Opinion: Location, location, location

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One last thought on the Henry Louis Gates Jr. case: If Gates had been equally eminent but a professor at somewhere other than Harvard, would the media have regarded his ordeal as such a ‘teachable moment’?

Maybe it’s sour grapes because they rejected me, but take Harvard out of the equation and the story might not have become an iconic example of strained race relations. Sure, Harvard’s location added to the plot line: Tension between Harvard and the Irish working class of Cambridge (and Boston) has been grist for a lot of pop-sociology journalism and some excellent fiction. (Check out ‘The Governor’ by Edward R.F. Sheehan if you can find it in a second-hand bookshop.)

Google ‘Harvard’ and ‘New York Times’ and you get 8 million results. Replace ‘Harvard’ with ‘Cornell’ (which is in New York State) and you’ll get a measly 1.82 million results, and Dartmouth must content itself with 425,000. Other indices of Harvard’s disproportionate valuation are its over-representation on the Supreme Court (though Justice David H. Souter’s retirement reduced the Harvard-educated cohort to six) and the national press corps.

If Gates, who used to teach at Duke, had been nabbed by the Durham, N.C., police, would Obama have had to bring out the beer?