Shots in the Dark

After Richard Perez-Pena’s article quoting this blog, Harry Lewis, Michael Mitzenmacher and Tim McCarthy—because the resident deans were too afraid for their jobs to speak and Michael Smith and Evelyn Hammonds were just too cowardly to speak—Smith and Hammonds have put out a statement. The Times says that it is “attributed” to them, which means that even the Times doesn’t put much stock in what was surely a group effort at denying responsibility. Come on, deans Smith and Hammond: Man up. It’s not just yourselves you hurt by evading responsibility, it’s the long-term credibility of your offices.

In any case, their explanation for why they did not share with the residential deans that they had spied on the deans’ email is almost hilariously Orwellian: Because they wanted to protect the one dean who had apparently leaked something.

“Some have asked why, at the conclusion of that review, the entire group of resident deans was not briefed on the review that was conducted, and the outcome,” the two deans wrote. “The question is a fair one. Operating without any clear precedent for the conflicting privacy concerns and knowing that no human had looked at any e-mails during or after the investigation, we made a decision that protected the privacy of the resident dean who had made an inadvertent error and allowed the student cases being handled by this resident dean to move forward expeditiously.”

Is it just me, or does this make no sense at all? Why would following Harvard policy and telling all the deans that their email had been searched expose the one who had forwarded the email (apparently for well-meaning reasons)?

The answer, of course, is that it wouldn’t. While it might make the residential deans wonder who, in fact, had been the transgressor, there would still be 15 other candidates, a number which would afford the actual forwarder plenty of cover.

More likely is that Smith and Hammond simply knew that people would be deeply upset about this academic espionage, and they wanted to avoid conflict.

Smith and Hammond’s response also begs the question: If one dean was told that his email was searched, was he also told that all the residential deans’ emails were searched? It stands to reason that s/he was told—because why would any particular dean be singled out? (And to suggest that one dean had been singled out, when that was not the case, would be deeply unfair.)

So did Smith/Hammond say to this particular dean, Hey, by the way, we searched everyone’s emails, but don’t tell them, okay? It’ll be our little secret.

This is what happens when you fail to take responsibility for an action you can’t proudly defend: You get all twisted out of shape concocting self-rationalizing explanations that lack the benefit of being true.

If you believe in the principle of Occam’s Razor, here’s the likely truth: deans Smith and Hammond were pissed off that news of the cheating scandal got into the press. They wanted to find out who leaked the news. They had the power to do so. Power corrupts. So they abused their power. And then they tried to cover their tracks by not telling anyone except the “guilty” party—who presumably would be too cowed to share the news that Smith and Hammond had gone all Nixon, because to do so would mean confessing that s/he was the leaker—and assuming that that person would keep it quiet. (Clearly Smith and Hammond had no intention of ever telling the other deans, and only hastily did so after the media started asking questions.)

The leaker obviously did not keep quiet, or we wouldn’t now know about the espionage.

How deep the damage from this incident goes is unclear. But I suspect the damage is deeper and longer-lasting than a) that from the cheating scandal and b) that from the forwarded email. How do you trust these two ever again?

I said before that resignation should be on the table. This will never happen, of course; the only person who could effect these resignations is Drew Faust, and, well, Faust isn’t known for taking difficult stands on principle. But maybe it should.

Loving their new album, Arc, and in particular this song, Duet.

Anne-Marie Slaughter—she of the famous Atlantic article—reviews Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In, in today’s Times.

(Great choice, Times.)

Near the end of the review Slaughter writes something that summarizes my objection to the book…better than I’ve written it:

… it is hard not to notice that her narrative is what corporate America wants to hear. For both the women who have made it and the men who work with them, it is cheaper and more comfortable to believe that what they need to do is simply urge younger women to be more like them, to think differently and negotiate more effectively, rather than make major changes in the way their companies work. Young women might be much more willing to lean in if they saw better models and possibilities of fitting work and life together: ways of slowing down for a while but still staying on a long-term promotion track; of getting work done on their own time rather than according to a fixed schedule; of being affirmed daily in their roles both as parents and as professionals.

