Wednesday, February 20, 2008
The FIGHT over HMI
The Crimson weighs in with a nice piece about the underlying tensions between Drew Faust's decision to cut loose Harvard Medical International.
Today, the organization—Harvard Medical International (HMI)—operates in over 30 countries on five continents, providing consulting services and bestowing Harvard’s imprimatur on medical schools and hospitals from Dubai to Dresden. In exchange, the non-profit funnels its excess revenue back to Harvard Medical School (HMS), which pocketed over $1.5 million in the year ending June 2006, according to tax filings.
The problem, apparently—or allegedly, I should say—is that HMI's original mission was conceived of as educational, not a profit-oriented health care-delivery service.
“The change was slow and gradual,” Hyman, the provost, writes in an e-mailed statement. “Over time a number of faculty and members of the administration recognized that major aspects of HMI’s effort were moving away from the University’s core mission.”
But here's my question: Even if this mission creep did occur, what's wrong with it? What distinguishes HMI from any number of profit-oriented activities Harvard sanctions that take advantage of the Harvard name? One Day University, for example....
(And to be fair, there are probably 100 better examples in the medical and business schools that I'm just not aware of.)
Let's face it: Everyone at Harvard is trying to make a buck off the Harvard name in ways that have little or nothing to do with "education." Where is the line drawn?
As the piece points out, Larry Summers certainly never had a problem with HMI; in fact, he helped it evolve in exactly the way that the man he hired as provost is now objecting to..... ¶ 8:06 AM
Today, the organization—Harvard Medical International (HMI)—operates in over 30 countries on five continents, providing consulting services and bestowing Harvard’s imprimatur on medical schools and hospitals from Dubai to Dresden. In exchange, the non-profit funnels its excess revenue back to Harvard Medical School (HMS), which pocketed over $1.5 million in the year ending June 2006, according to tax filings.
The problem, apparently—or allegedly, I should say—is that HMI's original mission was conceived of as educational, not a profit-oriented health care-delivery service.
“The change was slow and gradual,” Hyman, the provost, writes in an e-mailed statement. “Over time a number of faculty and members of the administration recognized that major aspects of HMI’s effort were moving away from the University’s core mission.”
But here's my question: Even if this mission creep did occur, what's wrong with it? What distinguishes HMI from any number of profit-oriented activities Harvard sanctions that take advantage of the Harvard name? One Day University, for example....
(And to be fair, there are probably 100 better examples in the medical and business schools that I'm just not aware of.)
Let's face it: Everyone at Harvard is trying to make a buck off the Harvard name in ways that have little or nothing to do with "education." Where is the line drawn?
As the piece points out, Larry Summers certainly never had a problem with HMI; in fact, he helped it evolve in exactly the way that the man he hired as provost is now objecting to..... ¶ 8:06 AM
Comments:
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Harvard "sanctions" ODU? How, by somehow not prohibiting its faculty from teaching in it? (I can't find any indication on the web site that Harvard is a stakeholder.) By that standard, Harvard would be "sanctioning" all the organizations its professors join, and all the businesses for which they consult. I hold no brief for HMI, but as you suggest, this is an unfair analogy. HMI is part of Harvard!
I agree with Harry, saying that Harvard sanctions something like ODU is a slippery - and inaccurate - slope. A faculty member can go anywhere and deliver a lecture to any group or accept a guest faculty position during sabbatical, and the University is not *sanctioning* anything. It can't, there's a University policy against endorsements.
As Harry says, they are permitted (and even that is a bit off, since that assumes the University is approached for permission in the first place).
- Egret
As Harry says, they are permitted (and even that is a bit off, since that assumes the University is approached for permission in the first place).
