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No More Over Easy
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Gone are the hot breakfasts in most dorms and the pastries at Widener Library. Varsity athletes are no longer guaranteed free sweatsuits, and just this week came the jarring news that professors will go without cookies at faculty meetings.
By Harvard standards, these are hard times. Not Dickensian hard times, perhaps, but with the value of its endowment down by almost 30 percent, the world’s richest university is learning to live with less.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard’s largest division, has cut about $75 million from its budget in recent months and is planning more. With the cuts extending beyond hiring and salary freezes to measures that affect what students eat, where they study and other parts of their daily routine, the euphoria of fall in Harvard Yard is dampened. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences anticipates a deficit of $130 million over the next two years and is awaiting recommendations from groups of faculty members and students who have quietly been weighing the options.
“Everyone is worried,” said George Hayward, a junior who lives on a part of campus, the Quad, that lost its library to the cuts. “It could be anything next; nobody really knows what’s going to happen.”
Harvard is not the only elite school where student life is more austere this fall: Princeton has closed some computer labs and two of its dining halls on weekends. At Stanford University, the annual Mausoleum Party, a Halloween gathering at the Stanford family burial site, lost $14,000 in funding because of budget cuts and might be canceled.
But many here assumed student life at Harvard, more than any other institution, was immune from hardship. The loss of scrambled eggs, bacon and other cooked breakfast foods in the dorms of upperclassmen on weekdays seems to have stirred the most ire.
“Students generally feel that if you come to Harvard, for what you’re paying, you should probably have the right to a hot breakfast,” said Andrea Flores, a senior who is president of the Undergraduate Council. “They want to preserve the things that are at Harvard that you can’t get anywhere else.”
Some students are feeling the cuts more than others. Mr. Hayward said that those who live on the Quad, a 15-minute walk from Harvard Yard, were disproportionately affected because the library there was closed and shuttle bus service to and from the central campus curtailed. (Quad residents are touchy to begin with — “getting quadded,” or assigned to live on that part of campus, is many a student’s nightmare.)
Varsity athletes have also suffered more than most, said Johnny Bowman, a junior who is monitoring the cuts for the Undergraduate Council, because they were the biggest devotees of hot breakfast.
“It was a big shock,” said Mr. Bowman. “Athletes were accustomed to coming back from early morning practice and getting their nutrients — a solid meal.”
On top of that loss, some club teams find themselves sharing space at the Malkin Athletic Center because it closes earlier on weeknights. Khoa Tran, president of Harvard Taekwondo, told The Harvard Crimson that his team would have to share practice space with the Crimson Dance Team — and he was not sure what to expect.
“It will be an interesting mix because they will be playing dance music while we do our routines,” he told the newspaper. “We ourselves yell every time we kick… and we kick a lot.”
Harvard’s endowment was $26 billion in June 2009, down from $36.9 billion in June 2008, a 27 percent decrease. The loss is especially hard on the Faculty of Arts and Science, which includes Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering, because the endowment provides half of its budget.
Though faculty jobs have so far been protected, the university laid off 250 staff members this summer, said Jeff Neal, a Harvard spokesman. He said it was too soon to know whether future cuts would affect students.
“We are working hard to minimize the impact of the global financial downturn on any substantive aspect of student life,” he said in an e-mail message.
Ms. Flores said that after excluding students from conversations about what to cut last spring, the administration is now seeking their input. The administration scrapped a plan to end weeknight shuttle service at 1:30 a.m. instead of 3:45 a.m. after a student outcry, she said, though it did cut the service on weekend mornings.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has also started an online “idea bank” where students can submit proposals for saving money. The 170 submissions so far include charging tour groups to enter Harvard Yard and having students clean their own bathrooms instead of paying other students to do it as part of a work program.
“We understand we have to give up something,” Ms. Flores said. “But students want to be able to say what they’re willing to give up and what they want to protect. As long as that’s part of the discussion, I think the process can hopefully be done peacefully.”
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Students Call On Harvard’s President To Accept Pay Cut
By Thomas Grillo
A group of students are calling upon Harvard University’s president to take a pay cut in the wake of the layoff of 275 administrative, clerical and technical workers.
The Student Labor Action Movement said Drew Faust, who earns nearly $700,000 in salary and benefits and lives in a Harvard-owned home, should share in the pain unleashed by a 30 percent drop in the school’s endowment, which was worth $37 billion last year.
“She’s not promoting the message of shared sacrifice, not even the most baseline gesture,” Colette Perold, 21, a junior and SLAM organizer, told Bloomberg News.
SLAM’s Web site said unlike Harvard, other schools have taken measures to share the financial burden of the crisis.
At Arizona State University, top administrators will go unpaid for 15 days of vacation time. The chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis and the Stanford University president and top administrators will take a voluntary 10 percent pay cut for the next two years, SLAM said.
But Ralph Walkling, a professor at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, said while a Faust pay cut would be an important symbolic gesture, it has to be weighed against other factors.
“There is intense competition in academia for talent,” he said. “Like businesses, we try to hire the best and the brightest and that takes money. . . . Frankly, $700,000 is not an outrageous amount at all.”
