Shots in the Dark

The Crimson reports that the John F. Kennedy School of Government is changing its name to the Harvard Kennedy School (it’s like two icons for the price of one!). It also has a new slogan: “Ask what you can do.”

Schools have slogans?

I wonder what the biz school slogan would be? “Ka-ching!”

Or the college slogan: “Why stop now?”

I tease. But it’s true that the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard is a mouthful, and if a slogan helps the school define and market itself, well, so be it. The K-School has some of the most idealistic people at Harvard and a sense of community that’s unusual for the university, and it’s hard not to wish it well.

Drew Faust and FAS dean Michael Smith announced a substantial expansion of Harvard financial aid policies today, designed to lighten the burden of a Harvard education for middle-income families.

The new formula creates a sliding scale of payment by income level for families making less than $180,000.

Families with incomes above $120,000 and below $180,000 and with assets typical for these income levels will be asked to pay 10 percent of their incomes. For those with incomes below $120,000, the family contribution percentage will decline steadily from 10 percent, reaching zero for those with incomes at $60,000 and below. For example, a typical family making $120,000 will be asked to pay approximately $12,000 for a child to attend Harvard College, compared with more than $19,000 under existing student aid policies. For a typical family with $180,000 of income, the payment would be approximately $18,000, compared with more than $30,000 today.

The new policies will also eliminate loans as a source of aid and eliminate the consideration of home equity in determining a family’s ability to pay for college.

“We want all students who might dream of a Harvard education to know that it is a realistic and affordable option,” said Faust.

The Times approvingly writes up the announcement.

The initiative appears to make Harvard’s aid to students with household incomes of $120,000 to $180,000 the most generous to be offered by any of the country’s elite private universities.

But there seems little doubt that part of the reason behind this is outside pressure—whether it’s a Business Week story on the growing wealth inequity between “Ivy-Plus” universities and state schools, or Congressional consideration of a law to mandate what percentage of a university’s endowment must be spent on financial aid.

(The Globe, which seems to consider its website something to work on after the next day’s paper is printed, has nothing.)

On a quick reading, this seems like an important move for Harvard, whatever the motivation, and terrific press for Drew Faust. Your thoughts?

My friend Nina Burleigh has written a new book, “Mirage: Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt,” that gets a terrific review in today’s Times book review.

Mirage is about Napoleon’s ill-fated occupation of Egypt in 1798, which didn’t go so well for the little general—or his soldiers.

In “Mirage,” Burleigh’s description of a young army overdressed for the sweltering heat (in Alpine wool uniforms), afraid and unable to communicate with the increasingly hostile locals, also has echoes of the present. Her principal subject, however, is not the military but the 151 “savants” Napoleon took along — geologists, mapmakers, naturalists, artists, even a musicologist.

….Burleigh, a journalist and the author of “A Very Private Woman,” a well-received account of the 1964 murder of the prominent Washington figure Mary Meyer, hurtles in less than 250 pages through the three grueling years the savants spent in Egypt, peppering her tale with multitudes of facts, digressions and anecdotes.….

It sounds like a fascinating book, and I’m not just saying that because Nina’s an old friend….

In the Globe, columnist Sam Allis visits with Harvard minister Peter Gomes to talk about God.

[Gomes] is, on the subject of Christianity, a font of knowledge, humor, and edge.

A font of edge?

Well, never mind. Gomes has a new book called “The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus,” and he has recently been named preacher to the Henley Royal Regatta, though why a crew race needs a preacher, God only knows. Allis, however, has come to challenge him on matters of faith.

I recently stumbled on “The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality” that buoyed my spirits no end. While this manifesto contains nothing particularly new, it stands as a refreshing breath of foul air against the irritating piety of religious tomes that blow onto the scene in droves.

A refreshing breath of foul air against the irritating piety of religious tomes that blow onto the scene in droves?

If Sam Allis is metaphorically challenged, Reverend Gomes is eloquent as always. But this is an odd column. Allis says that atheists are fine, Gomes says that there must be something more, and that about wraps up the column, the Boston Globe’s idea of a learned disquisition.

Business Week has an important piece about the growing wealth of “Ivy Plus” (the Ivy League, plus Stanford and MIT) universities.

Called “The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League,” the article examines the growing wealth gap between Ivy Plus-schools and public universities, especially with states freezing or cutting their support of public higher education.

