At Harvard…Questions
Posted on February 14th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »
Thanks to all of you who have reported on some of what’s going on behind the scenes.
Feel free to post your answers on the message board…
1) Which Harvard figures of gravitas and stature are now spending much of their time conversing with members of the Corporation?
2) Which one of Harvard’s most important alumni and donors has now become directly involved in pushing for Summers’ firing or resignation?
3) Which 19th-century American conflict are people now citing as a likely scenario if Summers does not leave?
4) Which president of Harvard either has hired or is considering hiring a personal lawyer?
5) Which university is rumored to have substantially and deliberately over-reported donor contributions, possibly leading to the departure of a high-level administrator who did not want to be associated with the practice?
6) Which high-level Harvard figures believed that they had extracted a promise from Larry Summers to resign in the summer of 2005…only to be stunned when that promise was not honored?
7) What Harvard professor and/or administrator was Larry Summers referring to when, in a phone call from a public place at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he apparently told an aide, “Fuck xxxx”?
The call happened to be picked up by a live microphone nearby….
8) What Harvard president is said to be hunkering down, preparing for a fight, prompting rumors of “an intervention” from people who worry that he does not realize the extremity of the situation?
10 Responses
2/14/2006 11:48 am
Does anyone else remember this, from a Wall Street Journal article “Capital: When Standards Are Unacceptable” by David Wessel in 2002?
“WHEN LAWRENCE SUMMERS spoke from his U.S. Treasury pulpit, he preached that no innovation was more important to the success of U.S. capital markets than ‘generally accepted accounting principles.’ The transparency and accuracy of corporate reporting, he would say, was part of the intangible infrastructure of the financial system that made American prosperity possible.”
Seems ironic now.
2/14/2006 12:49 pm
This is a guess, but — Steve Ballmer for question 2?
2/14/2006 2:27 pm
You are a master test designer! You must have had some practice somewhere. I am curious if you will be posting the answers?
2/14/2006 2:34 pm
Thank you. But then, I did go to (and teach at) Harvard…
I’m not entirely at liberty to post the answers right now, but if that changes, I will.
2/14/2006 2:36 pm
The question that fascinates me is what is going through the heads of Summers’ cronies like Pinker, Glaeser, and a number of others who know who they are (and whose colleagues know who they are)? Those who can get off the sinking ship are clearly getting off. Those who can reestablish some credibility by a last minute show of integrity and colleagiality are trying to do so now. What about people who have so exploited their positions as cronies that no last minute show will do? Panic should be setting in just about now.
2/14/2006 3:15 pm
The answer that you clearly want to No. 4 is The Civil War, but I wonder whether the English Civil Wars would not be a more appropriate comparison. Didn’t Charles I lose his head for repeatedly lying, declaring war on his subjects, and squandering the blood and treasure of the commonwealth?
2/14/2006 3:40 pm
Regarding the civil wars…yes, it’s possible that I made an assumption there, exposing my Americanist roots in the process. Forgive me.
2/14/2006 3:41 pm
And regarding the “cronies” question…doesn’t the answer to that depend on whether you think their support of Summers was genuine or just sycophancy?
2/14/2006 6:28 pm
Saturday, February 11, 2024
What It Looks Like
When a Harvard Professor
Is On a Nobel Prize Winning
Trajectory
UD recalls being confused, after Harvard settled a very expensive and embarrassing lawsuit brought against it by the federal government for a faculty’s member’s illegal conflict of interest activities in Russia (background here — it’s the first post), that the miscreant not only remained in Harvard’s economics department, but retained his named chair status.
This man single-handedly cost Harvard dearly, in money and in reputation. Yet not only did the university step right up and pay the almost twenty seven million dollars (about half the yearly salary of one Harvard money manager) the government demanded, it also imposed, far as UD could tell, absolutely no punishment on the guy.
Yes, it confused old UD. “I guess tenure really does mean never having to say you’re sorry,” she concluded at the time, and let it drop.
But now Harvard’s faculty has picked it up again. A recent magazine article about the scandal, full of gory details, has many wondering if the university’s president had anything to do with the remarkable impunity this particular professor has enjoyed.
‘Tawdry Shleifer Affair’ Stokes Faculty Anger Toward Summers, runs the headline in the Crimson.
Six months after the University paid $26.5 million to settle a government lawsuit implicating Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer, controversy over the case has erupted anew and fed the Faculty’s current uprising against Shleifer’s close friend, University President Lawrence H. Summers.
“I’ve been a member of this Faculty for over 45 years, and I am no longer easily shocked,” is how Frederick H. Abernathy, the McKay professor of mechanical engineering, began his biting comments about the Shleifer case at Tuesday’s fiery Faculty meeting.
But, Abernathy continued, “I was deeply shocked and disappointed by the actions of this University” in the Shleifer affair, which was detailed in a lengthy magazine article that jolted many professors out of their reading period slumber last month.
Shleifer, the Jones professor of economics, was found liable by a federal court in 2004 for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government while leading a Harvard economic reform program in Russia as it transitioned to capitalism in the 1990s. Shleifer settled the case for $2 million.
The article, in the January issue of Institutional Investor magazine, suggests that Shleifer’s relationship with Summers shielded the professor from the consequences of the scandal while at Harvard.
There’s a nicely revealing detail about academic culture in the Crimson piece:
One of Shleifer’s colleagues, Professor of Economics David I. Laibson, yesterday expressed his department’s support for one of its stars.
“By any measure, he is on a Nobel Prize winning trajectory,” Laibson wrote in an e-mail.
Here’s a guy who was found guilty of defrauding the US government. Bigtime. His colleagues are salivating at the thought of his proximity to a Nobel Prize and could give a shit about his criminal activity. They’re confident the Nobel committee feels the same.
*****************************
UPDATE: [Now that UD has read the II article.]
Already a book is forthcoming about the Shleifer case and other events which have made Harvard, as the book’s title has it, a place of Excellence Without a Soul. (Subtitle: How a Great University Forgot Education.)
But UD sees movie possibilities too, assuming the account of the scandal in Institutional Investor is correct.
For instance, the following sequence would work well as farce: An honest staffer in Russia, Holly Nielsen, started talking about the malfeasance to the authorities. “Shleifer ordered that she be fired. Nielsen informed [Jeffrey] Sachs [back at Harvard, running the larger program of which the Russian project was a part], who countermanded the order. Shleifer reinstated it. …She informed Sachs, who again reinstated Nielson. [Shleifer had] security guards …bar her from the offices…”
And this would make a good visual: “A faculty member asked [a dean] why Harvard should defend a professor who had been found liable for conspiring to commit fraud. … [A]nother professor asked [the same dean] why Harvard should pay a settlement of $26.5 million and legal fees estimated at between $10 million and $15 million for legal violations by a single professor and his employee, about which it was unaware. On both occasions [the dean] is said to have turned red in the face and cut off discussion.”
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
UPDATE II: Valuable background at economicprincipals.com.
2/14/2006 8:09 pm
The Nobel Prize committee does care about conduct even if Prof. Laibson does not think they do. Economists all over the world are saying that Shleifer should be deprived of tenure and dismissed by Harvard, and some prominent figures in the American Economics Association are talking about whether they can strip him of the John Bates Clark award, which he won before his guilt was known. Shleifer is a liability, period.