But this is exactly why Sandberg has garnered so much corporate support for Lean In: Because her womanifesto is so deeply unthreatening to corporate America, and asks of corporations exactly nothing.

Did you notice, for example, that Sandberg’s first book party was held in New York and co-hosted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Arianna Huffington? Bloomberg, however, has a terrible record on women in the workplace issues; when one Bloomberg female employee revealed to Bloomberg that she was pregnant, his advice to her was this: “Kill it.” Because apparently he was fed up with female employees getting pregnant. And, quick, name one high level woman in the Bloomberg administration who is not a wealthy socialite.

And Huffington is said to be an awful person for anyone, male or female, to work for, known for screaming at staffers on account of alleged issues with her car service; let’s not forget, she made nine figures in her buyout but didn’t share a penny with all those people who’d built her site…working for free.

What do you think the likelihood is that Sandberg has ever raised an objection to these things to Michael Bloomberg or Arianna Huffington?

And yet, millions of American women will now start thinking that all they have to do is “lean in” and “sit at the table” and not “leave before they leave,” and their problems will be solved. Some of them, maybe. On its own, absent of any real world context, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Sandberg’s advice.

And maybe some of them will get to the top and make things easier for the people coming up behind them.

But many of them will find that leaning in doesn’t really address the power structure—of which Sheryl Sandberg is part and parcel—one bit. As a great songwriter once said, “Meet the new boss….”

A New York Times reporter called me last night to ask my opinion on the email scandal at Harvard; I was flying to Los Angeles, so hadn’t yet read the Globe piece exposing the fact that Dean Michael Smith ordered a secret search of the email accounts of 16 residential deans.

Harvard University central administrators secretly searched the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans last fall, looking for a leak to the media about the school’s sprawling cheating case, according to several Harvard officials interviewed by the Globe.

The move could have been acceptable under a certain interpretation of Harvard policy, but Smith’s office did not follow the terms of that policy; for instance, it did not inform 15 of the 16 deans that their email had been searched.

Naturally, when the Globe started asking questions, a Harvard press secretary (one of the hordes of Harvard press secretaries) was forced to take the fall for Smith, who himself lacked the cojones to talk to reporters.

This is, I think, one of the lowest points in Harvard’s recent history—maybe Harvard’s history, period. It’s an invasion of privacy, a betrayal of trust, and a violation of the academic values for which the university should be advocating. And all to try to hunt down the source of a leak on a story about which the university should have been forthcoming in the first place (but of course wasn’t).

You might expect this from the Nixon White House, but you shouldn’t expect it from Harvard.

That may be changing.

Tim McCarthy wrote this on Facebook, and I think he’s quite right:

To think that the powers that be-who are so often detached from and seemingly disinterested in the lives of students here-would search the emails of those who care most about students, who tend to them on a daily basis, simply to preserve their pristine image in the media-this makes me sick to my stomach. “Veritas” means “truth,” right?

McCarthy also makes the point that this spying is worse than the original cheating scandal, and I think that that is also correct. Perhaps Dean Smith never heard the old Washington adage, “The cover-up is worse than the crime.” That, too, came out of the Nixon White House.

Smith owes the university, at the very least, an apology. But I don’t think a resignation should be off the table.

A couple of weeks ago, two articles about Sheryl Sandberg came out, one of which could be interpreted as slightly critical, the other of which actually was pretty critical. The former was written by the New York Times’ Jodi Kantor; the latter was written by Maureen Dowd. Also, someone wrote something about Sandberg and Marissa Mayer in USA Today, which no one read.

On the basis of those three articles, Sandberg defenders have quickly attacked the “backlash” against the Facebook COO. The Daily Beast ran a piece entitled “The Absurd Sandberg Backlash.” Slate published “The Backlash against Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg: Why Do We Hate Successful Women?” (Answer: We don’t.) The New Yorker writes: “Maybe You Should Read the Book: The Sheryl Sandberg Backlash.” On HuffPo, a “digital strategist and writer” (just…no) named Nisha Chittal wrote “On the Sheryl Sandberg Backlash.”

