Larry Summers' Parting Shots Today is the last day of the Summers' presidency. (Some would note that it precedes Independence Day, a national holiday.)

President Summers has been popping up in various odd places lately. Last night he appeared on the Charlie Rose Show (he and Rose are, apparently, friends from Washington days). I didn't see the show, but here's a summary.

(By the way, the interview negates George Stephanopolous' claim that his talk with Summers would be Summers' only interview.)

Summers also gave an interview to Justin Pope, the AP's education writer. (Why Pope? Seems an odd choice; one wonders if Pope would agree to a Q & A, while other outlets would not.)

An excerpt...

AP: Harvard is governed essentially the way it was 350 years ago: by a secretive, 7-member, self-perpetuating body called the Harvard Corporation. Does the system need to change?

Summers: I think the university does need to reflect on questions of governance... The university's governance structure was set at a very different time when universities were investing much less than they're able to invest today, when the demands on them from a larger society are much less than they are today.

And so I think particularly after a period of some tension between a president and members of the faculty, I think it would be appropriate for there to be reflection on institutions of governance at Harvard.

AP: But to what end?

Summers: I think the university needs to be more prepared to change and adapt itself. I think that the veto power is too widely distributed within the university. There's too much stove-piping into individual disciplines and individual departments. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences hasn't created or eliminated a department in more than 35 years.

Stovepiping?

I can't really figure out whether Summers is suggesting that the Corporation needs changing (I don't think so) or that the FAS needs to have more power taken away from it (seems more likely...)

More to come later...but by the way...I'm taking Germany over Argentina.  ¶ 9:25 AM 18 comments   

  Larry Summers and the Department of Economics Thanks so much to all of you who've been contributing such thoughtful comments lately. Here's another one that deserves to be highlighted. I'd be curious to hear some responses to this...as it seems that some answers are called for.

Henry Rosovsky and Michael Spence were both economists and deans of FAS. While Spence was not as successful as Rosovsky it was not because of his relations with FAS faculty. Faculty did not dislike Summers because he is an economist, but because he was an arrogant, unprincipled, unethical and ultimately ineffective leader. But why did so many economists rally around him? Perhaps because he put his friend David Cutler in charge of the social sciences? Perhaps because economics increased its number of faculty appointments by a very large percentage even while other social sciences with large enrollments did not grow at all (Psychology) (History is the other social science to grow a great deal, I wonder why History and Economics grew so much?). Perhaps they liked Summers so much because he made such a big deal about "improving undergraduate education" but did nothing about the economics department which has very unsatisfied undergraduates? Perhaps it is because there is a dirty secret that the economists teach much, much less than other social scientists and humanists. They doctor their teaching loads with team taught classes where they show up a few times a semester and a lot of professors get credit for the same course and they make it look like they are teaching a normal load? Perhaps it is because he said out loud what the economists must believe about women not being smart since they had until this year only two tenured women? Or perhaps it is because he defended their friend Shleifer even while it deeply shamed the university? Or perhaps there are other skeletons in that closet? If Larry Summers had cared one iota about undergraduate education he would have gone after people in his own department and he would have asked them to teach a full load, to hire some women to tenured posts, to pay attention to their undergraduates, to show up in their offices instead of working at the NBER. If he cared about Harvard's bottom line he would have stopped the process of economists running their grants through NBER and giving them the overhead instead of Harvard. Glaeser is a smart guy, unethical and sleazy, but smart. That is why he did not want to be on the radio with Richard Thomas, who is both smart and ethical and who could counter some of Glaeser's self serving lies about Larry Summers.  ¶ 11:12 PM 7 comments   

  Maureen Dowd On the Warpath Maureen Dowd uses her column today to share how much she sympathizes with Anna Wintour, the thinly fictionalized protagonist of "The Devil Wears Prada," and excoriate the author of that book, Lauren Weisberger.

On the first front, Dowd says that the Wintour character in the film doesn't sound unreasonable in her expectations of what an assistant should do.

Is it so wrong of Miranda to expect her assistant, Andy Sachs (played by Anne Hathaway), to know how to spell Gabbana, reach Donatella and ban freesia? Is it so bad to want help getting a warm rhubarb compote for Michael Kors? Or to have an assistant who knows what an eyelash curler is?

Dowd then notes that she herself once asked her assistant to choose her cell phone ring, "50 Cent's "In Da Club" or the Fox Sunday football theme?"

Which is just the kind of personal detail that makes Dowd so annoying: It's irrelevant and shouts, "Look at me! Look at me!" And it's schizophrenic. I'm a guy's girl, she says—I listen to rap and watch football. But I'm helpless at technology, she admits, fluttering her eyebrows. Can't you please help me with my phone?

In any case, Dowd truly sympathizes with Wintour over Weinberger because " it just seems better, this time, to side with the Wicked Stepmother than the opportunistic Cinderella."

Weinberger's an sleazeball, Dowd argues. "This Cinderella's primary value turned out to be voyeurism, profiting by keeping her nose to the glass and poaching off her glamorous former boss's life."

She recycles the in-vogue (no pun intended) term for "The Devil...", calling it a "hiss-and-tell." Then she adds that "Lauren Weisberger plotted to be rich and famous by writing about how she didn't want to become Anna Wintour....[But] it's more admirable to be the beast to which the parasite attaches itself than to be the parasite.

Well, this is singularly harsh stuff, and, I think, unfair.

I write, of course, as a colleague of a famous person who ultimately wrote a book about that person. It's a very different kind of book than "The Devil Wears Prada," of course—warm and complimentary, I think/hope. Nonetheless, some pundits criticized me on the same grounds: That plebeians who come to know rich and famous and powerful people should not disclose their secrets.

Nonetheless, I think I can be relatively objective.

