They were ‘temporarily impaired’
N. Gregory Mankiw served as chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers and advised Mitt Romney in his two Republican presidential campaigns.
But as a popular economics professor at Harvard, Mankiw decided that his students weren’t able to learn anything in the hours after Donald Trump’s surprise presidential victory.
He told The Harvard Crimson that he made a Wednesday midterm “optional” after getting emails from “quite a few students” who felt they couldn’t handle a test because of the “lateness of the hour and the bigness of the surprise” when the race was called.
MORE: Professors let their students waste the day after the election
Rather than call them snowflakes, Mankiw credited their pleas with “feeling pretty exhausted” and said he did not want their grades to suffer because they were “temporarily impaired” by the Trump victory.
Mankiw wasn’t any different from his peers on the faculty, the Crimson notes.
Former Harvard College Dean Harry Lewis gave students three extra days to turn in a computer science paper; fellow economics professor and former Harvard President Larry Summers just showed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s concession speech (though he claims he wouldn’t have canceled a scheduled midterm); and several professors just told students to talk it out:
History lecturer Brett Flehinger said he knew right away that he would be unable to teach his class History 1433: “American Populisms: Thomas Jefferson to the Tea Party + Trump” as usual Wednesday.
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“People were emotionally not in a position to learn,” he said. “Students were pretty emotionally knocked down, amount of sadness, tears, and people were clearly very exhausted.”
Meanwhile, a group of professors held a panel discussion last night that blamed increasing unreliability of polling and Americans with declining economic fortunes for the surprise election result, The Crimson reports.
MORE: UMich prof postpones exam due to ‘serious stress’ from Trump
History graduate student Andrew Bellisari enjoyed the panel but thought it “confirmed many stereotypes Trump supporters might believe about Harvard,” according to the Crimson:
Here is all of Harvard, Cambridge—educated elite coming here and, freaking out, quite frankly, about what has just happened. I could almost see the Facebook posts of certain family members or friends taking extraordinarily sick pleasure in watching us deconstruct this moment the way we have.
All those educated elites probably aren’t worrying how much money they (or their parents or taxpayers) are throwing down the toilet by wasting a class day venting, unlike some people.
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