Shots in the Dark

While Harvard continues its misguided crackdown on drinking at The Game, Yale alums say that, without tailgating, there’s much less reason to go.

Harvard’s absurd policy is this: You can’t bring alcohol into the university parking lots, and only those with Yale or Harvard IDs can buy the alcohol that will be on sale.

My policy would be this: People who are driving, don’t drink. Everyone else, knock yourself out.

Truth is, The Game has always been more fun in New Haven, because the campus parties are better and there’s more room for tailgating in the fields around the Yale Bowl than there is in Allston.

Harry Lewis began this anti-drinking mania by banning kegs at The Game—a mistake, I thought, which would probably lead to greater consumption of hard alcohol. Benedict Gross seems to have solved that problem by making it so little fun to drink any alcohol at all, no one will want to go.

If I were a Harvard College alum, I’d withhold my annual contribution for that reason alone….

Did Virginia Senate candidate George Allen—and, until recently, likely presidential candidate—routinely use the N-word in college at the University of Virginia? And if he did, should it matter now?

Salon nails him on the first part. As to the second, you could argue it either way, depending on what Allen has done with his attitudes since then. But since he’s denying ever making any racist remarks—hello, macaca?—we’re never going to know…

Meanwhile, in Connecticut, Joe Lieberman continues his disinformation campaign.

First, he calls for the number of US forces embedded with Iraqis to be doubled or tripled, so that we may hasten the training of the Iraqi forces and accelerate our withdrawal from Iraq.

That’s a tortured (no pun intended) argument to begin with…but then Lieberman goes on to say that that doubling or tripling could come from redeployment of forces, rather than actually committing additional troops.

I am still trying to understand that line of reasoning. If you double or triple our number of embedded soldiers, without decreasing the number of soldiers elsewhere, then you are increasing the number of soldiers, period. What difference does it make where they come from? (Well, of course it makes a difference if you’re the soldier involved.)

Lieberman continued his old argument that he does not support an open-ended commitment to staying in Iraq, but that he opposes setting a timeline for withdrawal.

And I continue not to understand how, if you oppose a timeline for withdrawal, you are not supporting an open-ended commitment.

Finally, Lieberman responded to the recent intelligence report saying that the Iraq war has increased the threat of anti-US terrorism by saying that the increased threat would make troop withdrawal too dangerous.

In other words, we sent troops in, which increased the threat of terrorism. But now we can not take them out, because of the threat of terrorism that they have created. This is a prescription for a permanent US military presence in Iraq.

It is, I think, in the nature of a bad war, a fundamentally ill-conceived war based on lies and false premises, that it promotes Orwellian rationalizations. “We may have created the danger, but we can’t leave now because it’s too dangerous.”

I am not a military historian, but it seems to me that history judges favorably those who resist the twisted rationales and labrynthine language of a bad war, while those who succumb to it—intelligent people who compromise their intelligence and integrity to defend their mistakes or attempt to further their ambitions—forever stain their records.

This is exactly what Joe Lieberman is doing. I wonder if he ever lays awake in bed at night and thinks, My God, what am I saying? What am I doing?

Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. I don’t know which option is worse.

The Economist loves Daniel Golden’s book, “The Price of Admission,” which makes me wonder a bit about The Economist.

Quoting Golden, the magazine writes, “No less than 60% of the places in elite universities are given to candidates who have some sort of extra ‘hook’, from rich or alumni parents to ‘sporting prowess'”.

Let’s just examine that, shall we? Golden cites that figure in his book, attributed to a single source, who claimed that it was true for one—you got it, one—Ivy League university. The source wouldn’t say which university—perhaps because that, of course, would mean that you could then check it out and prove it wrong. Because as anyone who knows anything about college admissions will tell you, the idea that 60% of a class is slotted for legacies is absurd.

In other words, it’s a stupid statistic, and Golden was irresponsible to quote it. But The Economist translates that into 60% of the places “in elite universities”—not even just Ivy League universities, but elite universities generally. This is what you might call bad journalism.

If that suggestion were true, of course, legacy admissions would indeed be a dire problem. But it isn’t.

The magazine concludes: There are a few signs that the winds of reform are blowing. Several elite universities have expanded financial aid for poor children. Texas A&M has got rid of legacy preferences. Only last week Harvard announced that it was getting rid of “early admission”—a system that favours privileged children—and Princeton rapidly followed suit. But the wind is going to have to blow a heck of a lot harder, and for a heck of a lot longer, before America’s money-addicted and legacy-loving universities can be shamed into returning to what ought to have been their guiding principle all along: admitting people to university on the basis of their intellectual ability.

