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Post by td128 on Dec 14, 2023 8:42:26 GMT -5
Bill Ackman’s Clash With Harvard Over Stock Gift Reveals the Messy World of Big Donationswww.wsj.com/us-news/education/bill-ackmans-clash-with-harvard-over-stock-gift-reveals-the-messy-world-of-big-donations-2d12dc4b?mod=hp_lead_pos9 Benefactors expect to have leverage in administrative matters of prestigious schools to which they donate. Prestigious universities are learning the costs of the big gifts they receive from prominent donors.
The strings that fund managers Bill Ackman and Ross Stevens attached to sizable donations to Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, show the degree to which wealthy benefactors expect to have a continuing say in administrative matters.
This inevitably causes chafing at universities, which pride themselves on resisting outside pressures in their unfettered pursuit of higher learning. The delicate relationship between schools and their biggest donors has contributed to their continuing clash over addressing antisemitism.
Ackman, who has been calling for Harvard to oust its president over its handling of free speech and antisemitism on campus, took to X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday night to criticize the university for not abiding by the terms of a 2017 gift he gave it to recruit star economist Raj Chetty.
As he tells it, Ackman was in the middle of a divorce and had little cash on hand, so gifted the school $10 million of shares in Coupang, a Korean e-commerce company that was privately held at the time. It came with an unusual agreement: If the value of the shares rose above $15 million when Coupang went public, Ackman could allocate the surplus to his preferred Harvard-related cause.
A few years later, Coupang was nearing a blockbuster IPO and Ackman said the value of his gift had ballooned in value to $85 million. The hedge-fund manager started making plans to fund a new building designed by architect Norman Foster for Harvard’s economics department.
He was shocked to learn the school had sold the shares in March 2020 for $10 million without telling him.
Ackman, who said he would have bought the shares back had he been offered them, complained he never received an apology from Harvard leadership, even after he wrote to its governing board. He still expects the university to allow him to allocate $70 million and hinted he might see a use for it addressing the issues he has been agitating about. (Still, Ackman said his disappointment over the Coupang shares is unrelated to his current campaign.)
Harvard didn’t respond to a request for comment.
While most sizable donations from prominent donors are carefully negotiated and come with stipulations that can make for future disagreements, stock gifts in particular can be thorny. Stock in a private company run by the donor gives the benefactor even more leverage.
That was true in the case of Stevens, who made a donation to Penn’s Wharton School in 2017 to fund the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance. The gift, now valued at about $100 million, came in the form of units in Stevens’s financial firm, Stone Ridge Holdings Group.
Stevens used the terms of those units as a bargaining chip to try to oust Penn President Liz Magill over her handling of antisemitism on campus. The gift bound Penn to Stone Ridge’s limited partner agreement, which allows Stone Ridge to retire such units if it decides that holders of them violate laws or rules that result in damage to Stone Ridge’s business or reputation.
Lawyers for Stone Ridge alerted Penn leadership last week in a letter that the university’s stance on antisemitism on campus gave it grounds to retire the units Stevens donated. Stevens and Stone Ridge would give Penn the chance to fix the violations of its limited-partner agreement once Penn replaces Magill.
Magill, one of three college presidents who testified in last week’s now-infamous congressional hearing, resigned over the weekend, as did the chairman of Penn’s board of trustees.
Some donations have more offbeat stipulations. Billionaire investor and Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger, who died last month at age 99, donated hundreds of millions of dollars to build student housing at schools including the University of Michigan and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
One condition for Munger’s gifts was that recipients had to accept his input on architectural design. His idiosyncratic preferences included external hallways and staircases, as well as bedrooms that lack windows. His proposal for a UCSB dorm featured installing artificial windows modeled on the portholes on cruise ships.
My question: what is Holy Cross' greatest asset? IMO, our great name, College of the Holy Cross.
Can we trust our BOT and rely on those individuals to make sure that our good name is and NEVER will be for sale in the fashion that selected colleges and universities have clearly sold out to individuals, organizations, industries, and foreign governments?
