Shots In The Dark

With thanks to webmaster extraordinaire Dan Von Behren, I've finally figured out how to check the number of visitors to this site—and it's looking good. After starting slowly in February, RichardBradley.net is now getting about 10,000 hits a day, and readership has been going up every week. Since I started "Shots in the Dark" primarily to follow the saga of Larry Summers' presidency after the publication of Harvard Rules, I'm delighted by this statistic. (Now, if you'd all just buy the book....)

I do hope that you'll bear with me as the blog veers from the completely serious to the wildly playful. I like to mix things up, to keep "Shots in the Dark" from getting predictable or stale. I'm fascinated by the goings-on at Harvard, of course. But I also like to roam elsewhere—to politics, to pop culture—even, from time to time, to the personal.

Whatever the subject, I try to write with some humor, insight, and craft. And equally, I try to stay away from cynicism and negativity. There's enough of that in the online world as is. Frankly, there's enough of that in the world, period. No need to add to it.

A long time ago, I decided upon a principle of journalism that isn't always easy to follow, but has served me pretty well: Don't write anything about someone that you wouldn't say to the person's face. Having been written about myself, sometimes harshly—don't think you're getting a hyperlink here—I know what it's like to be attacked in print. Anyone who tells you it doesn't sting is lying. Once you've been through that experience, you try extra hard to be fair.

So I find that if I stick to that rule, even when my comments are critical, they do tend to be fair, and within the bounds of civil discourse. Which is not to say that I've always been perfect. But I try, and I'll keep trying.

Meantime, thank you for reading. There's lots more to come. And thanks too for all your e-mails and comments. Keep them coming! It's [email protected].

The American Thinker blog cites Heather MacDonald's article and refers to the $50 million diversity plan as "the bitter fruit of capitulation to idiocy."

I quote this paragraph because it nicely sums up the way many conservatives are reacting to Summers' endorsement of the diversity scheme.

"This is a personal tragedy for Summers. He must have been told to genuflect or else lose his job. He dared speak the truth, and then flinched. Far better for him to have earned a noble place in history than to hold onto the trappings of glory at the cost of his intellectual integrity."

Yes, possibly. But that's what ambition will do to a man—make him compromise himself. Is that so wrong? Discuss.

As the Cure would say.

The New York Times reports on a new poll of Harvard alums commissioned by a new alumni magazine called 02138.
Of 402 alums surveyed, 63% said that Summers "should keep his job"—the Times headline suggests that this means they don't think he should resign, though it might mean that they don't think he should be fired, an important distinction. Just over 50% think that he's doing a good job as Harvard president and that he's a "victim of political correctness."

Not surprisingly, the older the alum, the more likely he was to fall into this group. (And I think it's safe to use the masculine pronoun here.)

Anyway, that's the good news for Summers. That, and the headline: "Alumni in Poll Say Harvard President Should not Resign."

A more accurate headline would read: "Poll Shows Mixed Support for Harvard President."

Because, as the article goes on to note, 42 percent of those surveyed think that Summers has damaged the reputation of the university. Fascinatingly, only 28% said no, while a huge 30% said they didn't know or refused to answer the question.

I know a little bit about polls from my work in politics, and I think you can safely conclude from this that a majority of Harvard alums think that Summers has damaged their university's reputation.

Given the natural tendency of Harvard alums to rally around their president, these numbers are not all that encouraging for Summers. By Washington standards, they're not so bad. By Harvard standards, they're unprecedentedly so.

And a final point: It's remarkable that a poll by an alumni magazine on the fate of Larry Summers makes the pages of the New York Times.

As Nelly would say, it's getting hot in here.

How's this for a cultural perfect storm: a story in the New York Times about Jews having genes for intelligence.

I'll quote the lede: "A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability."

Since I'm not Jewish, I'm always reluctant to comment on such matters, both because it's so easy to be misunderstood and because, apparently, I'm not smart enough.

(Joke! Joke!)

(And by the way, the title of this item is also a joke.)

(And furthermore, you're welcome to make WASP jokes if you want. Everyone else does.)

But this is certainly a very interesting article and a very provocative thesis. Would someone please, please, at the next public forum with Larry Summers, ask the Harvard president what he thinks of this paper?

