Shots in the Dark

Now that Princeton has created a Center for African-American Studies, the Princetonian wonders if Harvard’s Skip Gates will head south. I wonder too. The rumor earlier this year was that Cornel West would actually be leaving Princeton to return to Harvard, but Gates-to-Princeton seems just as likely. He’s not department chair any more, it’d be a chance to build another program, closer to New York, a place Gates loves—and loves to do business in…..

My take on Dan Golden’s book, “The Price of Admission—How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates” appears in the New York Sun today.

Here’s a hint as to how I felt about the book: “‘The Price of Admission'” isn’t really a work of reportage. It’s a jeremiad masquerading as an exposé”….

…I think I see a post. Yes! It’s by Sanford Levinson, and it starts….

I wonder if anyone else finds it noteworthy that the ostentatiously self-identified “Dr. Bill Frist” is leading the fight against the McCain-Graham-Warner bill that would prevent the US from engaging in torture or other similar procedures not defined as such by the Administration (but identified as such by most of the rest of the world)?

Short. Snappy. Succinct. Yup, Open University has this blog thing down….

The Times reports on a forthcoming Sports Illustrated profile of Alex Rodgriguez, the Yankees’ immensely talented but troubled third baseman.

A-Rod is having by most standards a terrific year: He’s hitting .286, with 34 homers and 116 rbi’s. But his season has been plagued by mental problems on the field and at the plate; he’s made more errors than ever before in his career, and he’s failed at the plate repeatedly—consistently, you might say— in crucial situations. As a result, the New York media have gotten on his case pretty severely.

And now, so are his teammates. Jason Giambi is quoted in the SI article as saying, “Alex doesn’t know who he is. We’re going to find out who he is in the next couple of months.”

Ouch.

In return, Rodriguez expresses his frustration that other well-paid players don’t get criticized as he does. “[Pitcher Mike] Mussina doesn’t get hammered at all,” Rodriguez is quoted as saying. “He’s making a boatload of money. [First baseman Jason] Giambi’s making ($20.4 million), which is fine and dandy, but it seems those guys get a pass. When people write (bad things) about me, I don’t know if it’s (because) I’m good-looking, I’m biracial, I make the most money, I play on the most popular team.”

Ouch on so many levels.

Rodriguez isn’t entirely wrong; Mussina is a chronically underachieving pitcher, probably the most talented pitcher in baseball never to win 2o games. I love Giambi, but he’s hitting .250, which is about .40 points lower than A-Rod, with similar home run and RBI totals.

On the other hand, Rodriguez’s analysis of why he gets criticized is just inane. Because he’s good-looking? Bi-racial? I suspect most Yankee fans never give much thought to either one. Nor do they care much about what he gets paid: So many Yankees get paid so much, one becomes inured to multi-million dollars salaries.

The reason A-Rod gets so much attention is the disparity between his great talents and his ability to perform in clutch situations…particularly because his teammate, Derek Jeter, says so little but always seems to come through in tight spots.

Now that the Yankees have pretty much clinched the division, A-Rod has been hitting .345 in September. Giambi’s right. The next month is going to be hugely important for him…

About a week ago, the Times published a piece noting that, in the lyrics to his new album, Bob Dylan borrowed extensively—and without attribution— from a little-known poet named Henry Timrod. Does this make him a plagiarist? Or just a musician working in the folk tradition?

A correspondent to the Times named A Subrahmanyam thinks it’s the former.
Subrahmanyan writes:

The reaction to Bob Dylan’s borrowing from the Civil War poet Henry Timrod appears to reflect a double standard in society.

There is no attribution to Timrod anywhere on Mr. Dylan’s new album, “Modern Times.”

Therefore, it is no different from the cheating by Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore whose first novel was attacked when readers discovered that many passages in it nearly exactly replicated portions of novels by Megan McCafferty. Yet Ms. Viswanathan was vilified and publicly humiliated.

Bob Dylan no different than Kaavya? That’s a bit extreme. But whether we let Dylan off too easily—tolerating his plagiarism even as we revere his lyricism—I think that’s a fair question.

The Globe gets the story right about the performance of Harvard’s endowment.

Writes Steven Syre, Harvard’s returns outdistanced most investment benchmarks, but will probably fall short of the top tier of performers among leading university endowments. Harvard Management officials said they expect the 16.7 percent gain will be modestly above the average performance of those endowments, but not rank among the best 25 percent.

From the Globe article, it sounds like one of the reasons the endowment (relatively) underperformed is because of the transition from Jack Meyer to Mohamed El-Erian.

