Read Vanity Fair Yet?
Posted on July 10th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 47 Comments »
Harvard Magazine takes note of Nina Munk’s Vanity Fair story on its website.
The article was generating buzz even before it hit newsstands in Harvard Square…..
When I posted about this article before, most of you folks hadn’t had the chance to read it, so the discussion, while lively, wasn’t about the article per se.
If you’ve read it now, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
47 Responses
7/10/2024 10:08 am
Mine still hasn’t come, which has me wondering whether it will.
7/10/2024 11:01 am
Yup, mine came over a week ago, Richard.
7/10/2024 1:53 pm
So I went and bought one.
The article is very interesting, mostly on the topic of HMC (I found nothing interesting or new on DF or Mendillo, and put zero credence in anonymous claims about boring lectures and the like). I still like the sound of Mendillo, and lets hope she stays and gets things on track.
What emerges on HMC that is how “around the year 2000 by most accounts, Harvard Management Company, like the university, lost lost way”.
HMC, with obviously beneficial results for the endowment, mirrored society at large, and reflected the culture of greed that has been attracting 50-60% of each graduating class to Wall St. for the last 15-20 years. But that was how the game was being played (though I think Swendson was underpaid in those years, no?). I remember agreeing with the 1969 alums who objected to the “obscene” HMC trader salaries in principle but thinking that’s the game and not much can be done.
That is the game, incidentally, because Harvard has for a good 20 years been striving to become more corporate, using unqualified and inappropriate consultants, expanding bureaucracy, sustaining a fiction that the faculty make decisions, making the institution more generic and therefore discouraging a sense of duty to the institution. That shift has happened nationally and beyond, and it necessarily goes against some of the (good as well as less good) idiosyncratic ways in which the world of students and teachers work. I can only think the Corporation and high administrators are ultimately to blame for that shift, and of course what is utterly uncorporate is the fact that nobody seems to have lost their position because of cost overruns, bad financial policy, etc.
So when the separation of the Charles River and however many floors below HMC’s office became insufficient for Meyer’s traders to avoid embarrassment in this culture of greed and self-enrichment, they obviously weren’t going to work for peanuts, in part I assume because they were just hired guns, the best traders around, and had no reason to be loyal to Harvard. I.e. Walter Cabots don’t exist any more. That all makes sense and, sadly, is to be expected. Maybe.
What I think is new in the article the business about Rubin and Summers interfering with the investment strategies in up to 2005 [which is why the disagreement between Sam Spektor and Pioneer 13 about LHS and Meyer is quite interesting], which of course was rumored at the time. As events have shown such interference may have been justified, but the problem is that Meyer who by 2005 “had had enough” not only left, but took with him the best and brightest (including risks officers), who obviously felt greater loyalty to Meyer than to Harvard, for reasons above. The subsequesnt discontinuities in HMC leadership and the crisis in HU leadership, along with a corporate structure that seems to need serious overhauling, cannot have helped
Anyway, interesting article, and there seems to be plenty of blame to go around, though not too much for currrent HU, HMC or FAS leadership, as far as I can tell from the article.
PS I’m still going with 25.8%, which MAY be a tad high.
7/10/2024 4:19 pm
Whatever returns are posted should be viewed as only a guess with a bias for overstatement. Private equity, real estate and most commodity—think forests-related investments cannot be sold, not even in a 6-12 month period, for anything near the prices the managers and Harvard’s accountants put on them. If anyone doubts this simply look to the Harvard/Bain experience. While speculating on the number to be published is amusing, try to remember the number is not a true mark-to-market picture of the endowment’s value. Consider the return more like a mark-to-model value or mark to a private equity manager’s best estimate of value that might be realized over time. Try to dispose of these assets at the assumed values and be prepared for enormous shock on the downside. In my view, a more interesting speculation than HMC’s year end performance would be a guess on the true value of the endowment.
7/10/2024 4:28 pm
Thanks, P13.
Isn’t every place (including financial institutions we’re bailing out), avoiding mark to market, with Obama/Geithner/Summers/Frank permisssion/encouragement.
7/10/2024 6:05 pm
Yes. But with vastly different consequences. Harvard’s payout is tied to the value of its endowment. A 6% payout on $24 billion is considerably higher if, say, the real value of the endowment is only $18 billion. These levels then further worsen the financial problems in the future because you were drawing down imprudent amounts. The FAS deficit is partly manufactured by the payout. If the true value of the endowment is significantly less than the year end stated value, then cost reductions far greater than the forecasted $220 million will be needed when the Corporation realizes the payout needs to be reduced.