City Journal, a magazine of urban policy, doesn't think much of the $50 million diversity plan. How do I know? Well, for one thing they've entitled their article on it "Harvard's Diversity Grovel."

Agree with it or not—and it has its over-the-top moments—this is a pretty lively article. Here's how it begins:

"Harvard University has just pledged $50 million for faculty 'diversity' efforts, penance for President Lawrence Summers' public mention of sex differences in cognition. The university would have been better off hiring a top-notch conjuror, since only magic could produce a trove of previously undiscovered female and minority academic stars suitable for tenuring."

In a strange way, I agree with Heather MacDonald, who wrote this story, particularly when she writes this:

"What does $50 million buy you? This astounding sum, offered by Lawrence Summers as a down payment on his absolution for mentioning the science of sex differences, comes without any explanation as to how he arrived at it or what it will purchase."

Readers of this blog will know that I support wholeheartedly the hiring of more female and minority faculty members, and their promotion to senior posts in the largely all-white, all-male Summers administration.

But from a public policy viewpoint, this $50 million plan seems vague, poorly constructed, and ultimately unnecessary. You don't need a diversity dean or sensitivity training; you just need a president who thinks about this issue seriously and sends the message that everyone else at Harvard must do the same. I, too, have wondered if Summers just pulled that $50 million out of a hat because it sounds good—not too big, not too small—just right!

MacDonald's conclusion:

"The aristocratic ease with which Harvard has just dumped $50 million down a bureaucratic sinkhole tells you all you need to know about why attending Harvard for eight months costs more than most families earn in a year. Eventually, students and parents may start asking why anyone would want to."

Hyperbolic, yes. But MacDonald's article raises a number of awkward issues that the Harvard community shouldn't ignore.

Dear Mr. Levine (Supervising Investigator, New York State Liquor Authority, 212-961-8377),
Several readers of this "web—log," or "blog," as early adoptors have taken to calling it, have contacted me to express concern about my apparent hostility towards you.

Not so.

Though I was understandably miffed at your gross abuse of power in denying patrons of Pam's Real Thai the right to bring in a lovely six pack of beer, I was not that angry. Disappointed, yes. Hurt—sure. Traumatized, a little.

But those correspondents who implied that I was being "cranky" are off-base.

Want to know what cranky is? Cranky is the friend of my mother's who recently decided to fire off a shotgun in his suburban backyard, which resulted in him being led off in handcuffs by the local constabulary, a measure which my mother and I agree was appropriate.

Th point is, even after they took the handcuffs off, he was cranky.

Anyway, Mr. Levine, what I'm saying is that surely we can work together to ensure that the patrons of Pam's Real Thai don't have to wash their Kad Pra Kow down with water. I'm confident that's something we both want.

With the utmost sincerity,

RB

P.S. To those of you who wondered, the fact that I was toting three bottles of beer in my shoulder bag did not mean that I had surreptitiously swigged the other three.

It meant that my friends R-b, P-t-r, and T-wns-nd consumed them across the street from the aforementioned public school—an act of lawbreaking which is the direct consequence of the heavyhanded authority of a Mr. Martin Levine (Supervising Investigator, New York State Liquor Authority, 212-961-8377). But don't get me started.

The Skocpol appointment is a good sign for glasnost at Harvard. She's an impressive scholar—I read her excellent States and Social Revolutions in a political science course at Yale—but more relevant here, she's tough and unafraid to speak her mind. At the same time, she's reasonable; even as she criticized Summers, Skocpol was looking for ways to break the impasse. Like the most constructive figures in the pro- and anti-Summers debate, she cares about the institution of Harvard. So, some thoughts.

1) Obviously, the fact that Skocpol is a woman was a factor in her choice.

2) Let us hope that she is not coopted by her new power. (Although, truth be told, the dean of the GSAS is low on the decanal totem pole, in terms of power if not prestige.)

3) FAS dean Bill Kirby made the appointment, but what does Larry Summers think about it? In the past, he would never have allowed the promotion of even a moderate critic of his rule. Is he now conceding that he can't block the appointment? Did he endorse the elevation of a moderate as a bridge-building gesture? Or did Bill Kirby show unexpected independence from Mass Hall and appoint Skocpol regardless of Summers' feelings?

4) It's interesting to see how this story is being covered. (And that it's being covered at all, given that this is a fairly arcane appointment, in terms of the non-academic world.) Here's the AP story and hed, as run in Alabama's Tuscaloosa News: "Critic of Summers Appointed to Key Harvard Graduate Post."

Fascinating to think that the editor of the Tuscaloosa News really thinks his readers care about who gets named dean of the graduate school at Harvard. More evidence that Larry Summers remains hot, hot, hot!

Political scientist Theda Skocpol, one of Larry Summers' more outspoken critics during the recent troubles, has been appointed dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences by FAS dean Bill Kirby.

The text of Kirby's letter announcing Skocpol's appointment follows:

<
I am very pleased to announce that Theda Skocpol, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, has agreed to serve as the next Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, beginning July 1, 2005.

Professor Skocpol is a national leader in multiple fields of study, a noted teacher and devoted mentor of graduate students, and a dedicated citizen of this Faculty. I know she will be an especially effective leader of the Graduate School at a moment of great strength and challenge.

Please join me in welcoming Theda to her new role and in thanking, once again, Peter Ellison for his superb service as dean.
Sincerely,
[Bill Kirby]>>

Posted by: richard / 9:06 AM   

So last night my three completely sober friends and I went to see The Pillowman, which is terrific, of course, just as everyone says. (Though parents of small children might prefer Spamalot.)

But that's not the point of this little story. On the way in, my friend Rob and I were searched by a plainclothed security guard because, metrosexuals that we are, we were carrying shoulder bags.

Rob, who is an excellent writer and music critic, and a natural blogger if ever I met one, had nothing of interest in his bag.

I happened to be carrying three delicious, ice-cold Coronas, thanks to a Mr. Martin Levine, Supervising Investigator, New York State Liquor Authority, 212-961-8377. (Feel free to call, he gets lonely sometimes.)

But the security guard didn't care about the glass bottles of beer I was carrying, which, truth be told, could do some damage if held firmly by the neck and applied with force to the upside of the head of a tourist in the row in front of you who forgot to turn off his cell phone.

"Corona!" he said. "Mmm." Then: "Enjoy the show!"

So let's review.

1) Apparently Broadway producers are worried that someone's going to carry a bomb into their theaters in relatively fashionable shoulder bags. (Rob's more than mine.)

2) Carrying delicious, ice-cold beer into a Broadway show, on the other hand, is completely acceptable.

3) Why would anyone want to blow up The Pillowman? It's kind of dark as is. (Can you say, Little Jesus"?) Much better to blow up, say, "Good Vibrations." If it hasn't closed already.

In all seriousness, sometimes the post-9/11 security is pretty silly. I don't mind it where truly appropriate. But it's become an act of cultural self-importance to think that you might be a terrorist target: Blowing us up would devastate the city!

I wish someone would have the humility to admit that if they got blown up, it wouldn't really be a big deal.

Other times security is really a guise for making more money—like at Yankee Stadium, where they force men to check their bags in seedy bars across the street. Since terrorists probably can think of other ways to carry a bomb besides backpacks (or they could just rent a helicopter and fly it into the stands—or they could spray some airborne lethal disease over Cap Day—or they could...well, you get the point), it's hard not to believe that the intention is simply to make it harder for people to bring their own food to the stadium.

Women, meanwhile, can simply walk in with their purses....some of which are large enough to carry a bomb.

I suspect that, on a much larger scale, similar inanities are occurring within the Department of Homeland Security. Everyone wants to get in on the danger watch! And as a result, not enough attention is paid to the really vulnerable places....

...Supervising Investigator, New York State Liquor Authority
212-961-8377

1) How exactly did it "come to your attention" that Pam's Real Thai was allowing diners to bring in their own alcohol, despite not having a liquor license?

2) So what if we did?

3) Have you ever had spicy green chicken curry without a nice Thai beer to wash it down with? No, I didn't think so.

4) Did you force Pam's Real Thai to include your legalistic notices in its menu as some sort of public humiliation?

5) Just who made you the judge of Pam's Real Thai? That's kind of like playing God, don't you think?

6) I'll bet you don't even like beer, do you? Or puppies. Or little kids.

7) The fact that it was my friend Peter's 50th birthday doesn't mean anything to you, does it? Heartless bastard.

8) Do you feel that Rudy Giuliani a) went too far in cracking down on New York nightlife, or b) lacked the nerve to show those lunatics that they can't get away with their desperate little schemes for drinking beer and having fun?

9) Do you know what a blog is, Mr. Levine? Do you?

10) By the way...is it a federal crime to drink beer on a stoop across the street from a public high school? Just wondering.

"Bush S.E.C. Pick is Seen as Friend to Corporations"

—the New York Times, 6/3/05

Readers of today's New York Times will note a full-page ad on page A19 that announces the winner of the 2005 "Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom."

It is none other than Princeton professor Cornel West, who, of course, departed Harvard after Lawrence Summers questioned his scholarship, his commitment to teaching, and his political affiliations.

The Lannan Foundation describes cultural freedom as "the right of individuals and communities to define and protect valued and diverse ways of life currently threatened by globalization." West has written extensively about what he considers the downside of globalization.

Readers of Harvard Rules will know where I stand on this matter: I thought that West, though not without imperfections, was a very impressive guy, and that none of what Summers charged him with was accurate. Moreover, I thought that Summers' handling of the situation was bizarre.

This award serves as a rebuke to Summers, who has never told the truth about the incident.

Oodles of Summers news and references in today's wrap-up. So let's get down to it, shall we?

1) Here's a piece called "I Am Woman, Hear Me Discourse Quietly," from the New Haven Advocate (for you Cambridge folks, that's the Phoenix of New Haven).

Key quote: "The media love a war, gendered or otherwise. But what interests me most about such discussions is not whether Larry Summers or [New York Times columnist] John Tierney is a sexist; I doubt that either man is, and I enjoy their provocative musings, which none of us should be afraid of. No, what gets my testosterone boiling—macho man that I am—is that no amount of writing about female physicists or Indy drivers ever leads to meaningful family leave reform."

2) The Denver Post cites Summers and the $50 million diversity package in a story titled, "Lack of Female Profs a Stubborn Statistic."

Key quote: "Women, even after years of training, continue to leave universities for reasons ranging from personal choices to institutional bias. The result is that men continue to dominate faculties, with the numbers most striking in science and engineering departments."

3) Meanwhile, the Crimson has news of a potential $115 million gift to the Harvard School of Public Health from the Ellison Foundation, started by Oracle founder Larry Ellison. The money would go to establish a research center for global health.

If the gift goes through, Summers will certainly associate himself with it—deservedly, for all I know—and it would help to vindicate Summers' emphasis upon pursuing eight- and nine-figure grants from, in today's parlance, "high net-worth individuals." Perhaps Summers is waiting until Commencement to unveil it? That would certainly change the topic from women in science.

The circumstantial evidence mounts that Mark Felt was not lucid enough to decide on his own to out himself as Deep Throat.

1) Bob Woodward clearly doesn't think so. Family members "have said he just doesn't have any memory now," Woodward says in today's Washington Post. Woodward wondered whether Felt was "competent" to make such a decision.

2) Here's former Post editor Ben Bradlee, in the same article, on Felt: "The guy has not got all his marbles. The question was whether he could have given us permission."

3) And today's Times reports that the Felt family shoppped their story to People magazine and Judith Regan, of Reganbooks, a division of HarperCollins (which, full disclosure, is my publisher). "This was always about the money, and they were very upfront with me," explained the People contributor contacted by the Felts. Judith Regan, who publishes a lot of edgy stuff, turned the proposal down "because of serious concerns that Mr. Felt was no longer of sound mind."

4) The same article also includes this telling line: "For years, Mr. Felt himself emphatically denied helping Mr. Woodward, but in recent years, after he shared his story with his family, and began to suffer signs of dementia, they apparently grew eager to share it with the world."

Which raises the question: Was Felt already suffering from dementia when he told his family of his secret identity?

So here's question number two. Knowing that the main character in this drama—who didn't want to be identified as Deep Throat until after his death—may have changed his mind while suffering from dementia...but also knowing that the revelation would generate a massive amount of publicity and, very probably, ad sales for your magazine...would you have published this story?

...from today's New York Daily News:

<<The Australian film site Moviehole.com reports that actress Scarlett Johannson, star of the sci-fi cloning thriller "The Island," is a big fan of stem-cell research - even, apparently, for curing an illness that vaccines have already pretty much eradicated. "I mean, if they could eliminate diseases like Alzheimer's and polio," Johannson opines, "that would be incredible.">>

Like, for sure.

I'm fascinated by the news that Mark Felt is Deep Throat, but disturbed by the way this revelation was engineered. My thoughts on the subject here, at the Huffington Post.

Like me, Andrew Furman is psyched about the discovery of an ivory-billed woodpecker in the swamps of Arkansas. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he waxes eloquent about the ornithological implications. But he's most struck by the fact that a group of seven scientists, naturalists and researchers kept the bird's existence secret for almost a year until they published their news on April 28th. To him, such collegiality and self-selecting isolation from the capitalistic rat race are vanishing from university campuses.

He writes: " I fear that we are increasingly deaf to such wisdom, as academies of higher learning adhere more and more to corporate models of productivity and accountability, and as knowledge is reduced to a mere commodity. Students, the consumers in the equation, pay for knowledge, and professors are expected to provide it. My hope is that the childlike ebullience of certain oddball professors out and about on our campuses Thursday morning, April 28, might serve as a corrective to that unfortunate view. For at our best, we are all -- students and professors alike -- ardent seekers of knowledge, knowing all the while that the ivory-billed, though we may glimpse its splendor, will remain forever elusive."

The ivory-billed woodpecker as a metaphor for the quest for knowledge. Deep! I like it. Next, someone's going to find a white whale.

According to me, anyway. Here's my piece about why Showtime is the anti-Bush channel, written for the website TomPaine.com.

In India, five of six winners of a prestigious scholarship are female scientists.

Telegraph of India columnist Ayswaria Venugop writes, "Not that the achievement would change either Summers’s opinion — although the gentleman did say sorry — or the “innate differences” between the sexes that he talks of, but it surely is indication that, like in several other areas, women are slowly breaking through the scientific glass ceiling."

The achievements of women in science in non-American cultures has always been one of the most obvious pieces of circumstantial evidence against Summers' women-in-science theory. Ironic that Summers, who is a great proponent of students traveling overseas, would not have noticed that female scientists are not always discriminated against elsewhere as they are in this country.

*New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who has traveled to India many times, is a great friend of Larry Summers.

A curious piece in Canada's National Post argues that the attacks on Darwin and the criticism of Larry Summers are both religiously based, just from different ends of the political spectrum.

"Intelligent Design is linked with the 'fundamentalist right,' while Mr. Summers came under attack from the 'egalitarian' left. In fact, both are essentially religious positions," writes columnist John Foster.

How's that again?

Well, "the attack on Mr. Summers... seems to come from evangelical academics who are uneasy with the implications of neo-Darwinism for their socialist-inspired faith in an egalitarian society of equal results rather than equal opportunities."

Like many arguments in support of Summers, this one rests on a caricature of the Harvard faculty—its intellectual composition and its motives. I'd argue that this kind of caricature has been deeply damaging to Harvard.

It's certainly not Summers' fault (and, in fact, he may be sympathetic to it, particularly now). But as I've written before, a ringing defense of the faculty coming from the Harvard president would be more than appropriate—it would go a long way towards winning support from that constituency.

Just so you know that I'm equal-opportunity cranky.

Don't you just love that line from Fields: "If gays were warmly embraced....."

I'm not sure if that's Freudian, but it's definitely some kind of slip.

In today's Washington Times, Suzanne Fields writes what must be one of the stupidest Memorial Day columns to mar the pages of an American newspaper.

"War is hell," she begins.

(Apparently no one has ever said that before.)

After describing a trip she made to see wounded veterans—in the future, all trips by newspaper columnists to see wounded veterans should be off the record, so that they can't milk the experience of visiting those poor guys for a lousy newspaper column—Fields then goes on lambaste Ivy League colleges for denying ROTC the right to recruit on campus.

