those hallowed academic institutions whose brains far outweigh their brawn. Our poll is loaded with the most scientifically revered colleges in America whose endowment funds exceed that of the top jock shops. No one else can make such a claim.

Now, I do have a confession to make. Ever since I realized as a child that a terrible mistake had been made when I was dropped off by the stork in Iowa City, Iowa and not Boston, Massachusetts where I was supposed to go, I have suffered greatly. You see, I was created with Ivy League or MIT DNA and the corn fields of the Midwest are no place to create Microsoft or Facebook like I was bred to achieve.

I mean you know you are in the wrong place when your family laughs at your genetic tendencies. Like when I ordered lobster at the local cafe, put an Italian opera on the stereo, declared the Yankees (New York) and Red Sox (Boston) instead of the Cardinals (St. Louis) or Cubs (Chicago) my favorite team.

You most certainly would have agreed that I was odd. Don't get me wrong, I was a pretty good jock in all sports and that ran contrary to my DNA but I did get good at chess and croquet. In school I did most everything from get good to bad grades, being a jock yet a member of the speech and debate teams, playing in a rock 'n roll band and the school non-marching band.

If I had been delivered safely back at birth to the Rothschild family my name would have been a lot longer, I would have the name suffix III I fully expected to have, and in time I would have possessed all the alphabetical scholastic titles like B.A., M.B.A., J.D. & Ph.D. Knowing you were switched at birth and being helpless to correct this huge celestial mistake is a terrible cross to bear.

So I hung out with the freaks, geeks and misfits so I could at least assimilate my lost breeding if not experience it up close and personal. Thankfully I was well received. And later in life it helped me in understanding and relating to the powerful East Coast establishment who were products of the Ivy League and other educational institutions of higher learning than the other schools.

It even helped me survive working for people from Harvard, Yale and Princeton and working with people from MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. In spite of being part of groups like Marvin Minsky's Society of the Mind (MIT Media Lab) and other intellectually challenging groups, without the proper breeding you are never really one of them.

I never got to make my supreme contribution to the elite and I hope this BCS National Digital Football Championship helps pay back what I felt I owed. Perhaps I can get the ascot out of storage if we are a huge success?

As for the BCS NDFC it is time we make a statement, show the world that eggheads and geeks have as much to offer to Main Street as we (oops, a Freudian slip) you do to Wall Street and Washington. We want a playoff of the top 8 BCS NDFC teams at year end, meaning New Year's Eve, for the right to be the first of many future national champions of the National Digital Football playoffs.

Teams of four players with two alternates will be eligible from each school in the top 8 standing at year end. They will collectively agree as to the version of digital football to be played throughout the competition. The winner will be crowned, a trophy presented for the school, and whatever other prizes we can get from sponsors will be given. Oh yes, we are searching for a title sponsor like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft or whoever.

Now, for the official unveiling of the first BCS NDFC poll, here are the standings.

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology--Cambridge, MA
2. Stanford University--Palo Alto, CA
3. University of California, Berkeley, CA
4. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
5. University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, IL
6. Cornell University--Ithaca, NY
7. University of Texas--Austin (Cockrell) Austin, TX
8. Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
9. California Institute of Technology--Pasadena, CA
10. University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI
11. Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech)--Atlanta, GA
12. University of California--Los Angeles (Samueli) Los Angeles, CA (UCLA)
13. University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI
14. University of Maryland-College Park, MD
15. University of California--San Diego (Jacobs) La Jolla, CA
16. Harvard University Cambridge, MA
17. Columbia University (Fu Foundation) New York, NY
18. Purdue University--West Lafayette West Lafayette, IN
19. University of Washington--Seattle, WA
20. University of Southern California (Viterbi)--Los Angeles, CA
21. Brown University--Providence, RI
22. University of Massachusetts--Amherst, MA
23. Rice University--Houston, TX
24. University of Pennsylvania--Philadelphia, PA
25. University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill, NC

That's it folks. We have a Beaver, Tree, Bear, Scottish Terrier, Abe Lincoln, Big Red Bear, Longhorn, Tiger, another Beaver and Badger for mascots for the top ten. It gets better down the list.

If you know any students at these schools you should let them know they are in the top 25 poll of computer scientists, geeks and engineering freaks and we will be tracking the hits from each college town because in two weeks the number of hits from each college will be factored into the poll. Until the end of the season, year end, it will be the only way a college can move up through the ranks.

Marvin again?

The top 8, if sponsorship can be found, will play for the 2010 BSC National Digital Football Championship and full bragging rights to being the Other BCS National Football Champion. I want to see if anyone can knock off MIT and their Media Lab where Marvin Minsky should be coach.
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Obamaville October 22 - Our Elitist President can't help being Elitist but That's Okay

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Every time the Obama's almost convince us they are just like us common people they go and do something to prove they are not. Call it political naivety or stupidity, once an elitist always an elitist. You will never find Willie Nelson performing in the White House when pop stars like the Jonas brothers (for the Obama daughters) or Beyonce are available. Michelle's idea of catching a show is flying to NYC for a Broadway Production.

On his current campaign swing Barack again demonstrated his propensity for rock star elitism when he decided to show his concern for Main Street America and the small business community that powers our national economy by having a private meeting with the rock star of the mega-corporate world Steven Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple Corporation, the 2nd largest corporation in America.

It seems a key qualification for a business person to get a personal meeting with the people's president is to be a member of the billionaires club like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Steven Jobs. Hardly Main Street's idea of the common folk but when you are an Ivy League elitist you tend to have a different view of yourself and who should be in your presence I guess.

Make no mistake, Steven Jobs is legendary in the business world and is most certainly the top rock star of the billionaires club but in the midst of the final days of campaigning couldn't our president just once have a meeting with a corporate leader who represents the Made In America by American Workers goal we all want to promote, including our wayward president? I mean Apple has more Chinese employees in China than any other American company?

If I were an elitist and I had their money Jobs would be on my short list as well but why doesn't our president meet with a real American company CEO that epitomizes the Made In America by Americans we all want to see? Obama need look no further than his own state of Illinois for the perfect example, Caterpillar Corporation.

Caterpillar makes heavy equipment in America crucial to construction and mining operations around the world. It is one of the largest exporter of America goods overseas. In spite of the worldwide recession Caterpillar has increased their American manufacturing work force by over 7,500 employees in the last year and significantly increased export sales overseas which helps our balance of trade deficit. I guess it is too much to ask that an elitist president jump in the cab of an earth moving Cat from his home state when he can sip a latté in Silicon Valley with a billionaire.

We love you Obama because you are our president but be honest about yourself when your media people try to paint you as a commoner. John Kennedy never had to distort his Ivy League image to win our love because he knew even Ivy Leaguers can show concern and compassion for everyone and be real.

Barack and Michelle spent the last two years saying one thing and doing another. That does not sit well with the public and only makes you hypocrites. You say Michelle won't campaign then send her out to do million dollar political events. She spends a day on the Gulf Coast and a week at a Southern Spanish resort on vacation.

It's okay for our president to be a little elitist, we expect our president to be a little special. But do it with the style and class of a Kennedy, acknowledge you are different, but be the friend and advocate of Main Street America, along with rubbing shoulders with the billionaires club.
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