Shots in the Dark

In its December issue, Boston magazine will be publishing an investigation into the Harvard AIDS scandal, in which tens of millions of dollars in AIDS relief was held back while Mass Hall attempted to seize control of a federal grant won by the School of Public Health. As reported earlier by the Boston Globe, dozens of HIV-infected Africans died as a result.

Even before its issue has hit the stands, Boston has published documents related to the scandal on its website.

If you have a high tolerance for bureaucratic doublespeak, I encourage you to read them. Or wait till the article comes out, then read the documents.

To my mind, this is the most important and disturbing story of Larry Summers’ tenure at Harvard, because it was a matter of life and death, and death won.

In the Globe, Marcella Bombardieri reports on a letter critical of Larry Summers circulating through some Harvard offices.

The author of the letter is former Colorado senator Tim Wirth, a Harvard alum; he graduated from the college in 1961 and received a master’s degree from the school of education in 1965.

In the letter, which is addressed to Corporation senior fellow Jamie Houghton, Wirth praises a public attack on intelligent design delivered by Cornell president Hunter Rawlings. Harvard’s president should have the same public profile, Wirth says. “Unhappily, I fear that President Summers is so damaged that a Harvard statement and position might be lost, or might be reported only along with a further recitation of his woes.”

(Which is, I think, an accurate prediction.)

Wirth doesn’t explicitly call for Summers’ resignation, but he clearly implies that Summers’ exit would be the best way for Harvard to retake the leadership status that “the world…has come to expect.”

John Longbrake, Summers’ spokesman, dodges the larger issue by saying that Summers has spoken out against intelligent design, “as recently as November 12 at a large gathering in New York City.” A speech [presumably] at the Harvard Club was not exactly what Wirth had in mind.

An irony of this situation is that the Harvard Corporation chose Larry Summers precisely for the role Wirth envisions of the Harvard president. But some of Summers’ public statements on matters of public debate have been so hamhanded that he is now effectively gagged.

Wirth is a former senator, so it will be hard for Mass Hall to discredit him. (It would if it could.) The question is now, will other alums follow Wirth’s lead? And what kind of impact will Wirth’s letter and similar sentiments have on Harvard fundraising?
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* Thanks to the poster below who reminded me of Bombardieri’s piece.

The day after Thanksgiving, I happened to need to pay a visit to Ikea, the Swedish furniture store. A bit of a nightmare, but not as bad as it could have been.

Yesterday, though, I visited Times Square with my brother-in-law and six-year-old nephew. (He happens to be my only nephew, and so I happily call him my favorite nephew in the world…but lately, he has wised up, and points out, “I’m your only nephew!”)

The three of us braved the Toys-R-Us store in Times Square, an experience I won’t willingly repeat. The store was packed with clutching, grabbing, consuming Americans; one couldn’t move without bumping into someone happily snapping up a DVD of The Incredibles, picking up a handheld Nintendo device, or checking out the new Xbox. There’s actually an in-store Ferris wheel there. Naturally, you had to buy tickets. And naturally, there was an hour wait, which meant that you’d have to shop for an hour before it was your turn to ride.

I get a little nauseous in such situations, so I left quickly.

It was the second time I’d become somewhat alarmed about the way we Americans approach Christmas. On Thanksgiving night, I watched The Polar Express with my nephew and my two nieces, who, coincidentally, happen to be my two favorite nieces in the world. For those of you lacking children or favorite nieces and nephews, it’s an animated film about a little boy who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. On Christmas Eve, he boards a train to the North Pole and visits the huge metropolis where Santa and the elves manufacture Christmas presents.

It’s kind of a weird film. The largely-deserted North Pole turns out to be an unintentionally scary place, filled with ominous conveyor belts and pneumatic tubes and tunnels and trapdoors. It looks like a Soviety city that’s been hit by a neutron bomb—an impression that is only slightly lessened by a huge midnight rally at which all the elves cheer the imminent appearance of Santa Claus, who is first seen as a monstrous shadow.

(At which point I turned to my mother and whispered, “Do you think Robert Zemeckis [the director] is familiar with the work of Leni Riefenstahl?”)

Our little boy protagonist is finally convinced that Santa exists when the Great Man chooses him to receive the first present of Christmas.

What kind of message does this send to children? There’s not a hint of spirituality in the film.

Well, let me take that back. There is spirituality, just not as one would normally think of it in a Christmas context. Nothing about Jesus, or being thankful, or family, or helping others.

Instead, the material has been elevated to the level of the spiritual. The act of receiving a gift has been transformed into a quasi-religious ritual. Santa Claus is a combination of Jesus and Hitler.

