One of the most bizarre Clown World stories I recently read is that Harvard, once supposedly the top university in the United States, nowadays offers remedial mathematics courses. Harvard also offers “the most difficult mathematics course in the world”, the infamous Math 55. For non-US-citizens, the content of Math 55 is not too different from what they would encounter at university, but the first one or two years at university in the US are comparable to high school in many other Western countries. Thus, the challenge of the Harvard administrators is that they need to convince the world that a Harvard degree is evidence that you are among the best of the best. Yet, how can you possibly claim that all Harvard students are little geniuses when in one classroom Tyrone and Jamal struggle to with adding fractions whereas in another László and Dmitry work through Rudin’s Principles of Mathematical Analysis.

The news of Harvard offering a class in “Finger Counting”, followed by an advanced course called “The Numbers from 1 to 20” was first broken by the Harvard Crimson, which is the prestigious student newspaper of prestigious Harvard University, situated in prestigious Boston, MA. The article states, “the Covid-19 pandemic led to gaps in students’ math skills and learning abilities, prompting the need for a new introductory course.” If Harvard was a meritocratic university, however, then the students it admits would be so good that they could teach themselves. Of course, today “equal representation” is much more important that meritocracy. The Harvard Crimson unfortunately fosters racist stereotypes by putting a picture of a young, black scholar, surely a future doctor or engineer, if not a future MBA/J.D./M.D. holder, in an article on their new and very prestigious remedial mathematics course, which, according to informed sources, is by far the most prestigious remedial mathematics course in the entire world, just like Math 55 is the most prestigious mathematics course in the entire world. See, they are both obviously equally prestigious!

What I find most humorous is that tuition at Harvard is about $60k a year, with total costs amounting to about $90k. Imagine paying this much money, or someone else paying part of it via scholarships or some other form of financial aid, in order to study with “future world leaders” who apparently did not even manage to grasp the content of the middle school mathematics curriculum. This truly is peak Clown World.

There is a horrible anti-frog joke, which goes as follows: What do you call a frog in a suit? A frog! The suit does not make any difference. You can obviously put anyone or anything in a suit, but the animal, thing, or person will not become what a suit traditionally represented, i.e. a productive member of society. It seems that university diplomas will be perceived the same way soon. There was a time when it meant something to wear a nice suit. To combat that, the elites influenced society and promoted slovenly clothing as the new normal. A few decades ago, a university diploma was a somewhat rare good and it meant something. However, this led to rampant discrimination, so we are told, because it cannot be the case that some people go to university and others don’t. After all, IQ is a myth. Thus, everybody was allowed to go to university, and everybody got a diploma. The quest for equal representation has now gone so far that Harvard is taking in students who are clearly in the bottom quintile of intellectual ability. The result will be that university degrees stop being any kind of status signifier. The situation is much worse than with suits, though. You can still buy an expensive suit and look good in it. However, if our supposed most elite universities fill their curriculum with remedial courses, then a diploma will not have much value anymore. This will harm both good and bad students. Most affected, however, will be the gifted, hard-working students who will have to prove that they really did the work.