Harvard Makin’ Money
Posted on October 3rd, 2012 in Uncategorized | 17 Comments »
Bloomberg reports that Harvard and Jeremy Lin are in talks with Nike to create a co-licensed merchandised line. (NIke already sponsors Harvard’s football and basketball teams.)
A Lin-related line would be an economic and brand-building boon to Harvard where, according to the school’s 2010-11 Fact Book, almost 18 percent of the 6,657 undergraduates are of Asian descent, said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon.
“Jeremy Lin provides an incredible platform for Harvard in China,” Swangard said in an e-mail. “To millions of Chinese children, the NBA and Harvard are separately ‘aspirational brands’ and Lin is uniquely positioned to align their messages. I predict Lin will become one of the most effective brand- building tools for Harvard in China.”
As the makers of Reese’s peant butter cups would say, It’s two great tastes in one.
You can’t blame Jeremy Lin for this…and in a way, I suppose you can’t blame Harvard for acting like a giant corporation and trying to spread its brand in China. (In a way, though, you can.)
But given that the university’s renewed emphasis on its basketball programs appears to have contributed to an enormous cheating scandal, maybe this isn’t the time? Or—maybe never is the time?
17 Responses
10/3/2024 7:47 am
As Jim Sleeper said, “Every university president should be asked publicly to restore balance between the institution’s academic mission and its economic goals. Every president should try to repair the damage being done to universities’ ethos by corporatization.” Of course it wasn’t Harvard basketball that prompted him to write that. He was reflecting on the place that is actually selling its soul in Asia. What the Yale President’s Resignation Means for Higher Education.
10/3/2024 8:25 am
I’m not sure of your point, Harry—both Harvard and Yale are doing stuff they shouldn’t be?
I admire Jim very much and think he’s an important voice on the Yale campus, but I do think the Singapore issue is more complicated than he makes out. And there are some things he writes where I think he goes too far. For example:
Login with Facebook to see what your friends are readingEnable Social Readingi
Jim SleeperLecturer in Political Science, Yale University
GET UPDATES FROM JIM SLEEPER
Like
116
What the Yale President’s Resignation Means for Higher Education
Posted: 09/01/2024 11:31 am
React
Amazing
Inspiring
Funny
Scary
Hot
Crazy
Important
Weird
Follow
Stanley McChrystal , Yale , Charles Hill , Fareed Zakaria , Richard Levin , Grand Strategy , Singapore , Education News
SHARE THIS STORY
55
24
14
Submit this story
“I think the faculty want me out,” Yale President Richard Levin told an emeritus professor glumly last spring after a faculty vote of “no confidence” in his and his trustees’ move to establish a new liberal-arts college, bearing Yale’s name, in collaboration with the authoritarian, corporate city-state of Singapore.
Levin’s announcement last week that he’ll resign effective in June — and Fareed Zakaria’s resignation as a Yale trustee only two weeks earlier — were indeed driven partly by growing faculty resistance to the “world is flat” corporate expansion of American universities that both men championed. But what now, and what kind of leadership should succeed them?
Not so subtly, the liberal arts at Yale are being reinvented “from the ground up,” as one Yale publication put it — instrumentalized, I fear, not only to benefit Asia’s future capitalist leaders but also in a “parallel university” that has been emerging at Yale itself outside of the faculty’s deliberation and control.
On Levin’s watch, that parallel university bestowed upon President George W. Bush an honorary doctorate at the 2001 Yale commencement, where Bush told “the C students among you” graduates that this proves that “you can be president.” Levin’s parallel university installed Stanley McChrystal as a professor only a few months after Barack Obama fired him. It has hired Charles Hill, Ryan Crocker, John Negroponte, Tony Blair, and, most recently, David Brooks as instructors for undergraduates who thirst for celebrity, authority, and connections from eminences fighting old wars in Yale’s classrooms.
The “parallel university” does this through its Grand Strategy, Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and other programs for Yale undergraduates hungering for that kind of misdirection.