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Post by sader1970 on Dec 14, 2023 19:13:25 GMT -5
Was sure this thread was headed down the Prior controversy.
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Post by rgs318 on Dec 14, 2023 19:18:10 GMT -5
Is there still such a controversy?
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Post by sader1970 on Dec 14, 2023 19:31:57 GMT -5
I haven’t heard of it being resolved. I spoke with a HC officer whose identity I will not divulge and joked about the PRIOR Performing Arts Center and the response was, in any equally joking manner, “Prior, at least for now.”
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Post by alum on Dec 14, 2023 19:32:36 GMT -5
Is there still such a controversy? Federal case is still pending with no decision on College’s motion to compel arbitration. It is certainly possible that the parties are in discussions to resolve their differences.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Dec 15, 2023 19:26:09 GMT -5
Is there still such a controversy? Federal case is still pending with no decision on College’s motion to compel arbitration. It is certainly possible that the parties are in discussions to resolve their differences. I won't recite the opinions of several alums who have professional dealings with the uberich and tyjror axes, and who have read the complaint and HC's answer, --but I will say they do not have a charitable view of HC's behavior. I am increasingly curious as to whether several of Prior's allegations are related to the unexpected departure of HC's Chief Investment Officer three years ago. A position that was not subsequently filled. I also need to check whether Prior was still on the BoT at the time of this individual's departure.
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Post by newfieguy74 on Dec 15, 2023 20:13:35 GMT -5
Is there still such a controversy? Federal case is still pending with no decision on College’s motion to compel arbitration. It is certainly possible that the parties are in discussions to resolve their differences. No news is good news in these situations. Cooler heads, I hope, are prevailing.
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Post by princetoncrusader on Dec 16, 2023 9:18:13 GMT -5
Regarding the former CIO, a trustee told me that the decision to outsource was based on his view that HC could not get access to top fund managers. He also didn't think it would be cost effective to try and build out an investment staff on Mt. Saint James. Hence, the decision was made to outsource the management of the endowment to a firm in the DC area as I recall. Of note, Lafayette has a full-time CIO with a similar-sized endowment. Would be interesting to compare returns between HC and LC since that decision was made.
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Post by longsuffering on Dec 16, 2023 18:12:08 GMT -5
Bill Ackman’s Clash With Harvard Over Stock Gift Reveals the Messy World of Big Donationswww.wsj.com/us-news/education/bill-ackmans-clash-with-harvard-over-stock-gift-reveals-the-messy-world-of-big-donations-2d12dc4b?mod=hp_lead_pos9 Benefactors expect to have leverage in administrative matters of prestigious schools to which they donate. Prestigious universities are learning the costs of the big gifts they receive from prominent donors.
The strings that fund managers Bill Ackman and Ross Stevens attached to sizable donations to Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, show the degree to which wealthy benefactors expect to have a continuing say in administrative matters.
This inevitably causes chafing at universities, which pride themselves on resisting outside pressures in their unfettered pursuit of higher learning. The delicate relationship between schools and their biggest donors has contributed to their continuing clash over addressing antisemitism.
Ackman, who has been calling for Harvard to oust its president over its handling of free speech and antisemitism on campus, took to X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday night to criticize the university for not abiding by the terms of a 2017 gift he gave it to recruit star economist Raj Chetty.
As he tells it, Ackman was in the middle of a divorce and had little cash on hand, so gifted the school $10 million of shares in Coupang, a Korean e-commerce company that was privately held at the time. It came with an unusual agreement: If the value of the shares rose above $15 million when Coupang went public, Ackman could allocate the surplus to his preferred Harvard-related cause.
A few years later, Coupang was nearing a blockbuster IPO and Ackman said the value of his gift had ballooned in value to $85 million. The hedge-fund manager started making plans to fund a new building designed by architect Norman Foster for Harvard’s economics department.
He was shocked to learn the school had sold the shares in March 2020 for $10 million without telling him.
Ackman, who said he would have bought the shares back had he been offered them, complained he never received an apology from Harvard leadership, even after he wrote to its governing board. He still expects the university to allow him to allocate $70 million and hinted he might see a use for it addressing the issues he has been agitating about. (Still, Ackman said his disappointment over the Coupang shares is unrelated to his current campaign.)
