Shots in the Dark

It is, of course, Larry Summers, from his official portrait as secretary of the Treasury.

Thirty-year-0ld Floridian Robert Arrington was swimming off his boat 25 miles off Panama when he saw a beautiful fish, a marlin bigger than any he’d ever seen before—eleven feet long.

So what did he do?

He killed it, of course. And now he has its bill and a world record to make himself proud. And a video of himself shooting something that is so remarkable while alive, and so very sad after it has been killed.

Arrington doesn’t see it that way, though. For him, it’s something to tell the kids and grandkids about. And maybe they’ll say to him, “Gee, Dad, it must have been cool when there were fish in the oceans….”

Mohamed El-Erian isn’t making as much money with Harvard’s endowment as Jack Meyer did. And in an interview with Bloomberg News, he blames that on…Jack Meyer.

Mohamed El-Erian took over the management of Harvard University’s $29.2 billion endowment, the world’s largest, five months after its previous boss departed with the entire fixed-income staff in tow. Interest rates rose, causing bond investments made by the former team to drop in value.

El-Erian, 48, says he’s not going to let Harvard become overly reliant on a single team or strategy again….

So it’s Meyer’s fault, eh? In the investment world, that’s kind of like slagging God for taking the eighth day off. Did Meyer really become “overly reliant on a single team or strategy,” or is El-Erian just spinning?

Business Week just published a best and worst list for 2006, and Larry Summers is on it! He’s one of the worst.

Under the section, “The Worst Leaders of 2006,” there appears this (thanks to the blog SmartLemming):

• Worst Reaction Time: Michael Dell, Dell Computer
• Worst Talent Manager: Paul Pressler, GAP
• Worst Buyer’s Remorse: James R. Tobin, Boston Scientific
• Worst Twilight Years: John Browne, BP
• Worst Crossover: Larry Summers, Harvard University
• Worst Boardroom Rivalry: Patricia Dunn and Tom Perkins

The Crimson reported this out a little, getting an HBS prof to question the finding.

Weatherhead Professor of Business Administration D. Quinn Mills, who lectures on leadership at the Business School, wrote in an e-mail that BusinessWeek did not have the “right to characterize President Summers as the worst cross-over.”

“I don’t think his style was different in the two situations,” Mills wrote yesterday of Summers’ political and academic roles.

“There are many people who think President Summers was trying to provide good leadership, but that Harvard’s faculty would not accept it,” Mills added.

Mills has clearly written a lot on leadership, but his comment seems odd to me. The idea that Harvard’s faculty “would not accept” good leadership is casually made, but loaded with dramatically negative implication. What does it suggest about the Harvard faculty that they won’t “accept” good leadership? That they are anarchists?

Moreover, Summers’ leadership style may not have been different in the two situations…but isn’t that the point? The Treasury Department has one organizational culture; Harvard has another. The same leadership style that works at one might very well not work at the other.

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P.S. Dear Crimson—”Conflictive”—as in “[Summers] often conflictive relationship with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—is not, in fact, a word.

Ms. Bombardieri, are you there? Some people on this board (see below) are trying to get your attention.

A few thoughts on the Bombardieri situation: My impression—and I’ve never met her, and only talked to her once, briefly, on other subjects—is that the M-Bomb, as she has now been dubbed, does her best to get as much into the paper regarding Harvard as her editors will allow. It’s not her fault that the Globe has become Massachussetts’ very own USA Today. Also, she’s had the beat for a few years; she may be a little burned-out.

In any event, there’s lots to talk about.

First, of course, is the very interesting discussion going on below, which, if I could sum it up, seems to be a debate over Harvard’s treatment of women and minority professors, and whether it relegates them to non-tenure track positions. Certainly people at the ed school seem to think so.

Next is the news that the Af-Am department wants to bring back departed professors Lawrence Bobo and Marcyliena Morgan, who left for Stanford a couple years back when Summers refused to give Morgan a tenured position.

Here’s what I understand of that situation. Apparently Skip Gates went to bat with Summers for Morgan, who is a scholar of hip-hop. Summers told him that he didn’t think Morgan was a good enough scholar or teacher to merit tenure, but that he wanted to do what he can for Skip, and would work to find a non-tenured position which would allow Morgan to continue teaching at Harvard. But Stanford was beckoning with offers of tenure for both…..Note, though, that Stanford gave Morgan a tenured position that is not a full professorship.

Someone mentioned that Cornel West had been offered a job; that’s not exactly what the Crimson says, and it’s not exactly right. For the full story, check out my piece on Derek Bok in the forthcoming issue of 02138 magazine.

Larry Summers deserves his own item, so I’ll write that above…..

Want to hear the woman the New York Times just dubbed the next Walter Cronkite?

