Is This Racist? An Alabama TV station has aired a segment detailing how members of an African-American community in Mobile have become convinced that they've seen a leprechaun hiding in a tree.

The website youtube.com has it posted, but apparently a lot of bloggers aren't touching it because either they think it's racist, or they think that blogging about it will make them look racist.

What do you think?  ¶ 11:45 AM 9 comments   

  For Shots in the Dark, A New Look You'll notice that suddenly everything looks kinda different here. That's because I've been trying to fix some of the issues with the way posts have been presented on the site, and at the same time trying to give SITD a little bit of a new look.

See what you think....  ¶ 11:19 AM 2 comments   

  At Duke, Denials The Duke Chronicle reports that attorneys representing the lacrosse players says that their clients categorically deny that "any sexual act occurred with the dancer."

Interesting—you would think that if something had happened, they would have argued that it was consensual.

Local DA Mike Nifong is unconvinced. "The statements that [the team] makes are inconsistent with the physical evidence in this case," he said Wednesday.

This is only getting to be more complicated...and meanwhile, there's more student protest, and the Duke campus has turned into a media zoo.

I don't mean to be flip, but all this negative attention at another campus is actually good news for Harvard, which has finally gotten some good press—which it deserves—for its plan to exempt families with incomes of less than $60,000 from paying tuition.

And by the way, a little media aside: Last week, when the University of Pennsylvania announced that it was going tuition-free for families with incomes up to 50k (at that point, a higher exemption than any other university), the New York Times said not a word. But Harvard makes an announcement, and predictably, a major story (see the link above). If I were Amy Gutmann, I'd be deeply irritated.  ¶ 10:31 AM 3 comments   

  Harvard and the Taliban In the New York Post, columnist Deborah Orin tries to track down the rumor that Harvard has enrolled a former member of the Taliban, a man, even as it has allegedly denied entrance to female Afghanis.

Orin writes:

It took Harvard four days to come up with its weasel words. Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesman Bob Mitchell finally returned a call - at the direction of university spokesman Joe Wrinn. But Mitchell adamantly refused to answer, claiming it would violate university policy to say if Harvard had admitted a Taliban-type applicant.

"I can't say anything. We do not discuss applicants," Mitchell said, sounding peeved that he'd even had to return the call.

Yup, that sounds like Bob Mitchell, all right. The press secretary who never met a question, no matter how innocuous, that he didn't try to stonewall.

Here's what Mitchell should have said: "I'm sorry, but for privacy reasons I can't discuss individual applicants to Harvard. We have to make sure that people who apply here know that the process is confidential—after all, Harvard's a pretty high-profile place, and lots of reporters want to know who's trying to come here, who gets in and who doesn't. I'm sure you can respect that.

"But more generally, Harvard is an international institution which believes that education has the power to make the world a better place. And if there was a former member of the Taliban whose presence in this country was approved by the US government, who qualified for entrance, why shouldn't Harvard accept him? What better way is there to introduce the benefits of free speech and democracy to those who don't understand Western values?"

This is yet another example where Harvard's dogged reliance on press secretaries makes the university look arrogant, defensive and obstructionist, when it should look confident and engaged.... Bill Kirby should have just taken the phone call and answered Orin's questions. What's the worst that could happen—he could lose his job?

  ¶ 10:13 AM 0 comments   

  George Clooney V. Gawker George Clooney continues to prove himself perhaps the most thoughtful celebrity on the planet: He's proposing a clever idea to beat Gawker's vile "Celebrity Stalker" site, in which Gawker readers text in the location of celebrities they spot and, using Google Earth, Gawker instantly maps their locations.

Gawker Stalker is not only creepy, it's dangerous, a perfect tool for some wanna-be Mark David Chapman.

Clooney's solution, e-mailed to celebrity handlers: "Flood their Web site with bogus sightings. Get your clients to get 10 friends to text in fake sightings of any number of stars. A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this Web site is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless."

Gawker continues to defend Stalker, but the site has really done something quite remarkable: It's pushed the envelope of celebrity coverage to a point where even people who read Star and Us Weekly think it's too much.....


  ¶ 9:33 AM 0 comments   

  Marty Peretz Takes on Stephen Walt Writing in The New Republic, Marty Peretz blasts away at Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer. His thesis, primarily, is this: That while Walt and Mearsheimer posit that the "Israel lobby" is an undemocratic conspiracy, bending US foreign policy to the will of a clandestine minority, US support for Israel is, in fact, not only good for the United States, but an expression of the American democratic process.

Peretz's article is strengthened, in my opinion, by the fact that he largely shies away from name-calling, and avoids the term "anti-Semitism" altogether. Instead, he criticizes the methodology and the conclusions generally of the Walt/Mearsheimer paper.

Here's his concluding paragraph:

Professor Walt is vacating his position as academic dean of the Kennedy School in June. Even though he decided to leave the job of his own volition some time ago, Harvard should be grateful for his departure from this seat. An academic dean is supposed to be the shepherd of his faculty's (and his students') respect for evidence and scholarship. Having traduced the rules of evidence and the spirit of scholarly inquiry, he can no longer perform this function. Regrettably, Walt will not likely suffer any crueler fate than this. He has tenure, and tenure insulates one from all kinds of infractions against truth and honor.

I disagree with that last crack about tenure, but in general, I think Peretz makes a reasonable, if angry, case.

It's time for Walt and Mearsheimer to respond. Having put this paper out there, and sparked this debate, it looks odd and irresponsible for them now to shun it.
  ¶ 8:48 AM 0 comments   

  Unexpected Thursday Zen
From the Boston Globe:
Schoolchildren in Accra, Ghana, a film-toting man in Kiev, Ukraine, a young shepherd in Bqosta, Lebanon, and countless others from West Africa to Central Asia covered their eyes and watched the moon completely obscure the sun yesterday. It was the first total solar eclipse since 2003. (Photos: Aris Messinis/ AFP/ Getty Images (top), Olivier Asselin/ Associated Press (Accra), Efrem Lukatsky/ Associated Press (Kiev), Mohammed Zaatari/ Associated Press (Lebanon)) Story  ¶ 8:37 AM 0 comments   

  Duke Men and their Stix While a poster below chastises either me or Richard Brodhead (I'm not quite sure which) for "NPR-type language," the situation at Duke gets uglier. Now there is evidence that a woman who happened to pass by the house where the alleged rape allegedly took place also experienced racial abuse, in the form of shouted racial epithets; she was so upset, she called 911 to report it.

There seems to be an awful lot of outrage on campus about what may have happened, including a Take Back the Night March, a flier calling on people involved to "come forward," and a group called the Concerned Citizens at Duke University, which distributed a statement saying that "the university is cultivating and sustaining a culture of privilege and silence that allows inappropriate behavior to plague the campus."

An interesting charge; I wonder what the foundation of it is. Duke is certainly a privileged place, a university that sometimes feels more like a country club. But that statement makes it sound as if the cultivation of silence began after the alleged rape...