John Longbrake, a spokesman for Faust, declined to comment on the merit of the students’ proposal.
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‘We Have to Lead in Times of Uncertainty’
In a SPIEGEL interview, historian and Harvard President Drew Faust, 61, discusses her university’s financial problems, the management of her school’s multibillion dollar endowment and her role as a woman leading one of the world’s top universities.
SPIEGEL: President Faust, Barack Obama, a Harvard graduate, is currently busy trying to save entire American industries. Have you already asked him for a state-funded bailout?
Faust: No, I haven’t had the pleasure of talking with the president.
SPIEGEL: Do you dispute the fact that your university is facing major financial problems?
Faust: We are also feeling the crisis. Our endowment planning assumptions are that it will have fallen 30 percent, or $11 billion, by the end of this fiscal year. So, I do think there are similarities in that we are both facing worlds that are changing quite dramatically and in that we have to lead in times of uncertainty.
SPIEGEL: Many, also within your own ranks, say that Harvard had it coming. After all, the investment strategies of your Harvard Management Company (HMC) have been criticized for taking on risks that were too great in derivatives investments. Forbes magazine described HMC as a “giant hedge fund”.
Faust: Our strategies in endowment management have been very similar to those of other institutions of our type — Yale University, for example. And these strategies have left us far ahead of where we would have been had we pursued more conservative strategies. If you look at our returns over the last 15 years through last June, they were 15.7 percent annually. So the problem is the unexpectedness and rapidity of the shift in the economic circumstances rather than the overall strategy.
SPIEGEL: Even during the boom years, it has been very controversial that top HMC managers can make up to $35 million a year — far more than even the smartest Harvard professor.
Faust: At least there is a visibility about how our endowment managers are remunerated. This is not the case at other universities that have their endowment managed externally, so those costs of management are not disclosed.
SPIEGEL: Are you planning to introduce the same kind of salary cap on your money managers that is currently being discussed on Wall Street?
Faust: We review compensation on an annual basis and we have not made decisions about remuneration for this year. I think everybody is looking at investment in a changed context, asking questions about volatility. But the questions we are asking are not just about the endowment, but about all our sources of revenue. What are the limits on what we might get from tuition revenues? What can we expect from federal funding for research? What about philanthropy? Philanthropy is a significant source of income for us and when our donors and friends are under stress and constraint, what does that mean about those revenue streams?
SPIEGEL: So what are your conclusions?
Faust: If the endowment declines significantly, we will find ourselves reducing expenses and also depending to a greater extent on other sources of revenue.
SPIEGEL: On which ones, then? Even higher tuition? When you add housing and food, the cost of going to Harvard for one year is already around $50,000 a year — as high as the average American household income. …
Faust: … that’s why we’ve made a very firm commitment this year to retain our financial aid levels. That is such an important part of what Harvard is as an institution — we provide talented students with access to the best education.
SPIEGEL: Despite the recent losses Harvard remains the richest university in the world, with an endowment believed to be worth about $26 billion. Why can’t you be a little more relaxed?
Faust: Let me take the example of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), which includes Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and continuing education. The part of the endowment that FAS holds funds almost 60 percent of its operating budget. So if you take a 30 percent decline in the source of revenue that funds 60 percent of your operating budget, that means that resources are significantly diminished in ways that you have to compensate for.
SPIEGEL: Couldn’t you just take money out of the huge endowment?
Faust: We were actually forced to increase the payout — the percentage we spend in a year — from the endowment in order to keep operations going. But our endowment is not a pot of money into which a president can dip and spend. It is working capital that is meant to perpetuate programs and schools and educational opportunities into the eternal future. If you dig too deep, you simply diminish what is available to generate income for the future.
SPIEGEL: Why not?
Faust: More than 70 percent of our endowment across the university is specified as designated for a particular area. Donors say, “I am giving my money for a professor of French.” By law, I cannot take this money or the earnings from it and spend it on a professor of biology or on renovating a dormitory. Harvard’s endowment is not just a huge pot of money; it’s a series of more than 11,000 different specified accounts with specified purposes.
SPIEGEL: In other words, you must save money. How?
Faust: I went into a meeting this morning, and there were sandwiches and bagels on the table. I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was an accident, because since at least November, we just stopped having food at meetings. Just cutting back on catering costs is one example of saving in a way we say is inessential to teaching and research.
SPIEGEL: But free food is not the concern among your colleagues on campus. They worry that associate professors won’t get tenure and that they will not be able to hire new people from outside.
Faust: We actually still give tenure and we don’t have a hiring freeze. However, we look hard at filling positions when they become vacant. Do we need this person? How can we best fill our teaching and research needs without automatically filling every position that becomes vacant? Almost 50 percent of our costs are personnel.
SPIEGEL: Harvard has always been a brain hub, a generous host to researchers from around the world. You would invite scholars to give a speech at Harvard and put them up in a fancy hotel for three nights. Are these types of luxuries now a thing of the past?
Faust: That individual who comes for three nights is going to give the same intellectually scintillating lecture if she or he stays for only one night in a hotel.