In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, we learn that there is no greater gift than the present. In The Polar Express, we learn that there is no greater gift than a present.

In Dickens, we learn that the greatest joy is giving. In The Polar Express, the greatest joy, the ultimate satisfaction, is receiving.

And in the United States, this “holiday season,” as we have dubbed it, the greatest joy is buying…which was not unlike President Bush’s advice to the nation after 9/11: Go shopping.

Doesn’t the United States mean more than this? Isn’t there some way to retake Christmas from the materialistic orgy of our vapid capitalist culture? Or are we really nothing more than what we buy?

In the Globe, Allan Helms reviews Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals, by William Wright.

It’s a fascinating story, involving a secret tribunal that expelled a number of Harvard students for suspected gay activity. But Helms suggests that the telling of it is deeply flawed, including a number of factual mistakes, unattributed quotations, and occasional dips into fictionalization.

(The Crimson review said much the same.)

Concludes Helms, “Wright has been so ill served by his editor that perhaps it’s time for a new purge.”

A couple of points here.

First, Wright shouldn’t need an editor to point out factual mistakes or to tell him that interspersing fact and fiction in a work of history is a bad idea.

But second, as is more and more true in publishing, Wright probably didn’t have much of an editor. Well, let me rephrase; Wright’s editor probably didn’t do much actual editing. His publisher, St. Martin’s Press, is known as a commercial house (as opposed to one with a highbrown reputation).

(St. Martin’s publishes the paperback of American Son, so I don’t say that as a slight; nothing wrong with being commercial.)

But I’ll bet that St. Martin’s was concerned that the publication earlier this year of Harvard Rules and Ross Douthat’s Privilege had tapped out the market for books about Harvard, and consequently made a decision not to put a lot of resources into Wright’s publication. That, and the fact that it’s aimed at a very specific niche—gay people interested in Harvard—probably meant that Wright didn’t receive a lot of editorial attention.

And since publishers don’t pay for fact-checkers, Wright would have had to hire someone himself. (I did, for both of my books, and I consider it money well-spent.) It sounds like Wright chose not to.

I don’t say this as a criticism of Wright; it’s tough to write a book about a small subject and have the resources to do it just as you’d like to. At some point, you have to perform a cost-benefit analysis: If I have to spend $2500 on fact-checking, and that’s, say, five percent of my advance after taxes and a 15% agent’s commission, and the fact-checker catches ten small mistakes…is it worth the money?

Rather, I’m suggesting that some of the perceived failings of Wright’s book may reveal telling changes in the publishing business. It’s not easy to sell a book about a small chapter of Harvard history….

What are we to make of Samuel Alito’s membership in a group called Concerned Alumni of Princeton?

Here’s what the Times has to say about CAP:

“The group had been founded in 1972, the year that Judge Alito graduated, by alumni upset that Princeton had recently begun admitting women. It published a magazine, Prospect, which persistently accused the administration of taking a permissive approach to student life, of promoting birth control and paying for abortions, and of diluting the explicitly Christian character of the school.”

CAP also protested the number of minority students at Princeton, relative to the number of alumni children.

Again, from the Times: “A brochure for Princeton alumni warned, ‘The unannounced goal of the administration, now achieved, of a student population of approximately 40 percent women and minorities will largely vitiate the alumni body of the future.'”

A couple of thoughts.

It’s hard not to see such sentiments as racist. There doesn’t appear to be any argument why a student body of 40 percent women and minorities would be wrong for Princeton. (In fact, it’s hard to imagine such an argument that wouldn’t be racist and sexist.) But the implication that such a student body composition is, on its face, a bad thing reeks of racism.

It may also be possible to throw anti-Semitism into the mix. That phrase, “diluting the explicitly Christian character of the school,” is alarming. But to be fair, it’s possible to imagine an argument in behalf of a Christian tradition that isn’t anti-Semitic, and the Times doesn’t delve into this aspect of the story.

This article does remind one of how nasty the Reagan conservatives of the 1980s really were. Such extreme sentiments were hardly rare, and they were fueled by the Reagan administration. That’s one reason why Alito listed his membership in CAP in a 1985 appplication for promotion when he was working in the Reagan administration.

Yes, this happened a long time ago. But Alito’s membership in the group is relevant to his judicial philosophy, and senators should question him about it during his confirmation hearings.

A few years back, my cousin George Blow sent me a copy of a book he was writing about the golf swings of the greatest golfers in history. George has spent years not only working on his own game, but studying those of other golfers, and you could see that from the book, which was really quite smart. I don’t golf—not unless you’re feeling incredibly charitable—but George obviously knew his stuff through and through. Golf was his obsession.

