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It's fashionable with the Sarah Palin set to attack Harvard and treat its graduates as elitists. But if you spend any time on campus, you see students drawn from all over the world - an astonishing number these days with roots in Asia - whose chief assets are brainpower and hard work.

I don't get it. If you're saying, Tommy Lee, you don't fit the image of the East Coast, social elitist wealthy people who comprise Harvard, the only thing I can say is you have no idea what comprises Harvard.

If Harvard is $60,000 and University of Toronto, where I went to school, is maybe six. So you're really telling me that education is 10 times better at Harvard than it is at University of Toronto? That seems ridiculous to me.

I've been awed by the incredible opportunities that automatically float to the Harvard undergrads I once taught - from building homes for the poor in Nicaragua to landing prime White House internships.

In China, you've got six people buying for one child. But the thing is, you've got the largest rising upper-middle class in the world.

If you're last in your class at Harvard, it doesn't feel like you're a good student, even though you really are. It's not smart for everyone to want to go to a great school.

Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they're not known for educating large numbers of poor young people.

There's probably people that go to Harvard and say, 'Listen, I went to Harvard. I got a great education, and I can't find a job, or I didn't become the success that I could have been.' Sure, I mean, you probably have that at every major university.

The actions of the University in my case make it abundantly clear that the Administration's rhetoric about Harvard's desire to attract and retain the most distinguished women in the world is empty.

Harvard is the home of American ideas.