SPIEGEL: In recent years, around 40 percent of Harvard’s college graduates went into areas like investment banking and consulting. You addressed that yourself in a speech to graduates last year when you told them to choose a job they love and not simply the best-paid one. Is it going to be easier for you now, in a crisis, to encourage people to pursue more meaningful careers?
Faust: The students of the Class of 2009 are finding, in many cases, that it’s necessary for them to do something else because the numbers of opportunities and jobs in the financial service sector has diminished significantly. Some students, however, also tell me that the crisis gives them a chance to do things they wouldn’t otherwise have felt they were able to do. They would have felt the pressure to go and take the high-paying, high-prestige job.
SPIEGEL: Are Harvard graduates greedy?
Faust: Harvard students are driven. There has been an enormous recruiting effort each fall where financial firms come in and make students amazing offers. There is a wonderful little piece that two of our economists published about incentives to go and take a job on Wall Street. The article concludes by saying a rational person would do this. It basically says that you’d have to be crazy not to, in some sense, if you’re simply looking for the purely rational choice, because the pay is so generous. And I would add that the prestige has been very high. But with all the attacks on the financial services industry in the past year, maybe that prestige has been shaken a little.
SPIEGEL: Have you observed a transformation in the values of your students in the course of the crisis?
Faust: Even before the financial crisis, students kept expressing a little uneasiness about this. Why, they would say, are we taking these jobs? You began by asking me about President Obama. I think there’s a huge outpouring of a sense of possibility and desire to make a better world. So I think this spirit combines with the diminished opportunities in the financial services sector to create a shift in outlook among many of these students. We have the highest applications levels ever for Teach for America, which places people as teachers at public schools for two years.
SPIEGEL: The Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of the DNA structure James Watson complained that the best and brightest graduates in the US wouldn’t go into science because they’d earn less than they would on Wall Street. In many Harvard and MIT labs, more than half of the graduate students come from Asia or Europe, but not the US.
Faust: There have been a lot of commentaries and studies expressing concern about the numbers of American students who choose to go into science, and how there is not as high a proportion of them as in many other nations. How do we teach science in a way that makes students interested? I think we have not solved this problem and it begins before college.
SPIEGEL: As the president of Harvard, don’t you have a special responsibility to make sure that it isn’t just the Chinese or the Germans, but also Americans who get interested in physics or biology?
Faust: Certainly, we intend to continue to attract the best and the brightest from all over the world with interests in science and technology. But we, too, hope that more individuals from the United States will choose to pursue these fields.
SPIEGEL: Harvard was planning to build America’s largest science and engineering campus for $1 billion across the Charles River in Boston. The first building was to house the new Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and the existing Harvard Stem Cell Institute. But now the construction is on hold and has already been dubbed the “Harvard hole”. Are you ever going to finish this project?
Faust: Actually, construction is continuing with four cranes and lots of activity on the site, but we are looking at the pace and scale of the project going forward. Once the foundation is completed and the site brought up to ground level, we will assess the next steps for the project. When the economic crisis hit, we looked at our plans for this building, which is a very substantial investment, and we began to ask ourselves, how can we afford this building in the changed economic times? What we decided we were going to focus on was people and programs, rather than infrastructure in the near term. We are moving these departments into space on our Cambridge campus that we will renovate, giving us additional time to re-examine our options.
SPIEGEL: It took Harvard 370 years to appoint the first female president. What do you think your parents thought you would become when you grew up?
Faust: Someone’s wife.
SPIEGEL: Instead, you succeeded Lawrence Summers as Harvard President — a man who had to resign because he raised the question of whether women have the same “innate abilities” as men in fields like science. Now, more than two years into your tenure, do you think Harvard is still a man’s world?
Faust: I don’t think Harvard is a man’s world. I intend for it to be everybody’s world, regardless of gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation.
SPIEGEL: Do you remember, however, moments in your presidency when you felt that something is actually different because you are a woman?
Faust: After my announcement I said, I’m not the woman president of Harvard. I’m the president of Harvard. I have to meet all the same standards. I have to be a good president, a great president. But what I found was how much it mattered to people all over the world that there was a woman at the top at Harvard. I had letters from little girls in China that would say: “Now I know I can be a woman scientist.” Or from fathers of infant daughters saying: “I know that my daughter can do anything.” A 97-year-old alum of Radcliffe (formerly an all-girls college at Harvard), who felt she was never treated as an equal citizen in the Harvard universe, wrote to me: ‘Now I know why I lived so long.’
SPIEGEL: President Faust, we thank you for this interview.
Interview conducted by Jörg Blech and Gregor Peter Schmitz.
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Harvard MBA Oath
By LESLIE WAYNE
When a new crop of future business leaders graduates from the Harvard Business School next week, many of them will be taking a new oath that says, in effect, greed is not good.
Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.
What happened to making money?
That, of course, is still at the heart of the Harvard curriculum. But at Harvard and other top business schools, there has been an explosion of interest in ethics courses and in student activities — clubs, lectures, conferences — about personal and corporate responsibility and on how to view business as more than a money-making enterprise, but part of a large social community.
“We want to stand up and recite something out loud with our class,” said Teal Carlock, who is graduating from Harvard and has accepted a job at Genentech. “Fingers are now pointed at M.B.A.’s and we, as a class, have a real opportunity to come together and set a standard as business leaders.”
