Word: hearst
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Back in the heyday of "yellow journalism," the likes of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst (upon whom "Citizen Kane" was based) were not afraid to embellish or even invent news when things were slow. They learned that the truth often got in the way of the stuff that sells newspapers. People preferred to read about fabricated news rather than pedestrian real-life stories...
...Harvard Dropout Made Good" scenario, however, dates back much farther than Gates' premature departure and subsequnt rise to Mr. Microsoft. Newspaper baron, ever-aspiring politician and "Citizen Kane" inspiration William Randolph Hearst left the college without a degree in the spring of 1885. At his mother's behest, Hearst had enrolled reluctantly in the class of '86, moved into Matthews and suffered from the same culture shock many California transplants experience today. Not relishing his studies (which included, in his freshman year alone, Greek, Latin, Classical Lectures, German, Algebra and Chemistry), he concentrated instead on his position as "the first...
...that the University cared; Hearst spent most of his time here in conflict with the Ad Board's 19th century avatar. The Faculty Records from the 1884-85 school year indicate that on September 30, the Faculty voted to keep the inveterate prankster on probation until Christmas. On February 3, they decided to extend the punishment to the end of the year. But Hearst didn't even last that long. John R. Dos Passos '16, in his novel The Big Money, tells the story of Hearst's leave-taking: "He tutored and went to Harvard where he cut quite...
Lampoon president Matt J.T. Murray '99 calls the chamber pot uproar "the Lampoon's first prank" and maintains that Hearst was not expelled but "expunged," meaning that the college destroyed his entire record and any other traces of his having attended Harvard. Current administrators deny knowledge of any such abrogation, and, in fact, no one struck the boy's name from the Faculty records. On September 30, 1885, the Faculty negged Heart's petition to take special exams in order to rejoin his class; on May 4 of the next year, they denied his request to take the eight exams...
Dropped out, kicked out or expunged, Hearst completed his formal education without a diploma. Luckily for him, his father happened to have a paper that he could spare: The San Francisco Examiner. This first of Harvard's famous dropouts managed to double the paper's subscription in just a year; by then, he was well on his way to becoming one of the century's most notorious media moguls. Unlike the new crop of deserters, though, Hearst discovered no latent love of his alma mater in later life; Harvard did not see a cent of the $200 million he left...