Harvard didn’t respond to a request for comment.
While most sizable donations from prominent donors are carefully negotiated and come with stipulations that can make for future disagreements, stock gifts in particular can be thorny. Stock in a private company run by the donor gives the benefactor even more leverage.
That was true in the case of Stevens, who made a donation to Penn’s Wharton School in 2017 to fund the Stevens Center for Innovation in Finance. The gift, now valued at about $100 million, came in the form of units in Stevens’s financial firm, Stone Ridge Holdings Group.
Stevens used the terms of those units as a bargaining chip to try to oust Penn President Liz Magill over her handling of antisemitism on campus. The gift bound Penn to Stone Ridge’s limited partner agreement, which allows Stone Ridge to retire such units if it decides that holders of them violate laws or rules that result in damage to Stone Ridge’s business or reputation.
Lawyers for Stone Ridge alerted Penn leadership last week in a letter that the university’s stance on antisemitism on campus gave it grounds to retire the units Stevens donated. Stevens and Stone Ridge would give Penn the chance to fix the violations of its limited-partner agreement once Penn replaces Magill.
Magill, one of three college presidents who testified in last week’s now-infamous congressional hearing, resigned over the weekend, as did the chairman of Penn’s board of trustees.
Some donations have more offbeat stipulations. Billionaire investor and Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger, who died last month at age 99, donated hundreds of millions of dollars to build student housing at schools including the University of Michigan and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
One condition for Munger’s gifts was that recipients had to accept his input on architectural design. His idiosyncratic preferences included external hallways and staircases, as well as bedrooms that lack windows. His proposal for a UCSB dorm featured installing artificial windows modeled on the portholes on cruise ships.
My question: what is Holy Cross' greatest asset? IMO, our great name, College of the Holy Cross.
Can we trust our BOT and rely on those individuals to make sure that our good name is and NEVER will be for sale in the fashion that selected colleges and universities have clearly sold out to individuals, organizations, industries, and foreign governments?
One answer is a quote from a great sports/rom-com movie, "Show me the money!" I think the approach has to be a balance between "All gifts are final with absolutely no conditions, restrictions or claw back clauses" and selling out the College's good name. We need a savvy negotiator who knows all the fine points in agreements for mega gifts and can protect the college while giving up as little as possible of the donations that keep HC as elite as it is and to improve upon that level of quality going forward. If a wealthy person wants to enjoy sculpting his gift, we need someone who can help him to do so while also meeting HC's needs and protecting HC while making the donor feel like everything was his/her idea and pumped to give more in the future or by the next generation of the family. The former Admissions Director received poor reviews on the board for being too rigid. We need someone for major gifts who has so many "soft" skills they are like jelly while knowing the key words in a donation contract inside and out. Or maybe two people who can play good cop and bad cop. The sad thing would be our professionals twisting themselves into a pretzel to get the money and protect HC and then having below market investment returns. So both elements are crucial.
