Campus

Crimson blush

by Nina Willdorf

1) World-famous faculty

2) Stunningly competitive admissions ratio

3) Natalie Portman

Harvard may pat itself on the back in claiming all of the above, but this year there's one thing the esteemed university won't be touting in its alumni magazine. For the first time in 70 years, Harvard hasn't produced a single Rhodes scholar. Yikes. (To be technical, that doesn't include a gap between 1940 and 1946, when World War II precluded any American awards.)

But Harvard's current blight is not for lack of trying. After cutting back the number of students it nominated for the award over the past five years -- and still coming out with an impressive 10 winners last year -- this year Harvard aimed high. And hit low. The Harvard Crimson reported that on the recommendation of Elliot Gerson, American secretary for the Rhodes Trust, school officials upped their number of nominees by 23 percent, throwing a healthy 40 students into this year's pool of 950 applicants competing for the 32 highly regarded scholarships. Although four Harvardites made it to the final round, not a single one will join the ranks of famous Harvard Rhodes alumni such as Robert Reich, David Souter, and James Fallows. We, for one, are very concerned about this. Is the school skidding toward mediocrity?

University officials, however, are keeping their cool. "We feel like it's a fluke -- just a statistical aberration," says Paul Bohlmann, the director of fellowships at the Office of Career Services. According to Bohlmann, Harvard has claimed a not-too-shabby 10 percent of the almost 2000 awards given out since the program's inception in 1903. "This was inevitable at some point," he says with a sigh.

Bohlmann's hunch is that competition is getting stiffer. "Lots of schools across the country [are] beefing up their own efforts," he hypothesizes. And the ominous result may be that "the days of Harvard students' claiming four, five, or six are probably gone."

For the record, we'd just like to note that perhaps those days are not gone for a certain rival university that rhymes with "jail." Said university claimed three awards this year. Hmmm.