You Have to Wonder…
Posted on August 19th, 2010 in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
…summer vacation or no, if the students working on the Harvard Crimson truly believed there were good jobs out there for them when they graduate, would the most recent reporting on Marc Hauser and Monkeygate be five days old?
Or are they just enjoying vacation?
6 Responses
8/19/2010 6:20 pm
… or maybe they’re otherwise engaged in trying to put together a solid, sourced, accurate story rather than engaging in random speculation via a blog or likewise with the equivalent of “my best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend…”
8/19/2010 8:09 pm
The Crimson is probably uniquely positioned to write about the perspective of students re this incident. Irrespective of what the Professor did, or of what Harvard did in response, of great import is how does this episode affect students? Professors, especially popular ones, are role models for students, and they serve in many ways as moral exemplars… this is why it was troubling that LHS took on to sign dollar bills when he met undergraduates… How are undergraduates making sense of this story? and of the University’s leadership in response to it? What kind of ‘teachable moment’ will this episode in Harvard’s history be?
These are the kinds of questions that Derek Bok would have thought carefully about.
8/20/2010 6:02 am
The Boston Globe has now picked up on the article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Here’s the link to the online Boston Globe report:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/08/20/aide_reportedly_challenged_professors_methods/
8/20/2010 6:07 am
P.S. Franz Kafka had the best take on monkey business in academia: see his short story “A Report to an Academy.” There, an ape who has managed to become human enough to perform in vaudeville shows gives a learned report to a scholarly academy describing his evolution from ape to man. Among other things, he says: “Your lives as apes, gentlemen, insofar as you have something of the sort in your past, cannot be further from you than mine is from me.”
8/20/2010 8:50 am
Anon-Time will tell, I guess. But in the meantime, they’re getting their butts kicked on a story they should own. (Back in 2004-05, they were regularly beating the national press on Summers stuff.) That’s all I’m sayin’.
8/20/2010 2:29 pm
One doesn’t the impression that the Crimson has been hot on the trail:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/8/20/smith-confirms-harvard-hauser/