Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Nursery School on Mercer Island, WA, 1943

 

John Roosevelt Boettiger, the grandson of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is the 4-year-old blond-haired boy pictured on the far right in 1943. Boettiger’s parents, John and Anna, resided on the North end at that time. Don Gulliford, a longtime Mercer Island resident, bottom left, remembers attending the Emmanuel Church Nursery School in the old Guild Hall.

“Johnny pulled me out of ‘class’ (we shared a desk) and out we went to meet his grandfather in a snow storm. When Winston Churchill said meeting FDR for the first time was like your first glass of champagne ... he was 100 percent right,” Gulliford said.

by Mercer Island Reporter Staff

Inequality at Harvard - and wise advice from a Yale-trained lawyer

BY MADELINE R. CONWAY AND STEVEN R. WATROS

HARVARD CRIMSON STAFF WRITERS

Ten years into an initiative that has made Harvard’s the most robust financial aid program in the country and likely contributed to the matriculation of the College’s most diverse classes in its 377-year history, the gap between Harvard’s poor and its overwhelmingly affluent student body has become a pervasive part of undergraduate life.

Class background—while no longer as significant a factor in the ability to afford a Harvard education—still plays a large part in determining students’ experiences on a campus dominated by peers far wealthier than the average American. Socioeconomic status subtly shapes undergraduate life in a myriad of ways, as personal finances and class background influence students’ abilities to join student groups and otherwise partake in the experience idealized in brochures....

Harvard is undoubtedly a national leader in offering financial aid to its undergraduates, a fact well-broadcasted both within its gates and beyond them. Launched in 2004, the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative today gives 20 percent of undergraduates—those with household incomes less than $65,000—the chance to attend the College almost for free, with no expected parental contribution....

Even so, despite the rise in socioeconomic diversity the College has seen since starting the Financial Aid Initiative a decade ago, its student body today is still far from representative of the country’s income distribution as a whole, as Harvard students are disproportionately upper class.

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Wise advice in The Harvard Crimson from a Yale-trained lawyer, Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times:

PLEASE CALCULATE BADLY

Don’t find yourself in this position: You are terribly unhappy in your work (and a lot of lawyers are). You want to make a change. But you are locked into a mortgage and lifestyle that will not allow you to do something else, something that brings you satisfaction, if not joy, and something that makes the world a better place.

Leave yourself able to say yes when the phone rings. Leave yourself free to follow your heart. As a purely economic matter, I suppose I made stupid choices. But life is not a purely economic matter. You’ll make your own calculations. But you will be making a mistake if all of those calculations are financial.