Beating Harvard like a dead horse

Princeton has the Princeton Alumni Weekly, Yale has the Yale Alumni Magazine, and Harvard has . . . the Atlantic Monthly. The Atlantic is fairly obsessed with that noted institution*, and you can count on an article in which Harvard life figures prominently at least every third issue. Weird for a magazine that, while based in Boston, bills itself as a more generally American publication.

This month's display of Harvard-centricity in the Atlantic takes the form of a first-person alumnus account of grade inflation and lack of academic rigor at Harvard. Ivy League grade inflation: kind of important, kind of interesting. But what about--Ivy League ego inflation?

*Based on an online archive search, "Harvard" has been mentioned 1599 times in the Atlantic Monthly since 1857. For comparison's sake--Princeton: 350 times; Yale: 998 times; Cornell: 225 times.