Shots in the Dark

Had trouble getting a car loan lately? Or a mortgage?

It could be because your name is similar to a name on a list of suspected terrorists that the Bush administration is circulating to private businesses which, afraid of incurring a government fine for dealing with terrorists, are saying no to any potential customer who even sounds like a match…..

Has it ever occurred to the Bush administration that, in the name of protecting freedom, they are doing far more to destroy it?

41 varsity coaches; not one of them black. Fourteen top athletic administrators—none of them black either.

Ouch.

The Boston Globe’s Bob Hohler exposes the lack of diversity in Harvard’s athletic hiring in today’s paper, and he’s right on target: There’s no excuse for the sheer whiteness of the university’s athletics coaching and administration.

“We’re obviously disappointed that we lack significant racial diversity in the athletic department, in particular at the senior level,” said James S. Hoyte, assistant to the president and associate vice president for equal-opportunity programs at Harvard. “The new president has made clear she is very concerned about seeing a more diverse senior management team throughout the university, including athletics.”

When did she make that clear, I wonder? At about 4 PM yesterday?

Because chances are that diversity within the athletic administration never even crossed Faust’s mind (to be fair, why would the dean of Radcliffe think about the issue?) until a reporter for the Globe dialed her number….

And here’s another problem, tucked away within the story:

In the last academic year, the school reported paying its male full-time head coaches an average of $89,614, while female full-timers earned an average of $69,496.

Will Harvard’s first female president address the problem of gender-related pay inequity?

Floyd A. Keith, executive director of the Black Coaches’ Association, cited Harvard’s historic rival, Yale University, as faring reasonably well in fostering racial diversity in its athletic department. African-Americans serve as head coaches of Yale’s men’s basketball team and men’s and women’s soccer teams, as well as holding at least one senior administration position.

….In the Ivy League, Princeton is the only other school that has no black leadership in its head coaching or administrative ranks. Princeton also is searching for a men’s basketball coach.

Here’s a suggestion for the Globe: a three-part series on the lack of racial diversity within the Harvard administration. Who, after all, is the highest-ranking black academic official at Harvard? You have to think about it for a while, don’t you?

(I think it’s Evelyn Hammond, and it is slightly dismaying that the top African-American within the university administration is, basically, the diversity dean, rather than some position that has nothing to do with race…)

My 02138 profile of former Massachusetts governor and current presidential candidate Mitt Romney is now online…..

What’s wrong with this, the first sentence of Robert Drago’s essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “Harvard and the Academic Glass Ceiling“?

Drew Gilpin Faust’s appointment as president of Harvard University has seriously dented the academic glass ceiling.

Well, the assumption that there is an academic glass ceiling, of course—the existence of which, given the number of female university presidents in office before Drew Faust came along, seems questionable.

And that’s just the start of Drago’s problematic argument, in which he alleges that the real sexism at universities pertains to adjunct faculty members.

Recall the 2005 event that triggered Faust’s appointment. The university’s president at the time, Larry Summers, suggested, among other claims, that relatively few young women were prepared to make the “near total commitments to their work” required of successful academics. He also suggested that men may hold a biological advantage in the pursuit of science and engineering careers. The anger generated by those comments almost certainly contributed to his resignation.

About the biological comment, yes. But Summers’ remarks on the challenges of juggling work and family manifested, by his standards, Oprah-like sensitivity, and I don’t recall anyone being particularly upset by them.

Drago, a professor of women’s and labor studies at Penn State, has a new book coming out, Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life, which is certainly an important topic. But he loses me when he writes,

…Norms surrounding our ideas about motherhood…[lead] us to expect women to bear and rear children, to take care of the ill, elderly, and those with disabilities, and to do so for low or no pay, and without public recognition.

Without public recognition? Really? Has there ever been a time in history when mothers were more fussed over, talked about, and self-congratulatory than they are now?

What Summers missed are [women’s] sacrifices. Indeed, the way he broached the subject of family commitments represented a significant threat to the careers of female faculty members everywhere — an accusation that women are really “just moms.“

In fact, that’s just not true. As I recall, Summers detailed the challenges facing women in academia, and suggested that the greatest challenge was balancing work and family. He may not have waxed empathic about the difficulties of being a mom, but that wasn’t Summers’ topic.

Drago’s heart is in the right place, but his solution—a part-time tenure track—doesn’t really address the question of how you can maintain Harvard’s standards of excellence and make a balanced life viable for women (and men) who have children.

Theda Skocpol, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, has resigned the position effective the end of this school year. (See Jeremy Knowles’ e-mail below.)

A few things about Skocpol:

1) She is generally thought to have done a good job as GSAS dean.
2) She is considered a candidate for the FAS deanship, and is said to want the job.
3) She has been GSAS dean for two years, an unusually short term.
4) She is a senior adviser in the social sciences at the Radcliffe Institute, and last week gave a talk at its annual luncheon for women faculty, hosted by Drew Faust…..

How does Skocpol’s move affect the question of who Faust will chose as her FAS dean? Does it mean that she’s willing to walk away from Harvard if she doesn’t get the job? Or that she already has another offer? Or just that she wanted to step down and, if she didn’t get the FAS post, didn’t want it to look like sour grapes by resigning immediately afterward?

Got me. All I know is, the timing is curious and the plot thickens…..

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to let you know that Theda Skocpol has today announced her
intention to step down as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences, effective at the end of this academic year. This is, of
course, unwelcome news to those of us who know first-hand of the skilled
and energetic leadership she has brought to this role, and of the many
improving initiatives that she has launched to strengthen the Graduate
School.

