Austin Considine on a Tennessee tourist trap—
"It would be easy for a city slicker to assume this place misses its own punch lines."
It probably doesn't, but a certain academic tourist trap does .
A trio of Harvard hicks—
1. The chairman of the Harvard philosophy department, Sean D. Kelly—
"Football can literally bring meaning to life."
(See also Garry Wills on Kelly, Rite of Spring, and Heisman Trophy.)
2. A professor of English at Harvard, Marjorie Garber, in a deconstructive meditation—
Garber notes that the word "literature" has two meanings– the English department's meaning, and that of other departments' references to "the literature."
"Whenever there is a split like this, it is worth pausing to wonder why. High/low, privileged/popular, aesthetic/professional, keep/throw away. It seems as if the category of literature in what we might inelegantly call the literary sense of the word is being both protected and preserved in amber by the encroachment, on all sides, of the nonliterary literature that proliferates in professional-managerial culture. But literature has always been situated on the boundary between itself and its other."
— The Use and Abuse of Literature , published by Pantheon on March 29, 2011
3. The president of Harvard, Drew Faust—
A comment recently made to Faust—
“[A] tyrant wanted a crimson-tinged report that he was running a democracy, and for a price, a Harvard expert obliged…."
Her response—
"Faust replied that for her to say anything about this would make her 'scold in chief.'"
— University Diaries today. See the excellent commentary there.