Harvard University

Is it lame to still geek out whenever J.K. Rowling makes a public appearance? It probably is but, no matter, we're going to update you about her Harvard Commencement speech anyway. She was the university's fifth female Commencement speaker since 1950. At the June 5 ceremony talked about her greatest challenges and achievements: failure and imagination. Aw!  read more »

To publish or perish? That is the question Harvard faculty will face today, when they vote whether or not to publish their scholarly articles online (and open up their research to millions of readers) or continue to distribute their work in obscure journals with steep price tags and minuscule readership. According to Patricia Cohen of The New York Times, the vote's impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost. So Yale and Columbia could follow suit, as well as other mediums...  read more »

Is it still schadenfreude when it’s the indestructible Martin Amis getting kicked around? His new book, a collection of essays and stories about militant Islam, The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007, won’t be published over here until April Fools’ Day, but it’s already out in the U.K. (Jonathan Cape, £12.90) and was greeted last weekend with a one-two punch that would have left any ordinary writer reeling. On Saturday the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) ran a review by the talented Christopher Tayler that concludes bluntly that “the writings collected here add nothing to [Amis’] reputation.” On Sunday, the London Times (www.timesonline.co.uk) let loose historian William Dalrymple, who declares Amis’ book to be “not just flawed, but riddled with basic misunderstandings”; and again, in case we were in any doubt: “not just wilfully ignorant … but … at its heart disturbingly bigoted.”  read more »

Harvard announced today that J. K. Rowling will deliver the keynote address at this year's commencement ceremony, which will be held on June 5th. As is customary, the Harry Potter author will receive an honorary degree from the university.

Newly minted Harvard president Drew Faust issued a statement this morning in which she praised Ms. Rowling for getting kids to read.

"Perhaps no one in our time has done more than J. K. Rowling to inspire young people to experience the excitement and the sheer joy of reading," she is quoted as saying in the announcement.

The word from the college, meanwhile, is that some Harvard students are not exactly thrilled at the news, and disappointed that the university chose someone involved in the production of fairy tales rather a world leader or politician.

"[Faust] thinks this is a game?" one student complained. "It's a damn election year! You can't get someone at all related to that shit?"

Star Childs, who graduated from Yale with a forestry degree 27 years ago, was hammering a nail into a stump outside Sunday’s Yale-Harvard football game. He wore a tie, vest, and blazer, plus matching knit cap, and had a red cup in his non-hammering left hand.

The dozen students gathered around him cheered. “I’m a forester, I’m a lumberjack! And I’m okay,” Mr. Childs said. His family owns the one-room Yale Outdoors Cabin, with fireplace, in Bethany, CT.  read more »

St. Martin’s Press will end its partnership with the Harvard-based, student-produced travel guide series Let’s Go after more than twenty-five years. St. Martin’s, which provides Let’s Go with final edits, printing, distribution, and advertising, will continue to put out Let’s Go guides through fall 2009--one set of 15 books will come out this November, and another 15 next year. But after that, Let’s Go will need to find another publisher.  read more »

Rudy Giuliani said it's "fundamentally irresponsible" to set a date-specific timeline to withdraw troops from Iraq.

Eliot Spitzer wanted to borrow millions of dollars and spend it on pet projects for legislators.

Bill Thompson said some landlords got tax breaks from the city they didn't deserve.

The city may open a jail in Brooklyn and double its population within five years.

Andrew Cuomo issued a legal order requiring medical labs to get written consent before performing certain genetic testing.

Eliot Spitzer's budget director, Paul Francis and Assemblyman Richard Brodsky of Westchester had a lively exchange about school funding.

State lawmakers delayed releasing a list of member items.

The Daily News combed through the state budget and found some pork.

Instead of $7,000, Con Ed is now offering $9,000 to businesses affected by the blackout.

Newsday's editorial board supports the proposed $2 tax on cigarettes in Nassau, Suffolk and six other counties.

New Paltz Mayor Jason West's runningmate is out of the race. [corrected]

New Jersey's pension fund for teachers has some accounting issues.

John Edwards is gaining on Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.

"The same hardheadedness he displayed at Harvard permeates his prescriptions, which tilt away from the pie-in-the-sky toward the modest and achievable," writes TNR's Martin Peretz of the book written by his one-time Harvard student, Chuck Schumer [subscription].

And Keith Richards says he snorted his father's ashes. UPDATE: Richards said he was joking.