At Columbia Business School, all students must pledge to an honor code: “As a lifelong member of the Columbia Business School community, I adhere to the principles of truth, integrity, and respect. I will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” The code has been in place for about three years and came about after discussions between students and faculty.
In the post-Enron and post-Madoff era, the issue of ethics and corporate social responsibility has taken on greater urgency among students about to graduate. While this might easily be dismissed as a passing fancy — or simply a defensive reaction to the current business environment — business school professors say that is not the case. Rather, they say, they are seeing a generational shift away from viewing an M.B.A. as simply an on-ramp to the road to riches.
Those graduating today, they say, are far more concerned about how corporations affect the community, the lives of its workers and the environment. And business schools are responding with more courses, new centers specializing in business ethics and, in the case of Harvard, student-lead efforts to bring about a professional code of conduct for M.B.A.’s, not unlike oaths that are taken by lawyers and doctors.
“I don’t see this as something that will fade away,” said Diana C. Robertson, a professor of business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s coming from the students. I don’t know that we’ve seen such a surge in this activism since the 1960s. This activism is different, but, like that time, it is student-driven.”
A decade ago, Wharton had one or two professors who taught a required ethics class. Today there are seven teaching an array of ethics classes that Ms. Robertson said were among the most popular at the school. Since 1997, it has had the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research. In addition, over the last five years, students have formed clubs around the issues of ethics that sponsor conferences, work on microfinance projects in Philadelphia or engage in social impact consulting.
“It’s been a dramatic change,” Ms. Robertson added. “This generation was raised learning about the environment and raised with the idea of a social conscience. That does not apply to every student. But this year’s financial crisis and the downturn have brought about a greater emphasis on social ethics and responsibility.”
At Harvard, about 160 from a graduating class of about 800 have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” which its student advocates contend is the first step in trying to develop a professional code not unlike the Hippocratic Oath for physicians or the pledge taken by lawyers to uphold the law and Constitution.
Part of this has emerged by the beating that Wall Street and financiers have taken in the current economic crisis, which can set the stage for reform, Harvard students say.
“There is the feeling that we want our lives to mean something more and to run organizations for the greater good,” said Max Anderson, one of the pledge’s organizers who is about to leave Harvard and take a job at Bridgewater Associates, a money management firm.
“No one wants to have their future criticized as a place filled with unethical behaviors,” he added. “We want to learn from those mistakes, do things differently and accept our duty to lead responsibly. Realistically, we have tremendous potential to affect society for better or worse. Let’s humbly step up. We are looking out for our own interest, but also for the interest of our employees and the broader public.”
Bruce Kogut, director of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Company Center for Leadership and Ethics at Columbia, said that this emphasis did not mean that students were necessarily going to shun jobs that paid well. Rather, they will think about how they earn their income, not just how much.
At Columbia, an ethics course is required, but students have also formed a popular “Leadership and Ethics Board,” that sponsors lectures with topics like “The Marie Antoinettes of Corporate America.”
“The courses make people aware that the financial crisis is not a technical blip,” Mr. Kogut said. “We’re seeing a generational change that understands that poverty is not just about Africa and India. They see inequities and the role of business to address them.”
Dalia Rahman, who is about to leave Harvard for a job with Goldman Sachs in London, said she signed the pledge because “it takes what we learned in class and makes it more concrete. When you have to make a public vow, it’s a way to commit to uphold principles.
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Harvard endowment fund managers do well for themselves as its value drops
By JOHN HECHINGER
Annual pay for six top Harvard University endowment managers totaled $26.8 million in the latest academic year, up 15% from the year before.
The increase comes as the school is cutting its budget in the wake of a steep recent drop in the value of the university’s endowment.
Harvard said the payments rewarded the investment managers for strong performance in the year ended June 30. In that period, the fund posted an investment return of 8.6%, compared with a negative 13% return for the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. The endowment, higher education’s largest, ended the year at $36.9 billion. The year before, the top six managers received a total of $23.3 million.
This month, Harvard said its endowment had declined at least 22%, or about $8 billion, from June 30 through Oct. 31. But the school said the estimate understates the actual amount of the decline because it doesn’t include hard-to-value assets, such as real estate and private equity. The university is planning for a 30% decline for the fiscal year ending June 2009. Yale University and other big endowments also have reported similar steep declines.
Within Harvard, some alumni and professors have criticized the paychecks of the endowment’s investment managers, calling them inappropriate for a nonprofit institution. Harvard said it needs to pay well to attract top talent and that compensation is tied to investment performance.
“In the recent economic environment we are fortunate to have the talented investment professionals” at the endowment “shepherding the university’s resources through the volatility and uncertainty in the markets,” James F. Rothenberg, Harvard treasurer and chairman of the endowment’s board, said in a statement Friday.
The payments also come as lawmakers in Washington, academics and some on Wall Street are asking whether money-manager and corporate pay is tied too closely to short-term performance.
