Shots in the Dark

Could be 3 out of 3.

Readers of Gawker.com guess the identity of that unnamed “journalist-turned-Ivy-League-lecturer” who’s been a little too friendly with his female students. Two out of the three guesses involve Harvard profs. (One of those guesses, to be fair, is clearly a joke.)

Dating grad students is one thing…but did that visiting lecturer really date undergrads? Yucch.

On Monday night at the Tribeca Film Festival I saw a wonderful movie that deserves wider recognition—and a theatrical release. Called Special Thanks to Roy London, it’s the story of acting coach Roy London, who died of AIDS in 1993. I hadn’t heard of London, who never allowed his acting classes to be recorded and gave only two interviews. But as this documentary shows, he had a fascinating life and a huge influence on an enormous number of actors, including Jeff Goldblum, Garry Shandling, Sharon Stone, Geena Davis, and Hank Azaria. It’s quite remarkable to watch a film in which Hollywood stars talk modestly about their own gifts and expansively about how much someone else made them better. Roy London sounds like a very special person.

Now, full disclosure: The film is directed by Christopher Monger and co-produced by Karen Montgomery, who happens to be his wife. I know them both a little bit; Christopher wrote the screenplay for the never-made film of American Son. (If you’re interested, e-mail me, we’ll have lunch.) This film was a labor of love for him and Karen, and it shows. They did an amazing job.

At a speaking engagement a few weeks ago, I suggested that the ultimate test of Larry Summers’ leadership style was results, and that so far, the results were lacking. Summers’ style seems to have impeded his agenda as much as promoted it, I said.

After the talk, an angry alumnus asked me for specifics. I pointed to the curricular review, which I said was in a state of freefall, a fiasco. He responded that that wasn’t so. “You should read Dean Kirby’s 8,000-word letter to the faculty,” he said. I answered that I had, that this was perhaps not the most objective source, and that he could easily find other viewpoints by reading, say, the Crimson. He walked away in something of a huff.

Now there’s more evidence that I was not, in fact, smoking crack. The Undergraduate Council has released a report “strongly criticizing the progress of the Committee on General Education,” which is the review’s most important component. According to the Crimson, the Council “encouraged the Committee on General Education to state a cohesive philosophy on what a Harvard education should be before making any recommendations for change.”

Here we are, two years into Larry Summers’ highly-touted curricular review, and undergraduates are rightly pointing out that the review lacks any guiding philosophy other than the mantra to get something done as soon as possible so that it can be flacked to alumni and the press.

A curricular review needs the wholehearted participation of the faculty, which it has never had, since Summers has made a point of discouraging that. One faculty member involved in the review told me how Summers “dominated the proceedings and dismissed the input of committees that had put hundreds of hours of work into it.” Meanwhile, the Committee on General Education, for example, is stocked with his inner circle—Steve Pinker, Luke Menand, Robert Kirshner, Michael Sandel, etc.

After the no-confidence vote, serious faculty participation in the review is even less likely.

I hear whispers that the entire effort is essentially crumbling…and that what might happen is the passage of a few small steps—promotion of study abroad, for example—and the abandonment of any attempt at a larger, cohesive overhaul.

The Village Voice has this smart piece on Harvard, along with some kind words about Harvard Rules. It’s nice to see the book discussed, finally, in a progressive publication.

You have to give the conservative media credit; they realize the reality of the university as a political battleground in a way that the liberal press, such as it is, does not. Ross Douthat’s Privilege has been picked up and carried around on the shoulders of conservatives as if it were the quarterback who scored the winning touchdown. By contrast, Salon.com, the Nation, Mother Jones, the New York Review of Books, the American Prospect—none of these places have reviewed either Harvard Rules or Privilege.

I wonder if the left, shaped so much by the ’60s and ’70s, doesn’t simply take its dominance in academia for granted. If true, Baby Boomer liberals are going to be in for a big surprise. As Tom Wolfe and, more realistically, David Brooks, have pointed out, college students today are hardly surefire liberals. If the left cedes this turf to conservatives, it’s in even greater trouble than it is now.

