Shots in the Dark

Did Dick Cheney really mock Democratic congressmen John Dingell and John Murtha for their fealty to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi?

He did.

The House’s senior Democrats “march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi to an extent I had not seen, frankly, with any previous speaker,” Cheney said. “I’m trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion, but [in] the Congress I served in, that wouldn’t have happened.”

Asked if these men had lost their spines, he responded, “They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected.”

Ohdeargod.

But wait—there’s more, from the full interview in the Politico.

But throughout the interview, Cheney left no doubt that he takes pride even in some of the most-criticized policies of the Bush administration, including the wiretapping of suspected terrorists, and the long-term imprisonment and aggressive interrogation of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It really is time for Dick Cheney to depart this world and leave it to those of us who are trying to save it from the mess that he and his cronies, such as the president, have created.

Secret Service, I am not suggesting that anyone kill Dick Cheney, nor am I thinking of it myself. Unlike the vice-president, I do not believe that anyone should play God other than God.

I just think there’s a serious case to make that the world would be a better place without Dick Cheney in it.

Or something.

Drew Faust said today, according to the Crimson, that she would consider creating a committee to investigate free speech at Harvard.

Faust’s announcement at the meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences came in the midst of an ongoing clash between anthropology professor J. Lorand Matory ’82 and law professor Alan M. Dershowitz. Matory has claimed that critics of Israel like himself “tremble in fear” from repercussions for their views and urged his colleagues to pass a one-sentence affirmation of “civil dialogue.”

….Dershowitz told the professors that a research assistant had identified 54 events held at Harvard with anti-Israel perspectives since the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004.

I wonder if it was one of the research assistants described in 02138’s piece, “A Million Little Writers,” which discusses, among other things, Dershowitz’s reliance on research assistants?

The meeting was bogged down by countless amendments, vote counts, and quibbles over nitty-gritty details of the rules of order. Landscape studies professor John R. Stilgoe quipped, “I’m very happy…we decided not to broadcast these,” referring to the Faculty’s rejection of a proposal to broadcast meetings over radio.

I wish the Crimson had quoted Faust, because it’s a little hard to know how serious her statement is, or if it’s just a palliative.

If it’s serious, she’s making a big mistake (this has been a not-so-hot day for DGF).

A committee to investigate free speech?

According to the Allston Brighton Community blog, Drew Faust has issued a statement denying the Boston Globe piece of this morning.

I was quite surprised to awake to a front-page headline in Wednesday’s (Dec. 12) Boston Globe declaring “Harvard Rethinks Allston.” Let me be clear: Harvard is not “rethinking” Allston. I am unequivocally committed to moving aggressively and ambitiously forward, and to making our unfolding plans a reality.

And so on.

Just one problem: It was Faust herself who said…

“For the last several years, the university leadership has been in transition. I can own a project and look at it in a deliberative way. . . . We’re looking at everything again.”

“We’re looking at everything again” sure sounds like re-thinking, no? And in her statement Faust doesn’t make any attempt to deny that she gave the above statement; she doesn’t even acknowledge it.

So what happened?

Linda Wertheimer, who is starting to break some real news in the Globe, reports that Drew Faust is reconsidering some of Larry Summers’ plans for the Allston campus.

The president of Harvard University, Drew Faust, showing restraint on a major expansion that her predecessor relentlessly promoted, plans to reexamine proposals to move two graduate schools and other operations from Cambridge to a new campus across the Charles River in Allston.

A $1 billion science complex, which will house a stem cell institute, will stay on track for a ground-breaking early next year. But everything else, including plans for building four undergraduate dorms in the Boston neighborhood, will be reviewed, Faust said in a phone interview Monday.

Well. This is interesting. Reconsidering Allston would appear to be Faust’s most independent action since taking over from Derek Bok/Larry Summers as president, and in Wertheimer’s article, Faust suggests that she thinks the process by which Summers conducted Allston planning was fundamentally flawed.

