At Harvard, The End is Near
Posted on January 29th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 30 Comments »
In the Globe, the M-Bomb and Maria Sacchetti suggest that the presidential search is nearly wrapped up at Harvard. But their article has some gaps and hedges that make it less than useful.
Consider, for instance, the first paragraph:
The search for a Harvard president could wrap up as early as next weekend. One of the final contenders is Nobel laureate and philanthropic official Thomas R. Cech , while Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, appears to be the leading inside candidate, according to people familiar with the search process.
The search could wrap up…One of the final contenders is….Drew Gilpin Faust appears to be the leading insider candidate…..
And if that isn’t hedging enough, here’s the very next sentence:
But the search remains subject to change at any time, and other candidates could suddenly rise to the top, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is intended to be confidential.
In other words, what we’ve just written could be totally wrong.
The article then mentions that Harold Varmus is on the search committee’s short list, which strikes me as implausible.
From what I hear, it’s Drew Faust or Elena Kagan, with various e-mailers leaning towards one or the other….
I’ve been thinking that it’ll be Faust all along, and nothing I’ve heard has changed my mind.
A side note: Even though there are some who dislike Steven Hyman because of his association with Larry Summers, I gather that there is also a reservoir of respect and good will towards Hyman, and a sense that, in general, he has served the university well…..
30 Responses
1/29/2007 11:31 am
Richard,
I’d appreciate it if you’d respond to the developments I’ve posted in the comments thread to your John Edwards post below. Some corrective action up top here is in order.
Standing Eagle
1/29/2007 11:47 am
Members of the search committee were in Princeton a couple of weeks ago interviewing Anne-Marie Slaughter. Could she be the dark horse that rises to the top?
1/29/2007 1:20 pm
Richard - In fact, Marcella uses exactly the attribution you suggest, “according to people familiar with the search process.” Your rant about her using “according to sources” appears to be a misquotation of her second reference, which actually reads “according to THE sources.” That’s simply a way of writing the same sources mentioned in the previous paragraph (“people familiar with the search process”). “According to sources” is indeed vague, bad journalism, but Marcella never uses that phrase.
(Whether “sources familiar with the search process”, whhich she uses and you suggest, is really any more meaningful to readers than just “sources” is a different question. Presumably we assume that Marcella is not quoting sources unfamiliar with the search process.)
1/29/2007 1:36 pm
You’re absolutely right; that is my mistake, not that of the reporters, to whom I apologize.
1/29/2007 1:40 pm
Standing Eagle,
I’ve read all the cites that you’ve mentioned, and I don’t think it’s as much an anti-Solomon slam dunk as you and various liberal bloggers do. I don’t think the scandal is that Edwards sold his home, and I don’t think that it’s influence-buying on the part of the buyers. But I do think it’s a political gaffe for Edwards to sell his home to a front corporation headed by two businesspeople being investigated by the SEC on pretty serious matters.
1/29/2007 1:41 pm
Anne-Marie Slaughter? That would be a surprise…..
1/29/2007 2:04 pm
“I do think it’s a political gaffe for Edwards to sell his home to a front corporation headed by two businesspeople being investigated by the SEC on pretty serious matters.”
Well, that makes one of us.
Let me point out, incidentally, that this is a very journalist-centric view of the world. If your claim is true about the appearances here (which I do not concede, since *appearance* of conflict of interest is often the standard used for actual conflict of interest, and I am agreeing with people who claim there is no such appearance) — if, as I say, your claim has any truth value, it’s in focusing on the political ramifications of this story being feature prominently. In other words, it’s a POLITICAL gaffe only insofar as it’s a PUBLICITY ERROR. And it’s a publicity error only insofar as it’s made prominently public. So what’s the standard for things being made prominently public? Apparently, the standard is just the gut feeling of a reporter — and moreover, the gut feeling of a reporter who has a vested interest in not having wasted research effort when a lead runs dry. Am I wrong that there’s some circularity here? — not necessarily a vicious circle, but a serious logical weakness.
Someone besides reporters needs to be asking, “What’s news?” Otherwise the answer will always be “Whatever I’ve been spending time on.” Cognitive dissonance says “I couldn’t have been WASTING my time looking into this transaction; whatever feels like a story to me MUST be one.” (Cf. Al Gore’s awkwardness, circa 2000.)
