More on Harvard's Missing Money
The Crimson follows up on Zach Seward's piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, which reported that Harvard donors were withholding $390 million in gifts due to anger over the ouster of Larry Summers.
The Crimson's take is decidedly more cautious about this than the Journal.
For one thing, it discounts the donation of Larry Ellison, thereby reducing that number to $265 million. (Adding David Rockefeller's $10 million, Marcella Bombarieri in the Globe has $275 million.)
For another thing, the gifts now sound a little less in-the-bag than the Journal suggested.
Mort Zuckerman's spokesman released this statement: “Mr. Zuckerman had several conversations with Larry Summers. They had neither a final understanding of the project nor a final commitment, or a final agreement. But Mr. Zuckerman looks forward to working again with the new leadership at Harvard.”
Hmmm. So you couldn't really say that Zuckerman is withholding money, because he'd never really agreed to give it in the first place.
An e-mailer yesterday suggested that Seward was manipulated by proponents of Larry Summers, or perhaps Summers himself, into writing the story, as it continues the theme that Summers has endorsed that his departure is an enormous loss to the university about which everyone is outraged except for the nutters in FAS.
Remember, it was Marty Peretz in the New Republic who wrote a few weeks back, "
I know of at least three gifts in the $100 million range that were very likely to materialize and now are dicey."
Summers is gone, but the debate about him and the meaning of his presidency lingers. So far, the advantage goes to his proponents: They are angry, they feel wronged, and their sense of being wronged inspires them to action. As a result, they are having a profound impact on shaping the conventional wisdom about what kind of president Larry Summers was and why he was ousted.
The world of politics and powerbrokers versus the world of academia, indeed.
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P.S. The Financial Times plays the story aggressively with the headline, "Harvard Faces Donor Backlash," but the actual story is, again, more cautious than the Journal piece.
