Shots in the Dark

From where I sat, it was a remarkable speech. A more jaded friend says Americans will only remember the clips of Jeremiah Wright on YouTube. If so, and if that dooms Obama, then we will get the president we deserve. One thing everyone I know who watched the speech thought: It was impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton giving a speech of such honesty, ambition, and intelligence. Whether it’s because she has a different philosophy of public speaking or because she’s lost any nuance in her political voice, Hillary could never speak as Obama spoke yesterday….

To the new Richard Bradley homepage. You’ll see lots of changes around here, starting with a totally different look. There are so many changes, in fact, that I’m just starting to figure them all out myself. And there’ll be more still to come—minor tweaks, adjustments, additions, subtractions.

The original RichardBradley.net was created to coincide with the publication of Harvard Rules. It served well for three years. But now there’s a new book, The Greatest Game, and with a new book comes a new site.

Give it a look; tell me what you like and what you don’t; all suggestions are welcome.

And thanks, as always, for reading and contributing.

Cheers,

RB

There’s been a lot going on in the 02138 zip code lately, including a basketball recruiting controversy and a debate over segregated gym hours for Muslim women.

But President Drew Faust has been an absent figure during these campus controversies. I joked the other day that she was on her book tour, which was, in retrospect, overly snarky of me. But where has she been?

Testifying before Congress on the importance of funding scientific research.

Young scientists’ careers are being stifled by flat funding for biomedical research, Harvard’s president told a US Senate committee this morning.

The problem may be real, but the report on which Faust’s testimony is based, Broken Pipeline, is a joke; it’s a glossy brochure, more photos than text, based on the anecdotal stories of 12 junior researchers, produced in conjunction with the “integrated health system” Partners Healthcare. It looks like a corporate annual report, only with less information.

I don’t mean to deny the validity or import of the problem. But I do think that the fact that the president of Harvard is testifying before Congress, waving corporate brochures as evidence, even as she stays mum about issues happening at Harvard College says something about the evolving role of the university president.

(I don’t think even Larry Summers testified before Congress while president of Harvard.)

What are her priorities? Scientific research. Why? Because that’s where the big bucks are.

Except that then she has to push for more money for scientific research, because, well, that’s where the big bucks are. And around and around we go.

This prioritization might not make such a big difference in terms of the College if Faust had appointed strong FAS and College deans.

I don’t know a lot about Michael Smith and Evelynn Hammonds. But the posters on this blog (and to be fair, it’s a self-selected group) do not see them that way…..

Over the last eight years, Citigroup has paid Bob Rubin more than $150 million.

I think I’ll just let that speak for itself.

Geraldine Ferraro, one half of a presidential ticket all good Dems would love to forget, has resigned from the Clinton campaign after alleging that race is the basis of Barack Obama’s support.

On Wednesday a close ally of Mrs. Clinton, Geraldine A. Ferraro, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1984 who was on the Clinton finance committee, resigned from the campaign after being criticized by Mr. Obama’s advisers, among others, for her recent comments that “if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position” as a leading presidential contender.

The thing is, Ferraro wasn’t necessarily wrong. After all, if she hadn’t been a woman, she wouldn’t have been a vice-presidential contender. (She certainly didn’t get there on the merits.)

Similarly, if Hillary wasn’t a woman, she wouldn’t be getting so many votes from women.

But the Clinton campaign has been repeatedly introducing the race card in odd and worrisome ways into this primary battle, and the fact is they just don’t have any credibility on the matter any more. Things have reached the point where you can not give Hillary and her attack dogs the benefit of the doubt whenever they speak on race…..

The $1,000-an-hour prostitute known as “Kristen” who serviced Eliot Spitzer has been identified by the New York Times.

She left “a broken family” at age 17, having been abused, according to the MySpace page, and has used drugs and “been broke and homeless.”

But this should be taken with a grain of salt, because she’s trying to get into the music biz.

….On the Web page is a recording of what she describes as her latest track, “What We Want,” a hip-hop-inflected rhythm-and-blues tune that asks, “Can you handle me, boy?” and uses some dated slang, calling someone her “boo.” “I know what you want, you got what I want,” she sings in the chorus. “I know what you need. Can you handle me?”

This is all getting surreal: We live in an age where a prostitute is identified and interviewed because of her MySpace page….and there are dozens of comments of support—”Hang in there!” “We got your back!” And so on.

The funny thing is, she hasn’t taken down her page, which is linked to above. I think we can expect to see Ms. Ashley Alexandra Dupres in the pages of Playboy in a month or so, with a single coming out at about the same time….

