Shots in the Dark

A year or so ago at a meeting of the Aspen Institute, Larry Summers gave a talk in which he was asked about the representation of him in the film The Social Network, and he told a story about the Winklevoss twins which went something like this:

I learned a long time ago that if a student is wearing a suit on Tuesday afternoon, they either have a job interview or they are an asshole.

(Long pause…)

When I saw the video of that interview, which was conducted by Walter Isaacson, I was stunned that a former president of Harvard would refer to students as assholes—though I shouldn’t have been: in Harvard Rules, I recounted the story of how, on several occasions while president, Summers referred to student Zayed Yasin as a “little shit.”

But at least that sneering putdown occurred in relative privacy, at small gatherings; Summers called the Winklevosses assholes in a semi-public forum which was also being filmed.

So at this Asia Society talk on December 5th, interviewer Karen Fineman of CNBC asked him that same tired question about The Social Network.

And Summers repeated about three stories that he has told previously, including that one about the Winklevoss twins; the only difference was that this time he referred to them as “jerks” rather than assholes.

(He also calls them the “Winklevi,” which is their pop culture nickname, but again—inappropriate for a former president of the world’s greatest university.)

I really don’t see how an act of respect—getting dressed up to see the president of Harvard—could be interpreted as evidence of being an asshole or a jerk. What a bitter and jaded mind that interpretation suggests.

But even if that’s your take on what is intended to be a compliment, keep it to yourself. Otherwise, you not only come away looking like the jerk, but you dishonor your former office—that office to which the Winklevosses were showing their respect.

The Winklevosses aren’t always the most sympathetic characters, but that’s irrelevant. A president of Harvard should have grace. Larry Summers has none. That’s a big reason why he’s no longer president of Harvard.

I’d like to see Summers tell that story when the Winklevosses are in the room. I expect he wouldn’t. Bullies are too scared to say it to someone’s face…

They had a press conference to announce their new tour and discuss their new album—but no U.S. dates yet. This stresses me out immensely.

Sudhir Venkatesh, the Columbia “rogue sociologist” and subject of a recent NYT profile which suggested that he’d been playing fast and loose with Columbia’s money, has responded to the Freakonomics blog, where he has been a contributor.

His answer continues the argument he outlined in an earlier statement to a Columbia student blog: He’s the real victim here.

It is troubling to me that old documents are being leaked now. My life and my work has [sic] been about transparency and I have absolutely nothing to hide.

That’s not quite true. Venkatesh declined to answer the Times’ questions about numerous specific issues in Columbia’s audit—about, for example, $33, 000 in $100 grants to unidentified interview subjects. He probably has his reasons for not talking to the Times, and they may be perfectly justifiable ones, but you don’t get to stonewall reporters and then tout your commitment to transparency.

Venkatesh volunteers that he repaid some $13, 000 for matters in which “my own recordkeeping did not meet these new standards.” (Poor fellow; he’s the victim of new standards.)

But if you read the Times profile—car services to a building that houses a nail salon, a $9,000 payment to a collaborator that Venkatesh appears to have simply pocketed, etc.—the issue doesn’t seem to be sloppy record-keeping, but the appropriation of funds for personal use.

Venkatesh also says—well, implies, really—that the concerns were raised because of an audit that he requested and that, if you don’t believe him, then bear this in mind:

I have subsequently worked extensively with the FBI — which, as you might imagine, conducted a comprehensive financial background check on me before my work with them began.

Venkatesh is clearly no fool, and that’s a fascinating sentence. Does the FBI really conduct a “comprehensive financial background check” on every academic whom it hires as a consultant? I have no idea. In any event, would a hushed-up university audit, which surely never involved criminal charges, be turned up by the FBI in such a background check? I don’t know that either. But the implication of the statement is clear: Imagine that there was a “comprehensive” background check. Would the FBI have hired me if I wasn’t clean as a whistle?

It’s also worth noting that this chronology flatly contradicts what Venkatesh told Columbia’s BWOG; in that statement, he said that any financial mishaps were due to the fact that he was so busy working for both Columbia and the FBI.

Was I a good bookkeeper? Not by any stretch. I was overwhelmed, I was working both at Columbia and at the FBI, and I struggled to keep up. So ethically, I felt it important to return approximately $13,000 for which there was inadequate documentation. I then took a partial leave to deepen my work at the FBI.

(Again with the bookkeeping…..)

The contradiction suggests that Venkatesh was already working for the FBI when issues about his finances arose, and so any financial background check that was conducted likely occurred before Columbia’s audit. Which, if true, would make his statement to Freakonomics not only meaningless, but dishonest.

So go back and read that original sentence as a lawyer might—because it sounds like a lawyer wrote it:

“I have subsequently worked extensively with the FBI — which, as you might imagine, conducted a comprehensive financial background check on me before my work with them began.”

Which means that before he was working “extensively” with the FBI, Venkatesh was working a little bit with the agency, and before he was working with them a little bit, they did a background check.

In other words, if you read the sentence incredibly carefully, it’s literally correct—but carefully crafted to convey the impression that that background check occurred only when Venkatesh began his “extensive” work with the FBI.