It’s also a sign of how remarkable Meyer’s performance was that Harvard’s portfolio earned 16.7% last year and that can still be considered a disappointment….

When someone writes the definitive history of the Summers period, the story of Jack Meyer’s departure should certainly be a chapter.

It took a week, but Princeton has followed Harvard’s lead and abolished early admissions. Meanwhile, the Yale Daily News worries that Yale president Rick Levin is worried that, if he makes a change, he’ll be seen as following Harvard’s lead. The YDN doesn’t actually think that abolishing early admission is a good idea…but on the other hand, it doesn’t want Levin to be a wuss.

Meanwhile, Harvard’s endowment grew by about $3.3 billion, but its return was only (only!) about 16.7 percent, down from 19.2 percent and 21.1 percent the previous two years. The Crimson gives in to a little cheerleading at the expense of journalism, headlining its story University Endowment Reaches Record Highs. Well, it does that every year, and if it had gained a dollar from the year before, it still would have been a record high. The drop in the rate of return is the real story here… Did disagreements between Larry Summers and Jack Meyer cost the university between 2.5 and 4.4 percent on its rate of return?

And over on Open University, neither Steve Pinker nor Larry Summers have blogged about the new NAS report on women in science. Shocker!

According to the New York Times, “women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and ‘outmoded institutional structures’ in academia, an expert panel reported today.”

The expert panel, part of the National Academy of Sciences, produced this report: ” Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering.” (You can skim it, or pay $68—ouch!—for the whole thing.)

Here is its first finding: “Women have the ability and drive to succeed in science and engineering. Studies of brain structure and function, or hormonal modulation of performance, or human cognitive development, and of human evolution have not found any significant biological differences between men and women in performing science and mathematics that can account for the lower representation of women in academic faculty and scientific leadership positions in these fields.”

In other words, take that, Larry Summers.

Or, as the Times puts it, “The panel dismissed the idea, notably advanced last year by Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, that the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science might be the result of ‘innate’ intellectual deficiencies, particularly in mathematics.”

The Times reports that “a spokesman for Mr. Summers said he was out of the country and could not be reached for comment.”

We know the first part of that sentence is true. Since Summers commented via Blackberry to today’s Crimson on the news that he is writing a column for the FT, we know the second part is not true.

President Summers is now imitating one of his mentors, Henry Kissinger, who frequently uses the out-of-the-country excuse, as Slate’s Jack Shafer has pointed out.

I would expect this panel to generate some controversy. Its members included Donna Shalala, who knew Summers from the Clinton days; Elizabeth Spelke, who loudly disagreed with Summers after 1/14; and Ruth Simmons, who would be politically disinclined to agree with Summers on this issue. The Times points out that the 18-member panel had just one male member. As it were.

This would be a good moment for Steve Pinker to weigh in on the new academic blog, Open University. (Or Summers himself, for that matter.)

But no…just one post today.

It’s by someone named Eric Rauchway. Here. You can read it.

It seems that our theological disputations of last week have rested with Jacob Levy letting himself get rolled by Brad DeLong because Brad quoted some hippie theology at him and, in passing, called the Protestant God evil. I don’t normally like to get all Leviticusly Deuteronomous on people, but this seems like a good place to mount a defense of the old-time religion….

I don’t like to get all Leviticusly Deuteronomous on people either. But sometimes, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Not only did Joe Lieberman recently give a half-hour speech on national security without mentioning Iraq…he also parked in a handicapped space. Both of which are very, very bad.

Joe Lieberman’s car.

Meanwhile, the Lieberman campaign is trying to make a big deal of the fact that Ned Lamont received an unsolicited $100 check from the Democratic Socialists of America. Here’s how it works: The Lieberman campaign has someone dig up Lamont’s campaign finance records, finds the check, then leaks it to the New York Post, which is the only paper that would consider that a story. The Post runs a piece. Then the Lieberman campaign posts the Post piece on its blog with a big headline: SOCIALIST GROUP BACKS JOE FOE IN CONN.

That’s kind of like running a headline saying “Joe Lieberman Doesn’t Like Handicapped People.”

Or like pointing out that it’s illegal to post an entire newspaper article to your website.

Only I’m joking, and they aren’t…..

The Financial Times has hired Larry Summers to write a monthly column. That makes sense, and not just because it’s the kind of place where Summers would want to be read—international, business and economics-minded. The FT was one of just a few outlets to which Summers would consistently grant interviews on background….

And remember, too, that Summers pressured Harvard Magazine to run a monthly column “written” by himself, which he then abandoned after one month…..

I expect the FT gig will last longer.