Each year Harvard admissions officers spend thousands of hours poring over tens of thousands of applications, trying to decide who is Crimson material and who isn’t. It’s an arduous process and, inevitably, mistakes are made.

For a few of those who don’t make the cut, the experience is devastating. For many others, getting a thin envelope from Harvard eventually leads to the realization that there are plenty of paths to success besides the one through Johnston Gate.

But for some of the spurned, the rejection serves as inspiration to show Harvard how wrong it was. They go on to fame, fortune, and charitable giving ... to other universities.

Here, then, is 02138’s list of Harvard’s biggest rejects. Or at least the ones the university would love to reconsider.

Warren Buffett, Investor and philanthropist

Harvard Business School encourages its applicants to have some post-college work experience, but sometimes HBS takes that policy too far—like in 1950, when it rejected an up-and-coming whiz kid named Warren Buffett. When Buffett was a youth, his financial savvy was prodigious, precocious, and obvious: At 14, the Omaha schoolboy used $1,200 saved from his two paper routes to buy 40 acres of farmland, which he then leased for a profit. But as Buffett later told the Wall Street Journal, Harvard thought he was “too young.” (He was 19 at the time.) Oops. Buffett, who went to Wharton for two years before transferring to the University of Nebraska, slunk off to Columbia for his business degree, where he met Benjamin Graham, the intellectual father of a theory called “value investing.” Graham’s ideas would shape the philosophy behind Berkshire Hathaway, the vastly successful holding company Buffett built out of an undervalued textile mill. Buffett is known for his austerity—he lives in the same house he bought nearly 50 years ago, his annual CEO salary is $100,000, and he drives himself—as well as his largesse: Last year he gave over $30 billion, the largest private donation ever, to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Meredith Vieira, Co-anchor, Today, and host, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire

Between her morning gig as a Today anchor on NBC, her former day job talking girl talk on ABC’s The View, and her moonlighting on the syndicated game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, it’s hard to channel surf without running into Meredith Vieira. The Emmy-winning television personality also blogs. One recent topic: the horrors of the college application process. She herself “desperately wanted to go to Harvard University,” Vieira admitted on iVillage.com. “I wasted a lot of energy holding onto some Harvard fantasy—I even went so far as to hitch into Harvard Square every Saturday and ‘pretend’ that I was really a Radcliffe gal.” After learning that Harvard did not share her fantasy, Vieira graduated from Tufts in 1975 with a degree in English. But for all her success, she still hasn’t escaped the looming shadow of Harvard. Her boss at NBC? Jeff Zucker, Harvard College ’86.

John Kerry, United States Senator

Already a Massachusetts senator, foiled Democratic presidential aspirant, and trophy husband, John Kerry himself adds “Crimson- challenged” to his list of burdens. “Rejected,” he says, “is such a strong word.” The son of a Harvard-educated diplomat, Kerry was turned away by Harvard College in 1962. He eventually brushed himself off and earned a political science degree from Yale, along with membership in the elite secret society Skull and Bones. That was followed by a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts in Vietnam. Still Kerry wasn’t good enough for Harvard. In 1973, Harvard Law School rejected him, and he was forced to earn his J.D. at Boston College instead. Despite Harvard’s rejections, Kerry went on to serve four (so far) terms in the U.S. Senate, date Morgan Fairchild, and marry a billionaire, Teresa Heinz. Not getting into Harvard, Kerry jokes, may have been for the best. “I never would have fit in at a total jock school.”

David Remnick, Editor, the New Yorker “It’s a sad, sad tale,” says New Yorker editor David Remnick of his rejection from Harvard. “I don’t think I was even close.” The chief of publishing’s most respected magazine edited his high-school newspaper, but admits, “I wasn’t exactly Mencken. I did the whole paper at my kitchen table and it came out twice a year.” Apparently the admissions officers at Harvard missed those issues. So Remnick took solace at Princeton, from which he graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in comparative literature. A reporter for the Washington Post who earned a Pulitzer for his book Lenin’s Tomb before landing his current gig in 1998, Remnick no longer pines for unrequited love. In fact, Remnick insists that Harvard’s smarmy 25th reunion book is “the funniest work of literature since Gulliver’s Travels.” And he can’t resist a plug for his alma mater: “Princeton is astonishing for undergraduates,” he says. “And besides, it kicks Harvard around the block in basketball.”

Harold Varmus, President, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center

You might say there’s a family curse on Harold Varmus, former director of NIH and the current president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, when it comes to Harvard. Varmus’ father, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, attended Harvard College for just two years before having to leave due to lack of funds. Varmus earned his B.A. at Amherst and began a Ph.D. in literature at Harvard, but after a year, his interests turned to medicine. Dropping out of the graduate program, he applied twice to Harvard Medical School. Both times, Varmus would recall, he was told that he lacked the maturity to study at HMS. So Varmus settled for the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, graduating in 1966 and eventually acquiring enough maturity to win the 1989 Nobel Prize in Medicine. The Varmus family may have decided that they and Harvard just don’t go together: Varmus’ sons attended the University of Iowa and Wesleyan.

Lee C. Bollinger, President, Columbia University

Bollinger has twice gotten the thumbs-down from Harvard—not only was his 1964 undergraduate application denied, but in 2001 he was the runner-up pick for president. One reason why Bollinger lost out to Lawrence Summers: He didn’t have a Harvard degree. Instead, Bollinger had attended college at his home-state University of Oregon. (The Bollinger family hasn’t entirely given up on Harvard: daughter Carey got her A.B. in 1998.) After Columbia Law School, Bollinger became dean of the University of Michigan Law School, then president of that university, acquiring a reputation as a liberal champion of the First Amendment. Bollinger opposed the 1987 Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork and defended Michigan’s affirmative-action policy against two lawsuits, eventually winning in the Supreme Court. Chosen president of Columbia after Harvard opted for Summers, Bollinger is leading a massive expansion into the adjacent Manhattanville neighborhood and recently landed a $400 million donation for financial aid. Bollinger seems intent on proving Harvard wrong.

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