That’s not really so transparent, is it?

Some might say that this is much ado about nothing, a tempest in a teapot. After all, it’s an internal university matter. Right?

I don’t think so. First, who knows whether any of the monies involved came from public funds? Second, some of the money is almost surely partly paid by student tuition, which goes up and up and up in part to pay the inflated salaries of celebrity academics such as Venkatesh. Third, Venkatesh is a public figure, a pop phenomenon. He is, in that sense, an ambassador from the academic community to the outside world; his integrity matters. And fourth, his work is influential. If there’s anything sketchy about it, that’s important to know. Venkatesh is a powerful person writing about the powerless; it’s my faith that, under those circumstances, you have a particular responsibility to be scrupulously honest.

(Stephen Glass used to write about powerless minorities as well, you may recall.)

That’s a point that the Times article raised, but perhaps not in the depth it could have; one certainly got the impression that lots of Venkatesh’s colleagues in the field have deep misgivings about his work. (Venkatesh allies call it envy, which is, to be fair, not unheard-of in academia.)

Without explicitly mentioning it, Venkatesh does respond to one particular Times’ assertion—the idea that he may fudge or invent quotes from the pseudonymous gang members, drug dealers and prostitutes who populate his work.

The University prohibits me from using real names, so third-party validation is difficult to achieve. So, in practice, I work in teams, where many people can discuss what we all saw. I’ve collaborated with students and faculty in all of my research — with gangs, sex workers, public housing residents, etc.

A question about this, and a suggestion.

The question is this: Does Columbia really prohibit its professors—or sociologists, or just Venkatesh—from using real names in his writing?

If so, that’s pretty silly. It’s an invitation to make stuff up. (Who could prove you did it? No one. I doubt the gang leaders are going to file a complaint.) Why would sociologists be compelled not to use real names, and not historians, political scientists, economists and the like?

And here’s the suggestion: This statement doesn’t actually establish what Venkatesh wants it to—his trustworthiness.

Here’s why. While Venkatesh may well collaborate with students and faculty in his work, from all I can tell he doesn’t collaborate with them in his field work: He’s the only one out there in the projects, on the streets, hanging out with the Damon Runyon-esque characters of our era. (That’s what “rogue sociologists” do! They work alone!)

So if Venkatesh is making up quotes, or indeed whole characters, none of his “collaborators” would have any way of knowing that. When he says that he helped drag a gang lieutenant to safety in the midst of a blazing gun battle, or participated in the beating of a violent crackhead, his “collaborators” weren’t there, were they?

Which is to say, Venkatesh’s suggestion that his “collaborations” are proof of his veracity is so meaningless yet so carefully constructed, it makes one think that he is, frankly, lying.

As does Venkatesh’s overall approach to dealing with the Times story: through painstakingly crafted statements to blogs that allow for no questioning and, on close reading, seem to blur the lines of honesty and accuracy.

Sudhir Venkatesh has devoted his career to asking questions of other people and writing about their answers. He’s done very well by that. So why not let someone do the same with him?

“To be that thoughtful, you run the risk of being boring.”

—Ethel Kennedy to the singer Taylor Swift, after Swift declined to jump off the Kennedy yacht and swim because two of her friends had forgotten to bring bathing suits.

That quote says a lot about the Kennedys, actually….

(Thanks to Page Six.)

The Journal reports that the lawyers hired by Harvard grad and donor Buddy Fletcher to pursue his absurd lawsuit against the Dakota have parted ways with Fletcher, the namesake of Skip Gates’ endowed university professorship. The reason? Fletcher wasn’t paying his bills.

One law firm asked to withdraw from the case in October, after it said Mr. Fletcher had stopped paying bills in April. Soon after, the other firm asked to withdraw as well because of “irreconcilable differences” with Mr. Fletcher, it said in court papers. The firm declined to provide details, citing attorney-client privilege.

Fletcher has until 12/20 to come up with new lawyers. Perhaps someone willing to work pro bono?

The real question, of course, is why Fletcher even bothers to pursue the case. After all, the reason he’s suing the Dakota is because its board refused to allow him to purchase an(other) apartment there on the grounds that his finances looked shaky. The longer this case goes on, the more Fletcher proves it right….

“I’m deeply troubled that someone within the University’s administration selectively leaked private documents to the media. It is hard to have full confidence in the integrity of the University’s processes when things like this occur.”

—Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, in a statement issued to the blog BWOG (a Columbia student blog) about the NYT story describing Columbia’s investigation of possible financial irregularities by Venkatesh.

Venkatesh adds:

That said, I was not successful in implementing changes or, candidly, in paying careful attention to record keeping of my own. The audit document discussed in the Times article was the beginning of an inquiry, not the end. The administration asked me to address a range of issues, which I did honestly and forthrightly. Was I a good bookkeeper? Not by any stretch. I was overwhelmed, I was working both at Columbia and at the FBI, and I struggled to keep up. So ethically [sic], I felt it important to return approximately $13,000 for which there was inadequate documentation.

The Times article suggested that the disputed amount was more like $240, 000.

In any event, it is striking that Venkatesh suggests that the reason he was so careless with the university’s money was because he was so busy working outside the university….