-- Azi Paybarah

Laurence Tribe, the celebrated liberal Constitutional scholar, was looking at a black plastic &ldquo  read more »

Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith just said that his conference is going vote Martha Stark for comptroller.

Here's a snippet of the exchange Smith had with a radio reporter who asked why they're backing Stark.

Smith: "It's a conference decision."

Reporter: "But why is she more qualified than the other two?"

Smith: "Because Martha Stark is the person we voted for."

Reporter: "I didn't ask why, who you voted for. I asked why is she more qualified than the other two?"

Smith: "Did you look at her background?"

Smith wasn't much clearer when addressing the claim that two Republican senators were ready to switch parties, which would give the Democrats control of the Senate and make him majority leader. Citing the theoretical notion of "Zones of Potential Agreement" he said he learned about at a seminar at Harvard, Smith said that some other members of the legislature were "in the zone."

He declined to name names.

-- Azi Paybarah

The power of Louis Begley’s Matters of Honor sneaks up on the reader softly.  read more »

Simkhe accuses me of ignoring a lot of other leftwing Jews' critiques of the neocons, and assuming I'm the first Jew to notice. I'm sure you're right; it's not a discourse I'm that familiar with. One thing I'd note is that I talked to Phyllis Bennis a couple years back and, yes she knows the issue better than I do, but she also said she wasn't bringing her Jewishness into it, it's an American issue, she's talking to Americans. One thing I'm trying to do is bring my Jewishness right in, figure out my own Jewish American identity in the process...

Tough Dove hits me for going over the line in the dual loyalty post. He and I go way back, we were young Jews at Harvard together. I consider him a friend. He says I'm unleashing plagues by using such language. Toughdove and I had lunch together a few months ago and he stated a similar fear at that time.

The first thing is, Toughdove is a political activist. I admire his work, which he refers to. He's in the liberal community, he's been sweating away at this issue for a long time before I even came around. Hats off to him. I'm not a political activist, I'm a writer. I'm interested in ideas here, and not as worried about the political consequences as I am about where the truth lies. Toughdove is holding the possibility of pogroms over me; a, I don't see them, and b, I feel as if Toughdove is failing to register the tremendous difference between Jewish status in America and the history of the diaspora in Europe from ghetto to emancipation to marginalization to extermination. I think our experience here is altogether a new thing, and really does challenge Jews to redefine their sense of their separateness from the goyim. It's a challenge to Jewish consciousness, and it's huge, sociologically.

On the ideas, I don't think Toughdove is responding to the point, which I would sharpen here: I don't think a Washington thinktank should tell us to invade Iraq based on the views of someone who is voting in both Israel and the U.S.—without telling us as much. I don't think the New Yorker should be running pieces on All the good reasons to invade Iraq by a guy who served in the Israeli military, without telling us that. That to me is over the line. I love a pluralist America. But Toughdove is deluding himself if he thinks the debacle in Iraq does not legitimately open the door on a (yes, emotionally charged) issue: How much the U.S. has conflated Israel's interests and our own, to our detriment. Sorting those interests out, when the Middle East is afire, is honorable work.

I bridle at Toughdove's claim that certain ideas are off limits because racists and antisemites have espoused them. That is anti-intellectual of him. Tony Judt has been eloquent on this point. I won't be bound by that type of blackmail—especially when so many people are suffering in Iraq. The liberals in Toughdove's camp who would quiet me here are shielding themselves from the tremendous negative consequences of the neocons' ideas. They worry about some possible pogrom in America; well thanks to a lot of causes Americans now need to examine, there are pogroms right now, killing far more people than the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, in Iraq. I bet Toughdove's children are not in any danger of dying in Iraq.

One other point. As I said, Toughdove went to Harvard, i.e., he gained Establishment certification. Two other liberal Jewish friends of mine from Harvard have written important pieces about Walt-Mearsheimer, the latest being Jim Traub in the New York Times Magazine the other day. Both these pieces, ala Toughdove, have written off as highly questionable/antisemitic the two scholars' questioning of the morality of Israel's founding. W-M dared to bring up the expulsion of the Arabs in '48 and said, Hey guess what, Israel isn't lily-white here—but we still believe there was a moral basis for its founding and that it has a right to exist. Both pieces I'm referring to (the other was in the NYRB) then quoted Israeli historian Benny Morris, who feels, angrily, that W-M had misused his historical work. Both pieces accepted Morris's view to argue that W-M are out of line.