Now George has gotten the book published. It’s called Master Classes: The Evolution of the Golf Swing, and it looks terrific. If you’re a golfer, or you know a golfer—and who doesn’t, really?—this is a great Christmas gift.

…because this is too important: Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey are breaking up.*

It’s a shame when any marriage doesn’t work—although my fellow Groton alum Curtis Sittenfeld thinks that there’s some pleasure in the implosion of celebrity marriages—so I guess I’m sorry to hear that. But here’s what makes me laugh: Their statement to the press, which reads, in part, “We hope that you respect our privacy during this difficult time.”

This from the couple which starred in a reality television show about their new marriage….

Well, I don’t think that the press is going to respect their privacy. But then, since Nick and Jessica don’t respect their own privacy, why should it?

I happened to see the Johnny Cash film, “Walk the Line,” last night—Joaquin Phoenix is terrific, Reese Witherspoon perhaps even better—and it presented a fascinating counterpart to the Simpson-Lachey story. Cash’s early years as a singer were remarkable: Imagine recording at Sun Studio, then touring small-town America in a rock ‘n’ roll show with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and June Carter…with virtually no one paying attention. Now, up and coming artists are chronicled from their first steps.

I’m sure that something is lost without the omnipresent video and aural recording. But something is lost with it, too—the ability to develop under the radar as an artist and as a person without the self-consciousness effected by an ever-present video camera. Because as Nick and Jessica have learned, once that camera makes its way into your private life, you can never erase those images.
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P.S. I also laugh a bit that they released this statement the day before Thanksgiving, in an attempt to borrow a Washington trick and bury the news. As if. Moreover, I think there’s an argument to be made that this trick just doesn’t work any more….and all it does is make us media types work on holidays. Which we don’t like one bit.

I’ll be away for a day or so, spending some time with my family up in Connecticut. I have two wonderful nieces and an equally special nephew—my favorite nephew in the world, as I like to tell him—and we’ll get to spend some quality time together. Along with, of course, their parents, my brother and sister-in-law, and mother and stepfather. (Dad and stepmother are in Florida, to which they retreat at the hint of cold weather—lucky them!) Thursday, we eat and watch the Lions; Friday, we’re taking the kids to see “Disney Live.” It’ll be fun for the kids to watch, and fun for the adults to watch the kids.

I hope that you all have a wonderful time with your families. And a special nod to the men and women in the military overseas. We’re grateful for your service, and we haven’t forgotten you. Stay safe, and come home soon.

Writing for the conservative thinktank, the American Enterprise Institute, Charles Murray uses Larry Summers’ musings on women and science as a starting point to ask, “Where Are the Female Einsteins?”

He begins by saying, “Last January, Harvard University president Lawrence Summers offered a few mild, off-the-record remarks about innate differences between men and women in their aptitude for high-level science and mathematics, and was treated by Harvard’s faculty as if he were a crank.”

(Italics added.)

An observation here: Ever since Larry Summers’ infamous speech, conservatives have rushed to his defense by pointing out that his remarks were off-the-record.

It’s a curious logic. The stipulation that one’s remarks not be reported—which is what “off the record” means—has no bearing on their merits or demerits. If someone says something incredibly brilliant, it would be no less so for being off the record. And if someone says something incredibly offensive—used the “n” word, for example, or an anti-Semitic term—the fact that it was not intended for publication would not diminish its offensiveness. If a liberal called Rush Limbaugh a fat piece of human waste, and then said, “What are you so upset about, it’s off the record?”, conservatives would rightly disregard that caveat.

Charles Murray is welcome to defend President Summers’ remarks on countless other grounds. That’s a healthy debate. But the fact that they were off the record is irrelevant.

…while I set up my new iMac G5, with—I blush—a 20-inch monitor, 250 gigs of hard drive space, wireless keyboard and mouse, and built-in iSight.

After four years and two books, the old iBook was just running out of steam—not to mention hard drive space. I suppose 2700 songs in iTunes will do that to a computer. But it served me well, and it will eventually be put into the closet, along with my clamshell iBook and my Powerbook 3400, neither of which I have any idea what to do with but can’t bear myself to toss/recycle.

Problem was that in transporting files from the iBook, with OS 10.3.9, to the iMac, with OS 10.4.3, things went a little haywire, leading to no less than five hours on the phone with four different Apple reps. Adam, I apologize again for saying that my computer was FUBAR. Devon, it took 118 minutes and fifteen seconds, but we finally got those addresses imported. (1066 of them, to be precise.)

Now can I say that this computer is a thing of beauty?

Yes, I can. Let’s just say that if this blog were written as well as this computer is engineered…. Well, it’s something to shoot for.