The Crimson also runs an unfortunately tepid editorial on the AIDS grant situation.

Key grafs: “Bureaucratic oversight is often a necessary evil at a university. The administration’s unprecedented takeover of a federal grant given to a researcher that teh School of Public Health (SPH) is a perfect example of this. In February of 2004, Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases Phyllis Kanki received a $107 million grant to address AIDS in Africa as part of President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. …But last summer, University officials imposed a centralized management structure on Kanki as well as a provision tantamount to a gag order that prevents her from talking to the government, even though she was the recipient of the grant.

“It is unfortunate that the University is forcing Kanki to manage her grant through an executive director who reports directly to Mass. Hall. However, given the tremendous size of the grant—almost two times larger than any other received by Harvard—and the liability Harvard assumed by accepting the grant, the administration’s actions are understandable though inexplicably heavy-handed.”

Curious, that phrase—”understandable though inexplicably heavy-handed.”

I know the Crimson tends to err on the side of caution when criticizing the Harvard administration, but this time, the Crimson has just erred. If Harvard has long-established principles of grant management—which of course it does—then the particular size of this grant is not the issue. Moreover, oversight by this Mass. Hall is hardly a guarantee that things will run better. Finally I’m not convinced that liability was an issue here either; the comparison between this grant and Andre Shleiffer’s work in Russia is tenuous. (Somehow I don’t see Dr. Kanski investing in African stocks.)

The Crimson is buying into the spin put out by Mass Hall. It should raise the question of whether Summers’ overarching desire to control every major project at Harvard led him to delay implementation of the grant program for five months, possibly costing thousands of lives. I suspect that the real reason the Crimson won’t just come out and say so is because the possibility is simply so upsetting, so appalling, that no one wants to believe it could be true.

Meanwhile, I wonder how Summers’ apologists—those people who talk about him being a free speech martyr—will reconcile that portrayal with the fact that he (through his dean, Barry Bloom) imposed a “gag order” on a Harvard professor. To keep her from talking to the government….

Folks up at Harvard might want to read the blind items on today’s Page Six with particular interest, given the precarious state of gender relations in Cambridge.

The Crimson covers the Science Center debate between Steve Pinker (i.e., Summers surrogate) and Elizabeth Spelke (speaking on behalf of Nancy Hopkins and women everywhere). According to the Crimson, Spelke seems to have gotten the better of the debate, at least as far as the audience was concerned. Still, it sounds to me like she conceded a few points that she needn’t have. For example…

1) “Pinker later noted that women are not underrepresented everywhere, but only in the hard sciences.”

Granted, I’m going on the Crimson’s version of what was said here, but this is just nutty. As Nancy Hopkins pointed out in her essay in the MIT faculty newsletter (see below), science and math are far from the only fields where women are underrepresented. For example: business, law, medicine, op-ed pages—even the humanities. (At Harvard, men outnumber women in the humanities by about two to one, despite the fact that women are earning more Ph.D.s in the field than men are.)

2) “Spelke brought up some key points,” said Parvinder S. Thiara ’07, who sported a Che-Summers shirt for the event. “But she did admit, and I think it’s important, that at the highest level, there was no discrimination.”

It’s unclear from this quote what highest level Thiara is referring to—whether it’s the sciences, or the professions in general. But if it’s the latter, all you have to do to refute it is to look at Harvard. Where are the women in the highest levels of the Summers administration? Why is there only one woman on the Harvard Corporation?

Maybe Spelke wanted to keep the issue as narrowly focused as possible…but the argument that there’s discrimination against women in all fields certainly helps explain the lack of women in science, as opposed to the innate differences line of thinking.

3) “Pinker also noted that men and women tend to have different priorities in life; men seek status and money, while women look more for interpersonal relationships.

“’What this means is that there are slightly more men than women who don’t care whether or not they have a life,’ Pinker said.”

According to the Crimson, Pinker was positing a biology-is-destiny explanation for this phenomenon. That’s curious. There are so many plausible sociological factors to explain the differing choices that men and women make, I’d love to hear Pinker make this case.

I’m no scientist or deep thinker like Steve Pinker is. But the more I hear of his thinking, the less convinced—and more unimpressed—I become.

Today’s Times has an inadvertent commentary on just how screwed up the state of serious writing—and reading—is today.

On the one hand, Janet Maslin gushes over a new book, History of Love, by Nicole Krauss. Sample gush: “Beyond the vigorous whiplash that keeps Ms. Krauss’s “History of Love” moving (and keeps its reader offbalance until a stunning finale), this novel is tightly packed with ingenious asides.”

On the other hand, literary darling Steve Stern is struggling just to stay in print, despite regularly receiving the kinds of reviews that, well, Janet Maslin gives to Nicole Krauss.

The literary world has never been fair, of course, but there are some particular concerns in this comparison. Why is Nicole Krauss headed for massive success and Steve Stern forced to teach writing at Skidmore College to make a living?

It doesn’t sound as if it’s because Krauss is much the better writer. Perhaps it’s a question of image. Krauss, young and pretty, is pictured lying down in blue jeans and a low-cut blouse. The middle-aged Stern is pictured from the waist up, wearing a sweater that appears as bedraggled as does the rest of him.

Krauss also happens to be married to literary celebrity Jonathan Safran Foer, author of the wildly overrated Everything is Illuminated. The two make for good copy: the Times recently ran a real estate article about their purchase of a $6 million townhouse in Brooklyn.

Writers write today in a culture in which fewer and fewer people are reading. That’s partly why publishers like to have a pretty face and a sexy backstory to market. But I can’t help thinking that this is not, ultimately, how the written word will retain its relevance. Writers are never going to be able to compete with movie stars on the looks front; you can’t win competing on someone else’s territory. (And you sure don’t see Hollywood studios marketing their stars as really, really smart.)

Publishers have to have faith in what they sell…even if Steve Stern doesn’t much resemble Brad Pitt. They may just have to think of more creative ways to sell it. Maybe promoting Stern’s new book, Angel of Forgetfulness, on the web is one way….

Scientific American weighs in on the differences between the male and female brain. The piece is, of course, pegged to Larry Summers and his thoughts on the innate differences between men and women. The conclusion seems to be that while male and female brains turn out to have numerous differences, it’s absolutely impossible to say what, if any, real world effect those differences produce, and to suggest that they affect career choice is an extrapolation unsupported by evidence.

Key quote (from this sidebar specifically about Summers): “What does the research say? Evidence linking inequities in anatomy to intellectual ability is hard to come by. For starters, sex differences in performance on standardized tests of general intelligence are negligible, with insignificant differences sometimes favoring women, sometimes favoring men. And although neuroscientists are discovering a multitude of sex-related differences in brain structure and function, no one can at present say whether these differences have any influence on career success in science-or, if they do, how their effect might compare with that of cultural factors.”

Summers’ remarks at the NBER conference seem increasingly out of the mainstream….

There’s one source conspicuously absent from Donnelly’s article: Lawrence Summers. The Harvard president either wouldn’t be interviewed, or wouldn’t be interviewed on the record. Meanwhile, Stephen Hyman, Summers’ #2, is forced to make excuses for his boss—excuses that will stain Hyman’s reputation permanently.

Why wouldn’t Summers speak? After all, whenever there’s good news—about, for example, Harvard’s financial aid program (as opposed to its AIDS program)—Summers is more than happy to be quoted on the record. In fact, he insists upon being quoted in those articles.

This story, however, is bad news, and Summers wants to disassociate himself from it. Given the precarious condition of his presidency, he can’t afford bad news. So he shovels responsibility onto an underling.

It would be impressive if Summers stood up and said, “I’m the president. This is my responsibility. The buck stops here.”

Instead, he leaves the impression that he is more concerned with saving his own ass than doing the right thing….