More than before, impressionable students and ambitious parents have come to view college as a form of conspicuous consumption. …The increasingly plush Ivy Plus model casts into sharp relief the travails of America’s public instituions of higher learning, which educate 75% of the country’s college students. While the Ivies, which account for less than 1% of the total, lift their spending into the stratosphere, many public colleges and universities are struggling to cope with rising enrollments in an era when most states are devoiting a dwindling public share of their budgets to higher ed.

…The wealth gap between the Ivies and everyone else has never been wider. The $5.7 billion in investment gains generated by Harvard’s endowment for the year that ended June 30 exceeeded the total endowment assets of all but six U.S. universities, five of which were Ivy Plus.…

One consequence of the wealth gap: Ivy Plus schools are increasingly able to raid public universities for their best and brightest scholars. Moreover, Ivy Plus schools are able to fund campus expansions and research ventures that public universities can’t in the current budget climate.

When Business Week asked Drew Faust for her thoughts on this phenomenon, she responded that non-Ivy Plus schools should “really emphasize social science or humanities and have science endeavors that are not as ambitious” as those of Harvard and its peers.

Ouch. One knows what she means, and good for her for tackling a tough question, but it’s very hard to make such a remark without coming across as patronizing. Nice little public schools, you should build up your creative writing departments. And a pat on the head to go with it.

The question that Faust’s response begs, I think, is—well, there are more than one. Do rich universities have any societal obligation to poorer ones? (Because after all, not everyone can go to Harvard.) Is it a good thing for scientific research to be so heavily concentrated on seven or eight campuses? Does such a concentration benefit the universities involved more than it benefits the average American, who is, after all, generally paying for this federally-funded research? And what happens to a place like Harvard when it becomes so heavily financially oriented toward big science? How does that focus change the university and turn it into something quasi-educational, quasi-corporate?

As so often seems to be the case, one gets the sense that none of these big questions are publicly discussed at Harvard….because to express any reservations in public might slow down the money train.

From Jerry Saltz’s Art column in the December 3 issue of New York magazine:

Urs Fischer has reduced Gavin Brown’s Enterprise to a hole in the ground, and it is one of the most splendid things to have happened in a New York gallery in a whle. Experientially rich, buzzing with energy and entropy, crammed with chaos and contradiction, and topped off with the saga of subersion that is central both to the history of the empty-gallery-as-a-work-of-art but also to the Gavin Brown experience itself, this work is brimming with meaning and mojo.

And alliteration, apparently.

(My question: Can a thing buzz with entropy? Or be topped off with subversion?)

The work of art in question is, literally, a big hole in the ground.

In the Globe, Linda Wertheimer investigates the problem of gender inequity at MIT.

Just one out of 25 faculty members granted tenure this year at MIT is female, a gender imbalance that appears to contrast with the university’s decade-old effort to boost the status of women.

[Blogger journalistic pet peeve: “appears to contrast”? Come on, Linda. I know you don’t want to look like you’re editorializing, but of course it contrasts.]

The point was brought home recently when the school’s in-house newspaper published a portrait gallery of the faculty members granted tenure this year; among the sea of male faces was the lone woman.

…[Nancy] Hopkins, an outspoken critic of former Harvard president Lawrence Summers for his remarks about women’s ability in the sciences, said it was unnerving to see only one woman among the newly tenured professors featured in last month’s Tech Talk newspaper.”It’s a shock. I don’t have a thousand words as good as that picture,” said Hopkins.

There’s no simple villain here, not at a university with a female president. But according to Wertheimer, university officials “will investigate impediments to women receiving tenure.”

Note the implicit assumption in that quote—it’s important. If there aren’t as many women getting tenured as men, it’s because there are “impediments” to women receiving tenure. Yikes. That’s like a judge opening a trial by telling the defendant that he’s guilty, and this trial is going to find out why.

The questions that, in part, precipitated the demise of Larry Summers continue to plague academia. In a small way, perhaps, Summers can take comfort from that.

In the Crimson, Columbia historian Eric Foner lays a smackdown on Alan Dershowitz, and in pretty convincing fashion.

Here’s the back-story: In a November 20 Crimson editorial, Dershowitz lambasted “hard-left radicals “led by Professor J. Lorand Matory” as hypocrites who believe in free speech except when that speech is “pro-Israel.”

Who, other than Matory, are these hard-left radicals and “political cronies” at Harvard? Dershowitz doesn’t bother to say. Is there more than one? Wouldn’t a fair-minded editorialist feel compelled to mention at least another of this band of free speech-hating anti-Israelites?

