A few years ago, at a luncheon at Harvard University, Larry Summers noted an interesting fact. If you look at the top ten players in any industry or business 50 years ago, the list would look wholly different than it does today–except in higher education. It was Harvard, Yale, Princeton . . . back then, […]
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Like their compatriots in Zuccotti square, the 70 Harvard college students who walked out of Greg Mankiw’s economics class were larger on theatrics than on message, and failed to articulate a reasonable, much less coherent, justification for their protest. Gabriel Bayard and Rachel J. Sandalow-Ash, the two organizers of the protest, discuss the reasoning behind […]
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In 2009, reeling from the shrinkage in its $32 billion endowment, Harvard moved to slash costs by cutting back on the cookies served at faculty meetings. Eliminating the cookies, we were told, saved $500 per meeting, thus raising the obvious question of whether the Harvard faculty was obtaining its pastries from the wholesaler who supplied […]
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Harvard College’s Class of 2015 found something unprecedented awaiting their arrival on campus: an ideological pledge. It was framed as a request for allegiance to certain social and political principles. No such request had been made of Harvard students since the college’s founding by Puritans in 1636. First-years are being pressured to sign a “Freshman […]
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The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, by Clayton M. Christensen and Henry J. Eyring, $32.95, Jossey-Bass, 475 pages. Online college courses are a “disruptive technology” destined to drive profound changes in higher education in the United States and around the world. This is not an especially new idea. […]
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In 2008, when all the writing was on the wall but the wall was still believed to be surmountable, the various strategies to rescue the nation were largely about putting more money into the economy. Now, up against the wall, the strategy is about taking it out. That counter-movement has begun to reveal a few […]
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The embarrassing decision by the Monitor Group, the worldwide consulting firm founded by Harvard professors, to register retroactively as a foreign lobbyist organization over $3 million worth of work it did from 2006-2008 for Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan government, is the culmination of a story with two morals. The first is that even Harvard professors, high […]
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May 28, 2020, was a good day for the American economy and a momentous one for traditional colleges and universities. President Jodie Foster, the sixth Yale graduate to reach the White House, announced that the congressional agreement on Medicare and Social Security had finally begun to reduce the country’s debt, and the disastrous bout of […]
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There is a remarkable moment in Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course on Getting His Kid into College, which just came out this week. (The New York Times has an excerpt from the book here). Ferguson and his son are in the middle of the application process, both of them dismayed and discomfited […]
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A depressing, if somehow unsurprising given the current state of higher education, read from the Boston Globe. It seems that only 23 percent of spring 2010 courses at Harvard offer final exams. At least one reason is embarrassing—the university has cut back on funding exam proctors, meaning that professors or their teaching assistants now need […]
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The recent flurry of debate about tenure’s value has featured a revival of sorts for Harvard Education School professor Cathy Trower. The New York Times‘ “Room for Debate” section included a contribution from Trower, in which she proposed a “constitutional convention” selected through a kind of quota system—“selected to mirror the diversity the academy presumably […]
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Awhile back, I wrote about Dean Martha Minow of Harvard Law School, highlighting (with Peter Bercowitz’s help) her misrepresentations of a student email that raised questions about racial differences in intelligence. There, I concluded that Minow “disregarded what may be the first principle of academic discussion: to represent the words and ideas of others accurately […]
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The controversy at Harvard Law School over last month’s email about racial intelligence seems to have died down. The basic facts of the case are these: a Harvard law student who is an editor of the Harvard Law Review sent an email to two friends as a follow-up to an earlier conversation. In it she […]
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Here’s how easy it is to find out whether Adam Wheeler, the 23-year-old who allegedly faked his way into Harvard, was the preternaturally accomplished young scholar he said he was: Google. That’s how I spent a productive half-hour after I found Wheeler’s resume posted on the New Republic‘s website. Wheeler had submitted the resume when […]
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Stephanie Grace, an editor at the Harvard Law Review, has been outed as the third-year student who emailed to two friends her opinion that “I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African-Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent.” That triggered yet another racial flap at Harvard Law, with the school’s […]