Meanwhile, Brodhead is clearly trying to walk a line between expressing outrage and prejudging the players. "If you were at a university where the president meted out punishment based on what he reads in the newspaper, it would be a pretty dangerous place," the Times quotes him as saying.

According to the Duke Chronicle, Brodhead was accosted by a group of students who felt that the university was not taking a hard enough line. "I promise you, you will see this University respond with great and appropriate seriousness once the truth is established," Brodhead said to the group. "I want this to be resolved as quickly as you do."

That, too, is interesting: Brodhead is at least trying to turn this sad and tawdry business into a teachable moment. Let's hope it works.



  ¶ 7:52 AM 2 comments   

  Bad Craziness at Duke I've long been an admirer of Duke president Dick Brodhead, whom I first met about 20 years ago when I was an undergraduate at Yale. A friend of mine had had an unfortunate experience with the Yale disciplinary committe, on which Brodhead sat, which resulted in his suspension from college for a year. I thought the process had been poorly handled, and said so in the Yale Daily News. This made for a few uncomfortable moments with Brodhead, then an English professor who was affiliated with my residential college, Branford.

But only a few. Brodhead initiated a conversation with me about everything that had happened, and though we agreed to disagree, I appreciated the gesture and thought that he listened respectfully to my perspective.

In later years, Brodhead became the dean of Yale College, and subsequently the president of Duke. Throughout, he's handled himself with a similar sense of decency and respect for the values of a university.

So my heart goes out to Brodhead now that he's enmeshed in a hideous controversy at Duke; an African-American woman says that she was raped by three white players of the Duke lacrosse team. (Charlotte Simmons was a terrible book, but perhaps Tom Wolfe did get some things right.)

Brodhead has cancelled the rest of the team's season, which seems appropriate given the ugly circumstances of what may or may not have happened.

But you have to love the eloquence and fair-mindedness of his statement on the matter.

“In this painful period of uncertainty, it is clear to me, as it was to the players, that it would be inappropriate to resume the normal schedule of play,” Brodhead said, according to InsideHigherEd.com. “Sports have their time and place, but when an issue of this gravity is in question, it is not the time to be playing games.”

And in a statement quoted by the Times, Brodhead said: "While we await the results of the investigation, I remind everyone that under our system of law, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. One deep value the university is committed to is protecting us all from coercion and assault. An equally central value is that we must not judge each other on the basis of opinion or strong feeling rather than evidence of actual conduct."

Responding to a question about outraged reactions to the alleged incident, Brodhead said, "How can I be surprised at the outrage? If the things alleged are verified, they're outrageous."

It is refreshing to hear simple, honest and direct speech that educates without inflaming. We should expect that from university presidents, but it doesn't always happen.  ¶ 9:22 AM 9 comments   

  The Conservative Assault on Campus Writing in the American Prospect, Jim Sleeper has a nice piece about how conservatives insist on concocting liberal conspiracy theories to explain Larry Summers' resignation, among other things....

The way conservatives insist that university campuses are filled with out-of-control radicals fascinates me. There's much more to be said on the subject, and if I get the chance, I hope to do some writing about it....  ¶ 9:15 AM 0 comments   

  The Harvard AIDS Scandal, cont'd. David McClintick's investigation of Larry Summers and the Harvard-Russia scandal may have helped effect the downfall of Larry Summers, but it wasn't the only important investigation of a Summers -related international scandal.

Now John Wolfson's Boston magazine piece about the Harvard AIDS scandal has been nominated for a City and Regional Magazine Award in Reporting...which is, in the magazine biz, a pretty prestigious thing. That piece didn't get quite the play at Harvard that it deserved, so it's nice to see it being acknowledged elsewere.  ¶ 10:06 AM 0 comments   

  Your Monday Morning Zen   ¶ 9:44 AM 3 comments   

  Is Hillary Losing Her Head? Oddly, but sort of interestingly, Richard Cohen in the Washington Post compares Hillary Clinton to Marie Antoinette.

According to Cohen, "Just as Marie came to personify all that was wrong with the aristocracy, so Hillary has come to personify all that is wrong with Bill, the Democrats, liberals, working women, independent women and women of a certain kind...."

I'll let you be the judge of that, and instead take this opportunity to make a point about image and identity in our modern world, and instead compare Hillary Clinton to Larry Summers.

Hillary Clinton has become a Rorschach test; one's opinion of her is invariably dominated by the prejudices and attitudes one brings to her consideration. She means a hundred different things to a hundred different people.

Which is to say that she has lost control of her public identity; she has lost control of her message; and, in my opinion, public people who are not clearly and solidly identified with a particular and positive image have enormous difficulty leading.

This was one problem Larry Summers had: he represented something different to every possible constituency of the university and the world outside it. Economists, conservatives, Washingtonians, Jews, alumni, internationalists, practitioners of the liberal arts, just plain liberals—every one of them saw Larry Summers differently. There was no consistent, unified image that Summers himself had largely shaped. Whereas if you asked all those people about, say, Derek Bok, they'd probably all say pretty much the same thing.

I'm not quite sure why this happened, but I think it was fatal to Summers. When everyone is imposing their own interpretation of who you are on what you do, your attempts to lead become bogged down in debates over identity and intention. It's an oddity: for a public man, Summers really is not well-known.  ¶ 9:02 AM 0 comments   

  A Moment for an Icon Cuban singer-songwriter Pio Leyva has passed away at the age of 88.

Like a number of prominent Cuban musicians, Leyva was really first noticed in this country following the release of the documentary, "Buena Vista Social Club." What a debt of thanks we owe Ry Cooder and Wim Wenders for making that film....and to Pio Leyva for the decades of music he gave the world.

  ¶ 8:51 AM 0 comments   

  Ain't Life Grand, Part II A conservative blogger just hired by the Washington Post—who once wrote that Coretta Scott King was a communist—has just been fired by the Post after he was discovered to have committed plagiarism. Ben Domenech, a founder of the conservative blog RedState.com who modestly writes under the nom de plume "Augustine," lasted all of three days.

Domenech is not only a plagiarist, he's also a liar. He tells the Times that he used material from P.J. O'Rourke with O'Rourke's permission. O'Rourke, it turns out, has no memory of ever meeting or talking to Domenech.

Couple points. Well, three.

First, it's always a pleasure to see smug, self-satisfied, obnoxious, Coretta Scott King-insulting conservatives take a fall.

Second, I've increasingly felt that the MSM is making a mistake by hiring extremely young people to write for them online when they'd never consider those people experienced enough to write for their dead-tree newspaper. It's a bad idea for a host of reasons, not least of which is that online writing is increasingly becoming more important than what appears in print. Certainly more widely read. So why treat it as a kind of minor-league apprenticeship for writers? Because the people doing the hiring just don't get the importance of the web.

Third, the MSM has double-standards for conservatives. The Post would never hire someone who'd written that Pat Robertson was a dickhead, which he is, but never mind. In their haste to appear balanced, the Post and other media hire people who make a name for themselves with vituperative rhetoric, and in that sense actually encourage the generation of such bile.