…Women are tearing Sandberg down….

Touchy, touchy.

Because, let’s face it, you come out with a book telling women how they can succeed just like you did—when how you succeeded was the result not only of your hard work, intelligence and ambition, but also a life of privilege, the support of powerful men like Larry Summers and Mark Zuckerberg, great timing and good luck—you’re going to take some heat for it. If you can’t stand that heat…

And let’s face it, too: Sandberg may have addressed sexism in a number of ways—most of which seem to involve blaming women for making the wrong choices—but I can think of a number of ways in which she hasn’t. What, for example, did she say about the “women are less genetically gifted at science and math” talk by her mentor, Larry Summers. She defended his record on helping women: “What few seem to note is that it is remarkable that he was giving the speech in the first place…”

I haven’t read Sandberg’s book, so I went and watched—twice—the TED talk on which it is based and which, I gather, it largely resembles.

It’s a fascinating piece of performance art, this talk. Sandberg is a terrific speaker—poised, likeable, polished. A lot of of hard work went into making this talk look easy, and I mean that as a compliment. Somewhat less appealing—to me, anyway—is the amount of work that Sandberg has put into her appearance; she’s pretty clearly sexin’ it up, while giving herself some plausible deniability. Sandberg strikes me as a bit vain in this way, but I realize that’s subjective; other people may just think she dresses well.

Regardless, when you dig beneath the visuals, this talk shows no evidence of serious thought. It’s smart in the sense that it’s strategic and calculated—there are lots of little defense (from criticism) mechanisms embedded within it—and it’s smart in the sense that there are lots of Malcolm Gladwell-like buzzwords and references to “data”—as in, “the data show”—both of which go over big at TED.

But in the actual substance, this talk is sort of dumb. There’s not a part of it that didn’t strike me as clever, but facile. Consider the anecdote about her brother at Harvard, which lends itself to so many other interpretations than the one she gives it; and yet, she uses it as if it’s representative of various truths about men and women. Or the statistic about how the more powerful women are, the less they’re seen as likable, which can be explained in some very interesting ways—assuming it’s even true—but Sandberg just uses as self-evident proof that we don’t like powerful women. I don’t want to deconstruct it too much, but I think a lot of our reaction to this talk depends on a) how visually well it’s delivered, and b) the fact that, as Fox Mulder used to say, we want to believe.

Sandberg’s clearly no dummy, and I’m sure her book will generate lots of useful discussions. But she’s putting herself out there about a very personal issue from a really elitist position: tons of money, a team of publicists, vast amounts of “social capital,” as one of her followers put it, lots of people who want to suck up to her because she’s clearly going to be a powerful person for some time to come…

It’s hard to worry too much about this “backlash,” when the knee-jerk response to it has already consumed far more “ink” (as it were) than the original criticisms. Particularly silly is the idea that women criticizing Sandberg demonstrates how women fail to support each other and tear each other down. Let’s give women some credit here; they’re capable of independent thought. Though you wouldn’t know it from the backlash against the backlash.

If I were invited to a Lean-In Group, which would come as something of a surprise, here are some questions I would suggest for discussion.

1) Numerous major companies are signing on to support Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” program. Are they doing so because it’s good public relations and it allows them to avoid more unpleasant issues about women in the workplace—like maternity leave, pay equity and so on—or because Sheryl Sandberg knows people at these companies or because they just really believe in what she’s doing, gosh darn it.

2) Facebook’s not doing so great. Teenagers are rapidly tuning out in favor of Instagram and other services, growth is slowing to a crawl, the Times’ Nick Bilton reports that Facebook actively suppresses news feeds when they are not paid for, and pretty much everyone who uses Facebook hates it. Is Sheryl Sandberg really as successful as we’ve been told, or is she just the lucky recipient of very generous press—in part due to the fact that she’s a woman in an industry where women are pretty scarce—who had the good fortune to ride the wave of joining hugely successful companies? And will she now be leaving Facebook just as the going gets tough?