7/11/2024 8:14 am
Thanks Professor Thomas. Your analysis is right on. The displacement of University Principles by a new set of corporate standards, and the displacement of students and faculty by managers and consultants, are the fundamental roots of this crisis. As none of that has changed, we can expect the crisis to continue. The only reason some of the tensions have surfaced is because the downturn on the economy has exhacerbated the conflicts between competing visions of the university and its mission in deciding where and how to cut. Once the endowment grows these conflicts will go again under the surface, where they have been for more than a decade.
The process of transformation of the University that this displacement of principles has generated is one of gradualism and punctuated equilibrium. Only at periodic intervals significant shifts and restructuring -punctuated equilibrium- fundamentally transfrom the nature of the enterprise. We are in one of those moments and the transformations are, for those who have been in the University long enough, well just shocking.
You may remember that LHS did say that his goal was to radically transform Harvard. He certainly did.
7/11/2024 10:14 am
1. Munk said: “One of my sources on the board of Harvard Management Company reports the endowment is down less than predicted and in line with losses at other universities: in the range of 23 to 25 percent.” Harvard took a very unusual stance in publicly commenting on this “fact.” Drew Faust denied that what Munk said was true. This is very out of character for Harvard to comment on something like this. So the questions to ask: did her source on the HMC board not know?; did she make up the fact that she had a source on the board? did the source deliberately mislead her? The lack of commas after the word board and after the word Company would indicate that she had more than one source on the board. Was she not able to get corroboration?
It’s interesting that Munk’s numbers are very different from the numbers (that Richard reported here late last year and early this year) of Edward Jay Epstein’s “source close to the HMC board.”
Are either correct? You have to really know your sources.
2. Munk said: “At some point in the last five years, the men and women who run Harvard convinced themselves that the endowment would grow at double- digit rates forever.”
Not true. My source, an excellent source, says that Meyer’s number was substantially lower than double digits and for planning purposes the Center used an even lower number than Meyer’s.
3. Munk said “… is how Meyer put it according to Danau. “I mean if you’re not adding value, why am I paying you.”” Question: how much value was really added?
4. Munk said: “What really happened is that somewhere along the line, around the year 2000 by most accounts, Harvard Management Company, like the university itself, lost its way.” She got that right.
In 1999 I wrote an eight page letter to President Rudenstine. The gist of that letter was this:
a. There was a flawed (in my mind) HBS case study from the early 90s, which spelled out in detail how the endowment was being run. Supplemented by The Harvard Annual Reports, it was clear to me that there were many faulty assumptions in the way the endowment was being run (hey, but what did I know!).
b. Leverage, both on and off balance sheet was troublesome
c. The benchmarks used to measure “value added” were faulty
I pointed out that I felt very strongly that at some point in the future, there would be a problem with the endowment results and that, at the time, it was being run not much better than the straight vanilla portfolio that was originally (and subsequently discarded) set as a target.
I showed this letter to Jeremy Knowles because the bulk of the endowment was for THE FAS. Jeremy was worried about the situation and followed up on it with the appropriate people. They were not supportive of what I wrote.
President Rudenstine wrote back to me (his first letter to me that was not written in long hand; his use of time was improving). The gist of his letter was that he and The Corporation had full confidence in the CIO of HMC and were very pleased with the way the endowment was being managed as well as with the results that had been achieved.
In early 2002, I updated the letter and sent it to three senior professors in The FAS. In this letter, in addition to what I had mentioned in the letter three years earlier, I pointed out the sharp increase in the use of off balance sheet derivatives (very shortly to reach almost 80 billion) and the troublesome nature of the entire derivatives situation including potential counterparty risk (which thankfully never came to pass). I never heard back from any of The FAS faculty members. Everyone was fat, dumb and happy.
5. 4:19 PM’s comments are overly simplistic.
7/11/2024 5:30 pm
Sam, there can’t be many roles more frustrating than that of Cassandra in the endowment debacle. One might hope that those who refused to listen would feel some remorse, but they’ve probably found ways to absolve themselves by now.
“A matter of Principle” is quite right that financial stress has brought the struggle for Harvard’s soul to the surface once more and that as the endowment grows, the debate will likely fade. More’s the pity since the damage done to Harvard by this corporate transformation will not fade-at least not until it’s recognized as an error.
But those who are running Harvard are not listening and they see the results of their actions as improvements. Why should Provost Hyman think that his favoritism toward the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology is a problem. SCRB will bring in lots of pharmaceutical industry money and will probably generate a stack of marketable patents. Pure research be damned (and evicted).
7/11/2024 6:06 pm
Well, thanks for trying, Sam. Speaking just for FAS, it seems to me there is enough material out there to empower the only elected faculty committee (Faculty Council), and a recently useful ad hoc group (Caucus of Chairs) to ask some fundamental questions when they get back together in a month or two.
7/11/2024 6:18 pm
Mr Spektor’s all-knowing tone continues to grate, but his comment about Rudenstine’s long-hand and time-management skills was absolutely priceless.
7/11/2024 8:56 pm
Feste. My guess is you are an overeducated staff assistant in MCB. Correct?
7/11/2024 10:05 pm
Why not faculty? Sox 15-9, Yanks 8-14. Ugly scores but auspicious for the second half, RB!
7/11/2024 10:42 pm
You know, I think that people might be mistaken about the trends in Harvard’s governance over the last ten to twenty years. I don’t think that Harvard has become more corporate, I think it’s become more like the government. Professor Thomas refers to “using unqualified and inappropriate consultants, expanding bureaucracy, sustaining a fiction that the faculty make decisions, making the institution more generic and therefore discouraging a sense of duty to the institution.” Those are not characteristics of most corporations, but they are characteristics of most governments.
Almost every government agency, as it ages, becomes more and more top-heavy with bureaucrats, and the people who do the actual work of the agency are listened to less and less. Government agencies use inappropriate and unqualified consultants all the time, both because the agencies don’t have to worry much about money and because the people who do the hiring tend to be the bureaucrats and not the experts. And, no one is better at discouraging institutional loyalty than the government (been to the RMV lately?).
Harvard has become more corporate only if you consider the distinguishing features of American car companies-poor decision-making, legacy costs, over-reliance on past reputation, lack of attention paid to the core business-as characteristic of all corporate culture. If you want to find an institution comparable to Harvard-with its bloated bureaucracy, internal divisions and infighting, fiscal irresponsibility, inefficient governance, and emphasis on the acquisition of influence instead of the actual mission of the institution-you need to look at the government.
7/11/2024 11:28 pm
Good distinction there, “Corporate, or governmental?”, though I think the former may apply to the attitude, language, distance from the actual mission, decisions about who gets cut, the latter to the realities of the bloat. And we can of course cherry-pick which corporation we’re talking about.
Get a hold of some directories and you find interesting—and depressing—results. Here’s one:
Harvard College Library:
Office of the Librarian:
1998: 7 FTEs 2008: 11 FTEs
Communications Office (those who announce the cuts, inter al.):
1998: 0 FTEs 2008: 4 FTEs
on the other hand:
Book Selectors (bibliographers), French and Italian section:
1998: 3-4 FTEs 2008 I FTE (TBA, i.e. not actually filled)
7/12/2023 8:21 am
Is Harvard University the next GM?
Can the shareholders fire the board of directors?
7/12/2023 9:17 am
It’s silly to compare Harvard to Government. At Harvard, across centrl admin and all schools, there are maybe 100 top administrative and budgetary officers (many of whom are academic-professors-or steeped in academic culture). They all know each other, see each other fairly often, form email loops for issues. I bet the city of Boston is more bureaucratic and rigid than Harvard.
7/12/2023 1:04 pm
Who is Mr. Spector and what is his connection to the University?
7/12/2023 1:36 pm
the City of Boston is less bureaucratic for several reasons: first the mayor is elected every four years and answers to real live voters, second, he has absolute control of the entire operation (when you are going into your 5th term you amass power), third, he controls all financial decisions, fourth, unlike a university the politics of a city are many and varied and need to be dealt with or the press and/or unions will kill an administration - power and money with a little more democracy than a university. as they say the politics in universities are so vicious because the stakes are so small.
and sam is married to ann berman who was the CFO under LHS and before that she was an administrator/consultant at FAS. and btw, she is completely competent and highly regarded.
you may ask how i know….worked at one place and attended the other.
oh, sam knows what he is talking about because he has been in the business since noah built an ark (no offense sam - you are one of the few people on the blog who uses facts and figures as opposed to others who just make statements.) so, his experience and wisdom should not only be listened to but sought out and applied.
enjoy the beautiful weather.
7/12/2023 1:45 pm
To complement RT’s count, the largest growth seems to have been in the Provost’s Office (with no evident increase in effectiveness).
Under Carnesale and Fineberg:
3 Assistant Provosts
1 Associate Provost
Under Hyman:
3 Assistant Provosts
6 Associate Provosts
2 Vice Provosts
1 Director
1 Chief of Staff (deputy)
7/12/2023 3:16 pm
She’s also a very good Latinist,
7/12/2023 7:10 pm
Did Derek Bok have a Provost?
How effective, comparatively speaking, was Dr. Harvey Fineberg. How much did he accomplish with 3 associate provosts and 1 vice provost?
Apparently not enough to please the Corporation who decided to pass him up as a possible Harvard President. Alas, they appointed Larry Summers instead.
HBS should write a case of the process of decision making the Corporation followed at that time. In retrospect, the full impact of that decision is cristal clear. Imagine… Harvey Fineberg could have been Harvard’s President… or Lee Bollinger…
7/12/2023 11:16 pm
There was no provost until Rudenstine appointed Jerry Green as I recall, then Al Carnesale. Good thing he did as it turned out, since Harvard needed an acting president fast. I think Fineberg was next and then Hyman. Yes, the office has grown from nothing to its present dimensions in less than 20 years.
I think both analogies, to corporate practice and to government practice, are apt. The consultants have been a very mixed lot — a few were actually good, many were not, but I’d love to know how much money they all cost, especially the ones from McKinsey, a company once headed by one of the Fellows.
One of the indicators of change is the use of bureaucratic language, and I don’t mean RB’s “bureaudiction.” I mean the dramatic increase in “Office of” this and that. The solution to problem X always seems to be to create an “Office of X,” as though no one could say Harvard wasn’t taking X seriously if it had a whole Office devoted to it. So if you click on the Provost’s web page and then the top link within it, you get “The Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity works with …” and so on. In the old days, you had actual people doing the work. I suppose there is some well intentioned signal of respect here for the underlings, but it just sounds so self important and bloated — as though if you really had a diversity issue you should call the Office because the actual Senior Vice Provost would be much too important to talk to you directly. Pretty much all the deans and whatnots have multiple capital-O Offices under them now.
As for the VF piece, which I finally tracked down in Walmart in Butte, MT, it seems to me entirely fair. Sam is right that a lot of anonymous sources say self-serving things, but nothing could be as self-serving as Larry’s parting words that his failing was to want too much change too quickly. To be sure there should be no doubt that the extravagant spending was by design — I don’t see Larry as having taken on rampant FAS waste. To the contrary, recall that in the spring of 2004 he sat in front of the Faculty and told them point blank (as paraphrased by the Secretary in the Minutes), “For a compelling definition of what would provide the optimal educational experience for Harvard undergraduates, and the most attractive environment for its faculty members to carry out their missions of research and teaching, Harvard would be able to generate adequate resources. The only real limitation faced by the Faculty was the limit of its imagination.” This at a moment when the FAS budget was already known to be in structural deficit. That does not sound like a man hectoring the Faculty about its allegedly spendthrift ways. Nor, for that matter, like a man staying up late at night with financial models for what his budget will look like with 5% or 25% endowment growth. He just sounds reckless, as though the Corporation had told him that his main job was figuring out how to spend money, not how to create or save it. Heaven help the U.S. of A.
As for Drew Faust, in Munk’s defense, I have actually heard both DF’s described in the commentary above, the dull, speech-reading one and the warm, disarming, informal one. Oddly, I heard the first with an entirely friendly audience of insiders, and the second in an alumni gathering, where she might well have been on guard. Perhaps she is, from time to time, the captive of the same communications staff who managed the Munk piece so brilliantly.
Munk never really does say where she thinks the buck stops. RB is surely right that she should have borne down on the Corporation more — my goodness, you might think the Treasurer would have some relevance to our woes, and he isn’t even mentioned.
7/13/2009 6:36 am
President Conant created the provost position at Harvard - and appointed Paul Buck. But neither Pusey nor Bok had a provost. Bok did create more vice presidents than Pusey.
However, I did hear Derek Bok (perhaps during his last Commencement speech, as Interim President) thank Steve Hyman for showing him the value of a good provost.
7/13/2009 8:44 am
thanks for the information - what does it mean?
7/13/2009 9:27 am
Thanks Harry for the clarification re the “The Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity works with …”
Is the implication of your comment that this office doesn’t really do much? How do you know?
7/13/2009 11:17 am
Harry, what do you do up in Montana anyway? Are you a summer rancher?
7/13/2009 1:01 pm
I hope the other Harry did not imply, with his comment, that he thinks diversity not important enough to warrant Provostial attention.
7/13/2009 1:24 pm
Provostial - big word.
Again, so what?
7/13/2009 1:54 pm
The thread was about corporatization/bureaucratization and I was talking about the way language has shifted, that we have so many more Offices now. The question of substance, which functions are core and essential to our teaching and research missions, is a separate matter on which I made no comment.
The complaint from the Corporation in the Rudenstine-Knowles day was that Harvard was grossly under-administered. Part of Summers’s job was to fix that. Now we really seem to have gotten enamored of organization charts and reporting lines, and that is definitely a corporate or governmental, not academic, culture. In my experience, proliferation of Offices impedes communication — anyone voicing an opinion on X but not in the Office of X is easily regarded as talking about something that is none of their business. And of course as the org chart grows, the people actually doing the work who used to be first or second cousins in the org chart become more distant relatives, unlikely to have ever met each other or to know what each other are doing.
But for a student, the important thing is not the logic of functional organization and specialization than a holistic, consistent philosophy and a sense that all the moving parts are in communication around a shared vision. In a university, the various functions are not so easily isolated as they are in the corporate world (though of course plenty of management writing has articulated the advantages of shared vision in the corporate world too).
7/13/2009 4:41 pm
Harry, wasn’t there an Office of the Dean when you were Dean of HC?
7/13/2009 5:11 pm
Actually, I tried to avoid having the capital-O Office as an entity be the subject of verbs. In fact, though we informally referred to the “housing office” to sort our incoming phone calls and the like, we had very little formal substructure, and I tried to reduce what there was. As the Associate Deans for this and that were replaced, I hired flexible people and called the new ones simply Associate Deans of Harvard College (not for X or Y) in an effort to discourage territoriality.
By the way, this sort of faux-businesslikeness is related to a comment someone made earlier about the loss of senior, knowledgeable people that has occurred. If the university is considered a kind of Tayloresque assembly line, with office workers as replaceable parts, you don’t look around the university to find who the good, knowledgeable people are when you have a job to fill in the Office of X; you do a national search for the best personal who already knows X and plug that person in. So this style of corpporatization is also related to the depersonalization of the university and the indifference to both career development and institutional memory.
7/13/2009 7:13 pm
HL is spot on in his observation about DF’s communications staff. They certainly tried to cozy up to Munk but would not agree to any interviews with recording devices. So what did the geniuses in Mass. Hall do instead? They went into radio silence with Munk. DF’s advisors are plenty smart and rarely in doubt, but when it comes to the press and communicating to the Harvard community they are blind to the notion that truth will set you free. There is too much fascination with Harvard to think that withholding information is a viable strategy, especially when so many who share your secrets are being canned.
7/13/2009 8:39 pm
Harry, how does that help the bemused supplicant trying to decide which Associate Dean to approach, when everyone is an Associate Dean? It still seems like a conclave that could, as shorthand, be called Office of the Dean of Harvard Kollege.
7/13/2009 9:13 pm
Let’s get serious, really, in discussing the costs and results of this bureaucratization. What do students, or faculty, or the university for that matter, get for the approximately one million a year spent in “The Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity …”
What has been achieved in terms of ‘Diversity’, other than some nice parties and wine and cheeses, that had not been previously achieved on this topic, when the office -created by Larry Summers- did not exist?
This is the kind of analysis, office by office, that would help answer the question of whether the ‘bureaucratization’ of the University -with its evident costs- has produced results that would not have otherwise been produced. Perhaps the answer is different for different offices… How to decide, then, which of these offices to keep in a time of financial stringency?
7/14/2009 12:16 am
As important as it is to examine the culture and, ultimately, the soul of this university, that process doesn’t get us closer to solving the financial crisis. I understand the argument that the culture that has led to the bureaucratic expansion is the same culture that has led us to this financial situation, but fixing the one won’t fix the other. This is especially true when we look at the magnitude of the problem.
The remaining deficit in FAS is $143M, I believe. Even if the average salary of the assistant/associate deans is $150,000 per year, we’d have to get rid of 715 of them in order to balance the budget (after combining salary and fringe costs). And remember that all of the expansions in the president’s and provost’s offices haven’t had any effect on FAS’s budget.
The president and dean have said we won’t touch financial aid, and we can’t make any cuts to either sponsored programs or debt service, because those costs fulfill external obligations. The remaining FAS budget is in the neighborhood of $600-700M (it’s hard to tell exactly from public info). To be slightly optimistic, let’s say it’s $750M. That would mean further reducing the budget by about 20%. Imagine one out of every five staff members and one out of every five faculty being fired. That would be a complete nightmare, and it assumes only an additional 20% cut. I know that people are upset about the bureaucratic expansion and they want to fix it, but that won’t answer the question of how the hell FAS can cut an additional $143 million from the budget.
7/14/2009 12:25 am
8:39: Think of the difference between an encyclopedia, where in theory you can find just what you want but only if you know exactly what it’s called, and Google, where you just kind of ask and you right away get directed to the right place, or to a few sort of right places among which you can choose, or to a place that is one hop away from the really right place. Others will have to judge whether people could get their questions answered while I was dean, but there is a reason nobody buys encyclopedias any more, even though the hierarchical organization structure make so much sense in theory. In practice, people don’t use bureaucracies like the index or table of contents in a book. They find someone they know and trust, or they call the number for “Dean of Harvard College,” or they just email the dean directly, figuring that person will send the inquiry in the right direction.
In any case, having a nicely articulated, logical, Aristotelian hierarchy of bureaucracy, where everybody knows what their own job is and isn’t, is a lot less useful to getting questions and problems connected to answers and solutions, than making sure everybody knows something about everybody else’s business, and making sure nobody leaves email or phone calls unanswered for more than 24 hours. Think web, not tree. We are not talking a mammoth corporation. Harvard just is not that big. It’s more complicated than it used to be, but it doesn’t need as many layers and Offices and titles and hierarchies and specialized functions as it has now.
7/14/2009 10:09 am
“What’s the solution” makes a lot of sense, but ignores three indirect effects of central administration bloat on FAS.
1. The extraordinary growth in the central administration, without adequate public justification, sets a bad example for other faculties, and makes it harder for them to hold the line or make cuts.
2. Along with the bloat comes impersonality and confusion about who is responsible (which associate dean, provost or vp should you go to). When HIID was shut down, nearly 300 people had to be laid off or transferred, including some who had industrial tenure. Some of us had doubts about whether that was right, but the Provost and his small staff at least had the courage to face and deal with these people in person. Now the lay offs, which really are necessary seem to be handled mostly through high level memos and low level counseling. The Provost is nowhere to be seen this time.
3. Previous presidents were able to use discretionary funds and other sources to subsidize some FAS projects (e.g. deferred maintenance in the Yard, financial aid). Though the amounts were not large and partly counterbalanced by the infrastructure “tax,” they were better than nothing, which is what the center’s contribution is likely to be now.
7/14/2009 12:16 pm
Administrative bloat will have to be addressed, but it’s hard to cut enough people and still run the university. Here are some other thoughts, many already mentioned here and elsewhere before, but things we may see: decrease in pension contributions across the board; take a whack at retiree health benefits; hold salaries flat for several additional years across the board in addition to the oft-mentioned cut in top 10-20% of earners; many more jobs go to 10 or 11 month schedule (already happening in some places); decrease/eliminate parking subsidies; cut other soft perks.
7/14/2009 1:11 pm
My dear Harry!
Your point about the way people use bureaucracies is SO astute, and is so important, and utterly eluded the people who were in charge of the College I served. (Dick Gross was good at putting himself into the students’ shoes but not at thinking about how to implement his insights systematically — and so the actual administration fell to others.)
One of the most maddening aspects of the meetings I attended after my first year on the job was that Deputy Dean O’Brien’s incessant rejiggering of the org chart really didn’t make any difference to students, and diverted decanal energy that might have been used to, say, (in her case) get up to speed on the mission and values of the Ad Board. Turf tinkering distracted lots of other deans too, against their will. And this was because the internal logics of the org chart were truly more important to her than the way the bureaucracy was to be used: and to be used not by her, to pull levers and make things happen, but to be used BY STUDENTS.
