Shots in the Dark

The Harvard Foundation, a group of uncertain purpose*—but that’s a hell of a good name for a foundation to have—has decided to give its “artist of the year” award to Wyclef Jean, formerly of the hip-hop band the Fugees.

The Grammy Award-winning musician will receive the group’s most prestigious medal at the annual Cultural Rhythms award ceremony on Feb. 27.

“His contributions to music and distinguished history of creativity have been appreciated by people throughout the world,” said S. Allen Counter, director of the Harvard Foundation, “and he is admired worldwide for his humanitarian efforts on behalf of the people of Haiti.”

Actually, that’s not true. There’s substantial evidence not only that Jean hasn’t helped the people of Haiti, but that he’s redirected money intended for Haitians into his own bank account.

The best reporting on this has actually come from Gawker, which has established that Jean’s pro-Haiti charity, Yele Haiti, is basically a scam.

Here’s one example:

A planned fundraiser for Wyclef Jean‘s charity in 2006 was canceled in part because Jean’s personal $100,000 performance fee made the event too expensive, according to internal e-mails and a source familiar with the event.

As Gawker rightly points out, why would Wyclef Jean be charging for a benefit concert for his own charity?

Documents posted by The Smoking Gun suggest that Yele Haiti has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to organizations apparently controlled by Wyclef Jean himself.

Jean may have needed the money because, after the Fugees split up, his career tanked. One example: A 2005 Harvard concert was cancelled due to lack of ticket sales. (And if you can’t sell out a college….)

….[Yele Haiti] paid $31,200 in rent to Platinum Sound, a Manhattan recording studio owned by Jean and Jerry Duplessis, who, like Jean, is a foundation board member. A $31,200 rent payment was also made in 2007 to Platinum Sound. The rent, tax returns assure, “is priced below market value.” The recording studio also was paid $100,000 in 2006 for the “musical performance services of Wyclef Jean at a benefit concert.” That six-figure payout, the tax return noted, “was substantially less than market value.” [Blogger: Judging from the Harvard concert, this is not convincing.] The return, of course, does not address why Jean needed to be paid to perform at his own charity’s fundraiser. But the largest 2006 payout-a whopping $250,000-went to Telemax, S.A., a for-profit Haiti company in which Jean and Duplessis were said to “own a controlling interest.”

…The group’s tax returns also report “consultant” payments totaling $300,000 between 2005-2007, while the 2006 return reported nearly $225,000 in “promotion and PR” costs. These expenses are not itemized further in the IRS returns.

Promotion and PR costs? For a charity?

Playing catch-up, the Times reports on the controversy.

The charity — which says on its Web site that it has created more than 3,000 jobs, put close to 7,000 children in school, and provided more than 8,000 people a month with food, has had trouble making ends meet for most of its 11-year history. In 2007, it ran a $490,000 deficit, which was covered by a loan from a Canadian foundation.

Until recently, Yéle did not maintain basic records required of nonprofit groups. Yéle, which is legally known as the Wyclef Jean Foundation, was not active from 2001 through 2004 and not obligated to file tax forms, according to Hugh Locke, its president.

But when the charity became active again in 2005, it still did not file any tax forms until the state attorney general’s office in Illinois, where Yéle is registered, asked for them. It filed tax forms for 2005, 2006 and 2007 on Aug. 20, 2009 — a move that Charity Navigator, an independent nonprofit evaluator, called odd and “beyond late.”

So why is the Harvard Foundation honoring someone who seems to have scammed donors to his Haitian charity for personal enrichment?

Don’t look to the Harvard Gazette, which prints its usual pap, or the Crimson, which has nothing on the story.

Perhaps it’s worth asking Allen Counter, the director of the Harvard Foundation

Or advisory board member and Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammonds, who has been so outspoken about Haiti.

As the Times puts it,

H. Art Taylor, chief executive of the Wise Giving Alliance, agreed, and said he wondered why donors were so supportive of fund-raising by celebrities.

“Wyclef Jean has been like a magnet to attract money to his charity, and we don’t have even the slightest idea of how he or his organization intend to use this money,” Mr. Taylor said. “What’s the plan?”

Wyclef Jean hasn’t released an album since 2007, and his “charity” appears like a for-profit company—for Wyclef Jean’s profit. And it’s worth noting that Yele Haiti is pointedly not on the long list of charities listed by Drew Faust on her “Support Haiti Earthquake Relief” page.

So why exactly is Wyclef Jean the Harvard Foundation’s “artist of the year“?

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*From its website: “For the past seventeen years, the Harvard Foundation has sponsored a variety of programs which have informed the subjcct of American and global cultural pluralism.”