First of all, I seriously doubt that Lauren Weisberger "plotted to be rich and famous" by writing a novel. Think for a minute about American culture these days, and who gets to be rich and famous. Writing novels isn't exactly your ticket to fame and fortune. More likely she's a young woman who wanted to write a book and wrote about what she knew. She has since gone on to produce a second book which, I gather, while not great literature, shows that she has some talent for the genre.

Second, Anna Wintour has, in her world, an immense amount of power, lots of money, the resources of a giant publishing company behind her...and by all accounts she is imperious and cruel to people who work for her. She also promotes anorexia, both in the pages of her magazine and in her body, and the destruction of animals for their fur.

If you have power and you don't use it for good, it seems to me, you open yourself up to people pointing this out. Especially when you treat those people terribly merely because you can. Or worse: Because in the value-void world of fashion, it actually adds to your reputation to act like a total bitch.

The process of writing a "hiss-and-tell" may not be pretty, nor the motives perfect. But these books do serve a function: they promote democracy in a country where celebrity is increasingly blurred with royalty. (And if you don't believe me, check out pictures of Anna Wintour at a fashion show.) They are what you might call a cultural check-and-balance.

Maureen Dowd has grown so far removed from the lower orders that she has forgotten this—forgotten what it's like to have no power, no clout, no money. For a New York Times columnist, that's both a shame and a problem.

It's unfortunate that Dowd doesn't realize this; that she has no self-consciousness. If she did, she might realize that her description of Weisberger—the parasite attaching itself to the beast—is, some would say, a pretty good description of journalists. If Maureen Dowd really wants to see the devil in Prada, she should look in the mirror.  ¶ 9:02 AM 3 comments   

  Harvard To Ellison: You're a Liar Marcella Bombardieri picks up the Larry Ellison story in today's Globe, in which several Harvard officials speculate on what Ellison's real motives for reneging on his proposed $115 million donation may have been.

No one seems to believe that Ellison is really so upset over Summers' departure that it just wouldn't be the same for him to pay up.

Writes Bombardieri:

Christopher Murray, the professor who would have run the institute, questioned Ellison's statement that the gift was withdrawn because of Summers's resignation .

``I am not sure what to make of Ellison's remarks, as he was not willing to speak with Summers on this topic, despite repeated attempts," Murray said in an e-mail to Bloomberg News yesterday. Murray also told the Globe last week that Harvard had not communicated directly with Ellison since last November, several months before Summers's resignation.

InsideHigherEd.com has a piece that further emphasizes the point.

...Some other officials at Harvard say Ellison’s rationale for abandoning the gift don’t quite ring true, given how events unfolded in the more than two years since Harvard and Ellison reportedly began talking.

Bombardieri is the only writer I've seen who seems to realize that both sides in this ugly mess should just shut up.

Well, she doesn't exactly put it that way.

Here's what she says:

The failed deal is bad news for both sides, said Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. ``When people hear a gift's been withdrawn, it's not good for Harvard and it's not good for Ellison," she said. ``People are always worried about their reputation as a good place to give."

Translation: Both parties should just shut up.

Derek Bok has wisely kept his name out of these stories. But maybe it's time for the president, or someone who works for him, to give Professor Murray a call and ask him to go away for the holiday weekend already.

In newspapers across the country, word is out that a huge donor to Harvard withdrew his money because he was unhappy about Summers' departure. True or not, that isn't a story you want to get around. It's making Harvard look passive and whiny and jilted, not strong and self-confident. The quotes coming out of Harvard have a sore loser quality about them.

Here's a tone that might work better: "We're sorry that Mr. Ellison decided to make another choice, but we hope to work with him in the future, and meantime, we're continuing our important work trying to stop the spread of disease in Africa."

And, except maybe for the middle part, it has the advantage of actually being true.....

_____________________________________________________________

P.S. Here's a question, though: Why did Harvard actually start to set up the institute and hire staff even before the money had come through—especially given that Ellison has a history of shaky giving?

  ¶ 7:53 AM 0 comments   

  The Summers Presidency on WGBH Tonight Professor Richard Thomas, the chair of the classics department, has posted something two items below that is worth putting on the main page (and if you have a chance to look at that item, the first post is quite interesting as well).

WGBH is doing a piece on the Summers presidency at 7 p.m. tonight (on Greater Boston). Professor Ed Glaeser of the Economics Dept. was to represent the positive side of the Summers presidency, and I was approached by Jeff Keating of WGBH and agreed to go on and give what would have been a moderate but generally more qualified point of view. I was to have gone to their office at 4:00 p.m. today. At 3:30 p.m. today WGBH called me and asked if I would go on with Harvey Silverglade since Prof Glaeser had "time issues" and couldn't make it. Yeah, sure, as we'll see.

I said I wouldn't go on unless it was to balance an altenative FAS faculty positon (i.e. Prof Glaeser's), which had been the plan all along. They said they would get back to me, but did not do so.

At 4:15 I called them, and surprise, surprise, Prof. Glaeser's "time issues" had been resolved, he had arrived, and was about to tape the show. I said, "I'll be right over," but was told Prof. Glaeser had said he would not do the show if any other faculty member was put on. I said I thought WGBH might have refused to proceed in such circumstances.

So tune in at 7 p.m. for a fair and balanced back and forth, with Prof. Glaeser responding to previously taped pieces with Profs. Daniel Fisher and Judith Ryan which he has presumably had the opportunity to see prior to his remarks.

Tricky move, Prof. Glaeser and WGBH.

Richard Thomas

  ¶ 5:00 PM 5 comments   

  In the Department of Bad Writing "When David Ortiz steps to the plate for the Boston Red Sox, you think about a bat connecting with a ball. You don't think about a fist connecting with a wife."

—Joan Vennochi, Boston Globe, today  ¶ 8:44 AM 2 comments   

  Ellison to Harvard: Drop Dead The Wall Street Journal, among others, reports that Larry Ellison isn't giving a dime to Harvard after all. The reason? According to an Ellison spokesperson, because of the unsettled situation at Harvard in the wake of Larry Summers' departure. (All right, imminent departure.)