I think this is an intellectual shortcoming. The treatment of the Arabs in the '48 War of Independence is something that American intellectuals should consider fully for themselves, that American Jews ought to know about, and Americans generally. Benny Morris isn't the only informant here; there is Norman Finkelstein, Shlomo Ben-Ami (in Scars of War, Wounds of Peace), and many Arab writers. But Jewish American writers routinely dismiss the issue out of hand. I'm not talking about the right of return per se, I'm not talking about the failure of Arab states to absorb the refugees in the last 58 years, I'm not talking about suicide bombers. I'm talking about a simple historical question: What befell these people? And what did we do in the U.S. to foster it?

In the liberal U.S. Jewish community, there's a real inability even to look at this because of the concerns about the political consequences. Joseph Lelyveld, the former executive editor at the Times, and author of a powerful book against apartheid (Move Your Shadow), 2 years ago published a memoir, Omaha Blues, where he talks about his Zionist father Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld's effort in the 1940s (underwritten by the nascent Zionist lobby) to discredit opposition to the formation of a Jewish state that came from my intellectual ancestors: assimilationist (or integrationist, as Rabbi Elmer Berger put it) non-Zionists and anti-Zionists within the Jewish community in the U.S. In his memoir, thoughtful Lelyveld never really considers the actual consequences of his father's actions. It's a matter for celebration, presumably. And yes, I grew up celebrating Israel's founding; and not knowing anything about al-Nakba, what the Palestinians call their catastrophe.

Acknowledgement of this catastrophe in our discourse would actually go some way toward healing the tremendous rage, and wounds, in the Middle East. That's the intellectual dereliction; let's open this up for discussion; thank you W-M! We're Americans, proud and free! Last night I met a young Palestinian Arab living in Syria, lately come to the U.S. on a State Department scholarship to study. He has a private dream. That one day he can achieve a status in this country that will allow him to visit the village his parents and grandparents described to him, growing up, a village they fled in war out of fear of massacre. He just wants to see it. Right now, he is stateless and angry. Can American Jews not understand his feelings of displacement?

I've just gotten a copy of a 79-page paper called "Setting the Record Straight: A Response to Critics of 'The Israel Lobby'" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. The scholars began circulating the rebuttal privately in December but have not published it on-line, I gather, because they are working on a book about the lobby and are trying to keep some of their powder dry till publication. Nonetheless, the paper is getting around. I find it exciting, and will be referring to it in days to come.

On first reading, my chief response is (surprise) positive: the paper humanizes Walt and Mearsheimer, the voice is warmer and more intimate than their stunning original of last March. You have the feeling here of two minds struggling through a difficult subject. For instance, the authors say that it was former Harvard Dean Walt's decision—not Harvard's—to remove the Harvard logo from the on-line Kennedy School version of the original after newspapers began referring to the paper as "the Harvard study," but that given the great symbolism attached to this gesture, it was a mistake, and illustrates the saying, no good deed goes unpunished.

The sense of intellectual engagement here is thrilling. The tone is, Here is what our critics have said, here's our response. W&M itemize a wide range of critical arguments, and detail them, including the Forward's assertion, "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews." And while they don't give an inch, really, the respectful debate they are pursuing ennobles them and honors the contributions of Benny Morris and even Alan Dershowitz—far more than Dershowitz, who slimed these guys, deserves. For instance, there is a shocking quote in here from Dershowitz on MS/NBC, saying that W&M "copied" their words from neo-Nazi websites. Thus vilified, some people would threaten to sue. These scholars take the argument on calmly. God bless America.

Something else that humanizes the document is the section at the end titled, "Our Mistakes." O.K., a number of these are penny-ante, still the tone is humbling. "...there are places where our choice of words could have been clearer or more nuanced... although we went to some lengths to demonstrate that we harbor no animus towards Israel or its more ardent defenders in America, it is possible that some of our discussion did not make this point as forcefully as would have liked. First and foremost, we regret having capitalized the word 'Lobby' in our original article..." Etc.

The paper concludes with a moving statement about the controversy. The ferocity of the attacks "offers additional evidence of he lobby's efforts to create a climate that discourages questioning of its actions, Israeli policies, or the U.S.-Israeli relationship. This situation is not healthy for American democracy." Hear, hear.

