Shots in the Dark

The women do it, too, as recent Dartmouth grad Ravital Segal writes on the Huffington Post.

…one night during the rush process, I was blindfolded with two of my fellow pledges. We were guided into the back seat of a car and one of our future sisters commanded us to chug the alcoholic punch that had been pre-prepared for each of us in individual 64-ounce water bottles. Simultaneously, I was handed numerous vodka shots from the older sister sitting in the front seat. Things happened quickly.

I woke up the following morning in the Intensive Care Unit at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center…..

Scary. And disturbing. Vodka shots and a 64-ounce alcoholic drink to boot? It’s a wonder Segal didn’t die. (She almost did.)

There are implications here for Dartmouth, of course, but also for the world, as Dartmouth president Jim Yong Kim, now Barack Obama’s nominee to head the World Bank, is generally acknowledged to have failed to take on the Greek system that perpetuates such hazing.

If you can’t take on fraternities and sororities, are you likely to take on the world’s bureaucracies, politicians, and failed leaders?

The view from 25th and Park…

Update: You may have noticed some technical difficulties. I’m working on that. (Not my fault!) In the meantime, try turning your head to the left.

The Harvard president has accepted an offer to join the board of the office supplies behemoth. Her nomination will be voted on at the company’s annual meeting in early June.

This is a bad idea in any number of ways.

1) Since when is being president of Harvard a part-time job?

2) Faust’s decision further blurs the lines between American business and American higher education. It’s an unfortunate trend, and it’s regrettable that, from perhaps the most important job in higher education in the world, Faust is contributing to it. All for a little extra lucre.

(Well, not that little, actually; the Crimson reports that Staples board members received $300k for their service last year. Nice work if you can get it…and if you’re willing to leverage the institution that pays your full-time salary, you can!)

Who would have thought that Drew Faust would diminish her credibility—perhaps her greatest strength—and the Harvard presidency for 300 grand?

(Actually, I might have.)

In the interest of balance, I should add that Faust does not say that she’s doing it for the money, but to “gain additional insight that might be beneficial to my role at Harvard.”

3) As Sam Spektor points out below, nothing in her financial or business background qualifies her to serve as a director of a Fortune 500 corporation.

Which makes one wonder why Staples would want her on its board.

Possible answers include:

1) Drew Faust uses a lot of office supplies, therefore is an expert.
2) Staples needs a female board member.
3) Staples needs a female board member who brings the prestige of Harvard University along with her.
4) Staples needs a female board member who brings the prestige of Harvard but is too busy and too unqualified to actually critique the operation of the company.

To be fair, Staples has several women on its board already, but every other person on its board has significant business experience. So why Faust?

There is one interesting ancillary story here. Mitt Romney has been slagging Harvard in his campaign. Mitt Romney helped found Staples. Doesn’t it get a little harder for Mitt Romney to trash Harvard when its president sits on the board of his biggest business success?

Nah, probably not….

The Daily Mail has these incredible photos of a Bryde’s whale feeding.

Here’s one from photographer Doug Perrine (the whole series is worth checking out):

Saw this advertised on the subway the other day. Somehow “Past-Present-Forever” doesn’t strike me as the way that I’d like to smell…

“Am ppl r not stupid as this x prof of con law.”

—Republican senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, on Twitter, writing about President Obama.

…Larry Summers is being paid a lot for the use of his name and the occasional bon mot advising a start-up university currently known as “the Minerva Project.”

In its own words…

The Minerva Project is the first elite American University [sic] to be launched in a century. Minerva’s philosophy transforms every aspect of the university-student relationship in anticipation of students’ changing needs in an evolving world. Across a full life cycle of admission to instruction to post graduation [sic] support, The Minerva Project is rethinking the role of an elite institution of higher learning.

What does this rethinking involve?

Minerva says it will accept only really smart kids, “while giving no weight to lineage, athletic ability, state or country of origin, or capacity to donate.”

Since the Internet “will continue to see [sic] a proliferation of free, high quality knowledge available to all,” Minerva will “deliver only the most rigorous, analytical courses that will synthesize such knowledge to prepare students to thrive in the real world.”

[Blogger: Not sure what that means, but doesn't sound good for sociology and Latin!]

