As you often like to imply, you are  #1.  Congrats.

But this means, as you know, that beyond the thousands of kids who apply to Harvard and do not get in are tens of thousands who do not apply (but might) as well as millions who barely know what the Ivy League is but attend schools that mold themselves to serve your funnel, a funnel shaped by your admissions office which itself shapes kids.

Might you shape them for the day we need humans to be ordinary in how they help us all live as well as extraordinary in whatever way you think of value?

Insist on a minimum standard for all your applicants of those activities that make today better, a day a hundred years from now possible.

Since the pedagogic standards of the world’s education system measure and sift according to your calibrations, can you please universalize for what you calibrate?  Since students are a product moving on the assembly line you engineer, could you please engineer them towards behaviors our whole world needs?  Please?

The world needs a population that lives on less and recycles more, that cools rather than heats. Right?

Make it clear, then, that a Harvard student will start as a person who does those things a sustained world demands.  Make sure even the geniuses can tend garden, the nobel laureate get around town by something other than a Mercedes.    Let those tiger mom’s picking up their kids at Posh Suburban High or St. Grotllesex know that Harvard expects them to be biking home instead and see what that does for the world.

Because, with respect, if you can’t do it locally, doing it globally earns you no gold star.  If there are homeless in Harvard Square fifty feet from where you educate the rock stars nothing they do in the future, no matter how impressive, matters much to the collective good.

Schools are nodes.  And you are the node in chief.  A leader.  Might you lead us better?

Please?