Is Your College Just an Understudy for Harvard?

JHU Seal

JHU Seal

Ok, so some students at Johns Hopkins University are upset that a new movie The Social Network, is being filmed on their campus. Their beef is that Johns Hopkins is standing in for Harvard in the movie, which is based on the true story of Mark Zuckerberg, who is credited with being the creator of Facebook while he was a student there.  My first though was that they must have chosen Johns Hopkins because it is in Maryland and therefore at least a few degrees warmer than it is up here is in Massachusetts.

But it wasn’t climate of even budget that took the films’s producers to Hopkins.  It seems that Johns Hopkins was something of a second choice for the movie producers because it wasn’t possible to film on location at Harvard. The Baltimore Sun‘s article on the controversy is funny, albeit quite sarcastic.

The movie, like some Hopkins students, couldn’t get into Harvard, which has a longstanding policy against commercial filming on campus. So the production has opened some old college-admissions wounds.

“The general consensus is, a lot of kids are not pleased,” said Lorre Atlan, 20, a junior majoring in biomedical engineering. “It’s obvious they [the filmmakers] could get Hopkins and not get Harvard.

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Harvard, meanwhile, like most colleges and universities is in the midst of an economic crisis brought on by the same financial crisis that has hit us all. It’s endowment has dropped by 25-33% according to most estimates. Lynne Munson and Donald Frey point out that Harvard is still not poor, but it is taking some cost-cutting measures such as those mentioned in a August 2009 piece in Vanity Fair.

All across campus, as a preliminary measure, thermostats had been lowered during the winter months, from 72 degrees to 68 degrees. Students and faculty were no longer entitled to free coffee at the university’s Barker Center. The Quad Express, which shuttles students between the Radcliffe Quadrangle and Memorial Hall, would soon be running every 20 minutes, not every 10 minutes. More recently, despite loud protests from Harvard’s athletes, among others, it was announced that hot breakfasts would no longer be served on weekdays at undergraduate residential houses. Instead of bacon, poached eggs, and waffles, students would have to get by on cold ham, cottage cheese, cereal, and fruit.

Harvard

Harvard

So here’s the thing. Johns Hopkins will receive a location fee. Apparently it’s not huge but something. Instead of worrying whether or not having some silly movie filmed at my university makes it look like a cinematographic safety college, I’d wonder if the money my college was getting and Harvard passed up might not have been enough to pay for those hot breakfasts the Harvard jock’s miss so much.