3) Has Sheryl Sandberg’s gender been an obstacle for her at Larry Summers’ Treasury or in the “male-dominated Silicon Valley,” or a source of her advancement?

4) Sandberg interviewed Oprah Winfrey at Facebook in September 2011. Is there a connection between Sandberg’s relationship with Winfrey and the fact that Winfrey is Harvard’s 2013 Commencement speaker?

5) Has Sheryl Sandberg ever really fought for anything difficult? Something that, even if it were the right thing to do, cost her personally or professionally?

See, here’s the thing about Sandberg, really: All this talk about gender is just a smokescreen. It’s a way of Sandberg raising her profile as a prelude to a political career.

But the issue that really divides executives and working people in this country isn’t gender, it’s power. And in my experience, people who accumulate power (and wealth ) tend to act more with far greater class cohesion than do people of the same gender. That’s why Marissa Mayer is making people stop telecommuting even as she builds a nursery for her own kid next door to her office. It’s not that she hates working parents. It’s that she can.

Now, a talk about the increasing consolidation of power among, say, the TED class would be an interesting conversation to have. But the people protesting the “backlash” are making it hard. They’re saying it’s unfair to talk about Sandberg’s wealth. That it’s bad for women even to criticize Sandberg.

Like Tom Sawyer and his fence painters, they are doing her work for her.

Now on at least his third lawyer, he’s continuing to pursue a discrimination lawsuit against the board of the Dakota, his former building (he doesn’t live there any more) that he can’t possibly—and shouldn’t—win.

The New York Post reports that the judge in the case recently admonished Fletcher’s lawyer for all the deadlines Fletcher and his legal “team” were missing.

“[Fletcher] has been missing one deadline after another. It’s enough,” Rakower told lawyer Nathaniel Read, adding that she did not know “if all of these delays have been in good faith.”

Read, who has been representing Fletcher only since Feb. 1, said “hundreds” of lawyers have been working to pull the material together.

Hundreds? That’s interesting, because several other Fletcher lawyers have quit for non-payment or unstated reasons. So Mr. Read is either a liar or an idiot. (He went to Swarthmore and NYU Law School, so…something doesn’t compute here.)

The mystery to me is, Why? Why won’t Fletcher just drop the lawsuit? He can’t afford it, he can’t win it, he doesn’t have a case. So why continue?

I love this anecdote from Sheryl Sandberg’s new feminist womanifesto, Lean In.

(Well, actually from the Washington Post’s review of it.)

Sandberg encourages women to act more like men. She quotes her longtime mentor Larry Summers, who once advised his tax lawyer wife, Vicki, to “bill like a boy.” “His view was that the men considered any time they spent thinking about an issue — even time in the shower — as billable hours,” Sandberg writes. “His wife and her female colleagues, however, would decide that they were not at their best on a given day and discount hours they spent at their desks to be fair to the client.”

My question: When did personal integrity become a character flaw?

I wonder if Sandberg discloses that Vicki Perry is now Larry Summers’ ex-wife?

I tried to “search inside the book” on Amazon, but Sandberg—though she’s all for mining the personal data of Facebook users—won’t let Amazon users search her book. What do those things have in common? They both make Sandberg money.

In any case, like most of Larry Summers’ aphorisms, they sound clever at first hearing (“who ever washed a rented car?”, etc.) but on deeper consideration often turn out to be not so convincing. As I understand it, the days when law firms could just put anything down on a client bill—time spent thinking in the shower—and have it get paid, no questions asked, are long gone….

I loved this story in the TImes about a non-married couple who found a baby in the subway—yes, they found a baby in the subway—and wound up adopting the infant boy.

When I got to the A/C/E subway exit on Eighth Avenue, Danny was still there, waiting for help to arrive. The baby, who had been left on the ground in a corner behind the turnstiles, was light-brown skinned and quiet, probably about a day old, wrapped in an oversize black sweatshirt.…

Not until I reached the last third of the article did I realize that both members of the couple were male…and for most of their son’s life, they hadn’t been allowed to marry.