Shots in the Dark

Larry Summers’ women-in-science controversy has faded at Harvard, but it lives on in media year-end wrap-ups. Like, for example, this from Newsweek:

“When they are sitting there constantly saying, ‘Am I smart enough? Am I smart enough?’ it doesn’t really help when the president of the university says, ‘Maybe you’re not’.”

—Harvard physics professor Melissa Franklin, on comments made by Harvard president Lawrence Summers that suggested women might not be as well equipped for the sciences as men. Summers has since apologized.

The Crimson follows up the Times with more on the breaking narwhal story.

Here’s my favorite detail: the man who discovered the purpose of the narwhal’s tusk, Martin T. Nweela, is a dentist. (Perhaps not coincidentally, he describes the tusk as essentially a very long tooth.) Nweela is a clinical instructor at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and somehow he also manages to have a full-time dentist’s office in Connecticut.

Why did Nweela start pursuing the mystery of the narwhal’s tusk? Because it related to dentistry? For reasons of medical advancement?

No.

Because he was curious. That’s all. He was just…curious.

I love that.

Although under other circumstances, the idea of a curious dentist would make me extremely uncomfortable.

For more on the narwhal, check out Nweela’s website, www.narwhal.org.

Has anyone else seen this site for warring bloggers on video? This particular debate involves my old New Republic colleagues—well, they were both far more senior than I, but never mind—Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus arguing about torture. Both of whom, apparently, have iMacs with iSight, perhaps built-in.

(There—obligatory Apple plug out of the way. When are those guys going to start paying me?)

Bob and Mickey are arguing about torture, and while the debate is kind of hit-and-miss—Mickey, who’s pro-torture, is a very smart guy, but Bob Wright, anti-torture, is scary-smart—the phenomenon of the video debate is perhaps more interesting and probably ultimately more important. Torture is an issue that’s really been propelled to the forefront of American politics by two things: 1) John McCain and 2) the blogosphere. So just as the v-blog was inevitable, I suppose the Internet version of the McLaughlin Group was equally fated. It’s pretty cool, really. This is the democratizing power of the Net at its finest….

Harvard’s decision to accept $20 million from a Saudi prince is stirring up controversy; the Crimson reports that New York congressman Anthony Weiner has written a letter to Lawrence Summers protesting Harvard’s action.

From the Crimson:

Weiner said in a press release issued Dec. 13 that American universities should not accept gifts from the Saudi royals, who “have a record of funding terrorist organizations.”

“August institutions like Harvard University and Georgetown University should not accept funding from a family that bankrolls terrorist organizations,” he wrote to Summers. “Their hands should be clean of any relationship with individuals associated with terrorism.”

A few thoughts.

First, this situation has the potential to blow up into a media feeding frenzy, if Bill O’Reilly, et cetera, latch onto it.

Second, there are really two questions here.

Are the allegations true? And if they are, should Harvard turn down the money?

I can’t speak to whether this particular Saudi has donated money to Hamas, etc—which is the question at hand, not whether Saudi princes in general have donated money to Hamas.

But if he has, should Harvard take the money nonetheless? Isn’t it better for him to give money to Harvard than to terrorists? Shouldn’t Harvard use the money to promote understanding and knowledge?

I think there’s a credible argument that Harvard should take the money.

Problem is that Larry Summers has criticized people for giving money to Hamas before: 2002 Commencement speaker Zayed Yasin. (And the charge wasn’t even accurate.)

He’s also run into this tension of the dirty origins of Middle Eastern money before, when Sheik Zayed of the United Arab Emirates wanted to endow a professorship at the Harvard Divinity School. That didn’t work out so well for Harvard, which ultimately returned the money.

I’m fascinated by this issue, as it touches upon a number of very important issues for Harvard: the conflicts of globalization and the university, the changing role of Harvard in the world, the desire to find new and deep, deep-pocketed donors, and last but far from least, the question of the university’s moral role in the world. These are not easy issues, and I hope they can be civilly debated in the days ahead.

Consider these two headlines from Harvard news organizations:

Early Admissions Return to Past Levels
—Harvard Gazette, 12/15/05

Number of Early Admits Drops
—Harvard Crimson, 12/15/05

What’s going on here? Well, it’s virtually impossible to tell from either article, since Dean William Fitzsimmons is the master of the confusing applications-related statistic, but it appears that the number of applicants to Harvard is dropping…. 800 students just received early admission, down from 892 last year, from a pool of 3827 applicants, down from 4212 last year.

Some of that drop may be due to changes in the admission procedures to prohibit students from applying early to more than one college. (Although that rule change took place three years ago, which prompted a very substantial fall-off from something like 7,000 early applicants a year.)

Fitzsimmons tells the Gazette: “Our return three years ago to our long-standing policy of ‘single-choice’ Early Action has helped to abate some of the frenzy that has beset early admission programs across America over the past decade or so. The pattern of the past three years suggests a return to a better era, when students could take the time during their senior year in high school to make more thoughtful decisions about where they wanted to spend the next four years,” he said.

Huh.

I have great respect for Fitzsimmons, but that sounds like spin to me. Universities don’t usually think it’s a good thing when the number of students applying to them drops substantially. And since Harvard puts out a press release every time the number of applicants hits a new high, it’s hard to credit this turn in the other direction as a positive development.

What’s also interesting is that given Larry Summers’ worthy free-tuition program for students from families with incomes lower than $40,000, you’d expect applications to be way up. But so far, they’re not—they’re down about ten percent from last year.