This may sound contrarian, or anachronistic, but to my mind, there are quite a few reasons for admitting people to college, of which intellectual ability is just one. A specific talent—the arts, writing, perhaps even athletics—might be another. And character—yes, character—could be another still. This person might not have gotten 1600 on his or her SATs, but what might he or she contribute to society?

I am probably old-fashioned, but to see universities as solely places for the kids with the best grades is to vastly reduce the scope of their mission, and in the process, lessen their value.

In the Times, columnist John Tierney blasts the recent report of the National Academy of Sciences blaming sexual inequities in the sciences entirely on discrimination.

Writes Tierney, “I never thought the academy was cynical enough to publish a political tract like ‘Beyond Bias and Barriers,’ the new report on discrimination against female scientists and engineers.” He then describes the report as “the kind of science you expect to find in the Onion.”

I’ve read surprisingly little debate about this report, and certainly nothing from Larry Summers or Steve Pinker over on Open University. (I tease, but I’m actually disappointed; I’d like to read their thoughts on the matter.)

Is it because everyone agrees with the report…or because everyone’s ignoring it?

A blogger over at fishbowlny went to Arianna’s party and promptly started taking pictures of Tom Freston’s house—his bookshelves, his desk, his family photos—then tried to defend himself by saying he (she?) was cleared to take pictures when he arrived. Pictures of the guests, I’m sure.

Tom Freston threw the guy out.

I’m with Freston on this one. Going to a book party at someone’s house and taking pictures of their family photos? No matter how you try to spin it, that’s just wrong.

Inbetween my more meaningful weekend experiences, I dropped by Arianna Huffington’s book party on Saturday night. The book is called “On Becoming Fearless…in Love, Work, and Life.” Meghan O’ Rourke ably reviews it, and Arianna herself, here, in Slate.)

(A digression: Slate is now running hideous ads that start playing video and sound some time after you click on the page, so that you won’t immediately click away. The ads have a tool bar that looks like the Quicktime tool bar, with a button for pausing and a button that says “close.” The only problem is, when you click either the Pause or Close buttons, they take you to another ad. Sleazy—and makes me hate the advertiser.)

The party took place at the glorious East 66th Street manse of Tom and Kathy Freston, who know Arianna from…well, God knows, because Arianna knows everyone. Tom Freston is the media executive who was just ousted from Viacom by Sumner Redstone. Kathy Freston—and you’ll be shocked, shocked by this—is a former model. (She is now a writer and blogger for Huffington Post who describes herself as “a self-help author and personal growth and spirituality counselor.”)

Kathy Freston: Knows how
to pose.

But it was sort of nice that Kathy Freston is a former model, because it meant that her friends, other former models, were also there. I was chatting with one of them, a lovely woman of about 35 with a massive engagement ring, when she turned and declared, “I’d like you to meet my fiancee.” It took me a moment to realize that she was talking about the 70-something year old man standing quietly next to me.

But I shouldn’t have been surprised: Such are the laws of beauty, power and money in New York City, and an Arianna party is nothing if not an invitation to watch the machinations of all three. What makes Arianna interesting, in part, is that she is both part of this world, and yet removed enough to remain something of an outsider, fascinated with its codes and rules. (The tell-all Arianna could write!)

I know Arianna from my days at George—she was the epitome of a George story, and I’ll never forget being invited to her 40th birthday party, held at a massive suite in the Waldorf, and seeing Arianna work the room while her husband Michael played, alone and happy, with their two children. Also, I’ve blogged for her site. But I stopped doing it months ago, because it seemed like all we bloggers there were doing was providing Arianna free content while she used the site to help maintain her high-profile. And here’s an interesting story: When I said hello to Arianna on Saturday, she kissed me on the cheek and said, in that lovely Greek accent, “Darling! You haven’t been blogging!” Which meant either an impressive level of familiarity with her site, or a level of pre-party preparation that is simply astonishing. Both possiblities intrigue.