Over at RedState.com, Domenech's defenders have this to say: "He'll take the time to wander in the wilderness as he rightly should. He'll walk that road. The least the rest of us can do is be waiting for him at its end."

Gag me.  ¶ 8:34 AM 0 comments   

  Girls and College: A Touchy Issue The Times today runs seven letters responding to Jennifer Delahunty Britz's op-ed about how many more girls than boys are going to college, most of which fall into the what-the-hell? category.

Brintz's essay has hit a nerve: It's been the #1 e-mailed article on the Times site for the past couple of days.

A theme from female letter writers is that while they once deserved affirmative action, boys do not, because they can not plausibly claim that they have suffered from discrimination.

Probably, but seems to me we just don't know—I haven't yet read a good explanation of just why boys are having such trouble getting into college.

Meanwhile, John Tierney weighs in on the subject with one of his typically pointless columns. Forcefully addressing the question of affirmative action for boys, Tierney writes, "After consulting with the federal Education Department, I can confidently report that this discrimination may violate the law — or then again, it may not."

Thanks, John. Appreciate that.

You probably can't read the article, because it's behind the Times' firewall. But then again, you don't really need to.  ¶ 8:22 AM 0 comments   

  More Tales from the Wild

Hal the coyote is resting comfortably and apparently eating quite well....and meantime, seals have come to New York harbor. Meanwhile, Lola and Pale Male are expecting.

Sometimes, ain't life grand?




  ¶ 8:14 AM 1 comments   

  The Shleifer Scandal: It Won't Go Away In today's Boston Globe, Janine R. Wedel, professor of public policy at George Mason University, argues that "when [Larry] Summers's legacy is examined, he should be held to account for his role in a scandal with which he was intimately involved, both as a Treasury official and at Harvard."

We think of the Shleifer scandal as the story of Andrei Shleifer's double-dealings in Russia and Larry Summers' attempts to protect Shleifer from any punishment, either from the federal government or from Harvard.

But Wedel, who has been writing about this scandal since at least 1998, makes another accusation that I hadn't heard before [italics added]: As Treasury secretary, "Summers helped Shleifer and Harvard gain noncompetitive government awards through arrangements that were highly unusual in foreign aid contracting at the time, according to US officials. Summers helped Shleifer and Harvard gain noncompetitive government awards through arrangements that were highly unusual in foreign aid contracting at the time, according to US officials.... The endowment funds of both Harvard and Yale gained access to valuable investments through networks inhabited by Shleifer and/or his currency-trading wife. His investments in Russia, which he does not deny, included securities, equities, oil and aluminum companies, real estate, and mutual funds -- many of the same areas in which he was being paid to provide impartial advice."

As excellent as David McClintick's article in Institutional Investor was, it sounds like the Shleifer scandal goes even deeper that McClintick portrayed it. (Which just goes to show how much timing has to do with the impact of an article; perhaps Wedel should have written something just after Bill Kirby was fired.)

I don't know how much of this Wedel covers in her book, "Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe..."

Anyone?  ¶ 7:59 AM 0 comments   

  And Speaking of Wild Animals
My cousin Lucy, who's a marine biologist, just sent me this photo of a 16-foot python found a few days ago in the Everglades.

Unlike coyotes, this animal probably does not belong in Central Park.  ¶ 10:35 AM 0 comments   

  Alan Dershowitz: Who's Spewing Hate? In the New York Sun, Dershowitz accuses Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, author of the controversial paper discussed below, of lifting quotations from neo-Nazi hate sites.

"The wrenching [of quotes] out of context is done by the hate sites, and then [the authors] cite them to the original sources, in order to disguise the fact that they've gotten them from hate sites," Dershowitz claims.

Dershowitz cites this example (and I quote from the Sun):

Under the section "Manipulating the Media," on pages 19 and 20 of the paper, Messrs. Walt and Mearsheimer write: "In his memoirs, for example, former Times executive editor Max Frankel acknowledged the impact his own pro-Israel attitude had on his editorial choices. In his words: 'I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert.' He goes on: 'Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognized, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.'" The footnote cites Mr. Frankel's 560-page book, "The Times of My Life and My Life with the Times," published in 1999.

Yet the Frankel quote used by Messrs. Mearsheimer and Walt, Mr. Dershowitz said, is nearly identical to the quote used by a neo-Nazi Web site in its own take on Jewish press influence, "Jewish Influence in the Mass Media."

Dershowitz's argument is logically fallacious and intellectually indefensible.

Let us say that this quote appears in three places: the original source, the Neo-Nazi site, and Mearsheimer and Walt's paper. Dershowitz assumes that W & M must have taken the quote from the web...because, apparently, two writers writing about how Israel is covered in the media would never conceive of reading a memoir by the Jewish former executive editor of the most important newspaper in the world.

"I promise you they did not read Max Frankel's whole book," the law professor said of the paper's authors. "How do I know that? We found the same exact quote on various hate sites."

That argument is so dumb, it would be laughable if it weren't wrapped in the context of a very serious accusation.

In any event, it's a safe bet that this quote has appeared in numerous places other than the memoir and neo-Nazi websites. It is, after all, a pretty provocative line—"I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I cared to assert." It is entirely plausible that W & M would have come across this line during their research in places other than neo-Nazi websites. (I'd bet that the neo-Nazis themselves didn't read the memoir, but got the quote from other sources.)

Let us acknowledge what Dershowitz is really saying: W & M troll neo-Nazi websites. That is a hideous accusation, and if this is all the "evidence" that Dershowitz has—evidence that would surely never be allowed in a courtroom—he shouldn't make it. Because it is a short skip and a jump from saying that W & M read neo-Nazi websites to saying that they are neo-Nazis. And Dershowitz is well on the way to implying that.

I will leave it to people smarter than I to evaluate the level of scholarship in W & M's paper. But you don't have to be a legal genius to see that Alan Dershowitz's intellectual standards do not impress.

  ¶ 9:38 AM 5 comments   

  So Much for Intellectual Freedom at Harvard Kennedy School dean David Ellwood has disassociated his school from the controversial paper written by K-School professor Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, the Crimson reports.

Such papers, written as part of a faculty "working paper series," usually bear the Kennedy School logo and carry a standard disclaimer saying that they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Kennedy School or of Harvard.

But at Ellwood's direction, the Kennedy School logo was removed from this paper, and a stronger disclaimer was inserted. It reads thusly:

"The two authors of this Working Paper are solely responsible for the views expressed in it. As academic institutions, Harvard University and the University of Chicago do not take positions on the scholarship of individual faculty, and htis article should not be interpreted or portrayed as reflecting the official position of either institution."

Well, Dean Ellwood, why don't you just take Professor Walt out back and shoot him?

This is not a great moment in the history of the Kennedy School. Is Walt's paper anti-Semitic? Let's put it this way: Reasonable people can disagree. I've read the paper, and I just don't think it's clear-cut at all. (If, for example, you replaced the word "Israel" with the words "Saudi Arabia," I'm not sure the paper would be anti-Arab.) There may be a case that the paper's scholarship is lackluster, but that is a different matter altogether. Professors are allowed to write bad books.

