Osler's Razor

Today is the annual Harvard-Yale game, an event that usually is completely irrelevant on the sports landscape (except for two years ago when Sportscenter went to Boston for the match) but still kind of fascinating. 

The two schools play an unusual role in the American imagination. Actually, I should say roles because people imagine them differently. For example, in a comment to a humor piece in the Yale paper about the game, someone (probably unaffiliated with either school) had this to say:

Harvard, and Yale, are Social Justice Warrior Academies producing obedient drones for imposing Soros' Open Society. Look around you, it's hard to miss. 

In rolling the comment around in my mind, I started to list the contemporary conservative political figures who got a degree from Harvard or Yale (or, in some cases, both):

Steve Bannon
Tom Cotton
Mitt Romney
George H.W. Bush
George W. Bush
Pat Robertson
Bill O'Reilly
Antonin Scalia
Samuel Alito
Clarence Thomas
Kris Kobach
Ted Cruz
David Vitter
Ben Sasse
Mike Pompeo
Chris Wallace

That is just off the top of my head; there certainly are many more.

The point is this: Harvard and Yale aren't an "academy" for either the right or left. The problem is that they are the academies for both the right and the left.