According to the Journal, Mr. Ellison said he plans to give the money that would have gone to Harvard to a charity that trains teachers and educates impoverished children in the developing world. He didn't identify the institution or elaborate further.

Something about this doesn't feel right; Ellison's intended gift was first made public in June 2005, and it wasn't as if Summers wasn't already a controversial figure at that point; women-in-science had already happened. In fact, at least from a public perspective, the months from June through January were relatively calm ones in the Summers era. Ellison had eight months in which to start writing checks. He didn't....and now he says it's because of upheaval that began in February.

There's another story here. Anyone know what it is?

By the way, these Journal etchings are sort of odd, aren't they?


  ¶ 8:32 AM 2 comments   

  World Cup Fever, Part 52 Like many of you, I was appalled that Italy beat Australia the other day, 1-0, with about five seconds to go in stoppage time. The "win" came on a penalty kick that shouldn't have been a penalty kick; trying to stop a run by Italian Fabio Grosso, Australian defender Lucas Neill attempted a sliding tackle inside the box. A dangerous play if you don't make contact with the ball...but Neill didn't make contact with either the ball or Grosso. The Italian began to maneuver around Neill's prone form, then came up with a better idea; he fell over his opponent. The ref called a penalty kick, and that was it.

There are two schools of thought about diving in soccer. One is that it's boring and irritating and reflects a certain lack of toughness that is very un-American; we are, in theory, tough. The other is that it's an art form, as Austin Kelly argues in Slate today.

Perhaps both are true, but I'm inclined to dislike the ease with which players fall to the ground and grab their calves in apparent agony, only to jump to their feet and trot around seconds later. It disrupts the flow of the contest, like all those fouls in the last minute of a basketball game. And, as Harvey Mansfield would put it, it is not manly.

(Professor Mansfield, an op-ed on this subject would be timely: soccer diving, manliness, and the American aesthetic. Feel free to run with that.)

Besides, the Australians—the Soccceroos—played a tough game against a far more experienced opponent. Wouldn't it have been great if they'd beaten the Italians? The team from Italy has not particularly impressed me so far...but they're great actors. Get anywhere near them and they crumble like France's Maginot Line.

Come to think of it, the French are pretty good at diving too.

Let's see now, who's left: England, France, Germany, Brasil, Argentina, Italy, Ukraine, and Portugal.

How can you not root for Brasil?



The Italian takes a dive—thereby robbing Australia, a great nation,
of a chance to advance at the World Cup.  ¶ 8:10 AM 7 comments   

  The Fight Between Larry and Larry The San Jose Mercury News reports that Larry Ellison is giving a $100 million gift to the Ellison Medical Foundation to sponsor research on aging and aging-related diseases.

Though the paper says the gift is unrelated to the $115 million Ellison allegedly promised but never paid to Harvard, it's hard to imagine that the Oracle chief executive, reported by the Wall Street Journal to be laboring under a cash crunch, is likely to make two $100 million gifts.

A source close to Ellison said Monday that Summer's shaky tenure and ultimate departure has adversely affected Ellison's decision to give the [Harvard] donation.

The Mercury News adds that the money will count toward Ellison's settlement with the federal government in an insider trading case....

From this and the other published stories on the Ellison gift, it's impossible to tell what really happened here. Was Ellison a Summers supporter who withdrew the gift in protest of Summers' ouster? Or was he just reluctant to give the money to a place—and a president—so plagued by controversy? Or did his decision not to pay the money have nothing to do with Summers, and he's just using that as an excuse?

One wonders if the flurry of news stories coming out of Harvard can't now be seen as preemptive spin—Summers making it look as if Ellison was reneging because he's not reliable, rather than the more embarrassing spectacle of Ellison deciding that he didn't want to give Summers the money.

As I say, impossible to tell from the published facts....  ¶ 9:01 AM 10 comments   

  Monday Morning Zen

Isla Bartolome, Galapagos  ¶ 9:56 AM 4 comments   

  Flying the Coop Is the bloom finally off Anderson Cooper's rose? The reviews of his two hour-interview with Angelina Jolie are in, and they're not good.... Even Gawker, which fell for Cooper like I fell for Miss Ferens in 4th grade, thought that the Coop was kind of boring with Jolie, and that the whole two hours felt like a Sally Struthers ad.

("When I was in Africa...." "No, when I was in Africa.....")



Jolie and Cooper:
What's wrong with this picture?

What was clear from the interview was that Jolie dictated its terms; in exchange for giving CNN her first interview, she would get to talk almost entirely about Africa. Good for her and Africa, bad for CNN. Anderson, you couldn't have slipped in just one question about Jennifer Aniston? Aside from the fact that it made for dull television, wasn't there a time when CNN was above that kind of horsetrading? Or at least a little less naked about it?

The good news for Cooper: His book is #4 on the NYT bestseller list......  ¶ 8:45 AM 1 comments   

  This Week with Larry Summers The Harvard president for five more days appeared on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" yesterday, making his case that the reason for his ouster as Harvard president was because he wanted to change an institution that did not want to change.

George Stephanopoulos, the struggling host of the struggling show, announced that this was Summers' "first and only network interview." Curious. Does that mean that if Tim Russert picked up the phone and called Mass Hall, Summers would say no? And if Summers was only going to do one interview, why do it with the lowest-rated Sunday morning chat show?

A couple of guesses. First, maybe no one else asked. Second, Summers and Stephanopoulos surely know each other from the Clinton administration, so maybe their preexisting relationship was a factor.

(It would have been nice to hear Stephanopoulos throw in even a token disclosure: "Summers, with whom I worked in President Clinton's administration...." But no.)

The interview went fine for Summers, I'd say; if I were he, I would be pleased. But that's more because of Stephanopoulos' embarrassingly uninformed questions and reverential attitude than Summers' (much improved) interview skills; Stephanopoulos always comes across like the altar boy he used to be, trying to please his elders with his good manners.