Given that this paper is clearly not the work of Louis Farrakhan, and that a credible case can be made that it is not a work of anti-Semitism, it is cowardly for the Kennedy School to hang Walt out to dry.

As Abbott Lawrence Lowell (who was, in fact, anti-Semitic) once wrote, "There is no middle ground. Either the university assumes full responsibility for permitting its professors to express certain opinions in public, or it assumes no responsibility whatever, and leaves them to be dealt with like other citizens by the public authorities according to the laws of the land."

Ellwood is trying to carve out a middle ground here—saying, in effect, well, we have to let them write this stuff, but trust me, we really don't support them—and it makes him look weak.

What's going on here? Well, apparently it's about money. David Gergen tells the New York Sun that he's been reaching out to "prominent Jewish donors"—their words, not mine—because "obviously, there are some people out there who are concerned."

Note that it isn't, say, Jewish alums in general to whom Gergen is reaching out, but Jewish donors. This isn't about the merits of Walt's paper; it's about a school with one of the smaller endowments at Harvard running scared of its donors.

The irony is that this attack on Walt and Mearsheimer only seems to bear out their paper's suggestion that critics of American foreign policy towards Israel are hastily silenced. A Harvard professor publishes a paper criticizing the power of the "Israel lobby." Prominent Jews such as Alan Dershowitz and Martin Peretz call the authors anti-Semitic. A pro-Israel, right-wing newspaper whips up a controversy. Jewish donors start making phone calls. The Kennedy School starts to distance itself from the professor. No longer welcome at Harvard, the professor leaves for a lesser institution.... (This last hasn't yet happened, but I wouldn't be surprised.)

To be fair, I don't know what else sincere critics of this paper are supposed to do; if they really believe the paper is anti-Semitic, they should certainly say so.

But this sequence of events has the unintended consequence of making Walt and Mearsheimer look more credible and less anti-Semitic.  ¶ 8:54 AM 2 comments   

  It's Getting Hot in Here Do you sometimes get the feeling that the Bushies are the last people on the planet to concede the reality of global warming? Every day, it seems, one reads another story about how the Arctic ice is melting faster than anticipated...and in a dive magazine, I recently read a suggestion that now would be a good time to dive the Maldive Islands in the Arabian Sea because, since they're only about two metres above sea level, they're not likely to be around much longer. How surreal. More than 300,000 people live on those islands.

Meanwhile, the Bush White House takes its instructions on global warming from Michael Crichton and Dick Cheney.

Well, if science doesn't convince the Bushites that global warming is real, perhaps satire will. This video of Will Ferrell doing George Bush talking about global warming is hilarious....  ¶ 8:24 AM 0 comments   

  The Man Who Fought Extinction

Remember the New York Times Magazine story a few months back about Reinhold E. Rau, a taxidermist who spent thirty years trying to breed an extinct zebra called the quagga back into existence?

Well, he died.

Nonetheless, Mr. Rau led a fascinating, whimsical, and individual life, and he devoted himself to trying to recreate something beautiful and lost. Had he succeeded, he would have been the first person ever to revive an extinct species.

Given what's going on in the environment today, the world could use more characters like Reinhold Rau. He will be missed.




Above, the quagga: Only available as an illustration, because humans killed them all.  ¶ 8:41 AM 1 comments   

  But Apparently They'll Never be Scientists or Mathematicians Writing on the Times' op-ed page, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, talks about an emerging problem in higher education: the fact that there are so many more well-qualified female applicants to college than male ones.

The situation has gotten so dire that male applicants are actually benefitting from affirmative action, in which admissions officers are lowering their standards to accept men, because if they don't, their schools will start to look like women's colleges.

At Kenyon, 55% of the applicants are female, and that percentage is rising. Britz writes, "My staff and I carefully read these young women's essays about their passion for poetry, their desire to discover vaccines and their conviction that they can make the world a better place."

Doesn't that second example feel like a deliberately chosen rebuke to Larry Summers' women-in-science proposition?  ¶ 8:32 AM 7 comments   

  Some People Have All the Luck (Or, New York is not a red state.)

Hillary Clinton's first apparent GOP opponent in her reelection campaign to the U.S. Senate dropped out, so hapless was she.

Now her second opponent, a woman named Kathleen Troia McFarland, is also proving to be a disaster; McFarland's claim to fame was that she was the highest-ranking woman at the Reagan Pentagon and helped author the Star Wars' speech.

Let us be generous and not point out that these are pretty dubious rationales for a Senate campaign. Because, as it turns out, these resume-padders aren't even true.

And the Times article linked to above doesn't even note—which it should—that Ms. McFarland has already been found to have been registered to vote at more than one location in New York, which is illegal, but has failed to vote in several recent elections....

All of which is good news if, say, Senator Clinton were planning on saving her campaign funds for a presidential race....




KT McFarland: Didn't write Star Wars speech, not the highest-ranking woman at the Reagan Pentagon, won't be the next senator from New York.  ¶ 8:18 AM 0 comments   

  Caged, Like a Beast

The coyote, named Hal by the police, is gone from Central Park. And aren't we all a little less alive as a result?
  ¶ 8:16 AM 1 comments   

  Arianna Dragged Through the Blog Arianna Huffington has caved in her fight with George Clooney, after Arianna compiled a bunch of quotes Clooney gave at various times, cobbled them together, posted the result on her website and claimed that Clooney had blogged for the Huffington Post.

I'm tempted to say that this is a story about a new kind of journalism ethics, having to do with the rules of the blogosphere, but that wouldn't really be true...every journalist knows that you can't press together public statements like plywood and call them a quote.

I will say, however, that it's probably not a good idea to mess with one of the most powerful guys in Hollywood who once led a boycott of tabloid tv shows and just made a film about a heroic journalist.....  ¶ 8:08 AM 0 comments   

  No, No, No and No The Brown Daily Herald reports that four possible candidates for the Harvard presidency—Nan Keohane, Columbia's Lee Bollinger, Penn's Amy Gutmann, and Tufts' Lawrence Bacow have all said they are not interested in the job of Harvard president.

None of these are surprising, and all of those people have to say no in public. I wonder, though, if Amy Gutmann would really say no....except that she hasn't been in her position as president for very long, and it'd be a pretty crummy thing to leave Penn after just a few years in the top job.  ¶ 4:44 PM 0 comments   

  The Coyote is Captured Sadly.

Apparently some people feel this is good news for dogs in Central Park. This is silly, of course, since dogs in Central Park are generally either in an enclosed run or on a leash and, in any event, are always in proximity to humans—and coyotes are shy animals who steer clear of people.

In any case, it's my opinion that any dog small enough to make a coyote meal probably ought to be a coyote meal—this whole small dog thing has gotten way out of hand. Serve 'em up, I say.



One of these should be food for coyotes.....  ¶ 11:17 AM 2 comments   

  A Coyote in Central Park? Apparently there's one wandering around in the park, and the cops are trying to catch it. I dunno—I think it'd be sort of cool to have a coyote in Central Park.

