So when 800 students and sympathizers -- demanding fair treatment for Harvard workers, divestment from corporations that abuse workers' rights, and other actions to reduce the university’s contribution to economic inequality -- erected tents in Harvard Yard on Wednesday night and began the Occupy Harvard movement (the media working group of which, in the interest of full disclosure, I am a participant), they didn’t enter the most hospitable environment.

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This week, Romney gave a foreign policy speech to some veterans, and he really gave Harvard what-for:

Chastising those who may believe that if the United States recedes, so, too, will its enemies, Romney bashed what is often seen as a liberal bastion.

“That may be what they think in that Harvard faculty lounge, but it’s not what they know on the battlefield!” he told the vets.

Stupid Harvard!

Of course, the Boston Globe and everyone else who knows even the slightest bit of biographical information about Mitt Romney realized that the former governor of Massachusetts is a Harvard alum. He went to Harvard Business and Harvard Law Schools.

Some people say it is a bit "hypocritical" or "transparently, desperately pathetic" of Romney to align himself with those who hate our nation's Ivy League elite, but it's really not. You see, Mitt Romney is actually just incredibly self-loathing. He clearly hates himself.

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But I did point to Harvard's Class Day Committee as having a good track record for picking great speakers. Between Ali G. , Conan O'Brien and Will Ferrell, this Ivy League knows how to keep young adults in their seats and not fidgeting. Graduating students want to witness a living legend, yes, but they also want to be entertained. Too often schools pick someone important or famous without considering whether or not they will be able to translate their years of wisdom and experience into something graduates will absorb. With the assumption that actions speak louder than words, graduation committees often forget that when it comes to speeches, it's actually the other way around.

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"How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records," he said, without providing backup for his claim.

Trump added, "I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can't get into Harvard."

Leaving aside the fact that Obama, who went on to graduate Harvard Law magna cum laude, seems like he was probably a very good student, Mr. Trump might need a refresher course in how unqualified people actually do manage to get into the prestigious Ivy League Universities .

Let us take, as an example, the story of a student so obviously unqualified, so transparently unworthy, that a book was written about what his admittance into Harvard said about the sorry behavior of supposedly elite colleges.

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Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus are scheduled to sign an agreement Friday that will establish the Naval ROTC's formal presence on campus for the first time since the Vietnam War era, the university announced Thursday.

ROTC first exited amid anti-war sentiment, and the school lately kept it off campus and stopped funding the program because of the policy that prevented gays from serving openly. But Faust said she had worked toward ROTC's return after Congress repealed the so-called "don't ask, don't tell" policy in December.

Under the agreement with the Navy, a director of Naval ROTC at Harvard will be appointed, and the university will resume funding the program. The program also will be given office space and access to athletic fields and classrooms.

Harvard cadets will still train, as they have for years, as part of a consortium based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also located in Cambridge, next to Boston. Currently, 20 Harvard students participate in ROTC, including 10 involved in Naval ROTC.

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One man, underdressed in a light jacket and baseball hat, paces impatiently at the basement door of the University Lutheran Church.

He's waiting for the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter to open.

Every night from Nov. 15 to April 15, the shelter brings together students from one of the world's wealthiest and most prestigious universities with neighbors struggling to survive on the fringes of society. It touts itself as the only homeless shelter in the nation run entirely by college students.

"When I got on campus, I saw a really strong juxtaposition between the wealth, prestige and power of the university compared with the plight of so many people in the square," said Jonathan Warsh, who in addition to being co-administrative director of the shelter is a senior from Bloomfield Hills, Mich., studying government and health policy. "It's too easy to get trapped in the ivory tower."

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The Massachusetts native is scheduled to receive his pudding pot at a roast on Feb. 4.

Hasty Pudding Theatricals, the nation's oldest undergraduate drama troupe, said "The Tonight Show" host was selected because he has "entertained millions of people over his long and accomplished career in comedy."

With the honor, Leno follows in the footsteps of his "The Tonight Show" mentor Johnny Carson, was named Man of the Year in 1977.

Actress Julianne Moore was named Hasty Pudding's Woman of the Year last week.

The awards are presented annually to performers who have made a lasting and impressive contribution to the world of entertainment.

(This version CORRECTS that Carson won the award in 1977, not 1997.)

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A sizable group of students upset by Peretz's writings over the years -- most recently his assertion that Muslim life is cheap and that followers of Islam should not be protected by the First Amendment, for which he later partially apologized -- was on hand to protest Peretz and the university.

Usefully, the protesters carried signs quoting Peretz's own words as they followed him and his entourage through Harvard Yard.

Here is the must-see video of the protest:

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But in an unusual move, the school has issued an official statement calling Peretz's recent comments "distressing to many members of our community, and understandably so."

Here's how we got to this point:

It started when Peretz, who has an extremely long history of writing racist things about Arabs and Muslims, wrote in a blog post earlier this month:

But, frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims. And among those Muslims led by the Imam Rauf there is hardly one who has raised a fuss about the routine and random bloodshed that defines their brotherhood. So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.