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Post by Pakachoag Phreek on Dec 18, 2023 10:47:59 GMT -5
Regarding the former CIO, a trustee told me that the decision to outsource was based on his view that HC could not get access to top fund managers. He also didn't think it would be cost effective to try and build out an investment staff on Mt. Saint James. Hence, the decision was made to outsource the management of the endowment to a firm in the DC area as I recall. Of note, Lafayette has a full-time CIO with a similar-sized endowment. Would be interesting to compare returns between HC and LC since that decision was made. The previous Chief Investment Officer was 'home-grown'. Native of Worcester. HC major in sociology, MBA from Northeastern apparently with an accounting emphasis. Post Northeastern, into the HC investment office, and relatively quickly then became Chief Investment Officer. LafayetteEndowment value June 2019 $832 million Endowment value June 2023 $1,048 million Distribution for College operations 2019, $41 million Distribution for College operations 2023 $45 million Contributions to endowment 2023 $9 million Holy CrossEndowment value June 2019 $785 million Endowment value June 2023 $1,043 million Distribution for College operations 2019, $30 million Distribution for College operations 2023 $40 million Contributions to endowment 2023 $17 million I am being lazy, so I used distributions $ as a proxy for endowment values pre 2019, and between 2020-22 IIRC, the HC Chief Investment Officer resigned in March 2020, and I used 2019 endowment values as a base. I do not know who managed the endowment for the entirety of fiscal 2020. In any event, it is likely that HC's endowment management fiscal 2020-2023 has out-performed Lafayette. (To be more certain, I would need to calculate total contributions and total distributions over that four year period (2020-2023). ------------------------- One of the claims in CP's lawsuit appears to suggest, to me at least, that HC co-mingled his $18 million gift in 2013 with other assets between 2013-18. The $18 million was a restricted gift, and in my very limited understanding of restricted endowment funds, distributions from an endowment gain on a restricted gift are returned to the restricted gift corpus if the distribution is unspent. HC did this with respect to certain restricted endowments where the distribution went unspent because the College was shut-down for on-campus instruction / activities during COVID.
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Post by purplehaze on Jan 2, 2024 13:14:34 GMT -5
Claudine Gay to resign this afternoon per report from the Boston Globe and student newspaper
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Post by longsuffering on Jan 2, 2024 13:17:34 GMT -5
Regarding the former CIO, a trustee told me that the decision to outsource was based on his view that HC could not get access to top fund managers. He also didn't think it would be cost effective to try and build out an investment staff on Mt. Saint James. Hence, the decision was made to outsource the management of the endowment to a firm in the DC area as I recall. Of note, Lafayette has a full-time CIO with a similar-sized endowment. Would be interesting to compare returns between HC and LC since that decision was made. The previous Chief Investment Officer was 'home-grown'. Native of Worcester. HC major in sociology, MBA from Northeastern apparently with an accounting emphasis. Post Northeastern, into the HC investment office, and relatively quickly then became Chief Investment Officer. LafayetteEndowment value June 2019 $832 million Endowment value June 2023 $1,048 million Distribution for College operations 2019, $41 million Distribution for College operations 2023 $45 million Contributions to endowment 2023 $9 million Holy CrossEndowment value June 2019 $785 million Endowment value June 2023 $1,043 million Distribution for College operations 2019, $30 million Distribution for College operations 2023 $40 million Contributions to endowment 2023 $17 million I am being lazy, so I used distributions $ as a proxy for endowment values pre 2019, and between 2020-22 IIRC, the HC Chief Investment Officer resigned in March 2020, and I used 2019 endowment values as a base. I do not know who managed the endowment for the entirety of fiscal 2020. In any event, it is likely that HC's endowment management fiscal 2020-2023 has out-performed Lafayette. (To be more certain, I would need to calculate total contributions and total distributions over that four year period (2020-2023). ------------------------- One of the claims in CP's lawsuit appears to suggest, to me at least, that HC co-mingled his $18 million gift in 2013 with other assets between 2013-18. The $18 million was a restricted gift, and in my very limited understanding of restricted endowment funds, distributions from an endowment gain on a restricted gift are returned to the restricted gift corpus if the distribution is unspent. HC did this with respect to certain restricted endowments where the distribution went unspent because the College was shut-down for on-campus instruction / activities during COVID. It's obvious. Laffy sold out to snag the PL FB auto-bid.
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Post by td128 on Jan 3, 2024 6:09:29 GMT -5
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Post by td128 on Jan 3, 2024 6:10:51 GMT -5
For those not able to access the entirety of the above Statements by Mr. Ackman, I welcome sharing: We now know that the @harvard Corporation Board sought to quash a legitimate whistleblower inquiry into President Gay’s work by threatening the media with litigation if they published the whistleblower’s allegations, which the Board said were demonstrably false, but in fact were entirely true.
It also appears that the Board’s ‘investigation’ of Gay’s plagiarism was pretextual, and Harvard’s mandated procedures were not followed in conducting the investigation.
Further, the Board allegedly sought to out the whistleblower and pursue damages against him or her in direct violation of Harvard’s own policies against retribution.