Take a look at Amanda Congdon on ABCNews.com as she talks about spam, Nintendo, an article she read in the New York Times, and javascript. But all you really need to know about Congdon is visible in her opening gesture of welcome.

“What’s the weirdest thing about it?” Congdon says of a Tori Spelling yard sale. “How it blurs the line between reality and fiction.”

What’s the weirdest thing about Congdon on ABCNews.com? How it blurs the line between news and advertising. Don’t you just love it when she says, “ABCNews.com—a good way to start the day? I think so.” Or when she adds, “I followed an advertiser link to…..”

Immature soul that I am, however, I did chuckle a little when she started talking about “life-juice.” (Just for the record, she was talking about blood.)

As Congdon would say—and does!—”Thanks for hanging out!”

Meanwhile, Walter Cronkite and Peter Jennings are making like matching propellers…..

As both the Crimson and the Globe note, Harvard profs have dropped a plan to make undergraduates take at least one course in religion.

As Marcella Bombardieri writes, “Instead, the faculty task force suggested a different, broader category, ‘what it means to be a human being’….”

Call it the Oprah-fication of the curricular review. “What it means to be a human being.” What a hoot!

“I think secular and liberal Harvard rebelled,” government professor Harvey Mansfield, one of the campus’s most outspoken conservatives, said last night.

This time, Mansfield may be right…..

Writing in the Harvard Crimson, Ryan M. McCaffrey, co-editor of the conservative Harvard Salient, says that the world “mourns” the passing of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and that Pinochet wasn’t really so bad. In fact, he was just misunderstood.

Writes McCaffrey,

Pinochet…was a criminal, murderer, and thief—or so the headlines ubiquitous in the mainstream media would have us believe. Pinochet, however, is a man misunderstood by many, and the distortion of facts surrounding his rise to and fall from power is a great injustice of our times.

“Or so the mainstream media would have us believe.” I like that part.

Here’s McCaffrey’s description of how Pinochet came to power:

Finally, with many certain that a coup was inevitable given the hyperinflation (a paycheck from one week could not even afford bread in the next week), starvation, recession, and extreme civil unrest, General Augusto Pinochet took power on Sept. 11, 1973.

Pinochet “took power.” Nice. No mention of the CIA, related assassinations, Richard Nixon’s instructions to Henry Kissinger that Kissinger devise a plan to topple Allende….

To McCaffrey, Pinochet was a justifiable response to Allende’s Cuban-style socialism.

If Allende had been able to continue to advance his extreme socialist agenda, he could well have caused far more death and misery than the 3000 people Pinochet is responsible for murdering.

Well, we’ll never know now, will we?

What’s remarkable about McCaffrey’s writing is how casually he justifies overthrowing a democratically elected government in a foreign country on the grounds of economic capitalism. This is the definition of American arrogance, and particularly given what’s happening in the world at the moment, it suggests that humility regarding intervention in the domestic affairs of other countries has not sunk in at the Harvard Salient.

McCaffrey’s conclusion:

The twentieth century saw more than its fair share of both wicked men, and individuals who countered their iniquity with crusades of justice. Pinochet, I believe, was a bit of both, but for the most part one of the latter. Pinochet—a devout and caring Christian man with an understanding of the dangers of radical socialism—deserves the respect from democrats the world around for his fight for freedom from tyranny in South America.

A devout and caring Christian man….

Somewhere, Pinochet is laughing through his hellfire, and the souls of the disappeared weep.

How’s this for pretentious media writing?

…[Amanda Congdon] often appeals to the camera — the audience? God? — to find out what’s going on. Slim, swan-necked, with the upright bearing of a dancer or cadet, she doesn’t exactly lean in for intimacy with the viewer. She’s not relatable. She seems a touch abstemious. The news, it seems, kind of grosses her out.

Before dismissing this as eek-a-mouse-ing by a news bimbo, though, it’s worth thinking harder about the pose. If anchormen like Peter Jennings cultivated brave, value-neutral stoicism about the news, it wasn’t always so. Watch old Walter Cronkite broadcasts now and what comes through is the marvelous moralism that used to inform every syllable of his speech….

And so the pendulum swings back. In another key — and of course in the quickie-video medium — Ms. Congdon may be reprising Mr. Cronkite’s melodrama.

This is Virginia Heffernan writing in the New York Times on the subject of blonde sexpot Amanda Congdon, who has been hired by ABCNews.com after a stint on a little known website. (The most known thing about the website, as any reader of Gawker will tell you, were two of Ms. Congdon’s physical attributes.)

If I read that correctly, Heffernan has just favorably compared Congdon to Walter Cronkite. (To her credit, Congdon herself would probably read this and think, ????)

As a friend of mine likes to say, this is surely a sign that the end is near.

According to the Times,
the next Cronkite. At least she
has good taste in music.