But now the anger over their publication seems to be dissipating, and what they had hoped for is coming to pass: a discussion of the ideas on their merits. Myself, the March day that a friend first emailed me W&M's paper and I read it through at my desk with my eyelids glued open was a great day. I had long felt constrained by the lobby, it had limited my work and freedom. W&M had a liberating effect.

I'm actually shocked that Niall Ferguson, a Harvard professor, used Tolstoy's opening line from Anna Karenina, "All happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," as the lead of his review of a book about business dynasties in my latest New Republic. It's shocking that Ferguson would display such laziness in a leading magazine, shocking that he seems to regard the use of the thought as original—it provides his tagline, too, of course—and shocking that the New Republic let him get away with it.

I suppose I ought to have known. I'm still sore at Ferguson over the lazy lecture he gave at Yivo a few weeks back, on a hot topic, Jews & Money, which turned out to be all cliches and chestnuts and threadbare Scottish homespun.

Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan has a message for New York lawyers.  read more »

Harvard Law School dean Elena Kagan has a message for New York lawyers.    read more »

Author photos are never on oath, but George W.S. Trow’s make you wonder.  read more »

Author photos are never on oath, but George W.S. Trow’s make you wonder.  read more »

Rep. Charlie Rangel, speaking at a Crain's breakfast in midtown this morning, shared his thoughts on the draft and some Ivy League students.

"I spoke about the draft at Columbia, Harvard and Brown. These kids don't even know there's a war in Iraq."

It doesn't sound like he's ready to let go of the issue any time soon, despite the near-unanimous lack of support he's received for a proposal to reinstate the draft. And Rangel, a decorated war veteran, will have the ability to make things increasingly uncomfortable for his newly empowered Democratic colleagues every day that goes by without a coherent alternative position on how to deal with Iraq.

-- Azi Paybarah

In Esau's Tears, a study of antisemitism, UCal/Santa Barbara prof Albert Lindemann quotes Harvard scholar Ruth Wisse as saying that antisemitism functions "independent of its object." That is, it's a malady that has nothing to do with the reality of Jews. But then Lindemann notes that Wisse herself says that the "dynamism" of Jews in the 19th and 20th century has been "unparalleled." Wisse would know; she is a Harvard scholar whose son lately married Joe Lieberman's daughter, and her in-law is now one of 13 Jewish senators.

Thirteen Jewish senators. 13 percent, exactly ten times the actual JEwish population percentage, of 1.3 percent. Jews are an elite, no one can deny it, and the cool thing about America, if you believe in it, as I do, is that America doesn't mind that they are elite. America respects subcultures; it understands that Jewish achievement is a reflection of Jewish culture of learning. At a time when Ruth Wisse and Gabriel Schoenfeld and a host of others are wringing their hands about the new antisemitism, the number of Jews in the country's most exclusive club, the Senate, leaps by 30 percent.

Last night Yivo Institute on W. 16th Street hosted a talk by the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson on "Jews and Money." How excited I was to hand over my $15. The center dedicated to the study of Yiddish-speaking Jews was bringing in a heavyweight prof, a biographer of Rothschilds and Warburgs, to anatomize the culture of Jewish success.

What a fizzle. Niall Ferguson was overawed by the SRO New York audience and his Lazard Freres intoducer, an affable machine in a too-long red tie, and did not venture one bold thought on the matter. Most of his talk seemed aimed at gaining the audience's approval by showing that he regarded the alleged affinity of Jews and money as anti-Semitic stereotype from Europe in the 1800s. Jews were no different from other ethnic minorities: Armenians in Turkey, Parsis in India, even Asians at Harvard today. O.K., but what are the facts? How wealthy are Jews? How much are "Wong and Chang," as Ferguson blithely caricatured his top students at Harvard, worth? I read the ad: This was not a talk about history or aspiration but money. Ferguson offered zero data, that's 0 data, on wealth in the U.S. today and confined himself to Germany during Weimar, where he stated Jewish overrepresentation in German elites was on a factor of 33 (to 1, was implicit; his statistics were sadly vague).

The talk took a safe slide at the end into the matter of intermarriage—again, not what Yivo said he was talking about when it asked for my $15, and again in historical terms. Ferguson said that in the 1920s, Hamburg (50 percent) and Berlin (43) had the greatest rates of Jewish intermarriage in Central Europe. Why? Was it the girl wanting to marry in, or the boy marrying out? The novelist/sociologist did not show up for this talk. Though Ferguson said, intriguingly, that high intermarriage rates were a motivator for Nazi ideology, Hitler wanting to purify Aryan blood from "self-assimilators."