Although it's probably more dangerous for the coyote than the humans.....

  ¶ 9:54 AM 0 comments   

  Bitch Beer I never much cared for HBO's old show, Sex in the City, because I thought it presented a portrayal of women that claimed to be feminist and liberated but was, in fact, quite the opposite: It showed women behaving just as shallowly and stupidly as men do and called it progress. One of the small ways in which I thought this was true was the show's depiction of its female characters throwing back Cosmopolitan after Cosmopolitan. As a result of that portrayal, thousands of New York women began doing the same and still do.

In my experience, most women who drink a couple of Cosmos are, basically, drunk, and some are well on their way after just one of the potent concoctions. Cosmopolitans contain quite a lot of alcohol, even though they don't taste like it, and due to their generally lesser body weight, most women are more affected by the booze than men are. That's just my anecdotal observation, but I think it's true.

And—though this part was not in my experience—it seemed to me that the result of that imbibing was that women were more likely to have casual sex they'd later regret. In other words, a show that was supposed to be all about women's sexual strength was in fact encouraging them to drink until they lost their judgment regarding matters sexual and otherwise. This did not strike me as a good thing; though you'd never have learned it from Sex in the City, the world can be a dangerous place, and men can behave badly, not least when women are drunk. In the most extreme example, I wonder if Immette St. Guillen was drinking Cosmos.

(That suggestion is certainly not to blame the poor woman for what happened to her—only the killer can be blamed for that—but to suggest that it is unwise for a 5'3" woman to be alone, drunk, in a bar at 4 A.M. Things shouldn't be that way, but they are.)

Now the University of North Carolina at Wilmington has conducted a study about men and women's drinking habits that seems to confirm my surmises. As InsideHigherEd.com reports, some college students have taken to calling fruity liquor drinks "bitch beer," meaning that those drinks have become to women what beer is to men—with a serious dose of misogyny thrown in.

Among the study's conclusions: Many women underestimate the potency of liquor-based drinks and as a result are often drunk well before the men with whom they are socializing. And what women do when they are drunk tends to differ from what men do. Many male college students reported that they needed to be drunk in order to dance; many women reported that being drunk made them more likely to have sex with men they didn't know well. (This falls into the realm of the obvious, but still, it's nice to see it confirmed.)

And many bars exploit these truisms, by, for example, letting all women in free of charge—or just letting women wearing skirts in for free.

As readers of this blog will know, I'm generally skeptical of attempts to divide men and women by character traits. But surely we can look at how they are divided by physical ones, and differing reactions to alcohol seems a worthwhile line of inquiry.  ¶ 8:41 AM 2 comments   

  A Thought on Excellence Having finally had the time to read Harry Lewis' essay, I want in particular to highlight one paragraph that strikes me as both utterly right and very well-said:

The lack of confidence of the Harvard faculty in its president was widely caricatured as stemming from a complacent faculty’s resistance to his controversial and innovative ideas, a backlash resulting from his abrasiveness, or more simply an attack by feminist harpies allied with leftist crazies. The reality is that the ideas Summers offered did not meet the Harvard standard. He expressed his “controversial” ideas as one-liners in brief talks, not in essays in which ideas struggled against contrary ideas. There was in his presidency a striking absence of the balanced, thoughtful, and informed analysis that characterizes the academy at its best. Where earlier Harvard presidents, including Summers’s immediate predecessors Derek Bok and Neil Rudenstine, wrote eloquent essays about matters they thought worthy of broad attention, Summers avoided using the written word to provide deep analysis of complex issues.

In researching and writing Harvard Rules, I spent an enormous amount of time trying to understand Larry Summers' vision for the future of the university. It was a deeply frustrating effort for much the same reasons that Lewis describes. Since Summers would not talk to me, I read and re-read all of his speeches and other statements on education, and they simply were not particularly thoughtful or nuanced. "One-liners" is an appropriate description.

This is not to say that Larry Summers did not have a thoughtful and nuanced vision of Harvard's future—just that he never put it into public words. One got the sense that Summers did not want to be pinned down; that he was in such a hurry to implement change—the change he felt Harvard needed—he wanted to skip the phases of debating that change and building consensus. So he said as little as possible—because once the words were out there, the Harvard community would have something to discuss.

Why? I would hazard a couple of reasons. Impatience is one. Arrogance is another; with a handful of exceptions, I don't think Summers felt there were many at Harvard from whom he could learn, or from whom he needed to learn.

But there's another, more subtle reason: Larry Summers avoided his weaknesses. In tennis terms, he ran around his backhand.

Summers is not a good communicator, and he has certainly never been a skilled diplomat or consensus-builder. (Just ask the finance ministers of various Asian and South American countries.) He likes vigorous questioning, led by him, and he likes to deliver monologues; but he does not like conversations, dialogues, give-and-take, or being aggressively questioned himself. Moreover, he does not like to write. University presidents often publish collections of their essays and speeches. Such a book published by Summers would be short and, given his reputation as a provocateur, surprisingly dull. (Only in response to questions does Summers truly become vivid.) And, frankly, much of it would be ghostwritten.

Summers' leadership style—his secrecy, his disinclination to reveal this thoughts and intentions, the paucity of his writings—flows directly from his avoidance of these intellectual dislikes.
  ¶ 8:14 AM 2 comments   

  The Revenge of Harry Lewis Forced out as dean of Harvard College by Bill Kirby and Larry Summers in March 2003, Harry Lewis is taking an elegant revenge: He has authored a book, "Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education," which decries the consumerist and materialist trends in higher education that (he argues) are responsible for the choice of Larry Summers as Harvard president.

How fortunes change: Ignobly removed from his job (as so many were during the Summers era), Lewis remains at Harvard, and with the high-profile publication of this book might well have a more influential voice at the university than the outgoing president.

(This is, by the way, an argument in favor of tenure.)

Today, the Crimson reports on the excerpt of that book (see below) that ran in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education.

Does anyone else get the feeling that the real debate about the state of Harvard education—not the silly curricular review, nor glib remarks about students who don't know what a chromosome is—is starting now? It'd be fascinating to see, for example, a Sanders theater forum featuring Lewis, Bill Kirby, Summers (if he'd do it), and a couple of faculty members from the curricular review.

With the departure of Larry Summers, a thousand flowers may be about to bloom....  ¶ 7:47 AM 0 comments   

  Death of a College President James Freedman, the former president of Dartmouth, has died from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at age 70.

A forceful advocate for the liberal arts, Freedman also spoke out against campus intolerance, such as the truly nasty Dartmouth Review, which had a habit of making fun of Jews, blacks, women, gays, and...well, you get the drill.

Freedman shows, I think, that a college president can be more than just a fundraiser, but can speak out on issues of public import, and do so without tearing his campus apart....  ¶ 7:32 AM 0 comments   

  By Popular Demand, Harry Lewis Before I had the chance to read Harry Lewis' piece in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, one reader posted it, and another suggested I move it to the front page here.

Because I am nothing if not sensitive to the suggestions of those of you good enough to visit this blog...without further ado....


