Amanda Please | Far from the real veritas

Apparently, the creators of the more-than-$65-million-grossing movie The Social Network thought their viewers could not deal with the facts.

And no, I’m not talking about the loosely based characters or the exaggerated plotlines — I’m talking about the setting at Harvard University.

“People go out of their way to set movies at Harvard, because, like Vegas or Cold War Berlin, Harvard signifies,” Nathan Heller, freshman-year hallmate of Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, wrote in Slate.

What Harvard signifies is more than academic excellence; it is, as Zuckerberg’s character says in the film, “a world where social structure is everything.” It signifies a world of Harry Potter-esque dormitories and cutthroat competition. It signifies a world of success and stress, elaborate libraries and even more elaborate exclusive societies. But most importantly, it signifies a world where old money, regatta blazers and a WASP-y demeanor reign supreme.

But that world is a far cry from the modern-day Harvard or Ivy League school.

Collegiate movies, ranging from Animal House to Legally Blonde to Transformers 2, thrive on the old-money social structure. But this structure, much like the basis of these movies, is at least partly fanciful. New York Times columnist David Brooks could not have written it any better: “The old WASP Harvard is dead.”

In Harvard’s Class of 2006 — Zuckerberg’s class had he not dropped out — 70 percent of students received some form of aid. Almost 7 percent were black students and 7.2 percent were Latinos. Forgive me for sounding like an admissions brochure, but these statistics show a side to Ivy League schools that The Social Network blatantly chooses to ignore.

Jeremy Cutler — a third-year doctoral student in Penn’s Graduate School of Education who completed his Masters in Education at Harvard — found there to be a diverse student body. “The people that I met at Harvard were from many different countries, races and cultural backgrounds and were generally very down-to-earth and humble,” Cutler said. “Granted, not all Harvard folks are like that, but there were enough so that I could find a healthy group of like-minded people.”

For a movie that strives to capture a new 21st-century generation and movement, it seems ironic that the social structure the creators chose to implement is completely regressive.

Don’t get me wrong, The Social Network was a good movie. And I’d say most Penn students agree — from personal experience, it was sold out for both showings on its opening night at Rave Motion Pictures University City 6, and shows continued to be sold out even a week after it had been released.

But while I’m no movie critic, I’d have to respectfully disagree with David Denby’s review in The New Yorker that the film is “absolutely emblematic of its time and place.” There’s nothing emblematic about portraying the old Harvard of 1952, when there was a 90-percent chance that you would be accepted if dear old Daddy had attended.

Hollywood’s fascination with portraying the Ivy League as some kind of snobby pressure cooker is purely outdated, overused and incorrect. It was wrong when Elle Woods seemed like the Harvard underdog because she was blonde and Warner Huntington III seemed like shoo-in because he was rich and wore tweed, and it was still wrong when the rich, buff mutant crew twins were at the top of the social ladder in The Social Network. These rankings may make for a good movie, but it’s a shame that this stereotype has been widely accepted as the truth.

So here’s the reality: Today, as Heller puts it, most Ivy League kids come from “pressure-cooker public schools.” Exclusive social clubs are not the only way to be accepted socially in college, as Zuckerberg is portrayed to believe. And computer geeks are not misfit moguls in disguise. The old Harvard has undergone a much-needed makeover, and it’s time for Hollywood to recognize the real veritas.

Amanda Wolkin is a College freshman from Atlanta. Her e-mail address is wolkin@theDP.com. Amanda Please appears on alternate Wednesdays.

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