In other words, I’m in favor of editors. The watchers need to be watched. Let’s not encourage those who watch their navels.
Standing Eagle
1/29/2007 2:07 pm
Anne-Marie Slaughter? Nice person “personally”, terible choice as President. That would not be good for Harvard.
1/29/2007 2:17 pm
Standing Eagle,
I don’t wholly disagree with you; I think the story could have been more clearly written, and I think it was harmed by its placement on Page One, which suggested a bombshell that wasn’t there. But I wouldn’t worry about editors; I’m sure they were involved in that story. Not to mention the bloggers who watch this stuff very carefully.
I think the question is, Can you really trust Edwards? And I’m not entirely sure that the answer is yes.
Anyway, here’s what Solomon said when asked about the story in an online chat:
—-Washington: A quick question about the Edwards story — leaving aside the politics for a moment, wouldn’t it have been against D.C. law for Edwards to refuse the sale? I didn’t think you were allowed to accept or reject a sale for political reasons, and I was wondering why this wasn’t mentioned in the story (if true).
John Solomon: Thanks for this question. Certainly there’s been lots of discussion in the blogs about this story and let me try to address the core issue. This wasn’t a story about whether John Edwards should or shouldn’t have picked the Klaassens as buyers. It was a story about the transparency of the deal. Those who aspire to the highest office in the land are required to disclose their financial dealings to the fullest extent. That isn’t a political requirement or some media-driven imposition. It is encoded in the federal campaign law. When Edwards’ campaign first disclosed the deal, much detail was lacking about the deal — most importantly the name of the buyers. Such information is critical to the transparency of a transaction involving $5.2 million that occurred on the night before Edwards launched his candidacy. Our story simply filled in the missing blanks.—-
For what it’s worth, I’m not sure that it is federal campaign law that Edwards discloses to whom he sold his house. But I still the transparency issue is important.
1/29/2007 2:27 pm
Richard,
Very good choice of picture for your Zen meditation this week. The symbolism of the turtle may be premonitory of what is to come at Harvard.
Good bye Standing Eagle, your rule is finally over.
Gentle Turtle.
1/29/2007 2:38 pm
Yes, perhaps Marcella has been rushing too much to maintain balance, depth and insight.
She might do well to ponder on the turtle a little…
1/29/2007 3:20 pm
“I don’t wholly disagree with you; I think the story could have been more clearly written, and I think it was harmed by its placement on Page One”
Unless you think that the evidence strongly suggests that this ‘story’ is a non-story (at best a not-yet-story), you DO wholly disagree with me. The sentence above is mostly nonsense; nothing I’ve been pointing out has to do with clarity or placement (except insofar as ‘placement’ means ‘being in the newspaper at all yet’).
Let’s not fudge what reporters are for — clarity and story-location are small parts of that (indeed, those are primarily things editors do). Identifying newsworthiness is, in my opinion, a large part (and that skill depends on understanding the country and its constitutional system* — signing statements should have been a huge story from the get-go, for example).
I read the Solomon chat you quoted already, and I note here the fact that you omitted an equally illuminating part of the talk:
“Washington: Are you saying that federal campaign law required Edwards to disclose more information than he did about his home sale? And now that your story has filled in the “missing blanks” regarding Edwards’ home sale, what has changed about your understanding of the deal?
“John Solomon: Sen. Edwards hasn’t filed his financial disclosure form yet. *He still has some time to do that.* [emphasis added] That’s where he’ll fulfill his legal obligation. There are very specific and technical rules for how to handle everything from stock transactions to house sales. My point was simply that the laws that govern presidential candidates are steeped [sic] in an well-grounded expectation that candidates give voters as much information as possible to make informed decisions about a candidate’s business and financial dealings. Once again, Sen. Edwards doesn’t have to break a law or even do something wrong to ask and answer these very basic questions.”
In other words, these PUBLIC documents are still forthcoming, and there is no reason to think they will be incomplete. And until they do, the presumption is that questions ASKED deserve as much prominence as the answers they elicit. (Note, by the way, that you, Richard, a good reader, had a false impression of how public the LLC owners’ names were, until Media Matters corrected the false impression the Post story gave. That’s sloppy journalism.)
Standing Eagle
PS. Richard, please resist the temptation to lump together ‘liberal bloggers’ as dismissive shorthand for ‘partisan hacks.’ It’s just not true, it’s lazy, and if you consider Joshua Micah Marshall a partisan hack, or even demonstrably liberal based on Talking Points Memo, you’re WAY off.