Yet Levin’s and Zakaria’s resignations are no occasion for gloating. “If Rick [Levin] leaves, you’ll appreciate how much he was protecting the liberal arts from immense pressures to undermine them and how many other good things depended on him,” one of his defenders told me months before.
She may be right. Levin managed Yale well fiscally and physically. He strengthened its bonds to its workforce and to New Haven, and I’ve credited him with these achievements here before.
He even got the Wall Street Journal’s right-wing bashers of the liberal academy — Robert Whitewater Bartley, John Fund, Bret Stephens — off Yale’s back by touting the Grand Strategy and other national-security oriented programs and Yale’s short lived, neo-con propaganda factory the Yale Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, which the university wisely abolished in 2010.
But while Levin and his trustees have been deft managers of their storm-tossed craft, they’ve been poor visionaries and navigators for liberal education, whose course will require different risks and courage.
Unless faculty and students can affirm the liberal arts in better ways, Yale may be even more mindlessly corporate after Levin than it has been under him. A similar challenge faces other universities, I argue in an essay, “With Friends Like These, Who Will Defend Liberal Education?”, that Dissent magazine will post and publish on October 1 in its special issue on higher education.
<>
That’s a stretch.
In any case, I think the issue here is not so much Harvard’s marketing of itself in Asia per se, but the idea of corporate/university marketing based around professional athletics—and the professionalization of Harvard athletics. You’d think the cheating scandal had never happened.
10/3/2024 8:27 am
Oh, hell-quoting Jim’s piece went all kerplooey on me.
This is the only section I was trying to quote:
Those of us who’ve criticized Yale’s Singapore venture know that many wonderful young Singaporeans want a fuller liberal education, but we also see the advance of a slick model of self-censorship in an authoritarian corporate milieu in that country and, increasingly, in public life in the U.S. While self-censorship in Singapore is ubiquitous and routine owing to fear of the state, here it’s embraced almost enthusiastically by some undergraduates who think it will bring them closer to power and commercial advantage.
10/3/2024 9:23 am
Wonder if Staples could get in on the co-branding? Then the prez would really be earning her 300K board fee.
10/3/2024 10:19 am
Sleeper is a voice, but reports from the Yale faculty meeting where Yale-NUS was discussed indicate that he is far from being a crank out there by himself.
As for who is oversimplifying, I have been clear that Harvard is in fact doing something wrong here, by making a big show of going after only some students who seem to have lived down to the low expectations their professor set for them, while the people who ran the course go their merry way.
10/4/2024 9:09 am
And I would never say that Jim is a crank, just that I don’t agree with everything he writes. He’s clearly an important voice at Yale.
Do you really think the people who ran the course are going their merry way, Harry? Seems to me that the professor (who is not tenured, and now probably won’t be) is paying a real reputational (if that’s a word) price for this. Not to mention that, whatever mistakes they may have made, they didn’t cheat, and it’s hard to see from what I know so far that their mistakes could in any way have justified cheating.
10/4/2024 9:10 am
By the way, I meant to add a question mark about “who is not tenured.” Because I’m just saying that from memory.
10/4/2024 9:49 am
Oh yes, I am sure the professor is paying a high price. After all, look what happened to Shleifer after he conspired to defraud the government and cost Harvard $26.5 million. Harvard takes faculty misconduct very seriously indeed.
I won’t accept your invitation to litigate the cheating allegations, having no new information and hence nothing new to say. But my original point, to respond directly to your question about the Jeremy Lin jerseys, was to try to shift the conversation to something worth discussing, cf. Matthew 7:3.
10/4/2024 11:08 am
Well, two things. What’s the faculty misconduct here, other than the guy saying how easy the course was going to be? That’s silly, yes, but I’m not sure it rises to the level of misconduct. Especially because part of what may have inspired the cheating is the fact that Platt appears to have tried to make the course more difficult, taking students by surprise.
And also I don’t think Matthew B. Platt—whose student reviews are pretty rough— has quite the high-powered friend at Harvard that Shleifer had.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/01/education/harvard-documents-class-reviews.html
Not to be combative, because I really don’t feel that way, but sure, the Jeremy Lin jerseys are worth discussing. No, they’re not on the scale of Yale in Singapore. But cutting a deal for basketball uniforms with Nike at the same time your team co-captains are taking a year off because of alleged cheating? Seems worth a discussion to me.