Thus, his questions weren't softballs; they were tee-balls. What went wrong at Harvard? Summers said, "Maybe I pushed too hard." Stephanopoulos' amorous follow up? "Where did you push too hard?"

Summers, as political as he is, wouldn't answer even that gentle question. "Oh, a university like this has been around for 370 years and it may be resistant to changing too rapidly," he answered.

Stephanopoulos' next challenging question: "You were also pushing against political correctness on a number of fronts." He mentioned ROTC, grade inflation, women in science. "Were you a victim of political correctness?"

Summers said no, then, basically, yes. "That's much too simple a characterization. There are a lot of things that went on here. I do believe that universities like this one must be open-minded to every perspective, be prepared to take on every subject...and I did speak out on those things."

A key to decoding Summers: When he says "universities like this one," which he says a lot, he means "Harvard." It's a way of implicitly criticizing Harvard while trying to make it look as if he's making a general point about higher education.

Stephanopoulos' next question: "Isn't one of the lessons of your tenure that you can't engage in that kind of inquiry?"

Summers spoke, as he has often done, of turning "heat into light." Then he ruefully conceded that "there may be some people who were deterred from my experience from doing studies they otherwise would have done."

Stephanopoulos: "A majority of students said they didn't want you to go. A majority of the Board of Overseers say they didn't want you to go. Why did you resign? Why not stay and fight."

It was, I think, at this point that I began savagely beating my head against the wall.

First off, no one has ever taken a count of the Board of Overseers that I know of, but from all I'm told they were more anti-Summers than the Corporation was at the end. So where did Stephanopoulos get this factoid, which is not only wrong but also misleading, in that most viewers will not know that Harvard also has a Corporation, which did want Summers to go? (Stephanopoulos thereby created the impression that Summers's resignation was contrary to the wishes of the university's governing board.)

It's such a weird thing to say that someone must have fed it to him...because you'd never have seen that fact in print.

But more important, the whole theme of this discussion—Summers as change agent, taking on the insidious forces of political correctness—is, frankly, just asinine. (And it shows why Stephanopoulos, for all his pat-me-on-the-head smarts, really doesn't think very deeply.)

Fine, Summers was a change agent. But political correctness had nothing to do with what happened at Harvard in the last five years.

Which is more "politically correct" these days, opposing ROTC or calling for its return to campus?

Is it politically correct to question the reality of grade inflation? Or is it politically correct to decry it?

(I always thought that the truly politically incorrect voices in this debate were those like Stephen Greenblatt, who said, Of course Harvard students get good grades, they're really smart. Surely that's more likely to offend than simply saying, We must lower grades.)

Is it politically correct to be offended when the president of the world's most important university makes off the cuff remarks about women's genetic capabilities? Or is it politically correct to say that people who take umbrage at genetic insinuations are just being politically correct?

Perhaps what goes on at universities is simply too complicated to discuss on TV; perhaps Summers is too complicated a figure to explain on TV.

But please...can we discard this paradigm of bold intellectual warrior versus inert, change-hostile, politically correct faculty? That paradigm is reductive, tired, and wrong.

It's one reason why Stephanopoulos' show isn't doing better: The man is too afraid to make anyone angry to challenge conventional wisdom, and as a result, even when he lands what should be a good interview, like Summers, he does nothing with it.

Note that I say "should be a good interview." One thing about Summers that disappoints me these days: For a man said to speak with such candor and intellectual energy, he sure does mouth a lot of platitudes.

"Be willing to change, be willing to move forward....Ask what that institution is not doing today that it can be doing.....if Harvard could find the courage to change itself, it could make a significant contribution to changing the world." Etc., etc.

Summers is constantly on message; he has his soundbites down. I suppose you can't blame him for that. But I wonder if the outside world, which doesn't know what Summers is like in private, would watch that interview and think, "What's all the fuss about? This guy's just a politician like all the rest of them...."  ¶ 7:42 AM 11 comments   

  Talk about Funny Money Anita Raghavan has a great tidbit in this morning's Wall Street Journal.

It's brief, so I'll quote:

Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers in his final commencement address offered praise for "a Bronx postman's son," a Harvard graduate "whose life was changed" by his education there. "This man," Mr. Summers said earlier this month, "is now to lead one of America's great financial firms."

Though he went unnamed in the speech, the description fits Lloyd C. Blankfein, the incoming chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. What also went unmentioned: Mr. Summers has been talking to Mr. Blankfein about a job.

The pair met in New York three months ago to discuss employment possibilities at Goldman, according to people familiar with the meeting. Aware of the job talks, a member of the university's governing board described the president's allusion to Mr. Blankfein in the commencement speech as "self-serving." A spokesman for Mr. Summers declined to comment.

So much to say about this, but a prior engagement beckons. Meantime, your thoughts?

  ¶ 7:49 AM 14 comments   

  Our World Cup Runneth...Out Well, Ghana beat us, 2-1, yesterday, and the United States soccer team now goes away for the next four years. A shame. The penalty kick that put Ghana ahead came on a terrible call—just as the red cards that gave Italy a one-man advantage came on bad calls.

But unlike the Italy game, when the U.S. played spirited, aggressive soccer, we just weren't very good against Ghana. The play on which Ghana scored its first goal, in which U.S. captain Claudio Reyna had the ball stolen from him just outside the box, was amateurish. Meanwhile, Ghana was tough; you have to give them credit.

Though they don't deserve to continue, I hate to see the U.S. go.

I love, however, to see that Brasil is starting to get its act together. It beat Japan yesterday, 4-1. But it wasn't just the goals that were fun to watch. The thing I love about Brasil is how well they do the little things in the game. No one traps the ball better, for example. Watch the way the Brazilians bring even bullet passes softly to the ground, how they catch the ball with their chests or the inside of a thigh and gently drop it to their feet. It's incredibly hard to do that; they make it look so easy that you take it for granted. Then their passes thread the needle or go to unexpected spaces, leaving the other team scurrying to catch up.