John Longbrake, a Harvard spokesman, said that, if Harvard’s fund managers underperform in subsequent years, the university under its compensation arrangements can “claw back” a significant portion of bonuses. Harvard also noted that a portion of the most recent compensation amounted to money that was held back in other years when managers performed well.
Mohamed El-Erian, former president and chief executive of Harvard Management Co., which oversees the endowment, received $921,000 in the year ended June 30. Mr. El-Erian left in December 2007 to become co-chief executive officer of Pacific Investment Management Co., so his pay reflects a partial year. Jane L. Mendillo, formerly at Wellesley College, now oversees Harvard’s endowment.
Stephen Blyth, managing director for international fixed income, received $6.4 million. The other four managers received sums ranging from $3.9 million to $6.3 million.
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New Law School scholar to report on sleeping with the enemy
By Peter Schworm
Harvard Law School today named renowned legal scholar Lawrence Lessig to its faculty, the latest in a series of big-name hires by the Cambridge graduate program.
Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University since 2000, will also serve as the faculty director of Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, law school officials said. He begins next summer.
Lessig is a widely acclaimed expert in constitutional law, cyberlaw, and intellectual property and the author of “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.” He has also represented clients in several high-profile cases involving the Internet.
“Larry Lessig is one of the most brilliant and important legal scholars of our time,” Elena Kagan, Harvard Law School dean, said in a statement released today. “His work has recast the very terms of discussion and debate in multiple areas of law, ranging from intellectual property to constitutional theory.”
Harvard has hired more than 20 tenured or tenure-track professors in the past five years, often snatching them from their top rivals. Among them is former University of Chicago professor Cass Sunstein.
Before Stanford, Lessig taught at University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School.
At the ethics center, Lessig will launch a five-year project examining what happens when public institutions depend on money from sources that may be affected by the work of those institutions, such as medical research programs that receive funding from pharmaceutical companies whose drugs they review, university officials said.
Lessig said the project is “of enormous importance to our democracy.”
Lessig holds a law degree from Yale Law School, a master’s in philosophy from Trinity College at Cambridge University, and a bachelor of arts in economics and a bachelor of science in management from the University of Pennsylvania. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
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The best and the brightest led America off a cliff
By Chris Hedges
The multiple failures that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredded constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the feet of our elite universities. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford, along with most other elite schools, do a poor job educating students to think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, advanced placement classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools and blind deference to all authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers. The collapse of the country runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and halls in places like Cambridge, Princeton and New Haven to the financial and political centers of power.
The nation’s elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers and rigid structures that are designed to produce certain answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service—economic, political and social—come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market, and with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and of course the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political and cultural questions. Those who defy the system—people like Ralph Nader—are branded as irrational and irrelevant. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement and information systems are the only things that matter.
“Political silence, total silence,” said Chris Hebdon, a Berkeley undergraduate. He went on to describe how various student groups gather at Sproul Plaza, the center of student activity at the University of California, Berkeley. These groups set up tables to recruit and inform other students, a practice know as “tabling.”
“Students table for Darfur, no one tables for Iraq. Tables on Sproul Plaza are ethnically fragmented, explicitly pre-professional (The Asian American Pre-Law or Business or Pre-Medicine Association). Never have I seen a table on globalization or corporatization. Students are as distracted and specialized and atomized as most of their professors. It’s vertical integration gone cultural. And never, never is it cutting-edge. Berkeley loves the slogan ‘excellence through diversity,’ which is a farce of course if one checks our admissions stats (most years we have only one or two entering Native Americans), but few recognize multiculturalism’s silent partner—fragmentation into little markets. Our Sproul Plaza shows that so well—the same place Mario Savio once stood on top a police car is filled with tens of tables for the pre-corporate, the ethnic, the useless cynics, the recreational groups, etc.”
I sat a few months ago with a former classmate from Harvard Divinity School who is now a theology professor. When I asked her what she was teaching, she unleashed a torrent of obscure academic code words. I did not understand, even with three years of seminary, what she was talking about. You can see this absurd retreat into specialized, impenetrable verbal enclaves in every graduate department across the country. The more these universities churn out these stunted men and women, the more we are flooded with a peculiar breed of specialist. This specialist blindly services tiny parts of a corporate power structure he or she has never been taught to question and looks down on the rest of us with thinly veiled contempt.
I was sent to boarding school on a scholarship at the age of 10. By the time I had finished eight years in New England prep schools and another eight at Colgate and Harvard, I had a pretty good understanding of the game. I have also taught at Columbia, New York University and Princeton. These institutions, no matter how mediocre you are, feed students with the comforting self-delusion that they are there because they are not only the best but they deserve the best. You can see this attitude on display in every word uttered by George W. Bush. Here is a man with severely limited intellectual capacity and no moral core. He, along with “Scooter” Libby, who attended my boarding school and went on to Yale, is an example of the legions of self-centered mediocrities churned out by places like Andover, Yale and Harvard. Bush was, like the rest of his caste, propelled forward by his money and his connections. That is the real purpose of these well-endowed schools—to perpetuate their own.