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On 2 December 2009 the curtain of Harvard’s famed Agassiz Theater rose on a production of Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis, one of the most famous plays in the Yiddish repertoire. An operetta set in the Land of Israel in late biblical times, it was last performed in Warsaw in 1939, and forcibly shut down by the […]
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College investments dropped 23 percent in 2009, the most disastrous year since the National Association of College and University Business Officers began compiling investment statistics in 1971. Two observations can be made about NACUBO’s report, issued last week: One is: The richer the institution, the harder the fall, generally speaking. Harvard, the nation’s wealthiest university […]
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By Harvey Silverglate With Kyle Smeallie Harvard University may be losing money like a hard-luck high-roller, but the Vegas tagline (what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas) certainly does not apply: what happens at Harvard reaches well beyond the Cambridge confines. For better or for worse, many schools follow in Harvard’s footsteps. What better place, […]
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A few weeks ago a teenaged pot dealer was shot dead in a Harvard dormitory. That alone was depressing enough. However, Harvard suspects a black senior, Chanequa Campbell, of an association with the pot dealer — Justin Cosby, also black — and last week was barred from her dormitory and prevented from graduating. Campbell grew […]
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In theory, e-mail should make it easier to organize for social and political change. But, as recent events in my campaign as a petition candidate for Harvard’s Board of Overseers have shown, new means of communication can be used to relegate would-be reformers of the academy to dead-ends, and to keep the outsiders outside. If […]
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The Boston Globe reports that Harvard alumni have written to President Faust asking that, given the recent drop in endowment value from $36.8 billion to $28.7 billion, the latest bonuses paid to the fund’s managers be returned. The five highest-paid executives earned between $3.4 and $6.9 million during the last fiscal year. Those aren’t especially […]
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You say you’re an English major—but you’ve never read a word of Chaucer, you don’t know which century Dickens wrote in (wasn’t he the author of “Scrooged”—or was that Bill Murray?), and you think “The Rape of the Lock” is about a guy with a sexual fixation involving keyholes. Guess where you go to college? […]
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Wisdom from a candidate for the Presidency of the Harvard Undergraduate Council, from the Harvard Crimson: The Waite-Petri campaign is adopting an age-old tradition of using their platform to advocate for the abolition of the Council. There is one caveat, however. “We’re going to invite a member of the House of Hapsburg to rule the […]
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To the surprise of few, donations from the Harvard College faculty in the presidential campaign have gone to Barack Obama over John McCain by a ratio of 20 to 1. A report in the Harvard Crimson said, “The words ‘liberal’ and ‘faculty’ seem to have been conjoined at the College for generations.” Nationally, academia has […]
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Harvard faculty maintain that additions to the courses that will fulfill General Education requirements (a replacement for the Core) are not growing easier. Subcommittee chairs maintain that their standards have not grown too lax. Here’s a defense, reported in the Harvard Crimson: Subcommittee chairs maintain that their standards have not grown too lax. “I don’t […]
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If you think that student life at an ultra-elite law school is a page ripped out of The Paper Chase—one long, frighteningly competitive grade grub under the icy eye of a clone of the movie’s fictional Prof. Charles W. Kingsford Jr.—think again. At Yale Law School, grades have been strictly optional since the 1960s (students […]
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The Harvard Crimson today reports that, beginning in 2009, Harvard Law School students will no longer receive letter grades, and will instead be evaluated simply on a modified pass-fail system, consisting of “Honors” “Pass” “Low Pass” and “Fail”. Yale and Stanford have similar grading systems. An obvious point of objection was raised: According to Richard […]
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Harvard president Drew Faust spoke at the ROTC commissioning ceremony, a controversial act on a campus where hostility to all things military is entrenched orthodoxy. The question hanging in the air was: will she tarnish a celebratory moment by taking the opportunity to denounce “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” or perhaps irritate the anti-military crowd by […]
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The Harvard English Department appears on the verge of changing its official name, from the “Department of English and American Literature and Language” to the “English Department.” This sounds like a good thing, a bucking of a trend that started nearly 30 years ago toward renaming university English departments in order to make them appear […]
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Advertising for last Friday’s conference on feminism at Harvard, organized by Harvey Mansfield’s Program on Constitutional Government, was hilariously provocative. The flyer proclaimed “The Conference the Radcliffe Institute didn’t want to host!” and “A genuine Debate with DIVERSITY of views on THE LEGACY AND FUTURE OF FEMINISM” not to mention “Ladies Receive an Additional 50% […]
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