Ronaldinho is an excellent example. The ESPN announcers, who cannot say his name without prefacing it with the words "the great," have lamented the fact that he hasn't scored. Not me. Watching the game, you can see that Ronaldinho is the key to the Brazil midfield; his passing is so creative, he unsettles his opponents. They never know where he's going to put it, and he can put it anywhere—a chip into the penalty box, a blast to the opposite field, a push pass down to a sprinting wing. And his ballhandling is astounding; every time he touches the ball, it seems, three or four defenders surround him. But he never looks fazed, and he doesn't lose control. Then, generously, he's always pushing the ball to a player left open by the swarm of defenders he attracts.

There was a moment yesterday near the end of the game where Brasil was trying to kill time
and just began passing the ball around. I lost count, but I'm guessing they completed about 30 passes before Japan was able to take the ball away. It was breathtaking, beautiful soccer. (I love the geometry of the passing game, the way triangles and squares and parallelograms take shape on the field, then disappear and become something else.) To me, that was more embarrassing to Japan than the lopsided score; gently zipping the ball from one player to another, Brasil made the Japanese, desperately running around trying to follow the passes, look like a bunch of high schoolers.

Too bad about the Americans...but Round Two is going to be very exciting.  ¶ 8:44 AM 1 comments   

  More Funny Money I suggested yesterday that a flurry of stories about Larry Ellison's non-existent gift to Harvard was curious. After all, there was no news in any of the stories; a gift that hadn't happened...still wasn't happening. Not usually cause for the media to go ballistic.

So why the stories in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, the San Jose Mercury News, the Boston Herald (and this wasn't a wire story), etc.? I know the media has herd-like tendencies, but still...that was weird.

Could it be, I suggested, that someone at Harvard was pushing this story? And if so, who would have a self-interest in doing that?

I saw some evidence of a Harvard role in the fact that Harvard officials appeared to be cooperating with the story on background—the Herald reported that Ellison's secretary told one Harvard official that Ellison was on safari, and the Herald sure as hell didn't get that from Ellison's secretary.

(Prompting one of you to fault me for blaming "every single thing that happens at Harvard on Larry Summers.")

Problem was, I couldn't see quite why Summers would have any particular reason to publicize the non-existent gift and embarrass Ellison.

Silly me.

Two pieces of circumstantial evidence now make me think that the point of the articles wasn't to embarrass Ellison and secure the money, but to make Larry Summers look good.

First, there's this little squib in the Financial Times, a paper with which Summers has cooperated in the past:

Correction: HarvardHuh. Who would want to correct the impression that fundraising didn't go like gangbusters during the Summers presidency? That phrase "the second best year in dollar terms in Harvard's history" is an unnecessary part of the correction, a little gift, and clearly someone at Harvard asked for it. The language—"in dollar terms"—sounds like that of an economist, don't you think? (Since the dollar amount had just been stated, wouldn't the rest of us just say "the second best year in Harvard's history"?)

Second, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle quotes anonymous sources saying that, were it not for Larry Summers' ouster, Ellison's millions would be en route.

<Ellison delayed the project because of controversy embroiling economist and then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers.

The sources, who asked to remain anonymous because they feared losing their jobs, said only Summers had the international clout needed to roll out such an ambitious project, which involved tracking how health care dollars are spent and what impact they have in the developed and developing worlds.>>

That is too funny. "Only Summers had the international clout needed to roll out such an ambitious project...."

He's the only guy in the entire world who could do it, huh? Let's remember: the project is basically evaluating data on health care spending in foreign countries. But only Larry Summers has the international clout for that. (Someone should tell Condi Rice.)

Now, to be fair, this storyline could be coming from Ellison, an excuse for not giving the money. It's certainly not impossible.

But then today we have this headline in the New York Sun, a newspaper which has been supportive of Summers:

Summers's Ouster May Be Behind Delay in Oracle CEO's $115M Harvard Gift

And more evidence that Harvard folks are cooperating with these stories:

The delay is curious in part because, according to Harvard insiders, Mr. Ellison was insisting at one juncture that his entire gift be spent in three years, with possible additional sums to follow based on performance. The speed with which the money was to be burned through made some Harvard officials, including Mr. Summers, nervous. During negotiations, Mr. Ellison reportedly agreed to add five endowed professorships, adding some long-term stability to the effort.

Harvard is leaking like a sieve....and the picture those leaks paint is that of Larry Summers, the voice of reason, outnegotiating Larry Ellison....

It's a little confusing, I know. So let me just take a shot at what's going on here.

The most plausible explanation I've read about why Ellison isn't coughing up the cash comes from the Wall Street Journal article a few months back suggesting that Ellison was having cash flow problems, and various reports saying that Ellison wanted to use this Harvard gift to pay off court-ordered gifts for charity—Ellison settled charges of insider trading. But when it turned out that this donation might not count against that legal settlement, Ellison backpedaled.

That's part one.

Part two is that Larry Summers is trying to shape the current perception and historical evaluation of his presidency by trying to establish via the press that fundraising was booming during his tenure. (Remember that Mary Peretz, a Summers ally, has also been pushing this storyline in the New Republic. Coincidence? Doubt it.)

Summers already promotes the idea that the undergraduates support him, as well as the graduate schools . Now, if my guess is right, he's pushing the theme that the alumni are also on his side.

Next thing you know, he's going to be endorsed by Angelina Jolie.

It's all about isolating and blaming the FAS.... and making himself look good while making Harvard look bad.

Did the Harvard Corporation include language in Summers' severance agreement to the effect that the outgoing president could not act in ways detrimental to the University?

If not, they are strangely naive, and Summers truly outnegotiated them.....
  ¶ 7:46 AM 5 comments   

  He's Away on Safari? Suddenly stories about Larry Ellison's missing gift to Harvard are everywhere. The Financial Times, the San Jose Mercury News, Bloomberg....

