Today is 9/11

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This is a tale of two college campuses and a Rorschach test for Americans to decide where they fit along the nation's cultural divide.

It's corny vs. cool, instinctive patriotism vs. deeply ingrained political correctness.

It's Texas A&M vs. Harvard.

Despite my Harvard background, I come down squarely with the Aggies.

My guess is that most Americans will, too, even those who might be embarrassed to admit it, until they think about the two schools and themselves.

Harvard ended funding for, and kicked off campus, the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, which provides financial aid to students who receive training and become military officers. It did so in 1995 because the Pentagon prohibits homosexuals from openly serving in the military.

Harvard, whose students can take ROTC at nearby schools, apparently believes that promoting gay rights takes precedence over the national defense.

At A&M, the military is part of a culture that reveres family, football and, in times past, making fun of New Yorkers.

But after the Sept. 11 attack, students at the working-class university devised a uniquely Aggie way to raise more than $150,000 for the victims, most of whom are from New York. Harvard students, with presumably greater financial resources, did nothing comparable.

A&M students sold 70,000-plus T-shirts proclaiming "Standing Up For America," in patriotic colors. The school's triple-decker, 82,000-seat football stadium was color-coded, the top in red, middle in white and the bottom in blue for the next game. It was one patriotic television picture.

Admittedly, these are not exact comparisons, but the anecdotes illustrate the cultural differences between Harvard and A&M, and, to an uncomfortable degree, between Ivy League elites and most of America.

Harvard is, well, Harvard, the nation's most-prestigious university. But it's a snooty place where many, although by no means all, look down on the rest of America as intellectually inferior and unsophisticated.

I spent two semesters there as a Neiman Fellow, taking advantage of a generous university program that allows mid-career journalists to sample its rich academic offerings.

At the time, shortly after Ronald Reagan's election as president, the campus consensus was that he had duped the country. Americans, the Harvard group-think argued, would return to traditional liberalism soon. That view was out of touch then, as now.

Fast-forward to today, when Harvard is among elite colleges where the view that U.S. foreign policy gave Osama bin Laden reason for his terrorism appears to be more than a fringe opinion. The Associated Press reports that "a recent peace rally [on campus] drew several times more students than a patriotism rally."

At A&M, this year rated the nation's 15th best public university by U.S. News & World Report, the T-shirts symbolize an instinctive belief in America and its values. Students and faculty there have the common sense to distinquish between foreign policy and murder.

The reality is that the comparison between Harvard and Texas A&M illustrates the hierarchy of institutional values.

At Harvard -- and I'm being generous to the school's students and faculty -- there is an underlying skepticism about the virtues of the U.S. military and unabashed patriotism. Some argue that hostility is a more accurate term.

Many at Harvard and similar institutions say that most Americans don't understand the complex nature of the issue. But they're wrong. Sometimes things are as simple as they seem.

The Harvard detachment from the military, symbolized by its looney ROTC policy, is one reason that students, faculty and administrators take an academic view of the situation. Many see flag-waving patriotism as wrongly judgmental about the superiority of the American way of life.

And Harvard is not alone. Other elite educational institutions, such as Yale and Cal-Berkeley, display similar attitudes, especially when compared with most of the nation's campuses and communities.

At A&M, as in most of America, the students and faculty believe national defense takes priority over pushing gay rights. And despite, what some of my liberal friends will argue, this view has nothing to do with anti-gay bigotry.

It has to do with common sense. When the nation is attacked, internal squabbles about policy nuances pale in comparison.

Times like these make me wish Harvard played serious football so I could root against them on TV. You can be sure that I will be pulling for the Aggies.

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How big of a douche do you have to be to downvote this post?

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