It's time for America to end its love affair with Harvard University

 I live in Baton Rouge's College Town neighborhood, where every street is named after a prestigious university: Oxford, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, and, of course, Harvard.

A Harvard Street can be found in cities across the United States--even in Los Angeles, which is 3,000 miles from Harvard Yard. 

Harvard is revered worldwide because it represents the zenith of academic prestige. As a recent  Associated Press news article put it: 

For students around the world, an acceptance letter to Harvard University has represented the pinnacle of achievement, offering a spot among the elite at a campus that produces Nobel Prize winners, captains of industry, and global leaders.

Like many others over four centuries, I came to Harvard believing a Harvard degree would dramatically change my life. I was a country boy from Oklahoma who was practicing law in Alaska. As a friend told me, a Harvard degree would erase Oklahoma from my resume. I would leave its hallowed campus, I naively assumed, with the credentials to speak at the national level on the public issues of the day.

I was disappointed. Harvard's Graduate School of Education, where I had obtained a berth, was not nearly as exclusive as I had imagined. HGSE's one-year master's program in education was a diploma mill, where students could obtain a Harvard credential merely by sitting through eight courses over nine months.  Some of those classes had enrollments of 200 students or more.

One of my classmates, an accomplished Connecticut attorney, researched the career prospects for HGSE graduates and shared her findings with me. The Education School's placement office data revealed that most doctoral graduates worked in the Northeast at modest salaries. My classmate concluded that a doctoral degree from HGSE was not worth the time or money. She left the program and went back to practising law.

Leaving the program was not an option for me. I had two small children enrolled in the Boston area schools. After disrupting my family and moving them across the North American continent, I felt I had to see it through.

After three-and-a-half years, I left Harvard with a master's degree and a doctorate and accepted a tenure-track job at a Southern university, making less than a third of what I had made as a practising lawyer.

My years at Harvard were the most miserable years of my life. I found the campus to be ugly, a jumble of dreary buildings in a multitude of discordant architectural styles and a far cry from the beautiful college campuses of the American South. To my surprise, Cambridge and Boston were shockingly provincial. The general population was surly, sullen, and cynical--as if they all lived in a Ben Affleck movie. 

As for the Harvard academic community, I found most (but not all) of the faculty arrogant, self-centered, and mediocre. As a white male student, I was a racial minority in a culture obsessed with race and gender. I was told not to bother applying to the Harvard Education Review: I was the wrong color

I hated the bleak and sunless Boston winters, which were oddly more depressing than the Alaska winters I had experienced. The subways were dirty, and the narrow, winding streets seemed designed to make it impossible to drive around a block.

When people compliment me on having a degree from Harvard, I tell them this: I was intelligent enough to get into Harvard but not smart enough to realize I shouldn't go.

Ain't we got fun!