“There’s a certain kind of student at these schools who falls in love with the mystique and prestige of his own education,” said Elyse Graham, whom I taught at Princeton and who is now doing graduate work at Yale. “This is the guy who treats his time at Princeton as a scavenger hunt for Princetoniana and Princeton nostalgia: How many famous professors can I collect? And so on. And he comes away not only with all these props for his sense of being elect, but also with the smoothness that seems to indicate wide learning; college socializes you, so you learn to present even trite ideas well.”
These institutions cater to their students like high-end resorts. My prep school—remember this is a high school—recently built a $26-million gym. Not that it didn’t have a gym. It had a fine one with an Olympic pool. But it needed to upgrade its facilities to compete for the elite boys and girls being wooed by other schools. While public schools crumble, while public universities are slashed and degraded, while these elite institutions become unaffordable even for the middle class, the privileged retreat further into their opulent gated communities. Harvard lost $8 billion of its endowment over the past four months, which raises the question of how smart these people are, but it still has $30 billion. Schools like Yale, Stanford and Princeton are not far behind. Those on the inside are told they are there because they are better than others. Most believe it.
The people I loved most, my working-class family in Maine, did not go to college. They were plumbers, post office clerks and mill workers. Most of the men were military veterans. They lived frugal and hard lives. They were indulgent of my incessant book reading and incompetence with tools, even my distaste for deer hunting, and they were a steady reminder that just because I had been blessed with an opportunity that was denied to them, I was not better or more intelligent. If you are poor you have to work after high school or, in the case of my grandfather, before you are able to finish high school. College is not an option. No one takes care of you. You have to do that for yourself. This is the most important difference between them and the elites.
The elite schools, which trumpet their diversity, base this diversity on race and ethnicity, rarely on class. The admissions process, as well as the staggering tuition costs, precludes most of the poor and working class. When my son got his SAT scores back last year, we were surprised to find that his critical reading score was lower than his math score. He dislikes math. He is an avid and perceptive reader. And so we did what many educated, middle-class families do. We hired an expensive tutor from The Princeton Review who taught him the tricks and techniques of taking standardized tests. The tutor told him things like “stop thinking about whether the passage is true. You are wasting test time thinking about the ideas. Just spit back what they tell you.” His reading score went up 130 points. Was he smarter? Was he a better reader? Did he become more intelligent? Is reading and answering multiple-choice questions while someone holds a stopwatch over you even an effective measure of intelligence? What about those families that do not have a few thousand dollars to hire a tutor? What chance do they have?
These universities, because of their incessant reliance on standardized tests and the demand for perfect grades, fill their classrooms with large numbers of drones. I have taught gifted and engaged students who used these institutions to expand the life of the mind, who asked the big questions and who cherished what these schools had to offer. But they were always a marginalized and dispirited minority. The bulk of their classmates, most of whom headed off to Wall Street or corporate firms when they graduated, starting at $120,000 a year, did prodigious amounts of work and faithfully regurgitated information. They received perfect grades in both tedious, boring classes and stimulating ones, not that they could tell the difference. They may have known the plot and salient details of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” but they were unable to tell you why the story was important. Their professors, fearful of being branded political and not wanting to upset the legions of wealthy donors and administrative overlords who rule such institutions, did not draw the obvious parallels with Iraq and American empire. They did not use Conrad’s story, as it was meant to be used, to examine our own imperial darkness. And so, even in the anemic world of liberal arts, what is taught exists in a moral void.
“The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic,” William Deresiewicz, who taught English at Yale, wrote in “The American Scholar.” “While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite.”
Intelligence is morally neutral. It is no more virtuous than athletic prowess. It can be used to further the rape of the working class by corporations and the mechanisms of repression and war, or it can be used to fight these forces. But if you determine worth by wealth, as these institutions invariably do, then fighting the system is inherently devalued. The unstated ethic of these elite institutions is to make as much money as you can to sustain the elitist system. College presidents are not voices for the common good and the protection of intellectual integrity, but obsequious fundraisers. They shower honorary degrees and trusteeships on hedge fund managers and Wall Street titans whose lives are usually examples of moral squalor and unchecked greed. The message to the students is clear. But grabbing what you can, as John Ruskin said, isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.
Most of these students are afraid to take risks. They cower before authority. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what their professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead. Challenging authority is not a career advancer. Freshmen arrive on elite campuses and begin to network their way into the elite eating clubs, test into the elite academic programs and lobby for elite summer internships. By the time they graduate they are superbly conditioned to work 10 or 12 hours a day electronically moving large sums of money around.
“The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name,” Deresiewicz wrote. “It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.”
“Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul,” he went on. “These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus.”
Barack Obama is a product of this elitist system. So are his degree-laden Cabinet members. They come out of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley and Princeton. Their friends and classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in powerful law firms. They go to the same class reunions. They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege and comfort and entitlement. They are endowed with an unbridled self-confidence and blind belief in a decaying political and financial system that has nurtured and empowered them.
These elites, and the corporate system they serve, have ruined the country. These elite cannot solve our problems. They have been trained to find “solutions,” such as the trillion-dollar bailout of banks and financial firms, that sustain the system. They will feed the beast until it dies. Don’t expect them to save us. They don’t know how. And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, they will be exposed as being as helpless, and as stupid, as the rest of us.
