Shots in the Dark

“Times columnist Maureen Dowd is irrelevant, yes, but is she also insane?”

—From Gawker.com.

I was interviewed by SportsTalkNY a few days ago, and you can find the streaming audio here.

(If the link doesn’t take you right to it, click on the “Archive” link on the home page.)

The Times reports on the efforts of Harvard’s Howard Gardner to get students thinking about careers in fields other than finance.

The professor, Howard Gardner, hopes the seminars will encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges.

“Is this what a Harvard education is for?” asked Professor Gardner, who is teaching the seminars at Harvard, Amherst and Colby with colleagues. “Are Ivy League schools simply becoming selecting mechanisms for Wall Street?”

It’s an important issue, and good for Professor Gardner and Drew Faust for giving it serious consideration. The problem is that Harvard sends such mixed signals on this front. It wallows in money; it reveres money. Look at the way alumni are feted during reunions; the secrecy surrounding and veneration of the Committee on Alumni Resources.

It will be hard to convince students that they shouldn’t care so much about money when the University clearly values wealthy alumni above all others….

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P.S. It’s worth looking at the slide show accompanying the article, in which one Harvard student talks about how “90% of my friends” are going into finance, as well as raises an issue discussed on this blog: How Harvard takes students from diverse backgrounds and actually makes them more homogenous, perfect foot soldiers for the money culture….

Underwater formations off the coast of Cuba…taken by a friend who is, actually, legally allowed to travel there.

Curt Schilling may be calling it a career.

Cry me a river…..

Suddenly the Yankees have won seven straight…..

President Bush is taking advantage of the price of gas to push for one of Dick Cheney’s passions: repealing a ban on offshore drilling off most of the U.S. coast, and opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

It’s bad environmental policy. It’s bad energy policy. It’s almost surely something that Cheney whispered into Bush’s ear. And it’s completely fraudulent. As the Times reports today, there aren’t enough drilling ships to have any impact on the abundance of oil.

Even as oil trades at more than $135 a barrel — up from $68 a year ago — the world’s existing drill-ships are booked solid for the next five years. Some oil companies have been forced to postpone exploration while waiting for a drilling rig, executives and analysts said.

The last year of a dying administration is a very dangerous time; it’s when ideologues secretly push their pet policies with abandon. I have a feeling there’s going to be an immense amount of bad policymaking from the Bush administration in the months to come…..

Drew Faust has hired Edward C. Forst from Goldman, Sachs in the new position of executive vice-president.

Forst, a Harvard alumnus, has worked at Goldman Sachs, the world’s biggest securities firm, for 14 years. He will oversee finance, administration and human resources at Harvard. Forst’s hiring follows the University of California, Berkeley’s June 16 announcement that it had recruited Frank Yeary, mergers and acquisitions head at New York-based Citigroup Inc., to become the school’s vice chancellor. Citigroup, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, is based in New York.

Forst, who wrote for the Crimson while at Harvard, will also sit on the board of the Harvard Management Company, whose current head, Robert Kaplan, is also a Goldman Sachs alum.

Last year, Forst made $44 million. What will Harvard pay him? Pravda doesn’t say.

Forst has been involved with Harvard of late, as co-chair of the University Committee on Student Excellence and Opportunity. He’s also been a reunion co-chair and, one can assume, a large donor to the university.

Harvard magazine has the clearest description of Forst’s new gig:

Harvard’s decentralized structure means the president and provost have a large number of direct reports: the deans of 11 individual faculties, plus seven vice presidents for the functions of central administration. The new post will reduce this burden. Three University vice presidents will report directly to Forst: Sally Zeckhauser, vice president for administration; vice president for finance, a vacant post being filled on an acting basis by Daniel Shore; and Marilyn Hausammann, vice president for human resources. The University’s chief information officer, Daniel Moriarty, will report to Forst with reference to administrative technology, but will continue to report to the provost on the academic side of his duties.

All of which makes it sound as if Forst, who, while obviously a very capable guy and loyal alum has no experience actually working at a university, will instantly become one of the most powerful officials at Harvard. One wonders when Harvard will give up the pretense that it is much more than a highbrow farm team for Wall Street?

As New York magazine just reported on the reunion class of ’03,

Roughly a third of Harvard’s class of 2003 lives in New York—among them real-estate mogul and newspaper publisher Jared Kushner, Loews heir Jessica Tisch, and actress Natalie Portman— and they went back to Cambridge on June 6 for their five-year reunion. A survey revealed that twenty alumni (1.3 percent) have a net worth over $10 million, with another eight worth more than $5 million.

Which reveals something quite interesting about Harvard, when you consider that it’s unlikely that a third of the class of ’03 actually came from New York: Harvard is taking diverse young people from all over the U.S. and the world…and actually making them less diverse. The persistent aura of money and wealth that infuses Harvard is probably the greatest single influence on its students—far more, it must regrettably be said, than anything that happens within Harvard’s classrooms.

As long as everyone’s making money, no one pays much attention to this awkward fact. But isn’t it a failure on the part of the university? Or, as the paranoid might wonder, would the university believe that the creation of Wall Street footsoldiers liked Edward Forst actually in its future best interest?

With some new friends…. This was taken on the Punta Tunich reef on the western side of Cozumel island, Mexico, about 40 or 50 feet deep. The turtle is feeding on coral; the angelfish and, I think, yellow wrasses are snapping up the turtle’s leftovers.

The diver is just trying to take it all in, grateful that this beautiful turtle was unfazed by my presence. Swimming against the current here, I stabbed a finger into the sand and I watched for what was probably around a minute as the turtle flexed his neck, twisted his entire body, and chewed the coral. Incredible. Then I lifted my finger and let the current lift me up and down the reef, leaving the turtle to his own devices.

It’s moments like this that make diving transcendent.

Sung to the tune of the James Taylor song.

That’s where I’ll be for the next few days. I’ll have the computer but posting will be light, as even a Mac doesn’t work well underwater.