Apparently, they were easier to find at Columbia.

At Columbia University, on the other hand, a group of professors—who are generally in sync with their extremist colleagues at Harvard—are complaining that Columbia’s President, Lee C. Bollinger, has too much freedom of speech when it comes to the Middle East. A campaign is underway to rebuke Bollinger for expressing his personal views about the Iranian dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Led by well-known radicals such as Eric Foner—who complained that Bollinger’s harsh description of Ahmadinejad was “completely inaccurate”—these politically correct censors want to muzzle Bollinger. They also want to muzzle students, alumni, and other “outsiders,” who have legitimate complaints about the Middle East Studies Department, which has become a wholly owned subsidiary of radical Islam.

Strong stuff, albeit without any particular evidence to prove it—a fact that Foner points out in his response.

I don’t know what the standards of proof among law professors are, but among historians it is customary to present facts to bolster an argument. I defy Professor Dershowitz to cite any statement of mine that is “against Israel.” My criticism of President Bollinger revolved around the part of his speech that seemed to commit Columbia University to support of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, and to blame Iran for the violence there. When introducing a foreign head of state, the president of a university is not simply expressing his “personal views,” as Dershowitz claims, but speaking for the university.

Lest anyone actually believe Dershowitz’s misrepresentation, I am categorically in favor of the broadest possible freedom of speech for everyone, whether I agree with them or not.

I think Foner has a good point. Several of them, actually. Moreover, there’s something odd and disturbing about the stigmatizing language Dershowitz uses in his op-ed—all this talk about “hard-left radicals,” “political cronies,” “extremist” and “well-known radicals.” It sounds like something you’d hear Joe McCarthy say back in the 1950s. Both Matory and Foner are pretty liberal, but the way Dershowitz describes them, you’d think they were sitting in the back of a labor demonstration waiting to set off bombs, or setting fire to Henry Kissinger’s office, or some such act of anarchism and violence. Dershowitz is smart enough to know exactly what he’s doing, and smart enough to know better.

Historians do appear to have higher standards of proof than do lawyers.

Will the Red Sox land Johan Santana? Yeesh. Aren’t they good enough already?

Truth be told, I’m pleased that the Yankees didn’t give up the farm (system) to land the pitcher, as great as he is. Phil Hughes, Ian Kennedy, starting centerfielder Melky Cabrera—these young players could all be stars in a year or so.

The Red Sox, however, have such pitching depth, they can probably afford to make a deal involving young pitching. But if I were them, I wouldn’t give up that Jacoby Ellsbury; that guy looks like the real thing.

Still, without the Yankees involved, the Twins would seem to have only the Red Sox to deal with, and since Santana will be a free agent after next season, they have incentive to trade him now, while they can still get something for him. You’d have to say it’s looking good for Boston….

I’m back from Mexico, where I split my time between diving, eating, sleeping, and keeping abreast of the Facebook situation. (We won. Here’s the court ruling.) It was a fantastic vacation—well, a long weekend, really, but still fantastic. Arrive Thursday, dive for three days, return Monday. The water was heaven, and the marine life incredible: a very rare blue parrotfish, almost extinct because restaurants serve it as grouper; moray eels, including one four or five feet long, swimming in the open water, which you don’t see often; huge barracuda; crabs as big as my outstretched arms. But often in diving it’s the little things that are most exciting to see: a fish cleaning-station, where certain species go to have their skin pecked clean of algae by other fish; or a fireworm, also known as a bristle worm, a long caterpillar-like worm covered with poisonous bristles. (Found one of those; never saw it before.) At one point, our dive master actually pulled out a magnifying glass to help my dive buddy and I see something….

Most exciting, though, was to see how the reefs of Cozumel are rebounding from the devastation inflicted upon them by Hurricane Wilma. I dove there just a few months after that hurricane, and it was like an oceanic ghost town; the reefs were awash with sand, and the coral looked gray and barren. Now the life is really starting to return—there are new sponges, new anemones, new growth all over. And the color is back: vivid reds, blues, purples, yellows, unlike anything one can see on land.

And then, on the return from the last dive on Sunday, our boat was suddenly surrounded by dolphins, an entire pod of them, swimming effortlessly inches under the bow as we chugged along, turning onto their sides to look up at us (or so it seemed, anyway), then turning and diving into deeper water. They gave us up eventually and we made our way back to the marina, but as we looked out toward the open ocean, the dolphins were still there, swimming and breaching, the lowering sun reflecting off their backs.

Heaven.