Shleifer Stripped The Crimson reports that fallen economist Andrei Shleifer appears to have been stripped of his endowed title, the Jones Professor of Economics, and is now just a "Professor of Economics."

Whoops...reading further down, I see that the Globe broke the story.

Writes Marcella Bombardieri, This morning, the entry for Shleifer in the on-line campus directory changed from "Whipple V.N. Jones Professor of Economics," to simply "Professor of Economics." A Harvard spokesman confirmed that the new title was accurate.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Marcella Bombardieri didn't just happen to be reading the online campus directory and notice that Shleifer's entry was changed. This was leaked... Even the fact that a campus spokesperson confirmed the accuracy of the new title is telling. I can tell you from experience that when Harvard spokespeople don't want to confirm something, they don't answer the phone.

I'll go so far as to say that the information was deliberately changed online at the instruction of someone high up so that it could subsequently be leaked. (Because let's face it, it'd probably be months before anyone got around to making that directory change, unless they were instructed to do it promptly.)

If I'm right, this would suggest that Jeremy Knowles wanted the news of Shleifer's loss of title made public, but for some reason felt he couldn't simply come out and say so himself. Anyone know why that might be?

Bombardieri gets some competing opinions about the change.

Neither his critics nor his supporters were pleased by the change in Schleifer's title.

"Does that place him in an extraordinarily embarrassing position? I don't think so," said mechanical engineering professor Frederick H. Abernathy, who has denounced Harvard's handling of the case. "If students put two or three lines in a paper without a proper quote, they are hauled before a [disciplinary] board and they are often given six month off."

Economics professor Lawrence F. Katz called the disciplinary action gratuitous.

"Andrei Shleifer is one of the finest social scientists on the planet, a huge magnet for students and a wonderful colleague," he said. "I don't think we should be playing games with names of chairs."

No surprise, but I'm going to side with Abernathy on this one; his argument is simply more viable than Katz's. The issue is not how good an economist Shleifer is; everyone seems to agree that Shleifer is, in some ways, very very smart. (Not so in others, methinks.)

The issue is character, something that economists seeem not to like to discuss....

Here's a question for you folks: Does losing the title mean anything other than, well, losing a title? Does it, for example, have financial implications?  ¶ 8:51 AM