Ontario’s Lakehead University Uses Bush to Recruit Students

Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada, has found a new tool in recruiting students, President Bush. Lakehead has set up a website, yaleschmale.com, which features a black-and-white photo of George “LBJ” Bush with a caption that reads, “Graduating from an Ivy League university doesn't necessarily mean you're smart.” Although the president of the Lakehead students’ union calls it “repugnant,” most of the visitors to the website like it, and more importantly, the website makes a good point. Mr. Bush proudly identified himself as a “C” student at Yale. There is no finer recommendation for electing only “A” students from Midwest or Californian colleges.

The website says "There are universities and then there are universities. So let's not beat around the bush. Lakehead is different. We believe the person you become after you graduate is even more important than the person you were when you enrolled.” One would go a step farther and say that the university should have an impact on the kind of person one becomes. However, that would mean certain institutions would also have to take the blame for the infamies of their alumni.

Of course, Mr. Bush is not only a Yaleman, but he also took an MBA from Harvard. Harvard apparently doesn’t want it back despite Mr. Bush’s spectacularly undistinguished business career. Being a business success, however, is not a requirement for being president; Harry Truman’s stint as a haberdasher proves that. Nonetheless, Mr. Truman never attended college either.

So, Lakehead had generated 7,000 hits for itself before its story ran on Reuters and then the BBC and a thousand other places. It got more free attention for the college than it could ever have hoped to get just a few weeks ago. And if a few students decide that the campus in Thunder Bay is for them as a result, it will have served its purpose.

What is curious is the complete silence from Yale. Were Lakehead’s tone not so tongue-in-cheek, one might conclude that the Ontario school was casting aspersions on the selection criteria at Connecticut’s most famous university. Then again, Presidents Ford, Bush I and II, and Clinton, Senators Kerry, Clinton and Lieberman, Vice President Cheney, Justices Alito and Thomas as well as Governor Howard Dean are all Yalies. Maybe Yale knows that Lakehead has a point.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

Home