AMONG HARVARD UNDERGRADUATES, the open-enrollment Harvard Extension School–whose continuing education program offers a Harvard diploma, of sorts, to anyone willing to pay a modest fee–maintains a faintly sketchy reputation, and not without reason. A homeless man who attempted, with some success, to take up residence in my freshman dorm was a part-time Extension School student; so was my notorious “classmate,” Ed Meinert, an ambitious George Washington University dropout who posed as an undergraduate and conned several campus organizations into allowing him to join up. At a school where students are encouraged to think of themselves as deserving members of the world’s most exclusive club, the Extension Schoolers are the gate-crashers–frustrated Cambridge housewives picking up ancient Greek in their spare time; disheveled autodidacts with an unhealthy Harvard obsession.
Or at least so we always thought. But then last week, the New York Times profiled the new breed of Extensionistas–not the balding weirdos who play chess in Harvard Square and clutch dog-eared copies of Gravity’s Rainbow, but relatively normal college-age kids who could have been admitted to a “real” school, but decided instead to pick up a Harvard diploma on the cheap. They’re experiencing a version of college without dorms or advisers, in which they watch lectures online and take classes at night–and they might be pointing the way to a better, more democratic approach to higher education.
