Zabars is looking shiny these days

Thank you, thank you, Michelle Cottle. I cannot remember the last time I agreed so fully with an article. And this has to be the coolest sentence I've read in a long time:

"If the president of Duke or UCLA or Rice or even Stanford had made such a gaffe, The New York Times would have yawned twice and gone back to reporting on Christo's plans to wrap Zabar's in orange cellophane."

So for that sentence alone, I am eternally grateful.

But Cottle's point about the Summers balagan is also right on. Journalists and pundits, not necessarily their readers, care what's going on at Harvard down to the most minute detail. Part of the problem is that the larger audience a paper serves, the more likely it'll be staffed by Harvard grads or otherwise Harvard-obsessed types, thus forcing, say, the entire NYT audience to get a play-by-play of everything Summers has consumed and excreted since The Incident. (I was a bit let down when I began noticing signs around campus for an event responding to Summers' remarks, followed today by a Maroon news article and unsigned editorial on the matter. Nothing short of UChicago spontaneously imploding would cause Harvard to respond in a similar fashion to anything going on here.)

Cottle writes:

Some will argue that the Summers story deserves prominent, extended play because the underlying subjects he touched on--gender discrimination, achievement gaps, work-family balance--are vibrant, vital points of debate. Horsefeathers. If the underlying issues were the real point, the media wouldn't spend so much energy boring readers to tears with blow-by-blow accounts of every meeting, vote, protest, and internecine squabble taking place in Cambridge. At this point, I know nearly as much about the various warring factions at Harvard as I do about those in Iraq.

The New York Times, I suppose, could argue that its readership, much like its staff, is heavy on Ivy Leaguers who simply cannot get enough news about Harvard's internal politics. Maybe. Then again, the Times is the country's paper of record, ostensibly with a responsibility to focus its resources on stories of national or international import. By no stretch of the imagination does the Summers episode rise to that standard.

Indeed. This is why we have the New York Sun, which is always chock full of news stories about the Ivy League, not to mention Manhattan's private and elite public schools. Did something racy happen at Brearley? Did someone hiccup at Columbia? The Sun is on the case. The NYT usually keeps more of a distance from these matters.

Now, of course, comes the problem: We've got the urban (some would say "Euro-American") elite in one corner, and the "real Americans" in the other. Or do we? Many, many people who'd qualify as elite don't especially care about Harvard, or simply tire of hearing about it all the time. Sure, those associated with other top universities will take more of an interest than others ("it could kinda-sorta happen here!"), but the gazillions of important types who went to Yale and Princeton (and even, yes, Chicago) have probably had enough at this point.

My own theory, re: Summers, is that he said what he said in order to take attention away from the Columbia-Mideast Studies balagan. How dare a sub-Harvard Ivy hold the spotlight for so long! Better remind the country which school really matters.