Those colleges don't like the military's discrimination against gays, she says. "But that's simply a smokescreen; if gays were warmly embraced other reasons would be quickly found."

Pardon my French, but that's just bullshit. If the military lifted its ban on gays, sure, you might have a few 1960s-stragglers who'd continue to protest the military's presence on campus. But the vast majority of students and professors would be happy to have ROTC back. Even if it's only because of the awkwardness of appearing anti-military at a time when everyone wants to "support our troops."

(Which we should do, of course...by doing things like providing them with the armored Hummers they need, paying them decently, and not letting them be ripped off by sleazy insurers preying on their fears before they go to Iraq.)

Discrimination against gays is something these universities take seriously, even if Fields doesn't.

But here's my favorite part of Fields' column:

"Patriotism remains a tough sell on some of our most 'prestigious' campuses. Yale and Brown, along with Harvard and Columbia, have no ROTC program. Perhaps it's tradition. Though New England took pride in its abolitionist sentiment, far fewer Harvard students rushed to enlist than their Confederate counterparts on Southern campuses when war broke out between the state...."

I certainly agree that Harvard students should do their part in wartime, and that it's important for Harvard that it feels the trauma of war just like any other part of America.

But to say that Southern slaveholders who rushed to war to fight for slavery were greater "patriots" than Harvard students were.... Well, that suggests that Fields' understanding of history is as silly as her interpretation of current events. After all, given that Harvard volunteers were fighting for the Union and Southern men were fighting to secede from it, then by definition, every Harvard soldier was a patriot, and every rebel was...not.

One of my favorite columns in the New York Times Magazine is "The Ethicist," by Randy Cohen. I don't know who Randy Cohen is and I've never really understood who made him Mr. Ethics—well, obviously, the Times did—but why anyone made him Mr. Ethics is what I really mean.

Anyway, I love "The Ethicist" because it gets my blood boiling. Every week I read it and think what a complete drag life would be if everyone acted the way that Randy Cohen suggests. (Like Canada.) Sometimes he's just wrong. Other times he's probably right, but there's something so goody-goody about his advice—maybe it's the schoolmarm-ish way he delivers it—that you want to go out and do the exact opposite of what Cohen recommends.

With that in mind, herewith the first in a series: Providing alternative answers to the questions people write to the Ethicist. Because, after all, it's not like the Times has a monopoly on ethics.

Today Steven Tanzer from Bayside, New York, writes about his son, who wrote an essay for his school's essay contest, which had a $750 prize. "After the deadline, the school announced that because only one student had applied for the scholarship, it was extending the deadline." The guy's son protested, as one might. Tanzner asks: "Was it ethical to extend the deadline?"

Cohen's answer: Your son "doesn't have much of a case." He bases this conclusion on the premise that the school was awarding the prize to the "best" essay, which implies more than one—"good, better, best," Cohen says. So the school was right.

Wrong!

The student fulfilled the stated terms of the contest. His essay, relative to the other entries, was not only the best; it was good compared to all the others, and it was better than all the others. It's not his fault that the other kids were too busy checking out Internet porn to bother scratching a few hundred words on a sheet of notebook paper.

In denying him the money, the school is changing the terms of a contract after the fact. That's like scheduling an exam for Wednesday and then giving it on Tuesday.

If the school doesn't pay up pronto, the kid should sue, making the point that even school administrators ought to keep their word—a valuable lesson for school administrators. The suit would attract lots of national publicity, and the kid would one day become a great defender of the rights of the oppressed.

Now, isn't that a better outcome than Cohen's, in which the school's sleazy behavior goes unpunished and a little boy learns that you'll never make any money writing?

Did you see this line blaring out from the cover of yesterday's New York Times Book Review?

"Surely we women have a gene—in addition to those saucy, but ill-mannered, hormones—for theatrics, so frequently do they puncture our inner lives and decorate our outer ones in operatic robes."

It's from a review by someone named Toni Bentley of a Mary Wollstonecraft biography.

Now, I know that Bentley is trying to write as pretentiously as she can—those saucy, but ill-mannered, hormones!—but still.....

Do women really need another woman saying that they have a gene for theatrics?

There are moments when I feel sorry for Larry Summers. Imagine if he—or any other man in a public position—had made such a remark?