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By the way, the photo above is the one the New York Times ran; below is the full MySpace photo (thanks, New York Post!). Kind of funny to see the editorial process at work.

Two articles in the Crimson touch on whether two recent events at Harvard have manifested institutional promotion of Islam at the expense of the rights and beliefs of others.

On the Opinion page, Diana Esposito, Benjamin Taylor and Aaron Williams write about their concern over the fact that, two weeks ago, the Islamic call to prayer, or adhan, was broadcast from the steps of Widener.

No doubt, the week’s events have broadened some horizons, and exposed some in our community to facets of a religion with which they were not previously familiar. This is certainly a good thing. However, it should be asked if other, more important concerns have been overlooked.

The adhan contains a very specific and prescriptive religious message, the authors continue: God is the greatest, Mohammad is the messenger of God, and so on.

We cherish the fact that it is possible to discuss our differences with our classmates and neighbors without that discussion erupting into conflict and sowing the seeds of division and disrespect.

We believe that the adhan, issued publicly in a pluralistic setting, does indeed sow those seeds of division and disrespect.

….To the extent that this statement is a profession of faith, it is benign; however, by virtue of its content, it is also a declaration of religious superiority and a declaration against all beliefs that conflict with those two statements.

The authors of this piece do not believe that there is no lord but God. Nor do we believe that Muhammad was God’s prophet. In fact, we do not believe in prophets. We expect that our statements might be offensive to some, and for that reason, we believe that it wouldn’t be appropriate, in the name of spreading awareness about our beliefs, use a public address system to declare to everyone in Harvard Yard that God is imaginary, that prayer is a waste of time, or that Muhammad was not a prophet.

This is the kind of indepence of mind and spirit that I find quite inspiring. It is not easy at Harvard to stand up and say that the embrace of pluralism does not extend to accepting the broadcasting of a particular belief, particularly one which tells you that your beliefs are wrong. These students respect the specific words of a particular faith enough to say, I disagree with it, and I’m offended by the way that its language seems to denigrate my beliefs, and Harvard shouldn’t be sanctioning such speech by blasting it from the steps of a building—particularly one which is supposed to represent the promotion of reason and pluralism.

Certainly one can disagree with the argument; I’m sure there are posters here who would say, it’s a one-time thing, imagine the administrative challenges of saying no, hearing the adan is educational, and so on. (Imagine the protests if you rejected a request to broadcast the adan! The cries of discrimination!)

Perhaps Harvard should now broadcast prayers of all religions from the steps of Widener. After all, having broadcast one prayer, wouldn’t it now be discriminatory to say no to others? Perhaps a Latin Mass? Or maybe Christmas carols? Or, as the writers suggest, perhaps they should get the right to broadcast their statement of atheism: There is no God, prayer is a waste of time, etc., etc.

On the other hand, there’s a serious argument that such religious displays are a reasonable compromise, and we gain more from tolerating them, even if we find them irksome, than by prohibiting them.

Some of those arguments are worth taking seriously.

Still, God love the dissenter who puts pen to paper and, in a grand American tradition, says, Get your religion out of my face.

And I love the fact that, while some professors pooh-pooh the issue, denying its import, three students stand up and say, no, there’s a principle here, and no matter how small or fleeting the incident overlying the principle, it is important to speak up and say what’s really going on.

That said, the Crimson also reports on Ola Aljawhary ’09, a young woman who is chair of the Harvard Islamic Society’s Islamic Knowledge Committee and has become a sort of unofficial spokesperson for Muslim women in the segregated-gym story.

“It’s become sort of an invasion of my personal space and privacy,” Aljawhary said. “My mental space is so cluttered by all these requests, but I don’t want anyone to say there’s a lack of transparency, or that I declined to comment. I’m now seen as the ‘it’ girl, the go-to-person, and it’s gotten intense.”

Aljawhary was not in the original group of six women who asked for men to be banned from the QRAC during certain hours. You have to give her credit for nonetheless recognizing the importance of responding to media interest in a frank, non-Harwellian way, acknowledging that transparency is healthy and promotes greater understanding of important issues.

Meanwhile, has a single Harvard official publicly addressed the matter?

“I’d be flattered by all the attention it if it weren’t so negative. All of it’s pretty derogatory, pretty degrading, personally hurtful,” she said. “We should be able to accommodate the minorities within reasonable limits. Otherwise, you’re saying they should just shut their mouths.”

It’s unfair to read too much into a single newspaper quote, but Ms. Aljawhary’s interpretation of the matter doesn’t impress. No one is telling anyone not to speak; quite the contrary. A civilized conversation about this debate would be a healthy thing. (It would have been even better if it had taken place before the implementation of the gym segregation.)