“My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for votes.”

—Andrea Fay Friedman, a young woman who voices a character with Down’s Syndrome on Family Guy, which prompted Sarah Pali to criticize the show. Friedman has Down’s Syndrome. The quote is from the New York Times.

The LA Times reports that California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger chastised fellow Republicans for saying no to everything and for being hypocritical on the stimulus package.

“I find it interesting that you have a lot of the Republicans running around and pushing back on the stimulus money and saying this doesn’t create any new jobs,” said Schwarzenegger, who has frequently criticized national Republicans in the past, often on Sunday talk shows. “And then they go out and they do the photo ops and they are posing with the big check and they say, ‘Isn’t this great. Look what the kind of money I provide you for the state.’ … It doesn’t match up.”

Schwarzenegger also dismissed the tea party movement as merely a manifestation of dissatisfaction that is bound to go nowhere.

Which reminds me that I meant to commend the New York Times for this long exploration of the tea party movement, which reminds one of what excellent work professional journalists can accomplish when they’re given the time and resources.

I read the piece with every intention of not pre-judging the 24-hour tea party people—that’s a little Britpop joke—and wound up thinking that this movement, or at least large sections of it, is pretty scary.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

These are the people who read (and write) all the crap that floats around the Internet and fills your inbox—conspiracy advocates, white supremacists, people who fly planes into IRS buildings…

I returned not too long ago from Oklahoma City, where the memory of Timothy McVeigh’s horrific mass murder are still painfully fresh. Some of these TPP—Tea Party People—remind me of McVeigh. This is a gathering of crazies, fostered for personal gain by Glenn Beck, whose hate of an African-American president is going to cause one of them to do something crazy….

Gazing out at his overwhelmingly white audience, Mr. Mack felt the need to say, “This meeting is not racist.” Nor, he said, was it a call to insurrection. What is needed, he said, is “a whole army of sheriffs” marching on Washington to deliver an unambiguous warning: “Any violation of the Constitution we will consider a criminal offense.”

The crowd roared….

I’ll bet they did.

Which is one reason why I keep reminding readers of this blog of the importance of supporting the president, imperfect though he may be. Consider the alternative.

Apologies for somewhat erratic posting this week. I’ve been in California, and between the air travel and work commitments, the blog has paid the price.

A commenter below noted that my categorization of Skip Gates’s decision to donate his handcuffs to the Smithsonian was quoted in the Crimson.

Happy to spread the news of SITD, but the Crimson also quoted Ruth Wisse saying:

“Perhaps they will exhibit the handcuffs with Sergeant Crowley’s whip,” Yiddish literature professor Ruth R. Wisse said in an e-mail yesterday.

Just want to say that I think that’s a bit over the top. Professor Wisse and I are both skeptical of Gates’ motives, but that level of rhetoric isn’t helpful….

…while I wasn’t looking.

Few days ago, at 2024/02/12 at 12:49pm, an anonymous poster wrote the 20,000th comment on this blog.

That’s kinda cool.

Thanks to all of you who read, and an added thanks to those who read and comment. If you didn’t do either, I wouldn’t have nearly the fun writing this blog that I do.

I haven’t written about the tragic horror of Amy Bishop, the Harvard Ph.d. who went on a shooting spree at the University of Alabama in Huntsville after being denied for tenure there. It’s such a sad story, and every day there are new disclosures about Bishop’s violent past—and how it was either glossed over or covered up. I hope whoever let that woman walk after she blew away her brother is having a tough time sleeping these days.

I’d originally thought of saying something about the painful consequences of being denied tenure on an unstable person, but I don’t think this has anything seriously to do with the tenure process. There are ups and downs in every life. A healthy person doesn’t go on a murderous rampage.

What I do think, however, is that this horrifying episode reveals something about the best in academic life—the camaraderie within a department, the sense of joint purpose, the friendship among scholars, the sense of community. That biology department sounds like it was a terrific group of people.

It will never be the same, of course. But I hope that the memories to be taken away from this aren’t about the worst side of academic life, but the best.

It’s a fad now: Joe the Plumber has renounced Joe McCain, expressed his admiration for Barack Obama.

The guy’s a train wreck, but still….

The Harvard professor discloses in the New York Times that he has donated the handcuffs in which he was arrested to the Smithsonian’s National History of African American History and Culture.

It’s odd that you will be remembered in connection with a pair of handcuffs when you’re hardly a rabble rouser. Would you agree?

No one would exactly call me Malcolm X. And I don’t think as time goes on that I will be remembered for handcuffs. I hope not.