10/4/2024 11:14 am
As Harry said, let’s talk about something other than sawdust.
For twenty years, Annie and I have been “friends” of the HCL (modest giving in the past, more to come in the future). We realize that there have been a lot of changes in the library system at Harvard, although we’re not sure of all the nuances.
We recently received a letter telling us that the Friends of the Harvard College Library is being dissolved. The tone of the letter was almost as if, ‘ we’re going to spite Harvard for what it has done.’
Why would The Board do that? We thought the HCL needed funds. Is the Jeremy Lin/Harvard deal so lucrative that the HCL doesn’t need the funds of anyone else?
What am I missing?
For what it’s worth, Lin is brilliant. He took the money. I’ve seen him play. Very good. Long term star in the NBA. Doubtful.
10/4/2024 11:18 am
Let’s call it faculty “negligence.” All I know is that nobody is talking about it. And you missed the irony in my voice. You can’t have less consequence than there was for Shleifer, since that seems to have been none at all.
Haven’t noticed anyone except you eager to talk about Jeremy Lin jerseys, actually.
10/4/2024 11:32 am
Harry, I think there have been many times when you have been a lone voice! (And more power to you for it.)
I didn’t miss the irony in your voice—it was pretty tough to miss. My point was merely that Professor Platt is a) untenured and b) so far as I know, not close friends with the Harvard president. Care to put money on whether he gets tenure at Harvard?
10/4/2024 12:38 pm
And I should have been clear that I actually have sympathy for Prof. Platt in this situation, as I expect he may have been doing exactly what he thought his department wanted and expected him to do- be popular, draw students in, get high student evaluation scores, and so on. I think the incentive structures for scholarly reputation and international fame have created a serious loss of institutional memory, handed down from senior faculty to junior, about how to teach, and the conversation needs to be not about this professor, nor about faculty pedagogical skills, but about the incentive and reward and training and monitoring structures through which faculty decide where to put their attention and effort and are held to reasonable standards.
Saying, as you do, that nothing in the way the course was run could have justified cheating is like saying that even if I piled stacks of hundred dollar bills on my front lawn, if I woke up the next morning to find them gone I would still be a crime victim. Sure, but there is a reason people use locks and safes, and for someone to blog about the crime rate in my town would be rather beside the real point.
Sam, that is amazing. Just amazing.
10/4/2024 2:20 pm
Sam, that is indeed amazing. I would be interested in seeing the letter, so I can look into the matter.
Of course there is no longer a Harvard College Library, just a Harvard Library, though what was once the Harvard College Library does tend to go under the label FAS Libraries.
I assume from your language (“dissolved”) that we are dealing with more than a name change here. If so it’s another disgrace.
10/4/2024 2:53 pm
RT
I’ll scan the entire letter and send it to you.
From the letter: “The Board of the Friends of the Harvard College Library has unanimously agreed that given the magnitude of these changes, we should dissolve the Friends group at the end of 2012 (your membership will be honored through the expiration date on your card). We propose to take the remaining funds raised through the Friends annual appeal and distribute them for collections support to the eight libraries that currently comprise the College Library.”
10/4/2024 3:48 pm
Unbelievable that the Library no longer wants Friends.
Regarding Shleifer, the official consequence of his conflict of interest was that, in 2006 (long after the events in Russia), he was stripped of his title Whipple V.N. Jones Professor of Economics, and now has to make do with a mere Professor of Economics. I do not know whether he felt the loss deeply, but at the time his colleague Larry Katz told the Globe that it was too much. See http://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/breaking_news/2006/10/harvard_strips.html
It is possible that there were other undisclosed consequences — after all, Jeremy Knowles was Acting Dean at the time of the title change — but Harry’s quite right that Shleifer does not seem to be hurting. He may even have more friends than the Harvard Library.
10/4/2024 3:49 pm
Thanks, Sam. You can redact any parts you want.