The Crimson should solicit an op-ed from someone—it could well be Aljawhary—who can make a more reasoned case for the segregated gym hours.

Evelynn Hammonds is written up in the Chronicle of Higher Education today.

Ms. Hammonds says that though she has enjoyed working in the provost’s office, it is time to move on.

“While I’ve felt that this work has been very interesting and very challenging, it’s really taken me away from the students, and I wanted to get back to working with undergraduate education and undergraduate life,” she says.

…..Her chief priorities as dean, she says, will be to put into effect the college’s newly approved general-education curriculum and to improve outdated student housing.

That is a big issue, isn’t it? I know that Yale has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the past decade or so renovating its colleges. Does Harvard need to do the same?

In the Globe, Red Sox historian Bill Nowlin gives “The Greatest Game” a nice review.

Bradley’s book tells the story of the game, of course, but tells it with rare flavor, alternating chapters on each inning with others offering rich perspective. Even during his chapter on the “Top of the First,” he devotes some pages to the birth of free agency in ways that enables even those of us who lived through the era to better appreciate the context of the times. He demonstrates a solid grasp of the hitters and the pitchers and their tendencies during the season, as well as the unfolding “game within the game” strategizing and how adjustments are made batter-by-batter, depending on circumstances. The detail gets down to the level of describing New York catcher Thurman Munson’s batter’s box rituals. Bradley’s profiles of key players are rewarding.

Here’s a line that makes me particularly happy, since it’s something I was striving for—and it may come as a surprise to some regular readers:

If he favored one team or another, it’s not evident.

The Greatest Game is probably not in physical bookstores yet, but it is available on Amazon, etc.

Last night I started wondering whether, in the matter of Eliot Spitzer, we weren’t all repeating the rush-to-moral-judgment mistakes of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The questions, after all, felt so familiar. How could Silda have stood alongside him like that? How could a politician be so reckless, so arrogant? What could make a man in that position risk everything? What a bastard Eliot Spitzer must be….

As someone who was, at the time, pretty moralistic about Bill Clinton, then later came to regret that attitude, I wish we could remember some of the moral nuances that the country eventually arrived at, some of the insights about the connections between political success and personal desires.

How could Silda have stood alongside her cad of a husand? How could Eliot have cheated on her?

Well, who are we to say what goes on inside a marriage? Even as all the pundits tut-tut at Silda for standing by her man, unless we are privy to the inner life of Eliot Spitzer and Silda Wall, we simply can not judge. (And why is the impulse to judge apparently so much more powerful than the impulse to try to understand?)

As for Spitzer’s carnal desires….well, this is a man who’s clearly hugely ambitious, energetic, and driven. Is it so impossible that, as with JFK and Bill Clinton, men who embody these characteristics often find that they carry a proportionate amount of sexual desire inside them?

And isn’t it possible, in a way, that we should want this from our leaders, because if they don’t have that passion inside them, maybe they shouldn’t be running one of the biggest states in the country?

I’m not saying there aren’t plenty of better options, or that this is a simple black-and-white matter. On the contrary: I’m saying that maybe we need to calm down, take a deep breath, before we have this guy tried and convicted in the court of public opinion.

Now, please don’t misunderstand me: I’m not sanctioning adultery, nor the use of prostitutes, particularly because governors shouldn’t commit crimes, no matter how minor.

(Prostitution, so far as I can tell, only hurts people when it’s illegal. And frankly, if I were a woman and you gave me a choice between, say, working in a coal mine or hooking at $5k an hour—extreme choice, I know, but you take the point—I might just take the $5k. I certainly wouldn’t criticize those who did.)

(Second point: Shouldn’t everyone who believes in abortion rights support legalized prostitution? How can one believe that you have the right to abort a fetus but not the right to sell your body for sex?)

What I am saying is that we shouldn’t entirely judge Eliot Spitzer because of the way he treated his wife and kids. (The Times reports that she is actually urging him not to resign!) We should primarily consider him in terms of how good a governor he’s been.

(Unfortunately, the answer to that is, not very good. But then, he was a pretty great state attorney general, and he was apparently visiting prostitutes at the time then, so there doesn’t seem to be any negative correlation between Spitzer’s sex life and his job performance.)

I’ll cede that moral leadership is part of public life, and that it’s important. But it isn’t everything. There are plenty of great leaders who are personal hypocrites. Martin Luther King cheated on his wife, but we all think of him as a great man, and we are right to do so.

So Eliot Spitzer has socially and maritally inappropriate sexual desires. That isn’t great.

But so did Bill Clinton. And while his successor, George W. Bush, doesn’t seem to have that personal failing, which one would you prefer as president?