SIDEBAR:
Moreover, let’s look at how Solomon decides what’s a story:
“On Edwards, I had written a 2003 story about his failed sale of a home to the Saudis’ U.S. lobbyist. When I saw a Style section blurb that the Edwards had sold another home, I simply set out to learn who the buyer was. The Edwards campaign’s first answer to my question was that it was a corporation whose name they didn’t know. The second answer was that they checked the deed and the name of the company was the LLC but the Edwards [sic — ‘the Edwards campaign’? ‘the Edwardses’?]intentionally didn’t want to know the name of the buyers. When we learned the identity of the buyers, the campaign then acknowledged Sen. Edwards had in fact been told their names.”
This makes very little sense — what seems likely is that the campaign didn’t feel like releasing the names, and Solomon misunderstood that aspect of their initial response. He then had to do extra legwork (not hard) to find them in the public records. (It would otherwise have been easy for the campaign to continue to maintain that Edwards didn’t know who the buyers were; in fact, when reporters have the names it becomes MORE imperative to maintain that claim if you think it’s worth lying about in the first place. In any case, the campaign’s lie should have been part of the story if it were substantiated.)
My bottom line is that this legwork Solomon did strongly predisposed him to consider whatever he found a story, regardless of what it was. And so did the fact that he had done a previous story on Edwards and real estate. So did the large sum of money involved (ooh, money and politics, money and politics! Ganglia twitching).
These are classic ingredients of an idee fixe. Editors should scotch stories based on predispositions, or hunches that don’t (yet) pan out. Candidates should NOT repeat NOT be judged on the question of HOW EASY THEY MAKE REPORTERS’ LIVES. When Solomon says candidates should reveal everything, he means that they should do his job for him.
I imagine the White House press office does a good job with oppo research so that reporters don’t have to do any, and the result is this nonsense claim that servicing the press is an important part of being a (brand-new) presidential candidate.
If Solomon didn’t have a bona fide history of ginning up nonsensical Democrat-corruption stories to try to balance the ledger vis-a-vis Abramoff coverage, one would be less heated.
Standing Eagle
Hey, Justin Pope, if you’re reading this — whassup? I’ll bet you know who this is. Email me @alumni.
* Constitution with a small ‘c’ of course refers to history, political and otherwise, as well as textual interpretation.
1/29/2007 3:27 pm
Standing Eagle, I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this.
1/29/2007 4:34 pm
“Standing Eagle, I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this.”
Yes, so let’s not pretend we’re “not wholly disagreeing,” okay? We disagree. Let’s not dodge and use politeness to appease and soothe the irritating commenter with an argument too multifaceted to engage.
We disagree.
It’s possible that you’re right, but I doubt it. You seem to me to be thinking under an ethic in which the media perception of a gaffe is self-fulfilling, regardless of the substance. This is the kind of thinking that had loads of citizens believing that John Kerry thought only people who were bad at school “got stuck in Iraq” as soldiers, when in fact he tried to say that G.W. Bush “got *us* stuck in Iraq.” He misspoke — everyone knew it, including Dick Armey — and how much sense does it make for Kerry to be disdainful of soldiers? The man is practically obsessed with his identity as a veteran. A nonsense “‘”‘gaffe'”‘” that got loads of air time; thanks to the John Solomon school of appearance-over-substance.
The credo seems to be: If it looks like a gaffe, it is one; and if I, the reporter, want it to look like a gaffe then I am entitled to create that impression as long as I don’t lie.
You’re too good a reporter to believe that; I have pretty direct awareness that Harvard Rules was fact-checked pretty punctiliously and avoided overgeneralizations of tone. Might be nice if you would agree to AGREE that a ‘brother journalist’ screwed up, rather than sticking with the guild reflexively against the blogoherd.
Standing Eagle
PS. If you haven’t in the past, you and everyone should read Janet Malcolm’s 1982 (or so) New Yorker stories on the slander trials initiated by Gen. Westmoreland and Ariel Sharon. The knee-jerk “We stand by our story” mentality that deeply flawed reporting garnered is unbelievable.