Finally, Venkatesh dodges the question of whether he fabricates material in his work by establishing a straw man, then rebutting it:

The article also suggests that I work outside the boundaries of mainstream sociology. I plead guilty. My discipline is stuffy and losing relevance daily in the academic and public eye. But, I have never been anything other than scrupulous, honest and ethical in my research, and I have always safeguarded the risk of my research subjects at every moment. With pride, I can say that, as a filmmaker and scholar, I have been working in some of the most difficult research field sites, in our nation’s inner cities with marginal populations, for two decades.

The article did indeed note—uncritically—that Venkatesh worked outside the boundaries of much of academic sociology. But it raised larger questions about the veracity of Venkatesh’s work, questions he fails to acknowledge or address here. (No offense, but sometimes it is useful to issue a statement to a student publication; they’re not as aggressive as they used to be.)

Someone somewhere should teach this response in a class on rhetoric…

In the Times, Ariel Kaminer has a fascinating and meticulously reported piece on Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh, who has become a celebrity scholar by virtue of writing about poor people, gangs and prostitutes, and by just generally being trendy.

It appears that Venkatesh’s work standards are…hmmm…flexible? And so are his accounting methods.

And at Columbia, where he briefly led the university’s largest social science research center, he was the subject last year of a grueling investigation into a quarter-million dollars of spending that Columbia auditors said was insufficiently documented, misappropriated or outright fabricated.

According to internal documents from that investigation, which were obtained by The New York Times, the auditors said that Professor Venkatesh directed $52,328 to someone without any “documented evidence of work performed.” He listed a dinner for 25 people, relating to research on professional baseball players; auditors found that only 8 people had attended, and that the research project had not been approved.

He charged Columbia for town cars to take him around, to take his fiancée home from work one late night, to take someone — it is not specified whom — from Professor Venkatesh’s address to a building that houses a nail salon and a psychic. All told, auditors questioned expenses amounting to $241,364.83.

This is slightly awkward for me, as I happen to know and like Venkatesh’s now-wife (and have met Venkatesh once briefly). But the issue remains—what compromises are universities willing to make to accommodate celebrity academics who can bring money and attention to their school while lowering their standards for integrity and ethics and scholarship?

The Times makes it pretty awkward for Columbia. About Gang Leader for a Day, Venkatesh’s most recent book, for example, the paper says this:

Many of the colleagues who, along with friends, employees and students, made up the almost three dozen people interviewed for this article, raised concerns about the process by which Professor Venkatesh translated his research into best-seller material. For example, the book includes page after page of dialogue, rendered between quotation marks as though verbatim, despite his acknowledgment that he rarely took notes in real time. (Other sociologists say there is no clear standard for quotations in ethnographic studies.)

Translation: He’s making shit up.

(Also, sociologists: If you quote someone, you are writing down what they said. Period. Don’t be silly. Remember, you’re trying to be a credible discipline.)

The Times also strongly suggests that the self-described “rogue sociologist” is a thief.

All of these projects, and many more, appear in a 24-page document, dated Aug. 4, 2011, that Columbia auditors drew up after their investigation into Professor Venkatesh’s financial activities at Iserp. Some involved minor expenditures, like a $41.26 lunch. But others involved much larger sums, and confusion about the reason for the payment or even the identity of the recipient. Cash payments, of $100 each to research subjects who could not be identified, totaled $33,000. Payments totaling $52,328 to the subject of one of his documentaries were for what auditors called “fabricated business purposes.”

A freelance editor who told auditors he had worked on “Gang Leader for a Day” received $15,000 to teach a writing seminar — $10,000 more than had been budgeted. And $8,911 that Professor Venkatesh was supposed to pay to a colleague for a study they collaborated on somehow failed to make it into that colleague’s account. Professor Venkatesh told auditors the colleague had failed to do the work, a claim that auditors determined to be untrue.

….All told, the auditors listed $19,405 in “inappropriate transactions” — like $1,514 in town car charges — and $221,960 in expenses with “insufficient documentation” — like payments to unnamed research subjects.

Professor Venkatesh declined to explain for this article how Columbia resolved these allegations….

Ventkatesh did say that he repaid some $13, 000 in disputed bills.

One doesn’t want to judge without knowing all the facts, but…this doesn’t look good. Payments to unnamed research subjects? Payments to the subject of a documentary? (That can’t conform to any serious academic guidelines.) $9000 that “somehow failed to make it into that colleague’s bank account”?

Columbia won’t go into details, which can’t make its donors very happy, though a spokesperson does confirm that “Professor Venkatesh is a faculty member,” which I guess answers the question of whether he’s been fired.

It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of Venkatesh. But I think Columbia’s going to have to say and do more than that, or its reputation is going to take a real hit. It appears that the university may have a fabulist and an embezzler on its faculty. If so, that would merit more than just a slap on the wrist.

Wouldn’t it?

One would have to guess that a slap on the wrist is exactly what Columbia gave Venkatesh, in the form of a $13, 000 bill. Why? Because someone was pissed off enough to give the New York TImes a damning internal report. Someone didn’t want to let Columbia sweep this under the rug.