I am sorry to say this, but in the event that any of the above is true, which looks increasingly likely, this is a scandal and a stain on the reputation of Harvard that goes far beyond President Gay.
An immediate investigation must be launched of the Corporation Board by unimpeachable members of the Harvard Board of Overseers, with the assistance of independent counsel who are unaffiliated with the University and the Corporation Board members to determine if, in fact, Harvard’s own whistleblower protection policies have been violated, and the other alleged governance and investigative failures are true.
This is conduct unbecoming any board of directors, let alone Harvard’s.
Only sunlight will remove the stain on the University’s reputation.
It is time for the sun to shine.
*** New whistleblower complaint alleging 50 instances of plagiarism by @harvard President Gay.
The whistleblower raises serious issues about how the initial investigation into Gay’s work was conducted.
The whistleblower levels credible accusations against the @harvard governing board in its apparent attempt to quash the initial inquiry into her work and its summarial dismissal of the allegations, relying on a still undisclosed three-person panel of ‘experts’ who assessed Gay’s work outside of the normal process for such investigations.
The coverup is often worse than the crime.
The media must dig deeper here. Gay-gate is in need of greater sunlight.
A must read (the Whistleblower Submission): freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2.pdf
I welcome highlighting this specific portion of the WB Submission:
So we now know for certain that the board’s investigation was a sham. Gay and Harvard, who conveniently omitted to mention any of this in their timeline of events to the Chronicle of Higher Education, had already made up their minds before launching their investigation. That’s why they let their lawyer tell the Post that the allegations were “demonstrably false” days before an investigation even began. The investigation was just for show.
Determined to quickly absolve Gay and prevent the allegations from becoming public, Gay and Harvard tried to silence the Post and by extension me by threatening to sue for “immense” damages if the proposed article was published.
See here: nypost.com/2023/12/22/news/plagiarism-harvard-cleared-claudine-gay-then-investigated/.
Even worse, the New York Post reports that Gay and Harvard “threatened to use legal means to out who had supplied the comparisons,” a shocking admission that Gay and Harvard sought to retaliate against me personally. At one point Gay and Harvard asked the Post, “Why would someone making such a complaint be unwilling to attach their name to it?” I was unwilling because I feared that Gay and Harvard would violate their policies, behave more like a cartel with a hedge fund attached than a university, and try to seek “immense” damages from me and who knows what else.
Since I’ve answered their lawyer’s stupid question, allow me to ask a reasonable question of my own. Why would an institution assessing allegations made in good faith, and ultimately substantiated, threaten to use its enormous resources to expose the identity of a whistleblower?
Did Gay wish to personally thank me for helping her to improve her work even if I drove her harder than she wanted to be driven? Gay and Harvard sought to silence and retaliate against a journalist and a whistleblower. Retaliation against complainants is a clear violation of FAS Policy: “Harvard community members may not retaliate in any way against complainants, witnesses, the RIO, or committee members.” It is also potentially a violation of university HR policies.
The members of the board are Claudine Gay, Timothy Barakett, Kenneth Chenault, Mariano Florentino Cuéllar, Paul Finnegan, Biddy Martin, Karen Gordon Mills, Diana Nelson, Penny Pritzker, Tracy Pun Palandjian, Shirley Tilghman, and Theodore Wells, Jr.
They should all be investigated for retaliation against a misconduct complainant (Inquiry 3). As should any other Harvard personnel who were privy to this extraordinary abuse of Harvard’s power and institutional resources to pursue a personal vendetta and to cover up a decades-long pattern of research misconduct. If Gay authorized these threats without consulting with the board, the board should tell us.
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Post by td128 on Jan 3, 2024 6:18:13 GMT -5
I welcome bringing this thread back to my original premise and repeating:
My question: what is Holy Cross' greatest asset? IMO, our great name, College of the Holy Cross.
Can we trust our BOT and rely on those individuals to make sure that our good name is and NEVER will be for sale in the fashion that selected colleges and universities have clearly sold out to individuals, organizations, industries, and foreign governments?
