Not What Harvard Wants on Commencement Day
Posted on May 29th, 2014 in Uncategorized | 28 Comments »
A front-page New York Times story saying that Harvard has been surpassed by Stanford in every category that defines the “brand” of the modern university.
Riding a wave of interest in technology, Stanford University has become America’s “it” school, by measures that Harvard once dominated. Stanford has had the nation’s lowest undergraduate acceptance rate for two years in a row; in five of the last six years, it has topped the Princeton Review survey asking high school seniors to name their “dream college”; and year in and year out, it raises more money from donors than any other university.
No one calls Duke “the Stanford of the South,” or the University of Michigan “the public Stanford,” at least not yet. But, for now at least, there is reason to doubt the long-held wisdom that the consensus gold standard in American higher education is Harvard…
Ouch.
This is, in my opinion, the converge of two trends: the growth of Silicon Valley and the tech economy, and in Cambridge, a quarter-century of either disastrous or uninspired presidential leadership….
28 Responses
5/29/2014 3:08 pm
From the article
“In academia where brand reputation is everything…”
This is very sad.
5/29/2014 4:05 pm
Well…live by the brand, die by the brand, Sam. Harvard has benefitted from brand recognition—even when the reality didn’t necessarily match the perception—for a long time.
That said, I will always remember Derek Bok, when I interviewed him and asked him about the use of that term—”the Harvard brand”—wincing and saying how much he disliked it…. But the values of Derek Bok seem a long way away from the present day, don’t they?
5/29/2014 4:27 pm
I am pretty sure some of the numbers are wrong. We just graduated 83 seniors in CS, which would be 5% of the class right there, without counting the Engineering majors.
On the other hand, while we want to grow (and the neglect of applied science started much earlier than the past few presidents, as I explained to the reporter), nobody wants what Stanford has. A Stanford colleague told me that there are now more CS majors at Stanford than all humanities concentrators combined. That does not sound to me like a design for a great university for any century.
I actually thought the story was pretty disappointing journalism, with vague descriptions of reputation without pointing to any surveys or other data. And really, the editor of the Crimson is your generic unaffiliated undergraduate voice?
5/29/2014 5:08 pm
On a side topic.
It was great to see that Harvard awarded President Bush an honorary degree. Don’t know who thought of it, who pushed it through, but whoever did, has my thanks. What a wonderful thing to do.
The photo of Drew with President Bush is priceless. She appears genuinely happy at the occasion of the honor to him, and rightly so.
No matter what anyone thinks about his politics, he is a true American.
5/29/2014 5:32 pm
But that’s not the criteria for a Harvard Hd: being a true American. I assume there are other reasons you are glad he was given one.
5/29/2014 9:24 pm
Sloppy journalism department: The NYT used 2011 numbers in a story about how quickly things are changing, without noting that they were 2011 numbers. The number of engineering and CS majors at Harvard is understated by a factor of something like 2 or 3. The Stanford numbers are probably also substantially larger, hence my comment above.
Has Yale done anything to honor 41?
Bush and Bloomberg were both footnotes to Aretha Franklin’s performance of the National Anthem.Astonishing. I was told that this was unrehearsed; it was only at breakfast this morning she announced she would do the anthem.
5/29/2014 10:47 pm
RT has been trying to post on RB’s blogs lately, but initials don’t seem to be coming through, so I try with this moniker. I was much happier to see Stiglitz up there than 41, the “true American”, whatever that means.
And yes, Harry, Aretha’s anthem eclipsed all.
5/30/2014 2:22 am
Richard T.
“Whatever it means.” Among other things, It means being willing to sacrifice for the good of your country, something few today are willing to do. It means keeping the common weal in mind, again something few today are willing to do. It means deferring Yale and enlisting in the military when you are eighteen because your country needs you. Little things like that are what it means to me. Does it mean anything to you?
Was not pleased that Stiglitz got an honorary degree. His comments about The World Bank, the IMF, world trade, and more recently the absurd comments about Greece have always left me cold.
5/30/2014 5:03 am
I imagine Larry Summers couldn’t have been pleased to see Stiglitz get a degree—the two can’t stand each other….
5/30/2014 6:17 am
In re the NYT article: I mentioned it in email to someone I know who graduated from Yale a few years ago and is out of the country at the moment. His response: “Sucks for Stanford.”