This can not be a coincidence. Is someone planting them? Answer: Yes. The question becomes, Who would have a vested interest in embarrassing Ellison?

In any case, this story from the Boston Herald details Harvard's troubles trying to get Ellison on the phone. Given the level of detail, it would appear that Harvard officials cooperated with the article.

Hmmm........

If Harvard is actually planting these stories, I'd like your thoughts on whether that's something that would ever have happened pre-Larry Summers. It seems a bad business to publicly embarrass a donor who won't pay up.  ¶ 8:46 AM 11 comments   

  Can You Kill a Lobster Painlessly? This website says no...but then, it wants you to "eliminate lobsters, crabs, and other sea animals from your diet" (fat chance), so you can't really trust it then, can you?

Meanwhile, lobsterlib.com (yes, seriously) makes the case that lobsters and humans actually have a lot in common—lobsters carry their young for nine months, they have "an awkward adolescence," and so on.

Hmmm. While it's true that my ex-landlady bore a certain resemblance to a lobster, I remain unconvinced.

Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters—which they say is pretty good, actually—agrees that the whole dropping a lobster into boiling water is not such a fine thing. He's got a better technique—with pictures!

He also has a nice piece in Boston Magazine on anti-lobster activism.....

Who knew that people spent so much time thinking about how best to kill a lobster? Me, I find it heartening. With some exceptions (veal, foie gras), I'm not against eating animals—they do it, so why shouldn't we?—but I am for treating natural things with respect....  ¶ 8:15 AM 1 comments   

  Stephen Colbert Swings, Hits I'm coming around on Stephen Colbert, who seems to be getting better and better. Of course, it helps that conservatives give him such great material to work with. Like Dan Henninger, deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, who noted on Fox News that a woman in India had apparently married a snake and he'd like gay people who want to marry to "absolutely, positively guarantee that the next movement is not going to be allowing people to marry their pet horse, dog or cat."

"And you know what?" Henninger sneered. "Given the "anything goes" culture we live in, I don't think they can deliver that guarantee."

What a jerk.

Colbert's response: "I think we can all agree with Henninger's flawless logic. If a woman in India marries a snake, gay people in America should have to justify it."

Check out the video—it's hilarious.  ¶ 7:58 AM 1 comments   

  Harvard: Follow the Money I misspoke recently when I said that Harvard was still waiting on Larry Ellison's promised $20 million gift.

According to InsideHigherEd.com, it's actually a $115 million gift...and it still isn't showing up. I think we can just write that one off, don't you?  ¶ 8:32 AM 7 comments   

  Fighting Back Against the Contrarians Maybe it's the occasional sanctimony of its proponents, maybe it's the hypocrisy of some of its advocates, but there's something about environmentalism that seems to invite contrarians to oppose it.

Take Alex Beam, the definition of contrarian, writing in today's Boston Globe. Beam takes aim at a target that you knew he couldn't resist: the decision by Whole Foods to stop selling lobster because of the brutal way it is generally transported and killed. For Beam, this smacks of political correctness; it's a denial of the fact that humans are predators. He extends his criticism to what he calls the "do no harm" movement—people who use fallen timber to build their houses, or aspire to stage "carbon-free" weddings.

Writes Beam, in an enormous leap of illogic,

Wouldn't it be great if we could just wait for trees to fall down so we could build houses for people? Wouldn't it be great if millions of chickens and cattle could be convinced to sign up for voluntary euthanasia programs so we could eat meat? Wouldn't it be nice if those nasty insurgents who are killing our sons and daughters in Iraq would just come talk to us over some Organic and Fair Trade Certified Monkey King Jasmine Green Tea, always available at you-know-where?

Of course, the desire to minimize the environmental damage one does during one's life has nothing to do with the recognition that there are bad people in the world whom we must, on occasion, kill. Beam knows this...but people who can afford to use fallen timber are rich, easy targets.

On the lobster front, Beam is particularly wrong, I think, both in the specifics and on the general principle. An ex of mine used to be a chef, and she told me horrific tales of how lobsters were treated in restaurants—placed inside the ovens while they were still alive because it was easier and, for some of the cooks, funny. Dropping a live creature, even one pretty low on the pecking order, into a pot of boiling water doesn't exactly soothe the conscience either. If one can minimize the pain of a fellow creature, even one that you're about to eat, why not?

Truth is, there's value in treating the animals we kill for food with respect and decency, and not just because it's easier on them. It's good for us. Killing animals with a minimum of pain increases our respect for the natural world and makes us more deeply appreciate the food we consume. If we value the animals that give their lives to be eaten by humans, then doesn't it become harder to kill a beautiful shark just to set a record? Or fire an explosive spear into a whale's head? Or slaughter a manatee with a powerboat because speed gets you off? And while treating animals humanely doesn't mean that we deny the existence of bad people, might it not carry over into how we treat our peaceful fellow citizens? If you treat animals with respect, aren't you more likely to do the same to people? And isn't the same true regarding disrespect?

Thinking about how we kill lobsters before we eat them may sound trivial. I'd suggest it's a small step in redressing how we think about the relationship between humans and other animals.

Now, on to another contrarian: the science and environmental writer Gregg Easterbrook. For years Easterbrook has campaigned against the existence of global warming. Not long ago, he realized that history was moving on and leaving him behind, so he conceded that he was wrong.
"Based on the data," Easterbrook wrote, "I'm now switching sides on global warming, from skeptic to convert"—as if everyone who was already there was basing their opinion on mumbo-jumbo, while Easterbrook was dutifully busy crunching the numbers.

But he's still cranky about being wrong, as evinced in this piece he's just done for Slate, in which Easterbrook argues that the reason hurricanes are causing greater damage now than in the past is because, thanks to development, there's more stuff for them to wreck.

Well...duh.