She said the university will take pains to consult more widely and deliberately with faculty and community members and, if necessary, revise the plan before giving the final version to the city next fall. Several professors have expressed concerns that the current Allston plan could dilute the cohesive quality of student and academic life on the Cambridge side of the river.

“For the last several years, the university leadership has been in transition,” Faust said. “I can own a project and look at it in a deliberative way. . . . We’re looking at everything again.”

A curious quote: First, Faust suggests that Harvard’s leadership has been in transition for several years, rather than just one or two (which is true, by the way, and good for her for saying so).

But more interesting is the almost plaintive assertion, “I can own a project…” Did anyone doubt that? And if so, was it the audience or the speaker?

Here is perhaps the most important point: Faust’s decision of what to move ahead with and what to put the brakes on may be exactly the wrong one. (And in framing the decision as a referendum on Larry Summers’ decision-making process, she deftly changes the subject from what decision she made to why she made it.)

James Watson, who has been discredited on other fronts in recent weeks, wrote about the Allston expansion in the pages of 02138 some months back. Watson’s argument: Building a massive science complex in Allston was the wrong way to go and could be a massive waste of money.

No one at Harvard, so far as I have seen, read, or heard, has rebutted that argument.

So while Wertheimer’s article shows a president taking command, the reverse may really be true; Drew Faust may, in face, be caving in to entrenched bureaucracies which don’t want to move to Allston, while plowing ahead with an expenditure of untold billions for a science effort whose merit has never been publicly debated……

You don’t have to be a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing, nor do you have to be an FAS faculty member to see that the carving up and diminishment of FAS proceeds apace. Faust/Smith have been put in place to do with a smile and a nod what LHS/Kirby could not accomplish.

—From “Harvard Shares the Wealth.”

“If he painted his penis, that would be an amazing thing. There needs to be more fine art.”

—Martha “Martabel” Wasserman, the new editor of H-Bomb, the Harvard sex mag (and why not?), in the Crimson.

Bloomberg and the Hartford Courant report that Yale plans to follow Harvard’s lead and expand financial aid for middle-class families, although the specifics of its plans won’t be announced until January.

The governing board for Yale, located in New Haven, Connecticut, met last week to discuss the enhanced program, university spokesman Tom Conroy said in a telephone interview yesterday. The change is occurring “irrespective of any other institution’s announcement,” he said. Conroy couldn’t supply details about the initiative, he said.

It is a fair criticism of Richard Levin’s tenure as Yale president, I think, that he has followed Harvard rather than led with new initiatives. In the Yale-Harvard rivalry, chalk up a big win for Harvard…..

Zeph Stewart, whose passing was noted by others earlier on this blog, is remembered in today’s Boston Globe.

“Zeph cared about every part of Harvard, and every part of classics in particular,” said Richard Thomas, a professor of Greek and Latin at the university. “He was brilliant in a very quiet way. He knew a great deal, but he wasn’t ostentatious about his knowledge, and he had an aesthetic sensibility that it was wonderful to be touched by.”

Thomas and others remember him eloquently, and he sounds like a man who deserved that eloquence.

02138’s story on Harvard professors and their researchers/ghostwriters, “A Million Little Writers,” gets a nice write-up from magazine columnist Peter Carlson in today’s Washington Post. (Scroll down to find the item.)

The magazine 02138 covers Harvard University generally in a breathless and fawning manner. But the current “Sex! Greed! Scandal!” issue contains a wonderfully acerbic exposé that reveals how some of Harvard’s hotshot celebrity professors actually produce their books: They do it “with the help of a small army of student assistants who research, edit and sometimes even write material for which they are never credited.”

I’m not sure that all of you would find 02138 is fawning and breathless, but never mind…

If Harvard students handed in term papers written by somebody else, [author Jacob Hale] Russell points out, they would be subject to expulsion. Apparently, the rules for their professors are more forgiving.

LaTroy Hawkins, formerly of Colorado. And it’s a good move.