Has Harvard Lost Its Way?
By HARRY R. LEWIS

Harvard strives to be the best at many things, and it often succeeds. But Harvard has protected its reputation for excellence at the expense of its sense of a larger purpose. Harvard’s leaders have allowed the university’s mission to drift from education to customer satisfaction. For them, Harvard is no longer a city upon a hill but merely a brand name.

Today’s Harvard education offers as a common thread nothing like the Puritans’ fear that their children would be left without a learned ministry, or the 19th- and early-20th-century benefactor Henry Lee Higginson’s conviction that “the health and true welfare of our University and our country go hand in hand,” or the worry of the 1945 curricular reform, General Education in a Free Society, that civilization itself might lie in the balance if Harvard did not do its job. The old ideal of a liberal education lives on in name only. No longer does Harvard teach the things that free the human mind and spirit. In 2005, after a three-year review of its curriculum, it headed toward the conclusion that its students are free agents and for the most part should study what they wish.

A liberal education in the sense Harvard now uses the term is simply an education not meant to make students employable. Undergraduate education should not be too advanced or too specialized, nor should it include courses that would be helpful in the world of business. Becoming too skilled at any one thing, so skilled that a graduate could make a living doing it, is distasteful. Students are better off being broadly educated generalists — though not much breadth can be demanded because students would resist any requirement.

Undergraduate education defined in that way allows professors to do as they wish as well. In an effort to persuade me that I should back the newly proposed, requirement-light curriculum, one professor offered that it meant we faculty members would no longer have to teach students who did not want to take our courses. But the courses from which students learn the most are often ones they would be disinclined to take without being pressed to do so. The general-education courses I took on Western philosophy stretched and rewarded me, and the core course I teach on information technology and society plays that role for my students. If professors can define their job as teaching what they wish to those who wish to be taught it, Harvard will not carry the centuries-old ideal of a liberal education forward into the next generation. It will instead indulge students’ inclinations to learn more of what they know already, while avoiding unpleasant but enlightening disagreements among professors about the relative importance of different studies. Liberal education will be reduced to an easy compromise among academics rather than a long-term commitment to the welfare of students and the society they will serve.

Even excellence assumes different meanings depending on the circumstances. No more than half the class should graduate with honors, Harvard opines, to preserve the value of the honors degree. The effect may be to make Harvard graduates, in aggregate, less well educated rather than more, but at least the news media will no longer deride us for grade inflation. The very concept of an honors program should be discarded, according to proposals afloat in late 2005. At the same time as Harvard plans to remove incentives to pursue advanced work in a field, it is proposing incentives to dilettantism, in the form of “secondary fields” in which students could earn recognition for a mere smattering of learning. In fact, stimulating Harvard’s remarkable students to do excellent work is beyond our ambitions. That lowering of expectations may reflect a reluctance of some faculty members to educate students.

Harvard teaches students but does not make them wise. They may achieve extraordinary excellence in both academic and extracurricular endeavors, but the whole educational experience does not cohere. Few could give a good answer, five or 10 years after graduation day, to the simple question: What was the most important thing Harvard taught you? Parents hope that their children will remember, in later life, lessons greater than how to parallel park or how to balance a checkbook. Like good parents, a good university should help its students understand the complexities of the human condition — or at least what others, men and women of acknowledged wisdom, have thought about the difficulties of living an examined life. A good university challenges its students to ask questions that are both disturbing and deeply important. Part of becoming a responsible adult educated in the best tradition of human thought is to come to grips, personally, with the basic questions of life.

One might argue that the great, sprawling, modern research university must be different things to different people. Perhaps, given the other demands on its faculty, the best it can hope to do educationally is to present a menu from which its multitalented, multiethnic, multicultural, multinational students can pick and choose. That cafeteria theory of education avoids the problem of valuing some things more than others, of judging that the specialties of some professors are more important for educated citizens than the specialties of others. It suggests that character and morality are not the university’s business at all.

Some of the forces that have brought universities to incoherence are societal. Universities did not create the consumer culture, but they have been overtaken by it. Universities did not become expensive by themselves, but they are subject to the same economic forces as other institutions. What universities have not done is to resist societal forces where resistance would be right and proper. The greatest universities have fared the best — they are the highest ranked and the most sought after by the customers. Sadly, although their wealth and their desirability have put them in the best position to press back against the forces that have compromised the education they offer, they have instead drifted complacently along with those forces. Harvard, as the best of them all, can push back most easily.

But the forces controlling Harvard today want it to follow the crowd. If most other universities have something, be it a simple distribution requirement for graduation or a women’s center, the new Harvard thinks they must be right. It is easier to justify doing as others do than to defend the principles behind Harvard’s uniqueness. Harvard needs the will to push back where thoughtful consideration should lead it to other choices. That will must come from everyone who is part of the Harvard family.

First, the leadership of the university. Harvard requires strong leadership. Harvard is not a direct democracy, not even a representative democracy. Decisions at Harvard cannot follow the average or the majority sentiment. Harvard needs leaders whom others will follow, not unquestioningly but with confidence and respect. But Harvard is not an autocracy either. In fact, it is more like a volunteer agency. Students at Harvard are volunteers — they would all be welcomed at other good colleges if they wanted to leave. Even though they are subject to Harvard rules and regulations while enrolled, their power of passive resistance is far stronger than the university’s power of coercion. They will study hard and do good work only if they are inspired. Every faculty member is a volunteer, too. Leading professors is, admittedly, like herding cats. They could all get jobs elsewhere at the drop of a hat. There are few effective punishments for professors, especially those with tenure, so the president and the deans cannot order them to be obedient. Almost everything professors do, they do because they have come to believe in its importance and rightness, not because someone above their pay grade tells them they should do it.

Even the support staff are volunteers. Those pushing paper can be made to do their jobs in the way that clerks everywhere are kept in line. But when they come in contact with students, they are likely to put on their human faces and to be candid about the way things work. Their loyalty is invaluable. The truth about Harvard’s attitudes, motivations, and hypocrisies travels very efficiently by word of mouth in a university, whatever the communications office may say. There is no upstairs and downstairs in a healthy college. Students talk all the time to the police officers, the medical trainers, the financial-aid officers, not to mention those with official advising and counseling roles. The employees at the bottom of the organizational tree are the ones who see students the most. They, too, are educators. They absorb the spirit of the institution and convey its values to students every day.

Most important in articulating and communicating institutional values is Harvard’s civil service. Many long-serving educational administrators have inexplicably left Harvard in recent years. The buzzwords of the new approach to such appointments include “professionalizing” the staff, bringing in “fresh ideas,” and just “shaking things up.” Reorganization is a disruptive and unending process. New organizational trees accompany reorganizations, with hierarchical, sharply defined reporting structures and new jobs to be filled by newly hired staff members. Though touted as making Harvard better, such moves often succeed only in shifting attention away from the big picture. Each new dean or administrator or vice provost assumes responsibility for some immediate task, which thereby becomes no one else’s problem.