This is a point that anyone who's thought about the issue even the tiniest bit recognized long ago. In fact, in an interview in Plenty magazine last February conducted by, um, me, MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel spoke of just this truism.

RB: As damaging as they are in the United States, aren't hurricanes far more devastating in places we don't pay much attention to?

KE: It depends on what your definition of devastation is. In terms of the monetary loss, it's the United States. In terms of loss of life, hurricanes do far more of that in developing countries—in Central America, Bangladesh, places like that.

Which is to say that Easterbrook misses the point. While we obsess about the tragedy of New Orleans, we overlook the fact that hurricanes are much more lethal in less-developed countries, and worrying about the damage done to buildings, even cities, is to some extent an example of how lucky this nation is. As terrible as New Orleans was, other countries have got it worse...and will continue to do so because, as Emanuel has argued, hurricanes are growing increasingly powerful because of global warming.

I love contrarians—there are those who would say I am one myself—but on the other hand, just because they're contrarian doesn't mean they're right.  ¶ 7:47 AM 6 comments   

  Politicians—They Drive You Crazy Way back in 1988, an upstart Connecticut pol named Joe Lieberman used harsh negative advertising to unseat incumbent senator Lowell Weicker, a liberal Republican. In the years since then, Lieberman has become the favorite of conservative Democrats who don't really care whether he represents Connecticut (my home state) or not. Nationally, Lieberman is nothing but high-minded, and the pundits love him for it. But locally, he's a dirty, unprincipled politician who's shown his willingness to do anything to win. This new ad, in response to a Lowell Weicker endorsement of his primary opponent, Ned Lamont, shows it.....

Getting Lieberman out of the Senate would be a wonderful thing.

Meanwhile, Steven Colbert rebounds from his disastrous White House correspondents' dinner with a hilarious, if depressing, interview with Georgia congressman Lynn Westmoreland, who must surely be one of the stupidest people ever elected to Congress.

Colbert: "This has been called a do-nothing Congress. Is it say to safe that you're the do-nothingest?"

Westmoreland responds that there is one other congressman who hasn't introduced a single piece of legislation.

Later, Colbert brings up the fact that Westmoreland co-sponsored a bill requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in the Senate and House of Representatives. Reasonably enough, Colbert then asks Westmoreland to name them.

Long pause.

"What are all of 'em? You want me to name them all?"

Westmoreland names...three.

On second thought, maybe Joe Lieberman isn't so bad after all....  ¶ 7:50 AM 4 comments   

  Monday Morning Zen   ¶ 7:25 AM 6 comments   

  A Whale Story While I was in the Galagapos Islands, we saved a sea lion. During a walk along a beach, my friends and I noticed an animal with a considerable length of fishing wire wrapped around cutting deeply into its neck. Several members of my group were marine biologists who work with sea lions, mannatees, and the like, and they decided to try to rid the animal of its man-made noose. Clapping their hands, they isolated it from a crowd of sea lions—they're friendly animals, unless they feel threatened, and this wasn't something one wanted to try amidst a crowd. One man was able to wrap a towel around the sea lion's head so that it couldn't use its strong jaws and sharp teeth. A second person threw a towel over the animal and held it down; a third swooped in with a knife. In seconds, it was all over: The wire was cut and the animal flopped away, barking, wearing on its face a look that truly seemed like recognition—and gratitude.

So I was delighted but not surprised to read the following article, sent to me by an eco-minded friend, about a whale similarly freed from crab trap lines by humans.

After a crab fisherman spotted a humpback whale entangled in nylon ropes near the Farallones, a group of islands about 20 miles off the coast of San Francisco, a group of divers from Marin County Marine Mammal Center got into the water to try to free it. No one had ever done that successfully before, and it's dangerous—humpback whales are not small. But this whale was in bad shape. About 20 of the crab-trap ropes, which are 240 feet long with weights every 60 feet, were wrapped around the animal's body. Some twelve crab traps, each weighing about 90 pounds, were also hanging from the whale, pulling it down. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, the whale was struggling to get to the surface to breathe.

The divers began to cut the ropes, and to their surprise, the whale simply let them, as if it knew what was happening. Then....

When the whale realized it was free, it began swimming around in circles,
according to the rescuers. [Diver James] Moskito said it swam to each diver, nuzzled him
and then swam to the next one.

"It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing that it was free and that
we had helped it. It stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and
had some fun."

If you've ever seen a humpback whale, you can imagine what a remarkable moment this must have been. Especially because humpbacks generally shun human company.

Such human kindness is inspiring. Unfortunately, it seems to be the exception when it comes to whales. The media hasn't been covering this much, but the struggle to save the whales from hunting and extinction has taken a turn for the worse. Yesterday, as the Washington Post reports, a majority of countries on the International Whaling Commission voted to resume commercial whaling. "It's the first serious setback for those against whaling in years," said Glenn Inwood, a spokesman for the Japanese delegation. "It's only a matter of time before the commercial ban is overturned."

The way things are going, Inwood is right; there's just one more vote needed at the IWC, and then the ban—a historic conservation measure—will be history.

Meanwhile, the pro-whaling nations support their move with spurious arguments that they surely don't believe, like saying that killing whales will be good for fishing. (On the grounds that whales eat fish.) Of course, by that logic, killing humans would be the best possible thing one could do for fishing.

Whales are remarkable, majestic, beautiful animals, and there aren't a lot of them left. (The right whale, for example, is probably a goner.) If they vanish from the planet, what kind of world will we have left? Not one that I want to live on.  ¶ 6:39 AM 2 comments   

  The New Republic Weighs In on Harvard Marty Peretz shows this week why his magazine, The New Republic, is still such a player in Harvard's intellectual and public life.

First off, Steven Pinker writes about University of Utah researchers who conducted a study of Jewish intelligence and found it a) genetically-based and b) high. (The links are probably subscriber only--sorry.) The relationship between genetics and intelligence is, of course, a subject on which Pinker has written and thought about a great deal; it was largely from his work, The Blank Slate, that Larry Summers drew the material for his remarks about women and science.

