Shots in the Dark

The New York Post reports that Harvard donor and secretive financier Jeffrey Epstein is likely going to jail, because he is also, apparently, slightly pervy and likes to get naked massages from underage girls.

Sources tell Page Six that Epstein’s high-powered lawyers - including Alan Dershowitz, Gerald Lefcourt, Roy Black and Kenneth Starr - have been negotiating a deal with federal prosecutors who are probing, among other things, whether the gray-haired money manager paid West Palm Beach girls for sex or transported them across state lines. Epstein is currently charged by the State of Florida with soliciting young prostitutes for sex - but federal charges would be far more serious.

…Palm Beach police records show that on March 15, 2005, a 14-year-old girl alleged she had visited Epstein’s estate, where she partially stripped and gave him a massage during which he “pulled out a purple vibrator” and used it on her in exchange for $300….

More and more young people are hiring photographers to take pictures of their marriage proposals…thus establishing that the power of narcissim is greater than the power of romance.

New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority has signed a deal to allow cell phone use in subway stations.

Because, apparently, waiting for a late, crowded train on a dirty, crowded platform isn’t stressful enough.

Life is full of hard questions. Such as….

Are the Sox going to blow the division? What the heck is going on with Papelbon? How many consecutive games can the Yankees win?

“Harvard’s got a white supremacist legacy, it’s got a male supremacist legacy, it’s got an anti-Semitic legacy and a homophobic legacy. So you choose to be a part of the legacy that’s critical, and Harvard has much to offer.”

—Cornel West on the Tavis Smiley Show, 9/18

The New York Sun reignites the debate over curriculum and citizenship, reporting that students at Harvard and elsewhere can not pass a test on basic American history.

Students at many of the country’s most prestigious colleges and universities are graduating with less knowledge of American history, government, and economics than they had as incoming freshmen, with Harvard University seniors scoring a “D+” average on a 60-question multiple-choice exam about civic literacy.

…At universities such as Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Berkeley, seniors scored lower on the test, available here, than freshmen, living proof of the broadening relevancy of the old Harvard adage that the university is a storehouse of knowledge because “the freshmen bring so much and the seniors take away so little.

Just in case the above link doesn’t work, here’s the test. If Harvard students can’t pass this thing, the university is really doing something wrong…..

In the Times, George Johnson writes quite a nice piece about just how intelligent Alex, the talking Harvard parrot, may have been.

Skeptics have long dismissed Dr. Pepperberg’s successes with Alex as a subtle form of conditioning — no deeper philosophically than teaching a pigeon to peck at a moving spot by bribing it with grain. But the radical behaviorists once said the same thing about people: that what we take for thinking, hoping, even theorizing, is all just stimulus and response.

Here’s Alex on a PBS show. Not only smart, but cute!

The Harvard-obsessed New York Sun commends Drew Faust for opposing the British boycott of Israeli academics, then adds this:

The stance taken by Ms. Faust on the matter is closely watched, and is particularly welcome, because there was more than a whiff of anti- Israel — even anti-Jewish, some students sense — sentiment in the faculty rebellion that forced Ms. Faust’s predecessor, Lawrence Summers, from Massachusetts Hall. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences motion in March 2005 expressing no confidence in Mr. Summers was made by a Harvard professor, J. Lorand Matory, who had signed a petition calling on Harvard to divest from Israel.

That petition, like the British boycott effort, singled out Israel for opprobrium among all the countries of the world, and Mr. Summers, showed the courage to reject it, more bluntly than other university presidents, as being anti-Semitic in effect, if not intent. That position earned Mr. Summers the enmity not only of Mr. Matory but no doubt others on the faculty who are hostile to Israel. With Mr. Summers gone, there is no doubt that the anti- Israel camp at Harvard will try to gain ground.

Note carefully that artfully worded insertion—”even anti-Jewish, some students sense.” Huh. Would that be some students making that assertion, or some newspaper editors in New York attributing their own opinions to Harvard students?

What a Rorschach test the Summers ouster is!

Speaking of Larry Summers, remember how the former president used to be driven around in a Lincoln Town Car with the license plate 1636? (I wrote about this in Harvard Rules….)

Well, things do change. A correspondent sent me this photo of a Harvard Parking Service van. Note the license plate…..