While I drank white wine and fended off overtures from clean-cut waiters bearing vegan appetizers, I checked out the crowd. There’s Naomi Wolf! (She’s working on a book about…well, she wouldn’t want me to say.) There’s Barry Diller! Society photographer Patrick McMullen! And journalists in abundance: Joe Conason from the New York Observer, Eric (ugh) Alterman, Alex Starr of the New York Times Magazine, Steve Roderick of New York, Kevin Buckley of Playboy, Jamie Steen of the Baltimore Sun and Nina Burleigh of People. It was one of those parties where you may not know everyone, but they all look vaguely familiar. I bumped into an ex-girlfriend, the ex-boyfriend of my ex-agent’s ex-assistant, and a young woman who’s helping make a documentary about the global water crisis. Such are Arianna’s parties.

As Meghan O’Rourke points out in her review above, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether Arianna really believes in anything, or whether she just loves to be in the mix—lives to be in the mix. Nonetheless, she is a character, and she has a remarkable amount of energy, and there is no question that she has overcome adversities in her own life to get where she is. Which is another way of saying that as long as she keeps inviting me to her parties, I’ll keep going.

Apologies for my multi-day absence, and thanks for your patience. It was quite a weekend, and I need a little zen this morning—hence the pensive-looking Galapagos land iguana featured below.

My Friday involved helping a friend excavate her parents’ apartment the day after she had helped move them to an assisted-living facility—a private situation for my friend, so I won’t go into it, but it was a tough thing for all involved. That was followed on Saturday night by a book party for Arianna Huffington at the imperial townhouse of Tom and Kathy Freston, about which more later.

And yesterday, one of my oldest friends and I traveled back to Groton, our high school, to attend the memorial service of our old friend, Rogers V. Scudder. “Mr. Scudder,” to us, died a few weeks ago of pneumonia, I think, but he was almost 94 years old, so you could probably just call it old age.

He lived a quietly remarkable life. Born in 1912 in St. Louis, he graduated from Harvard in 1934, earned a diploma in classical archeology from Oxford in 1955, and got a master’s from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1958. During World War II, he served as an ambulance driver. In the 1960s, he and collaborator Charles Jenney, Jr. wrote a four-volume series of Latin textbooks that would become the best-selling Latin texts in the country for 20 years. From 1976-1983, he served as the director of the Library at the American Academy in Rome.

But really, Mr. Scudder was a teacher, and for we students who didn’t know the details of his biography, that’s how we thought of him—as a teacher and friend. He taught at the Brooks School in Massachusetts from 1934 to 1966, when he retired for the first time. Brought to Groton to fill in for a teacher on leave, Mr. Scudder stayed on as a teacher of Latin and part-time dormmaster until 2005, when he was 92.

He was perhaps the kindest person I have ever known, and at a boarding school, where the social life can be brutal and escape difficult, his warmth was much needed and much appreciated. He was self-deprecating and funny and a gentleman in the best sense of the word; his grace and manners were extended to all, even those who did not immediately appreciate them. He tended to turn a blind eye toward harmless misbehavior—someone told a nice story of Mr. Scudder taking a group of students out to dinner and ordering them all a beer, and then, midway through the evening, remembering that they weren’t supposed to drink. “Oh, well,” he chuckled. “Just one then.” Mr. Scudder’s laughter and his generosity created the best kind of incentive for positive behavior; you didn’t want to disappoint him. You wanted to make him proud.

The actor Sam Waterston, who also attended Groton, was Mr. Scudder’s godson; Waterston’s parents taught at Brooks, and knew Mr. Scudder there. Waterston spoke yesterday of Mr. Scudder’s humility, which was profound, and of its rarity in our modern culture. He spoke of how Mr. Scudder taught him the meaning of perspective, without which we so easily slide into egocentrism; perhaps, Waterston suggested, this is a trait that comes from having lived through two world wars. And he spoke of the importance of teachers, of people who devote their lives to the instruction of others. As one of the school’s teachers said to me afterward, “That was good of him. It’s not the kind of thing another teacher could have said of Rogers, because it would have looked self-aggrandizing, but it’s true.”

We couldn’t be too sad at our loss; 93 is a ripe old age, and Mr. Scudder lived his life brilliantly, with dignity and grace and, for a remarkably long time, wisdom. But we can be sad that there are fewer and fewer like him.

I’m helping a friend move today, so the blog will have to wait till later today…

Meantime, there’s a great discussion going on in the comments area of the post on Dan Golden’s book, focusing on Harvard’s admissions policies and, specifically, the question of whether it’s a good idea to favor faculty children in admissions. Thanks to all who’ve been contributing, and if you haven’t taken a look yet, you should.

Back soon….and happy Friday, everyone.