The reorganizations have also eliminated many of those who knew how Harvard used to be. Far more significant than any structural effect has been the incalculable loss of many administrators who recognized their work as education and saw in it a high calling. They thought rigorously about the goals of a college education and how their part of Harvard might work with others to fulfill those goals. They were reflective about causes and effects, smart about students, and reluctant to risk teaching the wrong larger lesson by a quick decision that might be expedient in the short run. They were self-effacing members of a collective effort, and they provided perspective on deep and enduring problems. They were, in other words, genuine educational professionals. They left Harvard, or were forced to leave, because they did not fit into the new, retail-store university, in which orders are taken, defects are papered over to get the merchandise out the door, and the customers are sent home happy by “student-service professionals.”

Lawrence Summers was the product, not the source, of the trends that brought Harvard to its present predicament. He is an economist, who sees the actions and decisions of men and women as governed by rational choice and power, not by belief and commitment. He was hired by, and was answerable to, a governing board consisting largely of people from the world of business and finance. As a former U.S. treasury secretary, he understands the power of money to shape society. In his Washington years, he learned the ways of politics and the power of the media — and the importance of controlling information and communication, of message over substance.

Summers cultivated a reputation as a provocateur, but he avoided comment on difficult issues, such as banning military recruiters from campus, to stave off adverse publicity. The Summers administration cannot even be credited with making the university more businesslike. Summers centralized power in order to run the university more efficiently, saying: “Academic freedom is wonderful, but it really doesn’t have a place in the purchase of cement.” But the brilliant economist was a poor business manager. In the five years of his presidency, the balanced budget of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences fell to an annual deficit of $40-million — at the same time the university endowment rose by more than $8-billion. The deficit is projected to rise to $100-million within five years. Summers hired many high-priced consultants to review administrative structures, but the main result was to swell the bureaucracy of assistant provosts, vice provosts, and vice presidents; divisional deans and deputy deans; and assistant deans and associate deans. Much of the daily business of the university now becomes stalled in the bureaucratic thicket.

The vast power Summers held might have enabled him to achieve great successes. But his misfortunes arose from the impatience, harshness, thoughtlessness, and lack of candor with which he used that power. In the Harvard of President Summers, students and faculty members were like the electorate as seen from Washington, D.C. interest groups, not collections of individuals. Interest groups are given what their spokespersons say the groups want, in proportion to their size and influence. Educational pros and cons were balanced by political, not intellectual, analysis.

Summers enjoyed his celebrity; The Harvard Crimson called him a “rock-star president.” If unhappiness created public-relations problems, the president could earmark funds to buy peace. Most retellings of the tale of Summers’s remarks about women in science and engineering do not report the real source of the anger it caused. In his speech, he belittled the importance of gender discrimination as an explanation for the small number of women scientists and said he thought that “intrinsic aptitude” was a more important factor. Yet three months earlier, when a large group of women professors pointed out to him a dramatic decline in hiring of women faculty members, he offered no such theory. The faculty furor came because his speech revealed, to what he thought would be a friendly crowd, his doubt that ordinary hiring efforts would ever yield many first-class women scientists. He responded by apologizing, creating a new bureaucracy, and committing a large sum of money. The apologies and funds did not, however, erase the memory of Summers’s insincerity.

Public controversies and internal dissatisfactions marked Summers’s tenure as president, but too much has been made of his personality and his management style in explaining his downfall. Surely he was as much of a bully as a bull in a china shop, and his contempt extended not just to individuals but to entire fields of study, but none of that would have mattered if his ideas had been inspiring. Summers presented no imaginative program, envisioned no educational ideal, carried no flaming torch that students or faculty members wanted to follow. Because whatever agenda he had was advanced so ineffectively and unconvincingly, Summers will be remembered as a weak president, not a strong one.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences resolved last March that “the faculty lacks confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers.” Coming two months after Summers’s speech on women in science, the vote has often been construed as a rebuke of his views, but the debate leading up to it raised broader issues of substance, integrity, and governance. Any motion condemning a particular action or opinion probably would have failed.

The lack of confidence of the Harvard faculty in its president was widely caricatured as stemming from a complacent faculty’s resistance to his controversial and innovative ideas, a backlash resulting from his abrasiveness, or more simply an attack by feminist harpies allied with leftist crazies. The reality is that the ideas Summers offered did not meet the Harvard standard. He expressed his “controversial” ideas as one-liners in brief talks, not in essays in which ideas struggled against contrary ideas. There was in his presidency a striking absence of the balanced, thoughtful, and informed analysis that characterizes the academy at its best. Where earlier Harvard presidents, including Summers’s immediate predecessors Derek Bok and Neil Rudenstine, wrote eloquent essays about matters they thought worthy of broad attention, Summers avoided using the written word to provide deep analysis of complex issues.

His willingness to offend made him a hero to some, inside and outside Harvard, even as it insulted others. Summers’s presidency ended, however, not because of stylistic gaffes but because of disclosures of apparent dishonesty, which tipped the views of professors who had supported him during earlier controversies. When asked in a recent faculty meeting if he had any opinion about the university’s actions in the Andrei Shleifer affair, in which the university paid millions to settle a federal lawsuit involving a fellow economist, Summers denied knowing enough to make a judgment. That provoked soft murmurs from the many professors already familiar with Harvard’s role. Discredited as a moral leader, he could no longer play the role of academic leader.

Then a few days later, Peter Ellison, the former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, reportedthat, in response to a question in an earlier faculty meeting, the president had misrepresented his plans to change the faculty’s authority over doctoral programs. The issue, said Ellison, had become one of the president’s character, not his personality or style. A second no-confidence vote was scheduled; it would certainly have passed by a wide margin. Summers chose to offer his resignation rather than suffer that humiliation.

Lists of Summers’s achievements were quickly posted on the Harvard Web site and parroted in major newspapers, both by news reporters and opinion writers. Yet many of the successes claimed for Summers are neither his nor real. To the extent that his agenda had substance, incompetent administration and lack of sustained attention damaged it more than any faculty intransigence.

Ultimately, Summers lacked the skills needed to make significant improvements in undergraduate education. His style was portrayed as hard-nosed and data-driven, but data documenting educational problem areas had been collected and published for years. An expanded seminar program, more study abroad, and an introductory science course have been claimed as his curricular achievements, but they fit into no big educational picture and may not even be improvements. The faculty was already discussing the need for a curricular review a year before Summers became president; he deserves the credit for its official launch, but also the blame for its ham-handed management. In spite of the expectations he created when he became president, the undergraduate academic program he leaves behind may be less rigorous than the one he inherited and demand less study of science and of foreign cultures. The new financial-aid program he touted for low-income students amounted to only $2-million in a financial-aid budget of almost $85-million. Summers announced the new program in a media blitz, but credited none of the earlier work documenting the seriousness of the issue.

Planning for Harvard’s new campus across the Charles River in Allston, regularly cited as one of Summers’s greatest accomplishments, proceeded with the same disorganization as the curricular review — with multiple, poorly coordinated task forces, their work ignored when found flawed or unwelcome.