Gates explains that the cop who arrested him, James Crowley, gave him the handcuffs.

We met at the River Gods cafe several months ago, and he gave me the handcuffs.

What the interview doesn’t say—and this may have been edited out—is that Gates surely must have asked for them, because one can’t imagine Crowley, in such a delicate situation, dropping a set of handcuffs onto a pub table and saying, “Oh, I thought you might like these.”

Which would suggest that Gates planned all along to get some publicity for himself—and define himself in some small way as part of the civil rights movement—by donating the handcuffs.

Of course, there’s a long tradition of stagecraft in the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks wasn’t the first black woman to insist upon sitting while riding on a Montgomery bus; Jesse Jackson probably posed for that heartbreaking photo of himself leaning over an assassinated Martin Luther King.

But all this stagecraft was defensible because its goals were so profound and dedicated to a larger cause. Skip Gates and the handcuffs…?

There’s another part of the interview which strikes me as odd, after interviewer Debra Solomon asks Gates how he came to be called “Skip.”

Skip sounds so WASPy.

Hey, you know, I don’t think we knew what a WASP was. I didn’t realize it until I went to Yale as a student and met Chip and Muffy and — actually, I thought Skip was a black name.

Chip and Muffy?

I probably have a vested interest in this—I’m Catholic on one side and Protestant on the other—but isn’t it a little weird for a guy who’s talking about himself as a civil rights activist to caricature white people? My test is simple: Flip the colors and see how it sounds. If Bono joked about students at a black college being named Tyrone and Appollonia, would you raise an eyebrow?

(I guess it’s only fair to raise the point that, since Debra Solomon is probably Jewish, the same principle applies. I’m not sure that you could toss off a Jewish caricature in the New York Times without an editor striking it. It’s just a weird exchange.)

WASP jokes aren’t the end of the world, of course, and everyone has to be able to laugh at themselves. More problematic is the continued free pass Gates gets in the media, which constantly covers his advocacy of DNA testing while never mentioning that he has a financial interest in it. There’s nothing of that in the interview above, for example.

There is, however, an interesting Times biz section piece on a new DNA testing company called Counsyl. The article notes that Gates has endorsed the company.

Counsyl took advantage of the release of “Extraordinary Measures” to begin a publicity blitz. It issued a press release last Friday full of endorsements from fertility doctors as well as others, who include Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor of African-American studies, who called the test a “genuine breakthrough for minority health.”

Of course, as with all DNA testing, there are major concerns about for-profit DNA companies making exaggerated claims.

…some experts caution that it is too soon to know how accurate Counsyl’s test actually is, in part because neither the company nor any outside reviewer has published papers on its approach and results.

And some experts say the company’s Web site overstates the case. The company calls its product the Universal Genetic Test, for example, even though there are thousands of genetic diseases, not just the 100 Counsyl tests detect.

Interestingly, the company’s website also features an endorsement from Harvard prof Stephen Pinker:

“Universal genetic testing can drastically reduce the incidence of genetic diseases, and may very well eliminate many of them.”—Professor Steven Pinker, PhD Harvard University

There’s also a quote from the head of the Yale Fertility Center.

Unfortunately, the Times doesn’t mention that Pinker and Gates are listed as the company’s “scientific advisor” and “community advisor” respectively. (The Yale guy is listed as medical advisor.) This is flat-out bad journalism.

Coupla other things. First, Pinker is an evolutionary psychologist, which (to me, anyway) doesn’t make him an expert on the science of genetics. Is it his expertise the company wants, or his/the Harvard brand?

Second, how will the elimination he refers to happen? Since there is no DNA-correcting surgery that I know of, isn’t Pinker suggesting that the abortion of fetuses with flawed DNA will eliminate the transmission of that DNA?

I am no expert on this, so I apologize if I’m misspeaking .But if I’m right, Pinker’s implication leads to a very complicated moral area, perhaps too complicated to be condensed into a soundbite for which one is receiving a check.

So…a long and rambling post. My apologies; it’s Monday. Here are three conclusions.

1) Skip Gates and the handcuffs: No one can transform a painful experience into shameless self-promotion better than Skip Gates.

2) DNA testing: Red flags all over. (As it were.) Is anyone at Harvard looking out for the school’s reputation?

3) Media: I know it’s a bad time, but you folks in the MSM are dropping the ball on an easy story—a Harvard professor promoting as a civil rights issue a controversial business in which he has a financial stake .

The LA Times reports on one of the stupider moves of the Bush administration (which is saying something right there): the decision to build a fence along the U.S.—Mexico border.

(This counts as pro-Bama because sometimes it’s good to remember just how insane things were during the Bush years.)