The Globe writes on the number of Harvard students traveling and studying abroad.

Last year, a total of 1,678 Harvard undergraduates went abroad to study, one-fourth of the student body. That is 2 1/2 times as many as the 667 who went abroad six years earlier.

“This is a remarkable turnaround from an era, not very long ago, when undergraduates were discouraged from going abroad because it would take them away from precious Harvard Square for some moment of their undergraduate experience,’’ Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust said in an interview in her Harvard Yard office before leaving for China last week.

I know what she means, but the sarcasm of the quote—”precious Harvard Square”—seems unnecessary. (Particularly from someone who, before she was president, wasn’t known for traveling abroad much.)

Moreover, the argument against traveling abroad in the past was not a reluctance to leave “precious Harvard Square,” but the university’s conviction that few schools in other countries were as rigorous as Harvard, and so the college administration took a skeptical view of much foreign study.

I don’t know whether the quality of education elsewhere has improved, or if that simply matters less now than the value of a foreign experience.

For their part, many students were more concerned about interrupting their extracurriculars (sports, the Crimson, whatever) than they were about leaving Au Bon Pain.

In any case, this seems like a generally positive trend.

Havana, Cuba

Twenty-two year old Katie Spotz just finished rowing across the Atlantic to raise money for a group called Blue Planet Run Foundation, which tries to provide clean drinking water for those who don’t have it.

“Are you nuts?” Dan Spotz, her father, said when she told him about her plan. “When she rode a bike across the entire country, she didn’t have to worry about sharks or pirates.”

Spotz did see sharks. She was splashed by dolphins as big as her boat. [Blogger: unlikely. Her boat was 19 feet long.] Fish leapt and slapped her in the face, and exhausted birds nestled beside her as she rowed.

Spotz has also run across the Mojave Desert, swum the entire Allegheny River, and cycled across the US. Impressive.

“Their stories are intertwined, the new third baseman and the old. Their lockers are close together. They take ground balls one after the other, inhabiting a spot big enough for only one. A situation that could have bred distrust and strife in a clubhouse has not, from all evidence, though it is clear that, on many days, Lowell would rather be just about anywhere else.”

From “No infield dirt around third base,” by Amalie Benjamin, in today’s Globe

Texas.

As the Times reports,

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday voted to approve a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the role of Christianity in American history and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

Which matters, of course, because Texas is such a huge market for textbooks, and publishers are generally reluctant to change the textbooks from state to state.

What kinds of changes were made? A couple of reasonable ones—teaching about the growth of the conservative movement in the 1980s seems legit to me—a few silly ones, and some truly offensive ones.

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among the conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

...There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

Read the entire Times article. These people know nothing about history; they are dangerous idiots.

Gawker and the Smoking Gun report that in 2008 the Harvard honoree used $105,000 of his charity’s money to pay his personal assistant/mistress.

That amounts to roughly one-third of all the money Yele spent that year on management and general expenses.…

The woman, Zakiya Khatou-Chevassu, is listed on Yele Haiti’s website as a “vice-president,” but in fact she was Wyclef Jean’s personal assistant (apparently in more ways than one).

Meaning that he was again using money given to charity for his personal benefit.

Gawker reports:

Jean has a long history of using Yele Haiti’s money for his own commercial gain. In 2005, 2006, and 2007, the foundation paid out a total of $410,000 to commercial entities controlled in whole or in part by Wyclef, including a whopping $250,000 for advertising time on a Haitian television station he co-owns. According to internal financial statements obtained by Gawker in January, Jean didn’t contribute a single dollar to Yele Haiti’s American operation during the year he founded it, and its founding executive director resigned because he “saw hundreds of thousands of dollars going to business needs and nothing going to the charity, when it seemed that part of Wyclef’s new PR strategy focuses on his charitable endeavors.” In 2006, he demanded a $100,000 fee to perform at a Yele Haiti fundraiser designed to raise money for his own hometown. The event was canceled in part because securing Jean’s participation was too expensive.

You will find absolutely no mention of any of this in the Harvard Crimson or any other Harvard publication, website or press release. (Watch here as a clearly enamored Harvard College dean Evelynn Hammonds presents Jean with his award-it comes near the end of the video.)

You know, it’s a weird world when a gossip website has higher ethical standards than Harvard University.

…so Amalie Benjamin is just warming up!

Here’s today’s lede from the Globe’s syntax-torturing Red Sox correspondent:

” It was unfamiliar to John Lackey, the lengthy bus ride, the rain delay.”

If this stuff gets into the paper, one can only imagine what the editors start with…

The Times has a weird piece today by Peter Baker on “the fall of Desiree Rogers,” the former White House social secretary.

It’s one of those articles where everyone has an agenda, but none of the agendas have anything to do with serving the reader of the newspaper.

Baker, who treads gently indeed with Rogers, wants to curry favor with a source who’s clearly displeased about having had to leave the White House.

Rogers wants to get the word out that she wasn’t a complete screw-up.

And White House officials like Rahm Emanuel, who cooperated with the article, want to mend fences with Rogers so that she won’t become an anti-Obama leaker.

Here’s Baker’s thesis:

The rise and fall of Desirée Rogers, the glamorous Harvard-educated corporate executive who brought sizzle to the State Dining Room but became a victim of a publicity stunt by a pair of aspiring reality show stars, is a tale familiar to almost any White House. A new president comes to town and installs friends he trusts, but inevitably some of them wind up burned by the klieg lights and corrosive politics of Washington.

