Shots in the Dark

Are Patriots fans worried/irritated that quarterback Tom Brady seems to have moved to New York before the Super Bowl to hang out with girlfriend Giselle Bunchen?

You should be!

First of all, what, Giselle can’t go to Boston? We’ve never seen her there, but Brady is constantly in Manhattan. The Patriots quarterback is dissing his own town.

Second, shouldn’t he be practicing or something?

As the New York Post, which is reveling in Giants mania, puts it,

Meanwhile, [Eli] Manning got down to business in a different way. His older brother Cooper Manning said the quarterback is spending his free time studying plays and watching game footage. “He’ll be relaxing a whole lot less and getting more and more prepared for the game,” he said. Brady, on the other hand, may have been studying anatomy. “I would be concerned about sex affecting him mentally, because his mind is in a different place,” said sports psychologist Dr. Todd Hays.

I would be concerned about sex affecting him mentally, too, if I weren’t actually hoping for it.

Third, has Brady forgotten the Jessica Simpson curse? Tony Romo and the Cowboys sure haven’t.

Fourth, is Brady getting hair plugs?

In the Yale Daily News, Victor Zapana writes what is perhaps the best, most balanced piece about the Columbia expansion that I’ve seen anywhere.

Zapana details the objections that some neighborhood residents and businesses have to the Manhattanville Project, as we shall call it. But while most of the press coverage has reported on the protesters to Manhattanville, Zapana also captures the mixed feelings that people have—opposition, anxiety, and optimism.

For Manhattanville businesses whose land is within the 17-acre plot but has not yet been purchased by Columbia, a sense of tension permeates the four city quadrangles that make up this mostly abandoned industrial sector, where the landscape is marked by street after street of closed factory buildings. Residents are concerned that expansion will leave them without a source of income, but project backers predict it will revitalize the area, bringing in hundreds of well-paying jobs and permanently attracting businesses. [Emphasis added]

But as momentum builds for a project whose impact on the surrounding environment may be similar to that of the possible addition of two new residential colleges here in New Haven, the diversity of opinion — the opposition, in other words — is waning.

The Coalition to Preserve Community, a small but vocal group of community organizers opposed to the expansion, has struggled to attract large numbers of community members to join its ranks….

If Zapana’s right, that’s an interesting shift that hasn’t been picked up on elsewhere. Previous press accounts made it seem that the entire neighborhood [sic] was marching in the streets against Columbia.

And Zapana reports on what seems to me the obvious fact that some area businesses have good reason to think they’ll cash in on Manhattanville.

Especially at stores outside the 17-acre plot, some business owners and employees anticipate there may be some economic gain for them if more students and Columbia workers move into the area.

On the corner of West 125th Street and Broadway sits a small, 50-year-old liquor shop with a huge selection of wines stacked on the walls. The owner of the West 125th Street Liquors, Inc., Omar Ramirez, insists he is looking forward to the benefits Columbia’s new buildings might bring. He sees the expansion bringing in many more customers to his store, because “there’s a big wine culture” among students.

He hopes this “big boom” will happen sooner rather than later. “It’s gonna be a big change here, and we definitely need it,” he said. [Emphasis added here, too.]

I know the liquor store whereof he speaks, and there’s no question that it would be helped by Manhattanville.

Meanwhile, the Times ran a telling piece on one of Manhattanville’s most vigorous opponents, and he’s not exactly what anti-growth lefties would imagine. Nicholas Sprayregen is a multi-millionaire who owns five warehouses under the rubric “Tuck-It-Away Self Storage.” He owns four properties in the Manhattanville area, and he’s clearly hoping to get every red cent out of Columbia that he can. Which, of course, is his right—but he shouldn’t pretend to be a civil rights crusader when he’s really just trying to max out his profit.

“I would have never thought four years ago that I would get involved in a civil rights issue; I had never before considered myself as part of a minority that was being stamped upon.” He does now. “This is about the powerful growing more powerful at the expense of those who have less.

Puh-leeze. What exactly has Sprayregen done for the area in the 30 years he’s owned buildings there? Zilch.

I think the press coverage about Manhattanville may be turning because, on balance, the plan is a good and important thing for this New York area. (It really is hard to call it a neighborhood, since the only neighbors there are really people, like me, who live around it.)

Sooner or later, the merits of this thing win out over the arguments of self-interested multi-millionare landlords who, over decades, have done nothing to beautify the area or create jobs but are suddenly passionate defenders of justice and the American way….

AP education writer Justin Pope has a solid piece about the growing tensions between the super-rich colleges and everyone else.

Harvard’s endowment - the largest overall - expanded by an amount last year that’s more than Ivy League rival Cornell has altogether. Princeton now has more than $2 million in the bank for every student. Stanford raised nearly $1 billion during its last reported fiscal year alone.

The disparity between the haves and the have-nots appears to be creating a schism in education similar to the schism in American social class.

Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust added to the tension by getting into an exchange with Big Ten provosts over whether ambitious science research should be left to the most elite universities. Some objected to her suggestion that it would be better for some institutions to focus on social sciences and humanities.