I’m not sure what this all means, quite, because I don’t have enough data. Except that alumni giving is down, and so now is the number of early applicants….

The Crimson, by the way, reports two very salient facts that the Pravda-like Gazette conveniently omits.

(And I quote…)

Harvard was the only Ivy League school to report a decrease in its early pool this year, receiving 3,872 early applications, down from 4,212 for the Class of 2009.

Yale received 4,065 early applicants this year, topping Harvard for the first time in recent memory.

Despite Fitzsimmon’s portrayal of the numbers as a return to normalcy, this is not good news.

In the Globe, Marcella Bombardieri breaks some big news today: Harvard College is hemorrhaging cash.

FAS sources tell her that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is facing annual deficits ranging from $40 million this year to $80 million in 2009-2010. Which, given the lack of veritas in current Harvard accounting, probably means that they’re underestimated by 25-50 percent.

What’s the explanation for this state of affairs? “Sluggish fundraising, the construction of buildings, and the costs associated with improving undergraduate education.”

That last is conspicuously vague—what expenditure could not be crammed under the label, “improving undergraduate education”? If you bought a Mercedes for a professor that helped him/her get to class faster, would that be improving undergraduate education? The only large new expenditure in that realm that comes to mind is the $50 million-plus “faculty diversity initiative”—i.e., the Larry Summers’ gaffe fund.

FAS dean Bill “What Do I Care, I’m Out of Here Anyway” Kirby pooh-poohed the deficits
by saying that the school has the money to cover them (obviously true) and that “It’s our job, with as formidable an endowment as we have, to show we are using it.”

This is the kind of quote that makes one question Kirby’s truth-telling; it’s so clearly PRBS. (You can figure that out.) Because by that logic, FAS should just spend its endowment into the ground. After all, if you have such a, ahem, formidable endowment, you’d better show you’re using it.

In truth, of course, a preferable situation would be to display evidence of money well-spent without going into debt. Even for FAS, $80 million a year isn’t chump change, and you’d better believe that this is going to hit the faculty where it lives—salary, benefits, department budgets and so on.

It is an irony of course that the former Treasury secretary of an administration which prided itself on running a government surplus is now presiding over the largest annual deficits in Harvard College history.

And another question: When will that capital campaign begin?

For five years now, Larry Summers has had to spend relatively little time fundraising—a fraction of the time devoted to that pursuit by his predecessor, Neil Rudenstine, who was criticized for the amount of time he spent raising cash.

Is it finally time for Summers to start pressing the flesh in earnest? And what will be the results if he does?

“Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
“It is where I went.”

—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

Has anyone defined America better than that?

Occasionally, I go out for a night on the town with some guy friends, and we do guy things. We see “Wedding Crashers” and “Sideways.” We play tennis. We drink beer and eat cheeseburgers. We jokingly call the outings “man-dates,” which is a term that the New York Times Sunday Styles section applied to straight men doing things together. Whatever.

All was bliss, until the other day one of my “posse,” as it were (though there is no Leo DiCaprio figure in this group) suggested that we see “Brokeback Mountain,” the film about two gay cowboys. And I put my foot down: No way, I said. Not appropriate for a mandate.

(Which is, by definition, not actually a date. If you follow me.)

Does that make me a bigot?

That’s exactly the question that Mickey Kaus asks in his Slate blog. (Thanks, Mickey. Especially because you answer “no.”)

Mickey’s thesis: “My wild hypothesis is that more people will go see a movie if it features an actor or actress they find attractive! If heterosexual men in heartland America don’t flock to see Brokeback Mountain it’s not because they’re bigoted. It’s because they’re heterosexual.”

Whew.

Of course, that doesn’t explain why I’d be perfectly fine seeing the movie with a she-date (i.e., a woman)…..

But since David Leavitt doesn’t even think that Brokeback Mountain is a “gay movie”—and he’s gay!—then I’m even more confused.

The excellent William J. Broad writes in the Times about a startling discovery: the real function of the narwhal’s tusk.

Scientists and mariners have long wondered about the function of the whale’s staff, which can grow up to nine feet long. Theories have included breaking Arctic ice, spearing fish, piercing ships, courting females, digging for food, and fighting with other narwhals.

Now it turns out that the answer is very different: the narwhal’s tusk is filled with nerve endings that make it, as Broad writes, “a sensory organ of exceptional size and sensitivity…[whose] nerves can detect subtle changes of temperature, pressure, particle gradients and probably much else.”

Says Martin T. Nweeia, a narwhal researcher and clinical instructor at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine—an unusual combination—”This whale is intent on understanding its environment. The tusk is not about guys duking it out with sticks and swords.”

Which suggests how blind we can be when studying the world around us, how our theories about animals and the environment are really a sort of Rorschach test that tell more about us and our limitations of perception than they do about scientific truth. What would we do if we had a nine-foot tusk? Well, use it to impress women or to fight other men. What do the whales do? They use it to learn about the world around them in ways substantially more sophisticated than any comparable aspect of human physiology.

Which is also my way of saying that the time will come when we finally realize that the ongoing slaughter of whales is one of mankind’s greatest crimes.

The real moral of the narwhal discovery? We should study these remarkable animals not just to learn about them, but to learn from them.

Is Mike Wallace senile? His son, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, seems to think so….after Mike Wallace suggested to the Boston Globe that the country is “fucked-up” and that it’s probably Bush’s fault.

Let’s see: Who’s more mentally imbalanced, someone who thinks that President Bush has taken this country in the wrong direction or someone who works for Rupert Murdoch?