Intermarriage allowed him to conclude on a homiletic note that was calculated to please the (Jewish) crowd: "Jews don't necessarily gain much from ceasing to be Jews."

How would you feel if you bought a ticket to a show called "Angelina Jolie Nude" and the guy got out pictures of Angelina as a baby, and naked pictures of her baby? Sore. This is actually a fascinating subject. After all, it was Marty Peretz, the head of Yivo's board of overseers (who had taken the stage first to charmingly introduce Ferguson and the Lazard machine), who warned in the New Republic, when Larry Summers exited Harvard, that it had lost several $100 million gifts. Who did he mean? Harvard, where Ferguson works, has also been subject to Jewish blackmail over former dean Stephen Walt's brave statements on the Israel lobby. Can we talk about this? I guess not; not even Yivo is safe.

Niall—Nile? Kneel? Nail?—said that the true affinity is of Jews for knowledge, that once they have money, they move on to scholarship. He had little more to say on this point either. I thought he was biting his tongue. The only time he seemed halfway free in his expressions was when he said that his own brand, the Scots, tend to dominate England's elites, and had incurred "flickers of resentment" but no expulsionist agendas.

"They know they can't do without us!" he said, with the one emotion he forked over for my $15: pride.

That's what I think about the position of Jews in the American power structure: They know they can't do without us. This is an idea worth considering. I could have stayed home and read a scholar that the hashslinging Ferguson seems not to have read: the great Yuri Slezkine, who has studied the ways that Jews have been/are specially suited to modernity, in contrast to Parsis, Armenians, Scots, Changs and Wongs.

P.S. An interesting idea came up in the Q-and-A. Before he was shouted down, a speechifying questioner said that the ghettos in Eastern Europe and Paris, which were resistant to intermarriage, may have grown out of a desire by Jews themselves to stay apart. There is of course a segregationist element in Jewish organizational life today: the program of Jewish day schools and Jewish camps, aimed at preventing intermarriage. In fact, Peretz might have been endorsing this program in his introductory remarks, when he said (quoting Stephen Greenblatt) that Jews, having done so well at so many aspects of American life, from making money to being doctors and politicians, should do a better job of living as Jews. A pox on intermarriage. What about the poor shiksas?

The Jack Sprat Law    read more »

The Jack Sprat Law  read more »

One great thing about blogging is it reveals a writer's true nature, flaws and all. (Like my flakiness; I try and ground myself but there it is; I think in Kabbala they would say I am too much in my chochma). The latest evidence of this is Marty Peretz's pro-Israel blog, the Spine. Peretz is warm, funny, passionate and charismatic (I've met him), but there's something inevitably superficial and vicious, even scurrilous about him. The dictionary defines scurrilous as coarse abuse, and that's a manner Peretz is comfortable with, more comfortable with than ideas. Note his attack on George Soros and Morton Halperin for daring to launch an anti-AIPAC lobby. His argument boils down to the claim that he saw Halperin "brown-nosing" at a party at Harvard once (as if this were a significant character flaw; brown-nosing is alas the air that the meritocracy, and all other -ocracies, have to breathe), and that Soros doesn't know "shit" about Israel. Scatology 101.

The real fascination here is that in spite of Peretz's repeated dismissals of these events as inconsequential, it appears that Israel's American critics, harder and softer (from binational staters to Rabin-followers), are seeking a unified front on the left and—supplying further evidence for Walt and Mearsheimer's groundbreaking paper—the news of the anti-lobby is in Israel's leading papers, but not here.

To judge from What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, Michael Bérubé, a literature professor at  read more »

Forget the baseball rivalry: The real Boston–New York dispute is over bragging rights to Leona  read more »

Forget the baseball rivalry: The real Boston–New York dispute is over bragging rights to Leonard B  read more »

At the Core Club launch party for 02138--the magazine dedicated to the unity of the Harvard experience--attendees fell neatly into separate categories. Magazine staffers walked around wearing square pins affixed to their lapels, with their names and "02138" engraved on them. Their flacks hovered, making sure that Bill O'Reilly was ushered in with the appropriate amount of warmth ("Bill!"). Members of the magazine's "Harvard 100"--a list mixing Harvard College dropouts with Harvard Business School grads with quickie Kennedy School students such as O'Reilly--seemed bemused at the attention, and at the two flat-screen televisions beaming their names, occupations, list numbers, and photographs in a constant loop. Tall, thin, beautiful women sipped white wine and didn't discuss where they'd gone to school. Men in dark suits said they were in "private equity." "All the girls here are 6 feet tall and dressed to kill!" one of them said.  read more »