5/30/2014 9:27 am
I find Aretha Franklin a really true American, Stiglitz too, Bush too maybe. I think he’s a truer American than his son the president.
5/30/2014 11:19 am
Any reason why they gave Vladimir Putin an honorary degree? That can’t b good for Harvard
5/30/2014 11:59 am
A couple interventions:
1. Mayor Bloomberg’s speech creates the opportunity at last for properly forceful opposition to the bad-faith notion that “ideological diversity” is a value in itself. It’s just not. It has no value independent of the value of the ideas that constitute the ideologies involved. Ideologies made of incoherent or anti-empirical beliefs do not merit representation, token or not, on a faculty. (They will be represented among the student body because of other kinds of valuable diversity.)
Mayor Bloomberg is wrong wrong wrong and academia should say so.
2. I agree 100% with Sam about the honoring of the first President Bush, although I disagree with many of his commitments. I am yet more delighted about Stiglitz.
3. When I talk to high-school students I reinforce the importance of “brand” for one reason only: they should go top schools because of the fact that top students converge there. So brand identity is legitimately self-reinforcing and can wind down only very gradually. There is such a thing as bad publicity, but only in the same way that bits of gravel roads contribute to bald tires and hence subpar fuel efficiency.
(There are four super-magnetized schools that are large, and Harvard is, in my view, the worst choice of the four because of the blocking-group system. But that’s another conversation.)
5/30/2014 12:02 pm
“Bush too maybe.”
Maybe?
The country of your birth was heroic in World War ll, much of it in Europe. The troops were “true New Zealanders.” Let’s forget the word true, because you don’t like it and instead use the word great.
New Zealand was threatened. It was great and brave Americans like President Bush who helped thwart that threat.
Maybe? Come on Richard, get real. Don’t let your lefty politics get in the way of reality.
Best,
Sam
5/30/2014 12:30 pm
There you go Sam, I’ll go along with that.
5/30/2014 12:31 pm
Though not so much in his presidency
5/30/2014 12:49 pm
And SE 1) is important.
5/30/2014 2:42 pm
And who would be the members of the committee to decide which ideas are “incoherent”?
5/30/2014 3:13 pm
I would be the only member of the committee.
5/30/2014 3:47 pm
@ SE
With all due respect to you.
Read all of Bloomberg’s speech. Thought it was spot on.
My parents and some of their friends, were, unfortunately, at the receiving end of McCarthy’s “McCarthyism. I was aware of what was happening, but just barely. It was a terrible time.
We see the same thing happening today. You can speak of anti-empirical beliefs, but the fact of the matter is that we have McCarthyism again, this time from the other side.
Until you have been subjected to subjugation by demagogues, you have no idea what it means to be oppressed. You can speak about abstract ideas, but they are abstract. This is very similar to speaking about war, without having been subjected to lethal fire.
I don’t agree with much of what Michael Bloomberg believes in. I think he sold out to real estate interests which will harm Manhattan: watch out for those shadows from 100 story towers.
However, I think he got it right re intolerance on the part of the left (and the right).
I was pleased to see that he got an honorary degree and very pleased to see that he spoke his mind.
5/30/2014 5:45 pm
Although I’m certainly no fan of G.H.W. Bush’s domestic policy, it should be admitted even from those on my side of the political spectrum that he did well in foreign affairs. The citation for his honorary degree emphasized how much turmoil there was during his term: the Kuwait invasion, and, more importantly, the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War.
So, in Kuwait, he forged a multi-national alliance, which militarily drove the invader out. And then stopped.
In Germany, he pressed the UK and France to accept reunification, which they were inclined to oppose. In retrospect this was obviously the right course.
As for Russia, he withheld threatening moves as the country was reorganizing. It looks much better now than the eastward advance of NATO that Clinton and Bush II fostered. (I fail to see the essential American interest in defending Estonia; and the expansion obviously makes Russia feel threatened.)
5/31/2014 6:06 am
I have read the speech. It is utterly empty of any support for its central thesis that all political ideas should be actively encouraged (the necessary corollary of the claim that a school must never be politically homogeneous). And it offers NOT A SINGLE EXAMPLE of repression of conservative ideas. Not one. The claim that there is an idea of repression “floating out there” in universities is just made, with no support except for the FALSE claim that several invitations to speak were rescinded this year.
