Tom Cotton: “Harvard Sucks”

Bet that headline got your attention.  It’s accurate, but out of context.

Turns out that Tom Cotton, Harvard class of 1998 and an editor at the Harvard Crimson, wrote an editorial in 1997 entitled “Love’s End” that adumbrated Allan Bloom’s observations in The Closing of the American Mind about the decaying dating and courtship habits of undergraduates today.  It bores in on how “relationships” have replaced old fashioned “love.”

It was in this context that he wrote “Harvard sucks,”

just like Yale, Princeton, Stanford and every other college in America, and I do mean every other college, including the state universities for which the amorous and libidinous among us yearn. The problem is not at Harvard–the problem is in our generation. We don’t love or have love affairs. No, no, no! We “commit” and have “relationships.”

There was a time when love affairs were “where it was at,” but those days are long gone. You see, love is too inconvenient, too dangerous. We can’t really ration or control love; that’s why it’s called falling in love. It consumes all other emotions, and certainly conquers reason. It relegates all other claims on our time or on our energy to the margins–if it doesn’t wholly destroy them. As soon as love is recognized for itself, it unleashes a recklessness that can vitiate everything else we hold dear.

Worth reading the whole thing.  I have to say I’m going to love watching Tom’s speeches in the Senate.  I’ll leave the question about whether Harvard sucks in other respects to some other time.

 

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses