The Secret Seven Becomes Six?
Posted on December 14th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 14 Comments »
Sam Spektor reports in a comment below that Corporation senior fellow Jamie Houghton is stepping down.
If he’s right, that leaves—oh, the irony—Bob Rubin in charge.
Addendum: Harvard Mag’s story is here. And here is the Crimson’s.
I wonder if Houghton will give any interviews to a legitimate (i.e., not the Harvard Gazette) news source, or if he’ll just slip away.
14 Responses
12/14/2009 1:06 pm
No, the other Bob R will be
12/14/2009 1:16 pm
Ah, my mistake-Robert Reischauer.
12/14/2009 1:20 pm
No, my friend Bob Rubin should be, but the other Bob R will be.
12/14/2009 2:32 pm
Should be as in has 6 months seniority, I trust you mean, Sam, rather than by virtue of wise stewardship, finger on pulse of the University, actually attending meetings and the like?
If you are right this is a good sign. Robert Reischauer and Nan Keohane were the ones who first realized how bad things had gotten under LHS.
Cautiously optimistic, IF Sam is right
12/14/2009 2:35 pm
confirmed by the gazette:
“The search will be conducted by a joint committee of the governing boards. Robert D. Reischauer, who joined the Corporation in 2002 and served as a member of the Board of Overseers for the six preceding years, will succeed Houghton as senior fellow.”
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/12/houghton-to-conclude-corporation-service/
12/14/2009 3:56 pm
Alas! When I heard the rumor that Robert Reischauer would be senior fellow, I hoped and assumed it meant that Rubin would step down, too. For goodness sake, if we could get rid of Winokur after Enron, why couldn’t/won’t we get rid of Rubin now.
12/14/2009 4:59 pm
With Reischauer taking over, this is a good time for the Corporation to revisit its role, its methods, and how it interacts with the Overseers and the faculty. I realize that the Corporation has not appeared to be even slightly interested in sharing its power over the past decades. (Refusing to publish even the agendas for its meetings is a bit of a sign!) However, it may be that some members of the Corporation would like to see it run differently. The Corporation has the power to transform itself voluntarily. Heck, I am on some boards of trustees/directors that I would like to see changed: there are often board members who do not support all of the traditions and methods of the board on which they sit.
12/14/2009 6:02 pm
Nota bene, end of the Harvard mag and Gazette pieces, and a pretty broad invitation:
Confidential letters of nomination or advice may be directed to the Corporation Search Committee, Harvard University, Loeb House, 17 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA 02138, or to
[email protected].
12/15/2009 10:28 am
I hereby nominate Richard Bradley.
12/15/2009 6:17 pm
Harvard Magazine explains why Reischauer and not Rubin is Senior Fellow, in what I assume is merely a rationalization:
“He will be succeeded as senior fellow by Robert D. Reischauer ’63, president of the Urban Institute, in Washington, D.C., who joined the Corporation in 2002, having previously served for six years as a member of the Board of Overseers, an elected position. That gives him some relative seniority compared to Robert E. Rubin ’60, LL.B. ’64, the former Goldman Sachs and Citigroup executive and Secretary of the Treasury, who also joined the Corporation in 2002, but who did not previously serve as an Overseer.”
12/16/2009 3:21 am
Interesting to see that Harvard Magazine believes that Bob Rubin got his degree from Harvard Law. In fact, he graduated from Yale Law.
12/16/2009 9:56 am
I think that would have been “HLS ’64′”, Sam. And isn’t it a “JD” in both cases? Maybe not back then.
12/16/2009 12:07 pm
Richard,
My point was that Harvard publications never use the the year of graduation from other institutions. Did you ever see the year of Drew Faust’s graduation from Bryn Mawr or from Penn, or Larry’s from MIT?
It was interesting to see that LL.B ’64 was used for Bob.
LL.B. was used at Yale Law at that point (and until 1971) but not at Harvard Law (it was used earlier at Harvard Law).
12/16/2009 12:37 pm
You seem to be right there, Sam — rather parochial, that — and it looks as “(Yale)” was dropped, but not the degree.