1/29/2007 10:37 pm
Kerry is such an unbelievably pathetic politician (beat only by Bush in that department). That gaffe was amplified by everyone not because agenda-laden journos said it was a story but because the entire nation-including plenty Dems-were dying for an opportunity to give that utterly empty vessel a giant middle finger for just plain sucking. The American people are occasionally great about that. We grow really tired of someone, like Kerry or like Tom Cruise, and when they make a small mistake the whole nation stands up and says “you asshole.” We know its a non-story and we’re happy to contribute, because some people-usually phonies-deserve it.
1/29/2007 11:25 pm
Anonymous,
That’s all well and good, but the following week there was a nationwide ELECTION of some significance, in which Kerry was not running. So don’t pretend the media wasn’t serving as a GOP tool in amplifying the nonsense smear.
Stage the whole thing in a random February and I say have at ‘im if you want, idiotic as the whole thing was.
1/29/2007 11:37 pm
Why don’t you people (Richard and Standing Eagle) follow the usual protocol for blogs. This tendency to get sidetracked a) turns anyone interested in the original post off, and b) buries the sidetracked topic — not uninteresting but pretty inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t interested in Cech, Faust, etc. Standing Eagle is the primal sinner, since s/he could have e-mailed Richard instead of posting the diversionary first response on John Edwards on a post entitled “At Harvard, The End is Near”
Use his e-mail function, SE, he will reply!
1/29/2007 11:58 pm
Have you considered that Standing Eagle may be intentionally attempting to sidetrack the conversation?
If you look at his posts on this blog you will notice a pattern of when he sidetracks particular threads… generally when the conversation moves towards Mass Hall and the appointment of the new President.
1/29/2007 11:59 pm
Oh might… Might Standing Eagle be a member of the current Harvard administration?
1/30/2007 12:19 am
Yes Richard, it is down to the wire. And the new President has been already making plans for what needs to change.
You might print all archives of this blog and Present them to the new President. They constitute the foundation and a record of the State of Harvard as the new Presidency beigins. A public benchmark against which to measure progress in the years ahead.
It behooves the new President to document as much of the chaos as possible, and this won’t be hard to do, to then hopefully demonstrate to the Corporation how things are changing.
1/30/2007 10:35 am
Standing Eagle would have liked this conversation to happen in a post dedicated to Edwards, like the one WAY downthread. Standing Eagle is sorry that Richard didn’t institute one, and apologizes for hijacking this one. Perhaps further thoughts on Edwards and media solipsism could go in that new thread Richard just made about Standing Eagle and his PERFECTLY LEGITIMATE RELIGIOUS PRACTICE that’s really NOT THAT HALLUCENOGENIC despite the hype. Standing Eagle could quit anytime he wants, and only does it socially.
Standing Eagle does get fully engaged when he gets engaged on a topic, but has no stake in the Harvard presidential search (except to be very irritated whenever people pretend that Shirley Tilghman would be remotely interested in jumping ship at Princeton — an insane and Harvard-prestige-obsessed notion).
The name comes from Tennyson.
Standing Eagle
Tennyson: The Eagle:
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
-Seems more than a little self-aggrandizing now that I see it in print again.
1/30/2007 4:49 pm
The cult of Bradley continues to grow.
1/30/2007 9:34 pm
This has been a very confusing conversation. But for the benefit of those sleuths who seem to have been involved, I would guess that Standing Eagle is not a current member of the Harvard administration-perhaps a previous member, however. As for the tortoise, is that a comment on Drew Faust’s possible position in the race?
1/31/2007 12:22 am
I would guess SE is aka CS
1/31/2007 9:08 am
Who’s CS?
I do happen to know that Harvard has a beautiful government in exile around the area. Some terrific people who love the school. The Harvard axe came down on some carotid arteries that richly fed the institution.
I used to work in Accountz Receevible, beeyatch.
Peace in the ‘hood,
Standing Eagle
1/31/2007 10:12 am
Do you really identify with Eagles or with Crows? Eagles are honest about their purposes and identities. What was your role in the axing that you talk about. And how do you feel about your own neck now that change is imminent?
1/31/2007 10:20 am
Perhaps you prefer ACS?
1/31/2007 12:17 pm
Didn’t mean to imply that my own neck was included in the ‘government in exile,’ and don’t think I did imply that.
I still don’t know what CS is.
1/31/2007 4:17 pm
epistemologically challenged is what you get from study abroad in Germany.
1/31/2007 9:29 pm
Not to mention the good beer.