Shots in the Dark

…I might start looking into the activities of Harvard Medical International, which describes itself as “a self-supporting not-for-profit subsidiary of Harvard Medical School.“

What exactly is this group, which launches Harvard-branded hospitals in foreign countries, and why does it get to use the Harvard name? What were the terms of its arrangement with the Harvard Medical School, and who oversees it? What, in this context, does “not for profit” mean?

Word has it that a certain high-ranking University official has also been asking such questions…..

He’s got (yet) another gig: helping launch The Root, an online mag for black Americans. He’s editor-in-chief—and he’s also pitching tools to help blacks investigate their DNA history. Fascinating! Especially since Gates is an investor in AfricanDNA.com, a company he co-founded. (Watch Gates swab his own DNA in this video.)

Here’s Gates’ bio from the press release announcing AfricanDNA.com. Anything missing?

Long interested in genealogical research and DNA testing, Gates is the author of Finding Oprah’s Roots, Finding Your Own (Crown, 2007) and the forthcoming In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past, to be published next spring (Crown, 2008). He is also the host and executive producer of the critically acclaimed 2006 PBS series “African American Lives” and its follow-up, “Oprah’s Roots.” “African American Lives 2″ will be broadcast on PBS in February, 2008 in conjunction with Black History Month. Professor Gates is Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American and African Studies. Gates, an influential cultural critic, has written for Time Magazine, The New Yorker and the New York Times. The recipient of 48 honorary degrees and a 1981 MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. received a National Humanities Medal in 1998, and in 1999 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

To be fair, Gates’ Harvard title is noted early in the release. But it is remarkable that in the entire paragraph above, Harvard is unmentioned, as is any other university at which Gates has taught.

Well, Larry Summers works in a hedge fund, Skip Gates is becoming a business entepreneur. Has it occurred to anyone at Harvard that the university is paying its University Professors extremely well…so that they can go off and make fortunes doing other things besides teaching and research?

There’s a case to be made that this doesn’t matter, that Summers, Gates, et al bring renown to the university. But they are certainly expanding the traditional role of the University Professor and, indeed, the university itself. It is no strange irony that the people who are supposed to represent the pinnacle of Harvard’s scholarship are now pioneers in the corporatization of the university.

Ironically, one University Professor who did significant teaching, Cornel West, is the one most associated with not teaching…..

The quarterback has a sprained right ankle, didn’t practice at all last week, and may not practice until Wednesday or Thursday.

The Patriots don’t seem concerned. Overconfidence? Perhaps.

The Giants, by the way, are 11 1/2 point underdogs….

Yes.

As were the Buffalo Bills back in Super Bowl XXV.

The Washington Post has a nice description of Giuliani blowing off potential voters who want to shake his hand.

While it’s too early to write Giuliani’s campaign obituary, it’s not hard to see his weaknesses as a candidate. He seems constitutionally resistant to lengthy sessions of flesh-pressing and to uncontrolled campaign dialogue. He favors long, discursive speeches and generally limits questions to a handful, when he takes questions at all. Contact is across a rope line, generally — except when he must walk across a room to an exit, where bodyguards keep the curious at bay with deftly placed forearms, if necessary.

Want to know why? As any New Yorker will tell you, it’s because Rudy is an asshole.

(Sorry, but it’s true.)

The somewhat more sophisticated explanation: Giuliani doesn’t really believe in democracy. He believes in a hierarchy of citizenry in which he is at the top controlling the masses. (A small but symbolic example: We New Yorkers still have to deal with ridiculous iron gates Giuliani placed across certain New York avenues to force people to cross the street at certain points.)

Giuliani is cold, arrogant, patronizing, mean, bullying, and has fascistic tendencies. He would, I think, if elected, be a greater threat to the Constitution than Dick Cheney has been. And he’d do it all in the name of keeping us safe….but the truth is that he’d do it because he gets off on power.

In New Hampshire, where Giuliani led in the polls early and then collapsed by December, one of the former mayor’s appearances ended when aides asked attendees to remain in their seats so he could quickly leave the building and get to his next stop.

“I couldn’t figure out what he was doing,” said Andrew Smith, director of the Survey Center at the University of New Hampshire, who was there. “Was there some kind of security consideration? Did he fear that some old Rotarian lady had a butter knife? That kind of thing really hurt him here.“

There is an overwhelming narcissism in Giuliani, some/much of which was present pre-9/11, but which was deepened by Giuliani’s sense of his own importance on that day. (And, indeed, he was important on 9/11.)