Has our good name ever been sold?
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Post by hcpride on Jan 3, 2024 8:24:26 GMT -5
I welcome bringing this thread back to my original premise and repeating: My question: what is Holy Cross' greatest asset? IMO, our great name, College of the Holy Cross.
Can we trust our BOT and rely on those individuals to make sure that our good name is and NEVER will be for sale in the fashion that selected colleges and universities have clearly sold out to individuals, organizations, industries, and foreign governments?
Has our good name ever been sold? Can't imagine our college board of trustees would tolerate widespread (or even non-widespread) antisemitism on our campus or tolerate a school president who has obviously plagiarized on numerous occasions. Not even for a nanosecond. Thankfully, we are very different and have almost nothing in common with (secular) Harvard. Harvard failed to meet a very low bar in terms of antisemitism and plagiarism. Perhaps the former failure (acceptance of antisemitism) is linked to some big money sources (plus a progressive narrative) but the latter failure (acceptance of plagiarism) is not.
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Post by gks on Jan 3, 2024 8:27:32 GMT -5
I welcome bringing this thread back to my original premise and repeating: My question: what is Holy Cross' greatest asset? IMO, our great name, College of the Holy Cross.
Can we trust our BOT and rely on those individuals to make sure that our good name is and NEVER will be for sale in the fashion that selected colleges and universities have clearly sold out to individuals, organizations, industries, and foreign governments?
Has our good name ever been sold? Can't imagine our college board of trustees would tolerate widespread (or even non-widespread) antisemitism on our campus or tolerate a school president who has obviously plagiarized on numerous occasions. Not even for a nanosecond. Thankfully, we are very different and have almost nothing in common with (secular) Harvard.Harvard failed to meet a very low bar in terms of antisemitism and plagiarism. Perhaps the former failure (acceptance of antisemitism) is linked to some big money sources (plus a progressive narrative) but the latter failure (acceptance of plagiarism) is not. Agree 100%. You should post this on the football board.
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Post by rgs318 on Jan 3, 2024 9:44:30 GMT -5
Former President Gay has stepped down and will "settle" for her $800,000 salary as a tenured faculty member.
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Post by hc6774 on Jan 3, 2024 9:56:39 GMT -5
A broader perspective on this? the links in this did not copy
By Bret Stephens NYT Opinion Columnist 1/2/24
I had written and filed a column about Harvard and its president, Claudine Gay, when news of her resignation broke on Tuesday afternoon after fresh allegations of plagiarism in her published work. I’d like to record what I wrote: “Cancel culture is always ugly and usually a mistake. If Gay is to go, let it be after more deliberation, with more decorum, and when pundits like me aren’t writing about her.” Oh, well.
The point may now be moot, but the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.
Why did that change happen? I’ve seen arguments that it goes back to the 1978 Bakke decision, when the Supreme Court effectively greenlit affirmative action in the name of diversity.
But the problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement, so a kind of racial gerrymander now permeates nearly every aspect of academic life, from admissions decisions to faculty appointments to the racial makeup of contributors to essay collections. If affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year. Instead, it became a pervasive regime that frequently got in the way of the universities’ higher goals, particularly the open exchange of ideas.
In announcing Gay’s appointment, Harvard praised her leadership and scholarship. The work of a university president is also that of executive, fund-raiser and cheerleader for the institution, and maybe the Harvard Corporation thought she’d be good at that. But skin color was the first thing The Harvard Crimson noted in its story about hertaking office, and her missteps and questions about her academic work gave ammunition to detractors who claimed she owed her position solely to her race.
This is the poisoned pool in which Harvard now swims. Whenever it elevates someone like Gay, there’s an assumption by admirers and detractors alike that she’s a political symbol whose performance represents more than who she is as a person. The weight of expectations on her must have been crushing. But dehumanization is the price any institution pays when considerations of social engineering supplant those of individual achievement.