TEDDY: I woke up last Sunday in a dorm room in Harvard's Dunster House, logged into facebook.com and noticed a recently published photo album entitled, "Austen and Tito's Wedding!!! Location: East Hampton." It wasn't the first album of this nature I'd encountered. I contemplated waking up my lady friend, who is Harvard class of 2008, to show her the album and quite possibly ask for her hand in marriage, but instead I sat at the foot of her bed and watched her sleep. I figured she might need to get a few core requirements out of the way before officially agreeing to tie the knot, and in our case, jump on a sheet of glass as a symbol of our place in the Jewish tradition. I was surprised by the marriage of Austen and Tito--though I had actually read a short story written by the bride a year before confirming their love.

Perhaps because I had just spent a cramped night on an extra-long twin bed in a college dorm room, I just could not imagine myself on the altar in the Adobe Photoshop of my mind.  read more »

Yesterday, The New Republic introduced its readers to The Open University, its "first-of-its-kind blog, featuring America's top academics on today's top stories." As promised, there are lots of big-name professor types--the University of Chicago's Cass Sunstein, Harvard's Steven Pinker--and they've already taken on such weighty topics as "ideological amplification" and the demise of the HBO series "Deadwood."

Also among the contributors is deposed Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who ran afoul of female academics by speculating that women might be underrepresented in the science departments because of their inherent limitations. And it looks like the laboratory isn't the only place where the fairer sex isn't pulling its weight: A quick count of the 20 contributors turns up 17 men and 3 women: Harvard Professor Elisa New, Princeton Professor Christine Stansell, and Manhattan Institute Fellow Abigail Thernstrom.

Asked how TNR's newest blog wound up looking so old-school, the publication's online managing editor Adam Kushner said the magazine had tried to court more lady contributors.

"We did invite quite a number of women professors and some of them turned us down," he said. "The original conceit of the plan was roughly 50-50. I think we cast a lot of invitations all over the place.

"So we're not happy with the balance right now, and we've already been looking to improve, and we hope to improve," he said.

-Lizzy Ratner

A good exposé is irresistible, especially if it reveals the ugly side of something pretty and burst  read more »

Jason Horowitz did what I asked someone to do, stuck Israel right into the Connecticut Senate race:

Asked specifically if he felt that the wave of opposition to his candidacy had anything to do with his religion or his support for Israel, Mr. Lieberman paused, stepped toward the blue sedan that would speed him to a meeting outside of Hartford and said, "That's too big a question to answer on one foot. We should come back to answer that one."

As I reported for the Nation, Bernard Steinberg, director of Harvard's Hillel center, brought this issue up unprompted to me: "I talked to someone in Harvard development and asked what the fallout had been, and he said, 'It's been seismic.'"

Martin Peretz in The New Republic, "anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish animus"), desires to punish the university for Summers's departure and so plays the money card. "...[M]y own impression of wealthy alumni who were once my students is that Summers made them more generous... I know of at least three gifts in the $100 million range that were very likely to materialize and now are dicey."

"I got kicked out of Aspen.... In early 2002 they held a conference on relations with the Muslim world. For two days nobody mentioned Israel. Finally, I said, 'Look, this is a Soviet-style debate. Whatever you think about this issue, the entire Muslim world is shouting about it.' I have never been asked back." In 2004 Lieven published a book, America Right or Wrong, in which he argued that the United States had subordinated its interests to a tiny militarized state, Israel.

Women's Wear Daily has filled one of its openings on the media beat with Irin Carmon, a 2005 Harvard graduate and freelance journalist.

Most recently, Carmon has been writing a travel column for the Boston Globe, and has freelanced for the New York Times, Village Voice, and The Buenos Aires Herald. At Harvard, Carmon was an editor of Fifteen Minutes, the weekend magazine of the Crimson.

--Gabriel Sherman

On Charlie Rose, that is. The outgoing Harvard President was on for an hour, rebroadcast just now. It was interesting to see him up close at last. Some observations:

Summers seems a business executive by temperament. He's too tan and doesn't miss meals. He's bold. The strongest impression of the hour was how often he rode right over Charlie Rose when he tried to make a point, or cut in. Summers's voice would rise and Rose would have to shut up. An executive's way. It's kind of amazing that Harvard wanted him, but I guess this has a lot to do with money.