I used to think that Giuliani was simply cynical about exploiting 9/11 for political gain. Now, I’ve come to suspect that he has so deeply internalized that experience that it has permeated his entire world view, like the little black oily alien virus that used to creep into people’s eyes on The X-Files. Hence all this nonsense about security. Giuliani believes that he is the only man who can save the world…and thus, every bad guy in the world wants to take a shot at him.

In response to a query about whether he would be afraid of getting killed politically if he tried to greatly cut taxes, he grinned and boomed: “They’ll kill me? The Mafia never killed me. You think I’m scared of them?“

This is a very dangerous man. We are fortunate that his political career is almost over.

It becomes more and more apparent that Harvard’s recent move to expand financial aid was primarily motivated by a desire to fend off political pressure from Washington.

Unfortunately, that strategem doesn’t seem to be working. Yesterday the Times reported that the Senate Finance Committee has signaled that it will continue its push to compel “well-endowed” colleges such as Harvard and Yale to spend a greater percentage of their endowment annually.

The Senate Finance Committee, increasingly concerned about the rising cost of higher education, demanded detailed information on Thursday from the nation’s 136 wealthiest colleges and universities on how they raised tuition over the last decade, gave out financial aid and managed and spent their endowments.

… “Tuition has gone up, college presidents’ salaries have gone up, and endowments continue to go up and up,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the committee. “We need to start seeing tuition relief for families go up just as fast.”

A fascinating abandonment of the free market by Grassley…but then, since universities such as Harvard enjoy non-profit status even while they rush to monetarize everything they discover in their non-profit science labs, there is some legitimate government jurisdiction here.

This is a big test for Drew Faust…and truth be told, Larry Summers might have been better-equipped, given his Washington experience and economic know-how, to repel such Washington pressure.

It will be fascinating to see how Drew Faust responds….

The Times reports that it’s not just Ivy Plus schools who are “well-endowed“—it’s exclusive prep schools such as Exeter and Andover. Exeter now has $1 million in endowment funding for every one of its students.

Exeter may be a particularly successful example, but its ballooning endowment also reflects a broader trend. In the 10 years through the 2005-6 academic year, the number of students at independent schools, which does not count parochial schools, rose just 11.6 percent, according to the National Association of Independent Schools. Over the same period, the average endowment per student, adjusted for inflation, increased by 93.5 percent.

Other schools mentioned included Harvard-Westlake in LA, Brearley in New York City, and Choate.

I’ve seen some of this at my own alma mater, Groton, for which I raise money. Groton, which is a small school of a little more than 300 students over five grades, has had to transform itself to keep up with larger competitors such as Exeter and St. Paul’s. Where Groton once had its 8th and 9th grade boys sleep in cubicles with curtains for doors—sounds weird, but the kids loved it—the place now has dormitories, a gym, and a performing arts theater that are nicer than those, I’d bet, at most small colleges. It’s a little ridiculous, but Groton feels it has to maintain this level of facilities in order to continue attracting the children of the wealthy who are the natural constituency of any prep school. (And no one’s making a lot of money doing this; teachers at Groton get some nice benefits, but mostly they make their age.) It is a wonderful school and I was fortunate to go there, but it has become almost surreally luxurious.

(In one encouraging sign, Groton is now free for any student from families with incomes of less than $75, 000.)

Why does all this matter? Because it shows again how the very rich in this country are pulling away from everyone else….

Did Heath Ledger dream before he died?

It’s a morbid question, but one answered by this “Explainer” in Slate….

Meanwhile, Fox’s John Gibson defends his joking about Ledger in the hours after Ledger’s death by saying, “There’s no point in passing up a good joke….”

A Baptist church in Kansas has announced plans to picket memorial services for Heath Ledger because of his portrayal of a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain.

“You cannot live in defiance of God,” [church member Shirley Phelps-Roper] said. “He got on that big screen with a big, fat message: God is a liar and it’s OK to be gay.”

How Christian….

I suppose it’s encouraging that most of the posts on FreeRepublic, the arch-conservative website that posted this story, are as appalled as any decent person would be.