It may take a generation after the end of affirmative action before someone like Gay can have the opportunity to be judged on her own merits, irrespective of her color. But the damage that the social-justice model has done to higher education will take longer to repair. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, according to a Gallup survey. Last year, the number had fallen to 36 percent, and that was before the wave of antisemitic campus outbursts. At Harvard, early admission applications fell by 17 percent last fall.
The school next to Boston will probably rebound. But Harvard also sets the tone for the rest of American higher ed — and for public attitudes toward it. One of the secrets of America’s postwar success wasn’t simply the caliber of U.S. universities. It was the respect they engendered among ordinary people who aspired to send their children to them.
That respect is now being eroded to the point of being erased. For good reason. People admire, and will strive for, excellence — both for its own sake and for the status it confers. But status without excellence is a rapidly wasting asset, especially when it comes with an exorbitant price. That’s the position of much of American academia today. Two hundred thousand dollars or more is a lot to pay for lessons in how to be an anti-racist.
Nobody should doubt that there is still a lot of excellence in today’s academia and plenty of good reasons to send your kids to college. But nobody should doubt, either, that the intellectual rot is pervasive and won’t stop spreading until universities return to the idea that their central purpose is to identify and nurture and liberate the best minds, not to engineer social utopias.
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Post by hcpride on Jan 3, 2024 10:07:45 GMT -5
Former President Gay has stepped down and will "settle" for her $800,000 salary as a tenured faculty member. Make no mistake, there are plenty of fellow-travelers up at Harvard (and beyond) that believe she is the latest victim of racial injustice. Which probably tells you all you need to know about the state of elite academia (and fellow travelers) today. I guess her highly paid tenured faculty position is some comfort to that group. Rational folks might view her as uniquely unsuited for an academic faculty position.
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Post by mm67 on Jan 3, 2024 10:19:19 GMT -5
I assume the scholarship of the other Ivy presidents was investigated, too.
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Post by newfieguy74 on Jan 3, 2024 10:40:51 GMT -5
I assume the scholarship of the other Ivy presidents was investigated, too. 100%.
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Post by alum on Jan 3, 2024 10:59:52 GMT -5
What can Harvard, and all of us who are interested in higher education, learn from this debacle? What skill set should a huge university like Harvard ($9 billion plus revenue, $5 billion plus expenses, $70 billion in assets, $11 billion in liabilties, 19,000 employees, 23000 students) be seeking in its next President? How important is scholarship as opposed to leadership and fundraising? I am sure that someone will say, just don't make diversity hires and all will be good but that misses the point for several reasons. For one, she had been in academic leadership as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard for eight years and had shown leadership on some important issues including financial ones during Covid. The trustees knew her when they hired her. Second, to the extent that she was canned for plagarism, that isn't really a DEI issue. To the extent that she botched the student protests/antisemitism/free speech issue, I again don't think that the fact that she is a woman of color had a great deal to do with it. She failed because Harvard had failed for years to articulate a consistent message about the limits of speech. At times it had allowed pretty wide speech and at other times, speech had been shut down. Having no standard she could point to, she failed to draw a line between speech critical of Israel (pre and post 10/7/23) and antisemitic speech which approached advocacy for genocide. Then Ackman shorted Harvard just like he shorted Herbalife except that he won this time. Here is one suggestion for Harvard since they didn't ask: I looked at the Wikipedia pages of recent Presidents. For the most part they have been Harvard administrators before taking the top job. Maybe they ought to look outside the gates a little more carefully. EDIT: The 990 shows Harvard turned almost a $4 billion "profit" in 2022. Maybe they ought to consider whether that is a good thing. projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/42103580
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Post by hc6774 on Jan 3, 2024 11:04:24 GMT -5
I assume the scholarship of the other Ivy presidents was investigated, too. as reported in one of WSJ pieces there is a scholarship rating number that schools use in vetting process. among current Ivy presidents' ratings, Dartmouth's is 117; Harvard's 54
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Post by Sons of Vaval on Jan 3, 2024 11:29:40 GMT -5
I am sure that someone will say, just don't make diversity hires and all will be good but that misses the point for several reasons. Sometimes the best answer is the most obvious one -- hire the best person for the job based on merit.
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