As a handful of colleges get richer and richer, what effect does this have upon the American system of higher education in general? And how will American society be shaped by the education wealth gap?

It’s an interesting and important problem—perhaps the most important problem that Drew Faust will face in her presidency.

The New Hampshire college just announced that, starting next fall, students from families with incomes of under $75,000 will not have to pay tuition…..

I don’t know about you, but I find the death of Heath Ledger very sad, and I wonder how long it will be before some rightwinger—Rush Limbaugh, perhaps—links Ledger’s death to his portrayal of a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain in a “See? That’s what happens!” kind of way.

The Globe reports that Patriots fans, all fired up about the possibility of a 19-o season, are driving Super Bowl tix to record highs.

Don’t waste your money, Pats fans. Your boys are going down!

(Clearly, I have become more confident in the past 24 hours.)

Pats fans are paying as much as $10k for a seat on the 50-yard line.

Which is, of course, just the kind of thing that makes you root for the underdog, storybook, hardscrabble, blue collar, ordinary Joe Giants…..

Plaxico Burress burns Al Harris for the umpeenth time in Sunday’s legendary victory
against the Packers.

Oliver Stone is pitching “Bush,” a movie about our current president.

Stone, an outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, told [Daily Variety] he’s not looking to make an anti-Bush polemic. He said he wants “a fair, true portrait of the man. How did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?“

That’s a movie I’d like to see, actually.

Meanwhile, New York state attorney general Andrew Cuomo is investigating travel abroad programs at a number of schools, including Columbia and Harvard….

Questions about study abroad programs were raised in an article in The New York Times last summer that described how some program providers offer colleges rebates, free and subsidized travel, unpaid seats on advisory boards, help with back-office services, marketing stipends and other benefits. Critics say the arrangements, which are seldom disclosed, can limit students’ options and result in higher prices for those seeking international experience.

Hard to know how serious this is, but having Andrew Cuomo—one of the more ambitious and less pleasant men in New York—investigate you isn’t going to be fun…..

As if to reinforce the concerns of Roger Leheka and Andrew Delbanco (see post below), the Hartford Courant reports that “the number of low-income students at Yale is declining.”

In recent years, Harvard and Yale universities, and others, have boosted financial aid and expanded recruiting to draw more students of modest means.

In the Times, scholarship consultant Roger Leheka and historian Andrew Delbanco, both Columbia-affiliated, take aim at Harvard and Yale’s new financial aid plans with what is perhaps the most serious criticism yet of those new proposals. (Due more to the location of the argument than its novelty.)

Next year, each of these institutions will add more than $20 million to what they now spend on financial aid, reducing the cost of a college year for families earning $180,000 to $18,000, from $30,000. That’s good news for students at Harvard or Yale. But it’s bad news for many hoping to attend other private four-year colleges — and for the nation in general.

The problem is that most colleges will feel compelled to follow Harvard and Yale’s lead in price-discounting. Yet few have enough money to give more aid to relatively wealthy students without taking it away from relatively poor ones.

The authors point out that 99% of colleges in the U.S. have an endowment that is less than 1% of Harvard’s.

And here’s where it gets really interesting: The writers then note Larry Summers’ stated concerns about the lack of lower-income students at Harvard and elsewhere, and suggest that this is a far more important issue than the extension of financial aid to middle-class families.

In 2004, Lawrence Summers, then Harvard’s president, pointed out that three-fourths of the students at selective colleges come from the top income quartile and only 9 percent from the bottom two quartiles combined. ….The problem Mr. Summers described is only growing worse.

The authors don’t come out and say so, but they strongly imply that Summers was primarily concerned with the plight of lower-income kids, while Drew Faust and Rick Levin are actually hurting lower-income students.

It is understandable that Harvard and Yale want to make themselves more affordable. But the way they’re going about it sets an example that is likely to make it even harder for low-income students to attend the best college for which they are qualified. Harvard’s stated motive is to stop prospective students from “voting with their feet” by choosing public universities or other private colleges. But surely this is not a very serious problem for a university that each year turns away hundreds of high school valedictorians and whose yield (the percentage of admitted applicants who enroll) is around 80 percent.

Is that fair? I’m not so sure—who knows if Larry Summers wouldn’t have enlarged financial aid in the same way that Drew Faust just did? (After all, surely the original “free tuition” plan was not his idea, just as this recent enlargement was not Drew Faust’s.) And it doesn’t seem at all unrealistic to me that a family with an income of $150,000 would have trouble paying Harvard $50,000 of that. Moreover, will those 99% of colleges really take money away from poor kids in order to compete for kids with Harvard and Yale, when surely the applicant pool has little overlap?

Nonetheless, the impression that will linger in the minds of anyone who reads this piece is pretty clear: Summers right, current (unnamed) Harvard president wrong.

The answer, according to Leheka and Delbanco, is more government aid to colleges less “well-endowed,” to quote a certain Harvard president—i.e., rich—than Harvard and Yale.

Otherwise, America will be the loser, no matter who wins the Harvard-Yale game.

I think this line of criticism has now reached the point where Drew Faust and Rick Levin need to respond….