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Harvard University says its endowment has tumbled $8 billion in the four months since the end of the last fiscal year.
The estimated 22 percent decline is the school’s sharpest endowment drop in modern history. The endowment was valued at $36.9 billion on June 30.
According to a letter to deans from university heads, Harvard must take a “hard look” at staffing levels and compensation. They’re also forecasting a 30 percent drop for the fiscal year ending in June 2009.
The school has said its U.S. stock portfolio and foreign equity portfolio had taken hard hits recently. The school’s endowment is the largest in higher education.
The university’s president warns that the estimated drop may be conservative because some money managers that have yet to report figures.
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A sign tough times are here
By Tracy Jan
The dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has called for an immediate freeze on staff hiring and strongly encouraged department heads to consider canceling faculty searches.
In an e-mail to department heads Monday, Michael Smith, dean of the largest Harvard faculty, outlined immediate steps in response to the worsening economic climate.
“Given our heavy reliance on endowment income, these losses will have a major and long-lasting impact – one that will require significant reductions in our annual expenses,” Smith wrote.
Smith’s message comes two weeks after Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, told the Harvard community that the university is looking for ways to reduce spending across the campus, raising the specter of cuts to programs and compensation, as Harvard’s endowment plummets. It is also assessing all aspects of its sweeping plan to expand across the Charles River in Allston, she said.
Harvard’s endowment before the economic crisis was $36.9 billion. It’s unclear how far it has fallen, but Faust recently referenced a Moody’s projection of a 30 percent decline in the value of college and university endowments this fiscal year.
The freeze on staff hiring applies to all current and proposed postings, unless it is deemed critical, Smith said. Tasks associated with unfilled positions either will not be pursued or will be handled by existing staff.
“We all need to resist turning to the use of consultants and temporary staff as substitutes for unfilled positions,” he said.
While faculty searches are not frozen, Smith urged department heads to carefully weigh whether the positions are critical to Harvard’s academic program.
He reassured the department heads that Harvard remains committed to the tenure-track system and that promotion reviews will continue on schedule and will be based strictly on merit.
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By AMY HARMON
BOSTON — Is Esther Dyson, the technology venture capitalist who is training to be an astronaut, genetically predisposed to a major heart attack?
Does Steven Pinker, the prominent psychologist and author, have a gene variant that raises his risk of Alzheimer’s, which his grandmother suffered from, to greater than 50 percent?
Did Misha Angrist, an assistant professor at Duke University, inherit a high risk of breast cancer, which he may have passed on to his young daughters?
On Monday, they may learn the answers to these and other questions — and, if all goes according to plan, so will everyone else who cares to visit a public Web site, www.personalgenomes.org. The three are among the first 10 volunteers in the Personal Genome Project, a study at Harvard University Medical School aimed at challenging the conventional wisdom that the secrets of our genes are best kept to ourselves.
The goal of the project, which hopes to expand to 100,000 participants, is to speed medical research by dispensing with the elaborate precautions traditionally taken to protect the privacy of human subjects. The more genetic information can be made open and publicly available, nearly everyone agrees, the faster research will progress.
In exchange for the decoding of their DNA, participants agree to make it available to all — along with photographs, their disease histories, allergies, medications, ethnic backgrounds and a trove of other traits, called phenotypes, from food preferences to television viewing habits.
Including phenotypes, which most other public genetic databases have avoided in deference to privacy concerns, should allow researchers to more easily discover how genes and traits are linked. Because the “PGP 10,” as they call themselves, agreed to forfeit their privacy, any researcher will have a chance to mine the data, rather than just a small group with clearance.
The project is as much a social experiment as a scientific one. “We don’t yet know the consequences of having one’s genome out in the open,” said George M. Church, a human geneticist at Harvard who is the project’s leader and one of its subjects. “But it’s worth exploring.”
A new federal law prohibits health insurers and employers from discriminating against individuals on the basis of their genetic profile. But any one of the PGP 10 could be denied life insurance, long-term care insurance or disability insurance, with no legal penalty. And no law can bar colleagues from raising an annoyed eyebrow at a PGP participant who, say, indulges in a brownie after disclosing on the Internet that she is genetically predisposed to diabetes.
Then there is the matter of potential recrimination — from siblings, parents and children who share half of the participants’ genes and did not necessarily agree to display them in public. Prospective participants are advised to consult with first-degree relatives, but except for identical twins, their consent is not required. Some volunteers are worried about their hurting their teenagers’ dating prospects.
“A potential boyfriend could look at my genome and say, ‘I don’t know if this relationship is meant to be,’ ” said John Halamka, a participant and the chief information officer of Harvard Medical School, who has a 15-year-old daughter. (His daughter, he said, told him that if a suitor did that, “I wouldn’t want them as a boyfriend anyway.”)
Because of the known and unknown risks, Dr. Church required the first 10 participants to demonstrate the equivalent of a master’s degree in genetics. Most are either investors or executives in the biomedical industry, or else teach or write about it, so they may have a financial interest in encouraging people to part with their genetic privacy.
The project has drawn criticism from scientists and bioethicists who caution that even its highly educated volunteers cannot understand the practical and psychological risks of disclosing information long regarded as quintessentially private.