Since becoming Dean in July 2005, Theda has arranged for virtually all
graduate students in the humanities and the social sciences to receive
dissertation completion fellowships, she has helped to institute a new
innovation prize and seed grant program to honor and reward improvements
in graduate education, she has launched secondary fields for those in
Ph.D. programs to promote interdisciplinary research, she has created
the Graduate Policy Committee to involve faculty in the formulation of
GSAS policy, she has overseen the move of the Graduate School from
Byerly Hall to Holyoke Center, and she has encouraged coordination
amongst our science graduate programs. Her well-known zeal for
gathering and sharing data, her outreach to departments and centers, and
her gently unambiguous approach, have made the assessment and
improvement of our graduate programs and policies both more transparent
and more successful.

Most recently, Theda has served as chair the Task Force on Teaching and
Career Development, which issued in January a “Compact to Enhance
Teaching and Learning at Harvard.” She also served as a member of the
Harvard University Planning Committee for Science and Engineering. In
these, and many other ways, she has made important contributions to the
Faculty and to the University, as well as to the Graduate School.

I must now, for the benefit of my successor, begin to gather your
thoughts on the challenges and opportunities ahead for the Graduate
School, as well as your confidential suggestions of colleagues who might
succeed Theda as its dean. I trust that you’ll write to me in the
coming weeks about these matters.

With my best wishes and thanks,

Yours sincerely,

Jeremy R. Knowles

_______________________________________________________________

Blogger’s P.S. I can not resist: Crimson, consider yourself scooped…..

The CBS anchor-bot is taking a ton of grief for that interview with John and Elizabeth Edwards she did.

I’m no Katie fan, so I’m kind of enjoying this moment. But I will say that she probably did the Edwardses a favor by asking very difficult and blunt questions. (Though I agree with critics who slam her for repeatedly using the “some say” construction. It is lame.)

I do think that a big problem for Couric is the amount of botox and plastic surgery she’s had in order to look wrinkle-free on hi-def TV. She can no longer move her muscles into a sympathetic expression….

Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan just landed a $25 million donation from the Wasserstein family, whose best-known member is probably financier Bruce Wasserstein.

The timing of this announcement is interesting: Kagan recently lost the presidency to a woman whose ability to raise large sums is uncertain.

That $25 million gift, by the way, is about 50% larger than the entire endowment of the Radcliffe Institute.*

It’s possible to consider this gift as another show of support for Kagan. (The first, a week or so after Faust was named, came in the form of a party thrown by law students in her honor.)

Faust is said to have terrific relationships with Radcliffe alums, but one of the question marks about her announcement is how the mega-rich finance guys like Wasserstein will respond to her.

Rumor has it that the development folks are worried….

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* Mea culpa: A poster points out an egregious mistake on my part. The Radcliffe Institute endowment is more like $400 million; it’s the annual budget that’s about $15 million.

Someone sent me a list of Harvard blogs to prove that there are, in fact, more than two Harvard profs who blog.

Here it is:

Econ prof Greg Mankiw
Jeffrey Nesson’s cyberlaw blog
John Palfrey’s Berkman Center blog
Jonathan Zittrain’s blog (arguably doesn’t count, as it is Oxford-branded)
Toby Stock’s HLS admissions blog
The Kennedy School Library blog (last updated, last November)*

That’s six. Blogs. At Harvard.

Surely there must be more. (And in fact there are.)

Just out of curiosity, I Googled “Stanford university” and “blog” and got a ton of relevant hits—and the blogs there are really interesting.

For example:

The World Association of International Studies economics blog
The Stanford University Libraries Blog
The Stanford Social Innovation Review blog
A whole bunch of blogs at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society
Lawrence Lessig’s blog
The Stanford University Press blog
A whole bunch of blogs at the Stanford School of Medicine

I could go on and on, but you get the point. The institution of the blog seems to have taken deeper root at Harvard’s west coast rival than it has in Cambridge.

Why are so many more people blogging at Stanford than at Harvard? Is it because Stanford appreciates the Net in a way that Harvard does not? Because Harvard’s professors are older than Stanford’s and don’t get this newfangled technology? Is it because Harvard doesn’t foster a climate where the free exchange of opinions and ideas is encouraged, but is instead discouraged and punished? Is it because Harvard’s culture resists change?

Not to pat myself on the back, but why is it that the most topical blog about life at Harvard is written by someone who neither goes there nor works there?
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* A poster informs that the Kennedy School library blog can be found here, and has been recently updated. Thanks for the info.

Elizabeth and John Edwards hugely impress with their candor and their strength in this “60 Minutes” interview. It is impossible not to watch this without coming to the conclusion that these are serious, thoughtful and responsible people. And gutsy: I admired hearing both of them saying “We’re all going to die,” without feeling like they had to say “pass” or “we’re all going to be called to the Lord” or some such euphemism.

Elizabeth Edwards said of their choice to continue campaigning: “You have tow choices. Either your push on with your life…or you start dying.”

Tough stuff.

Katie Couric did not impress so much…. She comes across as cold and callous.

To be fair, Couric lost her husband to cancer, and I highly doubt that she is insensitive to the Edwardses.

My guesses? One, she’s trying to look like a serious newsperson, and show no signs of bias because of her own loss.

Two—and you can judge this one for yourself—She’s had so much work done to her face that she can’t actually look sympathetic.

Elizabeth Edwards, by contrast, has aged, and has wrinkles. Somehow, though, she looks much more beautiful than does Couric…..

Japan’s main whaling ship returned to port yesterday with its haul of 508 slaughtered whales.

Japan claims that its whaling is for “scientific” purposes, but has not explained what scientific knowledge is gleaned from the carcasses of over 500 whales, which are instantly carved up to be sold in Japanese supermarkets. (Under a government subsidy, by the way.)

Until Japan stops its massacres of whales and dolphins, consumers should boycott Japanese-made goods…..