I’m struck by an analogy: your description of the College is fundamentally USER-oriented, like, say, a Mac. What matters is not to represent the governing logic of who reports to whom, but to minister to students’ needs (broadly understood: I include in ‘student needs’ the need to be kicked out for a year, the need to to be excluded from a neglected course, usw.). Non-user-oriented people, people who are interested in the interconnections of logic for ITS OWN SAKE, for the sake of top-down clarity of understanding that satisfies their own manners of thinking (imagine perhaps a business-school administrator), are, at their most capable, like the technicians who design and redesign and redesign Windows operating systems. Because the initial framework is programmer-oriented rather than user-oriented, enormous amounts of energy are expended in adapting to each actual use situation, and the user constantly gets error messages that mean nothing to her, and has to reboot her academic life.
There’s a deep self-regard about dysfunctional bureaucracies that is not intrinsic to the idea of bureaucracy (I loved thinking of myself as a bureaucrat, in fact), but is a feature of the minds of the people at the top. Concomitant with this self-regard is the inability to listen without inarticulable ad-hominem hostility to ideas that don’t match the preselected logic with which one entered the job.
And where DID this confusion come from about who the user is? The user of the Ad Board is not the professor who is enraged by some student stunt and wants heads to roll; nor is it the Communications Office that wants the school to avoid sending muddled messages to the larger world about this issue or that. The user of the Ad Board is, on the contrary, the student! The rules of the faculty were written to engender learning, and the Ad Board applies those rules with that mission in mind. (Beneficiaries should also of course include the student’s peers, and the community of learning in general; but not, in the name of God, the deans themselves. We are vessels.)
Now, because society is as it is, I have PCs myself instead of Macs. But there is no denying that Windows is a blight, and that more computer people, or people in general, should be more like you, Harry.
I’m buying a Mac this month, in fact.
Cheers!
SE
7/14/2009 9:31 pm
Many surveys confirmed that students were quite unhappy during the glorious Harry Lewis, “Mac,” “web” years. The college administration was a happy, self-serving, clubby little group, accountable to no one. Lewis failed as dean, got fired, and needs to get over it.
7/14/2009 9:56 pm
And they were unhappy before and after. I was on Faculty Council before and after so saw all the stats. Once Summers arrived it was clear he and Harry Lewis were not likely to coexist happily, since HL with whom I clashed ion some issues, was not likely to follow orders that didn’t make sense.
[Whether happiness should be the goal of the College and the University is a good topic for another conversation.]
HL got fired by a dean who back then was doing what he was told and who himself got fired when he failed to bend us all to the will of LHS — who then got fired, but not before contributing mightily to the current situation.
Hey 9:31, if you have to go on here anonymously (do you?) you really should have enough of a compass to realize that you should refrain from ad hominem and personal stuff like this. Don’t bother responding to this one, since I won’t. follow suit.
7/14/2009 11:47 pm
I should have known it was a mistake, back at 4:41PM on 7/13, to answer a question about what happened while I was dean in what had up to then been a discussion about the present. Ah well, I got what I deserve for taking an anonymous question at face value. But what is the inquisitor’s point? That the big bureaucracy that has arisen is making students happy and should be left in place?
OK, I hereby swear off answering anonymous queries. Too bad that a troll can have that effect on the conversation, but so it goes.
7/15/2009 12:47 am
I’ll still answer them!
7/15/2009 7:54 am
Anon 4.41 (me) and Anon 9.31 (ad hom) are not the same person. WIth all due respect mine was an important question to answer - and I respect your answer - because to talk about Office of X, when you were once an Office, needs elaborating.
What RT and HL might not realize is that answering anonymous writers is a great chance to educate them and fulfill their curiosity; how else do we get a chance to learn so much about what really happened at Harvard? I’m sorry that the subthread I started ended with an ad hom attack on Harry by someone else.
7/15/2009 2:20 pm
4:41, please accept my apologies. (Maybe blogging tools could use authenticated anonymous identities, so you could always tell which Anons were the same and which were different.)
And frankly, one of the worst things a dean can do is to make important decisions based on the anticipated reviews from current undergraduates. I took a lot of hostility right off the bat by depriving students of the opportunity to express housing preferences, a practice that had over the years led to a degree of self-segregation along ethnic, athletic, and sexual orientation lines. It’s hard to do something that gets those three communities (or their most vocal spokespeople anyway) to find common cause against you, but I succeeded in that! I don’t think anyone now thinks what I did was a bad idea. What the grown-ups are there for is to provide some long term stability and perspective.
7/15/2009 3:02 pm
Same from me 4:41. I was obviously addressing 9:31, and generally engage reasonably toned anons.
Off to New Britain CT and Dylan concert!