All that is to be expected in a university that orients itself toward external markers of prestige and influence. Deliberation and debate are not the currency of a university in pursuit of temporal values. Summers is a victim in this drama, not a villain — a victim not of faculty anger but of his success at the role assigned to him.

Lawrence Summers’s principal failing was not that he was too strong or too uncongenial, but that the wisdom, knowledge, and judgment he lent to faculty affairs were too feeble. In the end, professors realized that Summers was not offering leadership they could respect. The Harvard faculty would rather mind its own business than vote down the president; they did not do so for sport. The majority voted against him, and a larger majority was prepared to do it again, because his intellectual contributions as president failed to meet Harvard’s high standards and to bring honor to the institution.

What Harvard needs more than anything are ideas and idealism, and those have to be articulated from the top. With the announcement that Derek Bok will be acting president, Harvard is already restoring confidence in its leadership. While some news-media accounts have characterized Harvard professors as inmates eager to run the asylum, the serious question is about the wishes not of the professors, but of the governing board, the Harvard Corporation. In searching for Summers’s successor, it runs the risk of being distracted by superficialities — candidates’ gender, celebrity, and manners, for example. Yet it also has the opportunity to return to original principles, to think deeply about how a college fits within a research university in the 21st century, about how Harvard can do the most good for society, and about how Harvard fits within America and the world.

During most of the Summers years, the Harvard Corporation had a leadership vacuum. Its members were rarely heard from in public and rarely spoke to those who made the university run, except the president and his staff. If Harvard were a publicly held corporation in today’s climate of intensely scrutinized corporate governance, the shareholders would have been up in arms. In airing their concerns about Summers’s leadership, Harvard professors were playing the role of shareholders. In 2005 some fellows who had joined the corporation since Summers’s selection began to listen to what professors were telling them, and the corporation ultimately played its proper fiduciary role.

For Harvard to reclaim its soul, the alumni must recognize what has happened to their university. To the extent that controversies at Harvard were portrayed as a struggle between the president and the professors, the alumni stood skeptically on the sideline. They were led to see faculty members as ivory-tower snobs or social radicals; when Summers attacked Cornel West, an African-American-studies professor who wore an Afro and released a rap album, they gave the president the benefit of the doubt. But alumni who remember Harvard for the lasting values it gave them should recognize where economic and market incentives are taking their university. The alumni-elected Board of Overseers, the large if marginalized second of Harvard’s governing boards, was awakened during the Summers crisis. It must not return to functioning as the university’s cheerleaders rather than its governors.

The biggest tasks await the faculty. Every decision concerning undergraduates should be held to an educational standard. No matter what the choice, whether affecting academic programs or student life, the question should be asked: If we do this, then over the course of four years, what lessons will Harvard students learn, and will they become better educated? Only if the faculty is engaged, in small ways and large, in considering the purpose of changes can wise changes be made — changes that will make Harvard graduates both excellent and prepared to serve their roles in society.

The next Harvard president must help the faculty develop a shared sense of educational responsibility for its undergraduates. There is no better student body anywhere, and we professors are teaching them because they are the promise of the world. We must design a curriculum for those future citizens, professionals, and scholars that we ourselves respect.

We will never return to the days of General Education in a Free Society, when the faculty imagined that all students might take one course. But there is an enormous difference between that impossible unity and today’s total disunity. The faculty must find a way to set priorities for itself so that it can give some guidance to students about what educated people, civilized people, should know in the 21st century.

The faculty needs to change, too. There is a great deal of good will among professors for more attention to undergraduates, and a great many disincentives and cultural biases prevent that good will from being translated into practice. Some of the change can, with incentives from the university’s leaders, happen quickly. Departments that are famously indifferent to undergraduates can, tenure notwithstanding, undergo the same process of reorganization that is applied to other underperforming units. In the longer run, teaching should be a serious component of faculty-hiring criteria, not simply a peripheral item. Alumni, parents, students can all call for change, and governing boards can insist on it. Honest means of evaluating teaching will have to be developed, mechanisms that are as scrupulously unbiased as the rigorous system of external reviewers used to evaluate the scholarship of tenure candidates. More fundamentally, “teaching” needs to mean more than skill at lecturing and leading seminars. We must find a way to honor good character in our faculty members and to penalize acts that call a professor’s character into question. The evaluation of character is easier said than done, given the risks of bias and prejudice. But the present system so discourages any judgment of personal character that a better system would not be difficult to design.

Finally, the counseling and therapeutic services for undergraduates must share the stage with a less clinical treatment of students’ hearts and souls. There is no program for that change. Telling students to go to church is not the answer, though church is an answer for some students. Community service is also an answer for some, though it has become so professionalized and technical that many students draw more managerial than spiritual value from volunteering. The opportunity to study under exemplary visitors from the “real world” is a special privilege of Harvard students. The teaching of challenging texts, literary or philosophical, can raise in today’s students the same important and troubling questions they have raised in other readers for centuries — if they are not taught to elicit “correct” answers that will earn high grades.

None of these proposals are inimical to excellence. Excellence must remain a guiding value, but the pursuit of excellence should no longer be an excuse for ignoring everything else. Faculty members should be expected to offer some courses that span large domains of human thought. Professors, like graduates, should possess knowledge in many things as well as expertise in one.

The restoration of a true core to undergraduate education, an approach to education that will turn dependent adolescents into wise adults, circles back to the question of leadership. The university’s leaders must believe in the process of self-discovery, and they must articulate that belief. They must support and praise faculty members and coaches and deans and career counselors and therapists who recognize its importance. To that end, the leaders must themselves embody the values of self-understanding, maturity, strength of character, compassion and empathy for others, as well as scholarly excellence. Everyone in the university — parents, students, professors, and members of the governing boards — should have a say in judging whether that standard is met.   ¶ 11:02 PM 2 comments   

  At Harvard, a Decanal Candidate? The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice profile of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard University Professor and member of the faculty council. I've heard Ulrich's name floated as a decanal candidate...and she certainly sounds impressive.

"I like to be liked, and there have been situations where the only way to make a difference is to say, Sorry, this is the way I see it," Ulrich tells the Chronicle. "People think of me as this very nice person, and they're very surprised when I stand up to them."

Not bad qualities in a dean....  ¶ 5:20 PM 2 comments   

  Manliness and the Bush Administration In today's Washington Post, Ruth Marcus uses Harvey Mansfield's theory of manliness to emasculate the Bushies.

(Does Mansfield really ask, ""Is it possible to teach women manliness and thus to become more assertive?" Apparently he does. Yikes.)

Marcus' conclusion: Mansfield writes that he wants to "convince skeptical readers -- above all, educated women" -- that "irrational manliness deserves to be endorsed by reason." Sorry, professor: You lose. What this country could use is a little less manliness -- and a little more of what you would describe as womanly qualities: restraint, introspection, a desire for consensus, maybe even a touch of self-doubt.

Honestly, I find this idea of characterizing various human characteristics as gender-specific pointless and, frankly, kind of dumb. But if it has to happen, I'm glad that Marcus has a little fun with it....  ¶ 11:07 AM 0 comments