“I’m concerned that this could make it seem easy and cool to put your information out there when there is still a lot of stigma associated with certain genetic traits,” said Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University. “There will be new uses of this data that people can’t anticipate — and they can’t do anything to get it back.”
For now, the PGP, which is privately funded, is sequencing only the fraction of participants’ genomes thought to have the most influence over disease, behavior and physical traits. But the question of how much value to place on genetic privacy has taken on more urgency as the technology for sequencing an entire human genome accelerated and the price has plummeted to as low as $5,000, so that it may soon be possible for everyone to possess their own genetic readout.
Sequencing a human genome — the six billion letters of genetic code containing the complete inventory of the traits we inherited from our parents — cost over $1 million just two years ago.
The two scientists whose full genomes were sequenced in the name of research both made them public. But they differ on whether the practice should be widely recommended.
“I put mine out there, but I’m 80,” said James D. Watson, the chancellor emeritus of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. “Randomly putting up young people’s genomes could cause individual harm, simply because there will be so many mistakes. We don’t know enough yet to interpret them.”
Esther Dyson has agreed to make her genetic information public to help encourage research.
The DNA Age
J. Craig Venter, a pioneer in human genome sequencing, said his nonprofit institute planned to sequence several dozen human genomes by the end of next year and to deposit the information in the public domain along with phenotype information in a model similar to that of the PGP. He said he had already heard from thousands of volunteers.
“If they want privacy we tell them to go somewhere else,” Dr. Venter said. “To truly understand humans we need a huge data set of 10,000 complete genomes, and the data needs to be open to everyone for interpretation.”
Besides, promises of privacy may be impossible to keep, given the extraordinary identifying properties of DNA. Over the last three years, more than a half-million people who participated in over 100 publicly financed genetic studies on traits like schizophrenia and drug addiction were promised that their anonymity would be protected. But last month, after a paper in a scientific journal described how an individual’s profile could be identified even when it was aggregated with hundreds of others, the National Institutes of Health abruptly restricted access to the data.
There are some signs that the reflex to protect genetic privacy may be shifting. On the Web site of 23 and Me, a company that markets a $400 minisnapshot of traits from risk of heart disease to ear wax type, some customers use pseudonyms to discuss their results, while others include links with their contact information.
And Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, recently revealed on his blog that he learned he has a considerably higher than average risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, which was diagnosed in his mother several years ago. (Mr. Brin is the husband of Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder of 23 and Me.)
“There are costs to keeping things secret,” Mr. Brin said in an interview. “There’s a much better chance that you will learn something useful if you are not trying to hide it.”
Still, it may depend on what “it” is.
As the PGP 10 gathered Sunday at Harvard Medical School in Boston to receive the first batch of their genetic data, many said they were motivated by a desire to demystify genetics, which is often wrongly viewed as determining a person’s fate.
As the hour approached when they would be asked to reveal their data to the world, Dr. Pinker said he was still considering whether he wanted to learn of his Alzheimer’s risk, or if he would ask the researchers to withhold the data from himself and the public. Everyone, Dr. Church said, is given a chance to change their mind about going public up until the last minute, “but we try very hard in our screening process to choose the people who understand that it is better to have it all out there.”
Only about 1,300 of the 20,000 human genes have been so far linked to a particular trait, PGP researchers said.
Thus, even if Dr. Pinker chooses to remove from public view the chunk of DNA currently associated with Alzheimer’s risk, he is not necessarily protecting himself from future associations scientists may make about genetic data that may now seem innocuous enough to put on the Web.
Dr. Halamka, a PGP volunteer who found out Sunday afternoon that he has a gene variant that has been associated with childhood blindness, said he had no qualms about putting that, and all of his other information, online. Since he is not blind, and neither is his 15-year-old daughter, the project’s researchers told him it seemed likely that something in his genetic makeup was compensating for the defect.
Still, he asked whether it was associated with multiple sclerosis, which his father has. “My daughter,” Dr. Halamka said, “will be asking questions.”
What happens to the PGP, Dr. Church said, may serve as a litmus test for the fears of sharing genetic data, in an era when everyone’s inborn imperfections are becoming more identifiable. If this group is tracked “like major league baseball players, everyone will want to be like them,” he said. “If it runs into social hassles and financial hassles, then no one will.”
The volunteers will be given more information as the data is analyzed, and they may be asked to answer questions that might help researchers. But the only requirement is that they notify the project if they suffer any adverse effects from their participation.
Dr. Church said that information, too, will be made public.
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There was a real John Harvard once who emigrated from England to what is now Charlestown, a few miles to the east of the campus. He lived only a couple of years before dying of tuberculosis after having made his will leaving half his estate to his wife and half to a struggling school along the Charles River at a place initially called Newtowne.
It was his intent that by leaving a sum of money and his library of books he would do a little something that would give more meaning to a life cut short by death. He was a protestant clergyman who had helped with worship services at the first church in Charlestown and was well educated in England and was wealthier than many colonists. So perhaps he felt a special obligation to make it possible for many to follow his footsteps as the pilgrims established themselves in this new land.