One invitation were rescinded. Three people got annoyed by protest and rescinded their commitments to come speak. That is the opposite. And then there was Ali at Brandeis, whose statements were just generally offensive without being conservative. Meanwhile on the actual stage the last pragmatic Republican to run for national office was being honored.
The spectacle is actually really very funny. Here is Bloomberg railing in the thesis of his speech about liberal McCarthism, but EVERY SINGLE ONE of his examples is about right-wing ignorance and intolerance, and he did no research to support his suspicion that faculties are repressing right-wing thought. (Failing to donate to Republicans doesn’t count.)
He embarrassed himself.
5/31/2014 6:20 am
“We see the same thing happening today. You can speak of anti-empirical beliefs, but the fact of the matter is that we have McCarthyism again, this time from the other side.”
Where?
“Until you have been subjected to subjugation by demagogues, you have no idea what it means to be oppressed. You can speak about abstract ideas, but they are abstract.”
Does this mean you don’t have to give evidence but I do? I have been treated more violently by pseudo-political halfwits in academia than anyone reading this. And my engagement with right-wing students, conversely, was the epitome of respect and educative challenge. Many of the students I have kept up with are and were conservatives — (although their Republicanism has been steadily softened as they became educated adults with healthy skepticism).
But let’s have it out logically. As a reductio ad absurdum, suppose any political concept can be placed on an axis of opinions from far northwest to far southeast. Does political heterogeneity to make a school great require the presence of both negative and positive values on that axis? Does it require symmetry around some consensus “mainstream”? And when society shifts the middle, because of demagoguery, are we supposed to believe that the university must shift its idea of necessary heterogeneity to comply with that intellectually unsupported shift? This cannot be correct. It is a stalking horse, at best, for Randianism and lassez-faire; at worst (and I mean that), it is a stalking horse for the Karl Rove Republican Party. Bloomberg is making himself a patsy by buying into the idea that this line of thinking has any defensible content.
6/2/2024 7:26 am
Since I seem to have won the argument, let me add an anecdote to establish my good-faith bona fides on this issue. In 2005 or so, a passel of student staged an extremely disruptive protest inside a CIA recruiting event. It amounted to a heckler’s veto. Their identities were known. My conversations led to a conservative student who had been present coming to discuss the matter further; this person has since become a staffer for one of last go-round’s GOP presidential candidates. With my encouragement, she brought the matter forward to the Administrative Board as a peer dispute, because the students had violated the letter and the spirit of the rules for campus speech.
The Board had weak leadership and didn’t want their names in the paper. Citing no real reasons, the two people in charge presented the question as a fait accompli that would not be pursued, and got rubber-stamped. I was one of only a few voices disagreeing — the liberal protestors should have gone through a disciplinary process.
I hasten to add that there was no preferential treatment of the protestor’s views. There was merely a desire not to be in the newspaper. Gutlessness, not suppression.
I disagree vehemently with many of my student’s commitments. But I championed her side, because she was right that campus speech needed defending in this case.
6/2/2024 10:39 am
SE, I don’t think there’s a single argument you’ve lost. Ever.
6/2/2024 2:21 pm
First, on the Stanford article, I’ve heard from many friends that Palo Alto is right now a dreadful place to work in or care about the liberal arts. People are running around hoping to strike it rich and the university has fully bought into this mentality, encouraging “entrepreneurship” over scholarship. I suspect that, a decade or two from now, a lot of people will be embarrassed at how they behaved during this period.
And speaking of embarrassment, I’m surprised no one here has noted the release of Harvard’s report on Marc Hauser: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/05/29/internal-harvard-report-shines-light-misconduct-star-psychology-researcher-marc-hauser/maSUowPqL4clXrOgj44aKP/story.html
6/2/2024 2:44 pm
I haven’t seen the report but he news story suggests that Harvard did a really good job investigating the fraud. I would love to know if the comparable Harvard report on the Schleifer affair was filed with any federal agency and might be FOIA-able.
6/5/2024 8:52 am
@Anon: It’s certainly possible that I didn’t win the argument, but rather that Sam was eaten by wild locusts right before his devastating rejoinder.
@Atter: Thanks for flagging that. It is good to see accountability for the prominent.