Pieces of Paper

The New York Times is granting free access to premium content to anyone with a .edu email address. Atrios makes a great point:

Certainly the most profound ethical dilemmma[sic] facing the country today is not whether college alumni will cheat to get free Times Select. But, apparently, people at the Times think graduating from an institution of higher learning magically bestows on one some ethical purity absent from everyone else in the nation.

Stuart's also written about his experiences with corporate America's blind faith in rather arbitrary pieces of paper.

Two things to remember: Ann Coulter has a degree from Cornell. Bush has an MBA from Harvard. That's about all I need to know to glean the correlation between practicing values and holding a piece of paper.