Finally,

The Minerva Project will also commit substantial resources not only to career services for current students, but to supporting its alumni throughout their careers with academic programs, personal publicity….

Personal publicity?

Perhaps I am unfair and Larry Summers is really quite deeply involved in Minerva. After all, it does sound like Summers’ idea of a university that he’d like to attend: No sports, no social life, no fraternities, no parties, no legacy kids, no giving back to the university (but instead it promotes your personal publicity), and any subject that does not have “real world” relevance won’t be taught. (Sorry about that, Elisa New!)

(It occurs to me that if everything Larry Summers did not want in a university were made tangible, it would be the Winklevoss twins.)

Minerva is the purest distillation of Larry Summers’ vision for Harvard back when he was president.

And you wonder why that didn’t work out.

But Minerva still has some kinks to resolve. For example, below is the seal of this new “university.” Note that its name and motto are written in a language that Minerva won’t actually be teaching.

Latin: It’s good for personal publicity!

What the Minerva website doesn’t tell you is that this is an online, for-profit venture backed by New York venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. Though it claims to be recruiting professors, its courses for the foreseeable future will consist of online videos, over which students are supposed to video-chat. Good luck with that.

The founder of Minerva is a guy named Ben Nelson, the former CEO of an online picture hosting site—never particularly successful, now owned by Hewlett-Packard—called Snapfish. (Never used it? Me neither.)

Nelson’s educational credentials are, well, slim: He has an undergraduate degree in economics and marketing from U-Penn.

Here’s a little snippet from an interview the San Jose Mercury News did with Nelson:

Q: Tell me how Minerva will work as an online-only school.

A: We simply cannot do it offline. You can’t aggregate that many great professors — or students — in one location. Offline classrooms have far too many limitations. You have lectures and recitations, and separately, seminars. Three days later you ask someone what you didn’t understand three days earlier. At Minerva, lectures and seminars will be melded together. We’ll have at-large lectures, where 25 students will simultaneously watch a class with a live professor, professors who are known to specialize in inspirational teaching, not just research. When someone raises their [sic] hand, the lecture pauses. The webcams come on, and students and professors engage in a debate. The seminars will be recorded and assessed, and will be part of how students will be evaluated.

The webcams come on! Ooh! Exciting!

I love the idea of Larry Summers giving an online lecture and then having to pause every time someone raises his or her hand.

Asked what courses Minerva will offer, Nelson says:

We’ll offer degrees in humanities, social science, computer science and business — what you’d find at Harvard or Wharton or MIT or Caltech. But we won’t have foreign-language majors. We won’t bother to charge students for stuff they can get for free elsewhere..

Huh?

Harvard will survive this. At the same time, universities such as Harvard and Yale would do well to continue reminding the world of their many virtues, because projects like this are good at pointing out where traditional universities fail, but are so oblivious to where they succeed…

“I didn’t learn about the economy just reading about it or hearing about it at the faculty lounge at Harvard or debating it in Congress.”

—Mitt Romney, who generally seems to forget that he holds a double-degree from Harvard or that, you know, one of his economics advisers probably sends some time in that faculty lounge.

That’s all. What else do you need to know?

Unfortunately, the Mets won. As the New York Post puts it, “Mets Undefeated, 161 Games to Go.”

By the way, here’s a little tidbit about the state of baseball today from the Times’ description of the Mets’ opening day (notable context: the Mets moved in their outfield walls and added seats because, without steroids, their players couldn’t hit the ball over the old walls; yes, that means you, former Red Sox slugger Jason Bay!):

The scene Thursday on the deck, sponsored by Party City, was festive and fun. Tickets there cost $200 each, but a food service featuring hamburgers and chicken tenders and access to a bar with 10 beer taps is included.

Wait. Stop. Re-read.

Tickets there cost $200 each, but…

But you get the right to buy chicken tenders and beer!

I can’t think of many baseball games I”d pay $200 to see, but of the ones that I might, none of them involve the Mets. So, as the editor of a financial magazine, I’d like to say to Mets fans: Save your money—watch the game at home. Take the $500 or so that you’ve saved and put it in your 401(k).

One way or another, it’s a bad idea to invest with the Wilpons.