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The elites were defined by Politico as people living in the Washington metro area, with incomes of $75,000 a year or more, who work in government or policy. These terrible elites with awful-sounding governmenty jobs like "policy professionals, regulators and contractors" are slightly less likely to think that the country is on the wrong track. And 74 percent of them recognize that they have been spared the worst of the recession.

In writing up the poll, Politico failed to note that the district's elites are not the only human beings in Washington. They did contact someone who almost might count as an non-elite, though: the mayor of Flint, Mich.! He would like more government spending. But the elites — led by the sort of people who read and write for Politico! — will not allow this.

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Consider the discussion of her personal background on the first day of the hearings, when Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl directed our attention to the New York City neighborhood where bright young Elena grew up. Quoting a profile from Politico that described her life experience as "distant from most Americans," Kyl noted portentously that she was raised on "Manhattan's Upper West Side" before attending Princeton and Harvard Law School, where she eventually served as dean.

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State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal was never captain of the Harvard University swim team. A 1978 Courant story incorrectly reported that he was -- an error repeated in subsequent Courant stories, including profiles in 1980 and 2004.

[Previously]

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This was easily the weirdest part of the original Times story on Blumenthal:

In two largely favorable profiles, the Slate article and a magazine article in The Hartford Courant in 2004 with which he cooperated, Mr. Blumenthal is described prominently as having served as captain of the swim team at Harvard. Records at the college show that he was never on the team.

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Professor Charles Fried, while calling Kagan "masterful" for her ability to work well with the diverse faculty at Harvard, recalled how she once blew up at him after some students said there were pages missing from a constitutional law exam.

Fried said he sent an e-mail to students explaining a resolution he thought had been approved. But, in fact, Kagan had worked out a different resolution.

"She came steaming into my office and said, 'Why have you done that? It's a confusing situation and you've made it worse.' She screamed and shouted at me and slammed the door and stormed out," Fried said.

"Two minutes later, she came back and said, 'I'm sorry I shouted.' I said, 'Elena, don't apologize, you were right.' "

"She was dynamic, aggressive, sometimes abrasive," said Detlev Vagts, a professor who clashed with Kagan over the appointment of Jack Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general in the Bush administration. "There was quite a turnover of her top management group when she was named dean," he said.

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If Adam Wheeler makes bail, he must stay away from Harvard and the other academic institutions involved in the alleged scheme, surrender his passport and remain in Massachusetts, a Middlesex Superior Court judge said.

The 23-year-old Wheeler of Milton, Del., is facing 20 counts of larceny, identity fraud and other charges.

Wheeler claimed he got a perfect score on the SAT, straight A's at prestigious prep school Phillips Academy Andover and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on his application to Harvard in 2007, prosecutors said. In reality, he had never attended either school, Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone said.

Prosecutor John Verner said in court Tuesday that Wheeler essentially stole $45,000 in financial aid, scholarship money and academic awards from Harvard.

His web of academic deceit unraveled in September when he sought the school's endorsement for Rhodes and Fulbright scholarships and a professor reviewing his applications found evidence that he had plagiarized from another professor, Leone said.

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In the pundit class, though, there was no better representative of Lieberman-ish would-be machismo than Peter Beinart, then an editor at the New Republic. (TNR, in fact, endorsed Lieberman in the 2004 Democratic primaries, although he had already thoroughly embarrassed himself by that point. Honestly, who tries to suck up to the other party’s nominee while running in a primary campaign to oppose him? Madness.)

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Ferran Adria will begin teaching in the fall at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in Cambridge, Mass. His general education science course will use cooking to introduce students to soft matter physics, which involves the study of suspensions and gels.

Adria has helped bring Spanish cuisine to the world's foodies and is known for deconstructing food and putting it back together in unconventional ways.

The Harvard course also will feature lectures by researchers and celebrity chefs, including New York's Wylie Dufresne (doo-FRAYN') and Jose Andres, whose eatery in Washington helped popularize the Spanish bar food known as tapas in the United States.

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Brittany Smith, 22, of New York City, was the girlfriend of Jabrai Jordan Copney, one of three men charged in connection with the killing of 21-year-old Justin Cosby. Cosby lived a few blocks from the Ivy League campus but was not a Harvard student.

Prosecutors allege the three men -- all from New York City and none of them Harvard students -- shot Cosby in a Harvard dorm during a robbery attempt during a deal to buy marijuana from him.

Smith is accused of giving the men her Harvard electronic key card to enter the building where the shooting occurred, hiding the gun under a friend's dorm bed and lying to police. She was indicted on charges of accessory after the fact of murder, illegal possession of a firearm and willfully misleading a grand jury and police.

Smith's lawyer did not immediately return a message left by The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Copney and Blayn Jiggetts are charged with first-degree murder and other counts in Cosby's death. Jason Aquino is charged with being an accessory after the fact of armed robbery and carrying a firearm without a license. All three have pleaded not guilty.

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