- Egret
# posted by 
: February 20, 2008 10:40 AM
: February 20, 2008 10:40 AM
I think the right comparison group is big, costly institutions started by visionary evangelists and run in some kind of alliance with the University. Eventually they evolve beyond the tenure of their founders, for better or worse. Two interesting examples, in addition to HMI, are HIID and NBER, which just named an MIT professor to succeed Feldstein as head. (David Warsh's recent report has some interesting details about the latter.) These two examples aren't very much like each other -- HIID was part of Harvard, but NBER isn't, and you'd never know from looking at the NBER web site that many Harvard faculty spend time there. Yet all three of these examples share some characteristics: they are a bit aside from the University's main mission, but the relations Harvard and Harvard professors have to them are so significant and visible that Harvard's name gets wrapped up with their successes and failures. Maybe Richard's question is how Harvard thinks about such situations.
I think these are fair points and appreciate the posters' making them. I guess what I was perhaps clumsily trying to suggest was that, to those of us on the outside world, there seem to be so many mercantile enterprises going on at Harvard that it's often unclear what's okay and what's verboten....and meanwhile, the university brand is subtly changed from a place that focuses on education to a place where education is the loss-leader for other for-profit ventures.
You are correct. It is often unclear what's OK and what's verboten, because things keep changing. Generally Harvard doesn't go around thinking in advance about bans on things that have never existed. The Grey Book has some rules for FAS professors. In that arena the standards are vastly more explicit than they were in 1974 when I started teaching, and it took a lot of hard work to get general agreement on the language about what professors can do, but the Internet, etc., keeps creating new situations that call for human judgment (and maybe evolution of the rules).
But talking about faculty and HMI is mixing apples and oranges. The interesting cases are the ones I mentioned. Some brilliant and respectable people made compelling arguments that HIID and HMI were consistent with Harvard's mission, important to their professional vision (which is part of what top professors offer), and good for the world. Probably all true (if someone thinks the denouements on these two proves that Harvard never should have gotten into them in the first place, I hadn't heard that). Somehow, over time, both were successful and both got out of hand. Harvard eventually decided it had to change its relationship to them. NBER is different; not sure that Harvard ever had a formal association with it, but it's an awfully strong informal association (for example, it at least used to be the case that Ec faculty sometimes ran their grants through NBER rather than through Harvard, and Feldstein told the NYT a few years ago, "I have a Harvard office, but I hardly ever, ever use it" - in part the problem there was shortage of Harvard office space). The Harvard AIDS Institute is maybe another example - opinions differ about that one, but some in the university administration thought it needed more university oversight. So the interesting question is how the university can productively adapt, and serve some socially useful purposes with its expertise, without letting things develop in directions it will eventually have to cut off?
And then of course there is the fact that what "Harvard" thinks probably changes as administrations change. It's always a challenge to maintain a consistent posture when both the world and the people in charge of the university are changing.
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But talking about faculty and HMI is mixing apples and oranges. The interesting cases are the ones I mentioned. Some brilliant and respectable people made compelling arguments that HIID and HMI were consistent with Harvard's mission, important to their professional vision (which is part of what top professors offer), and good for the world. Probably all true (if someone thinks the denouements on these two proves that Harvard never should have gotten into them in the first place, I hadn't heard that). Somehow, over time, both were successful and both got out of hand. Harvard eventually decided it had to change its relationship to them. NBER is different; not sure that Harvard ever had a formal association with it, but it's an awfully strong informal association (for example, it at least used to be the case that Ec faculty sometimes ran their grants through NBER rather than through Harvard, and Feldstein told the NYT a few years ago, "I have a Harvard office, but I hardly ever, ever use it" - in part the problem there was shortage of Harvard office space). The Harvard AIDS Institute is maybe another example - opinions differ about that one, but some in the university administration thought it needed more university oversight. So the interesting question is how the university can productively adapt, and serve some socially useful purposes with its expertise, without letting things develop in directions it will eventually have to cut off?
And then of course there is the fact that what "Harvard" thinks probably changes as administrations change. It's always a challenge to maintain a consistent posture when both the world and the people in charge of the university are changing.
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