This is nonsense. Rogers came to town and almost instantly did the one thing that you don’t want to do as a new arrival in Washington: Attract attention to yourself. (Especially if you’re not an elected official.) Suddenly every glossy magazine had its own photo shoot with Rogers—Vanity Fair, WSJ, Vogue—dressed in expensive designer clothing more costly than that worn by Sarah Palin in 2008’s presidential campaign. She attended Fashion Week as a guest of Anna Wintour. Michelle Obama had to stop Rogers from showing up at an MTV party.

Remember—this is during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Baker links Rogers’ downfall to Vince Foster and Harriet Myers: “Washington can be seductive and then destructive.”

Oh, balderdash. Rogers made rookie mistakes that were inspired by ego; the destruction was self-destruction.

Then, when the White House crashers fiasco happened, she was pushed out. Pretty simple—she was paying to much attention to promoting herself, and not enough attention to her job. It happened a lot with the Clinton White House, which was filled with 20-somethings, and almost not at all in the GWB White House, which was pretty disciplined.

(Rogers also started speaking publicly about “the Obama brand,” which was just idiocy, perhaps something Rogers picked up at HBS.)

For Ms. Rogers, associates said the episode proved a searing experience that has soured her on Washington. She believes she was left largely undefended by the White House… And while she is unwilling to discuss her story publicly, several associates [Blogger: i.e., people whom she directed to talk to Baker, and possibly Rogers herself-that’s a very carefully turned phrase, “unwilling to discuss her story publicly”] shared her account that her side has been lost….”As she put it, ‘They never lifted a finger to help me set the record straight.'”

As the great Chryssie Hynde once wrote, “It is time for you to stop all of your sobbing.”

Because Rogers is now making a second Washington mistake: Cooperating with a self-serving article to try to improve your reputation. The city rehabilitates people in its own time. What Washington doesn’t appreciate is people who make their bosses look bad—whether while they’re working for the president, or after. All this article does is suggest that the White House did the right thing in getting rid of her.

At the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (etc.), the US and other countries are advocating that…

1)… six species sf sharks, including hammerheads, be added to the list of endangered animals whose trade is monitored but not banned.

China opposes the measure because the Chinese are addicted to shark fin soup, even though sharks are consequently disappearing from the world’s oceans.

2) …trade in bluefin tuna be temporarily banned to allow stocks of the fish, which have declined by some 90% largely due to voracious overfishing by the Japanese, to regenerate.

Japan has said it will not honor such a cessation, which is insane, because if the fish is so important to Japanese culture, wouldn’t you want to try to save it?

3) the ban on trade in ivory (elephant tusks) be extended until 2027. As the Times reports, “Affluent buyers of ivory carvings in China, Japan and Thailand have driven the market in poaching…abetted by Asian gangs operating in Africa.”

(ProBama aside: We’re also pushing to ban trade in polar bear products—that means you, Canada!—which would never in a million George W. Bush years have happened.)

We certainly have our own environmental issues here in the US, but on these ones, we’re right, and the nations of Asia have to evolve—or else the animals that we love to appreciate and they love to swallow won’t be around much longer.

They just don’t give a damn when their heroes use steroids.

Yankees fans? We find it morally troubling. Jason Giambi, A-Rod, even (especially) Andy Pettitte, who barely counts as a steroid user. If Derek Jeter were ever revealed to have used steroids, Yankee Stadium would crack in two and sink into a massive hole in the Bronx ground.

We Yankee fans are morally serious people.

But David Ortiz breaks down after a career of steroid abuse and…no one cares. Hey, Big Papi! We love you! Say something cute!

Now Nomar Garciaparra signs with the Sox, then retires, and all the Sox fans go crazy with sentimental man-love.

Here’s how the Globe deals with the S-word:

At the time, some fans were bitter toward Garciaparra, accusing him of nursing injuries, using performance-enhancing drugs, and angling for a trade.

“Some fans” accused him of using “performance-enhancing drugs”? There wasn’t a baseball player or fan who didn’t think Nomar was on the juice.

But now, all is forgiven in Boston.

“He was the Red Sox,’’ said Juan Perez, a 61-year-old from the South End. “His best years were here, and he made such an imprint on the city. People just loved him.’’

Actually, Garciaparra was kind of a jerk.

I’m with Dan Shaughnessy, who writes:

….yesterday’s lovefest involving Nomar Garciaparra and the Red Sox was truly nauseating. If Nomar had been hooked up to a polygraph, the machine would have exploded….it’s downright fraudulent to deny or ignore how bad this relationship was at the end. Nomar hated Boston and the Red Sox in 2004, and the Sox knew they had to get rid of him if they had a chance to win a World Series. It was nasty and personal and it was obvious to everyone who was around the team in that iconic season.

A serious question: What is it with you people? It’s this kind of thing that makes people in other cities think that Bostonians are…you know…stupid.

Below, Nomar in before and after photos.

By the way, Globe writer Peter Schworm even tries to argue that Yankee fans think Nomar is a swell guy.

“I always liked him,’’ said Ian Kirschner, a 20-year-old University of Florida student visiting Fenway Park. “I always thought of him as a Red Sock.’’

This is very fishy! It’s highly dubious that any Yankee fan would attend the University of Florida, or visit Fenway Park in early March, for that matter. Let’s just say that I doubt Yankee fans think the world of Nomar.

In short: Deeply unpleasant guy, massive fraud, Sox fans love him. Weird.