Monday, June 06, 2005

ha-ba-deuh vs. seo-ul-dae

Interesting article about a Harvard student who studied for a year at Seoul National, then wrote a book comparing the two. Her critique of Seoul-dae sounds harsher than anything my students said about me. Upshot: Seoul-dae is a better place for fun extracurriculars, but the program of study is far too lax in comparison to Harvard.

[In fairness, I doubt this student can make a blanket claim without knowing the respective workloads of Seoul-dae students majoring in different fields from her own. She'd also have to have a good idea of the workload of Harvard students not in her field.]

Then there's this dissing of Harvard by Keith Burgess-Jackson (he's writing about the treatment of university president Lawrence H. Summers by Harvard faculty) that ends with the redolent sentence, "A great institution of higher learning has been taken over by intellectual midgets and moral retards."

No one's unimpeachable, I suppose. Everyone's an asshole to someone.


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