The controversy over those remarks is the unspoken subtext of this article.

As Pinker writes, In recent decades, the standard response to claims of genetic differences has been to deny the existence of intelligence, to deny the existence of races and other genetic groupings, and to subject proponents to vilification, censorship, and at times physical intimidation. Aside from its effects on liberal discourse, the response is problematic. Reality is what refuses to go away when you do not believe in it, and progress in neuroscience and genomics has made these politically comforting shibboleths (such as the non-existence of intelligence and the non-existence of race) untenable.

Physical intimidation? In any case, you can be sure that the controversy over Summers' NBER speech is on Pinker's mind throughout this article.

Following Pinker's essay, Martha Nussbaum, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, reviews Harvey Mansfield's Manliness and finds it impotent. It's such a devastating review, actually, that one almost wants to look away to spare the author embarrassment.

Writes Nussbaum: When we compare Mansfield to our decent-if-not-very-flashy [hypothetical philosopher], it seems appalling that Mansfield has spent decades teaching great philosophical texts to undergraduates who cannot easily tell a careful reading from a careless one, or low standards from high ones--especially when the teacher keeps portraying himself as the bold defender of standards. Undergraduates typically take a while to learn to analyze the arguments in Plato logically and to care about things like validity, ambiguity, and contradiction. Many of them, then, will not notice how riddled with logical error and verbal ambiguity their teacher's pronouncements are. That is the sort of thing that they are in class to learn. But surely other, older people know. How did someone whose every paragraph is a stake in Socrates's heart come to be an exemplar of philosophical seriousness?

Ouch.

And finally, TNR owner Marty Peretz uses the magazine's Diarist column to defend Larry Summers and attack Summers' critics. The column is called "High Ground," though online it's blurbed as "Lawrence Summers and His Enemies."

Peretz doesn't soften his blows. He dubs Jeremy Knowles, the interim FAS dean, an "oleaginous retread"; calls Corporation senior fellow Jamie Houghton "the nonexecutive chairman of Corning Inc.," which may be technically true but is written to suggest something else (Peretz calls Corning "the company founded by [Houghton's] ancestors more than a century and a half ago," and we know just what he means by that); and says that Nan Keohane is the most overrated figure in academia. "The book to which she owes her reputation—I think it was her Ph.D. dissertation...."

I repeat: Ouch.

I know and like Marty Peretz, who hired me long ago to be an intern at the New Republic, for which I will always be grateful. And I respect Marty; he's absolutely fearless, even if sometimes his words are...injudicious. (So, for that matter, are mine, sometimes.)

Rhetorically, Peretz is Summers' most efficacious defender. He ignores entirely the intellectually defunct curricular review, the Shleifer scandal, the budget deficit, and—perhaps most important—the absence of an articulated and serious vision of the meaning of the university and its future.

Peretz is, however, devastating on the subject of faculty critics of Summers. The ranks of these Summers detractors included those who simply sup off Harvard, while his supporters largely consisted of scholars who add luster to it....

Let us remember that one of the most vigorous of those supporters was Harvey Mansfield, who was just gutted and left for bled by Peretz's own magazine. Not much luster there.

Peretz also throws in a reminder that he has money, quite a lot of it, and knows other people who do—and apparently would have given large sums of it to Harvard were it not for the ouster of Summers.

My own impression of wealthy alumni who were once my students is that Summers made them more generous; and, as for the future, they will wait and see. I know of at least three gifts in the $100 million range that were very likely to materialize and now are dicey.

Well, maybe. Gifts of $100 million that were "very likely to materialize" could have materialized before now, but didn't. (In fact, one prematurely publicized gift, Larry Ellison's $20 million, has simply vanished.) If these supporters believed in Summers so much, why didn't they give the gift as an expression of their support?

It is easy to say that one was on the verge of giving a huge donation until.....

And then, of course, one can assume the existence of donors who sat on the sideline because of Summers' presence.

We will probably never know the true story of alumni giving at Larry Summers' Harvard. But if contributions were truly setting the records that are claimed, Summers would still, in all likelihood, be president—faculty opposition be damned.

Peretz's argument has other flaws. He points to undergraduate support of Summers and writes that "the most astute constituency at Harvard, it turns out, is the cohort of undergraduates."

Never mind that two paragraphs before, Peretz criticized these very same students for their ignorance, writing, Remember C.P. Snow's lecture about "The Two Cultures"? Well, in 1959, when he delivered it, undergraduates at least knew something of both cultures. Now they know neither Middlemarch nor genomes, neither the Missa Solemnis nor quarks.

Well, which is it? Are they astute? Or ignorami? Or are they ignorami who astutely recognized that Summers' devotion to their well-being meant the elimination of requirements they don't like and a new student pub?

I don't believe that. But it is the logical, if inadvertent, implication of Peretz's own argument.

Who was intimidated by Summers? Peretz asks in the end. "Only those who couldn't answer his questions."

I imagine that was sometimes true. In Harvard Rules, I recount the story of one undergraduate whom Summers humiliated in a meeting because the student asked him a challenging question based on a faulty premise. And perhaps there were some who could have responded to Summers but simply couldn't handle his aggressive style. When you call a law professor stupid in front of the entire law school faculty, that can intimidate people.

But it's a wildly unfair generalization. A fairer generalization might be that people whose professional future lay in the hands of a man widely seen to play favorites and punish personal critics were intimidated by him. People who worked for Summers and feared that disagreeing with him or falling into his bad graces would cost them their jobs were intimidated by him. I know this because I interviewed many of those people for Harvard Rules.

Marty Peretz, who has been very fortunate financially, doesn't have a job and doesn't need one. More power to him for that—and because of that. It helps give him an unusual perspective on Harvard. But sometimes, that perspective is more than wrong; it is callow.

  ¶ 3:55 PM 2 comments