Summers lacks tone. His accent is unfinished, reminds me of middle-class friends from Baltimore who never became that worldly. He has that "dt" problem—pronouncing "t's" with an extra consonant in there. The lack of tone extends to his ideas. He has an executive's impressive grasp of large ideas, forward-thinking ideas—to his great credit, he has no problem with the vision thing—but lacks subtlety. There was no sensitivity or elegance to his expression.

Summers is unhealed. He had worked on some smooth turns about how it was his fault too for being too aggressive, and he didn't handle things well, but when it came down to it, he couldn't really talk about what an abrasive personality he is. Rose seemed to me to actually dislike Summers, which is rare on his part, and kept pushing Summers to take responsibility for his lack of finesse. "You were Treasury Secretary, you should have understood the fishbowl," he said. Or he pushed Summers about his highhandedness and, using the third-person to refer to Summers, said, "You wonder... for all his brilliance.. he may not be the world's most—whatever the offense was." He meant "arrogance," a word Rose also managed to drop in. Summers didn't cop to it.

The only individual in the Harvard community he spoke of in the 50 minutes I watched was a 19-year-old student who had had the temerity to challenge Summers's data head-on in a class. Summers admired the kid, but I thought it was narcissistic. The kid plainly reminded Summers of himself.

I also think Summers misrepresented the forum for his controversial comments about women and science in January 2005. He repeatedly called it "a seminar." Later: "a private academic seminar."

But per the Washington Post, it was "a speech... at a session on the progress of women in academia organized by the National Bureau of Economic Research." According to the Boston Globe, which broke the story, the conference, on women and minorities in the science and engineering workforce, was "a private, invitation-only event, with about 50 attendees. Summers spoke during a working lunch." Not exactly a seminar.

P.S. In the New Republic this week, Martin Peretz, sore over Summers's departure (which he ascribes in part of course to "anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish animus"), desires to punish the university for Summers's departure and so plays the money card. "...[M]y own impression of wealthy alumni who were once my students is that Summers made them more generous... I know of at least three gifts in the $100 million range that were very likely to materialize and now are dicey." Note to journalists: always be vague when throwing around the $100 million figure, throw in an "at least" or two. You don't want anyone to try to pin you down.

In 1959, in Torremolinos, on a break from a failing academic career and a year after the end of his  read more »

Former dean of Harvard College Harry Lewis loves to quote old documents about the purpose of liberal  read more »

“We don’t consider ourselves an alumni magazine in the traditional sense,” said Bom Kim, Harva  read more »

In 1959, in Torremolinos, on a break from a failing academic career and a year after the end of his  read more »

“We don’t consider ourselves an alumni magazine in the traditional sense,” said Bo  read more »

Former dean of Harvard College Harry Lewis loves to quote old documents about the purpose of liberal  read more »

Commenter Miriam Reik points out a significant hole in my reporting from Newport yesterday:

I wish Weiss had reported the answer given to the Lt. Commander's question about "how the Palestinians can combat the Israelis' foreign influence in the United States." Maybe it wasn't answered, but it is a key question that needs to be engaged if US foreign policy is to return to normal and a healthy relationship with the Arab/Muslim world.

The answer given at the War College by Harvard professor Stephen Walt:  read more »

Arthur Sulzberger Jr. urged SUNY New Paltz grads to stick to their guns and have courage.

Here is a simple test of the Times courage. Stephen Walt and Kaavya Viswanathan are both Harvard authors who published the most significant writing of their lives this spring. Go to the Times site, the search box, and type in their names for the past 90 days. "Stephen Walt" : Seven results. One article, six letters. Now type in Kaavya Viswanathan : 33 results. Looks like most are articles: about 20.

Of course, Viswanathan is the 19-year-old sophomore whose plagiarized novel, called Opal something, became a bestseller, then a scandal among the chattering classes (including moi).

While Walt is the 50-year-old Harvard dean who co-authored the bombshell paper on the Israel lobby that is being passed among government ministers around the world, is the talk of the State Department, and has (even the Forward will tell you this) "triggered an escalating debate on the influence of Israel and Jewish organizations." Nope, The Times can't touch that with a bargepole.

Finally someone has done the article I wanted to read long ago: What is Harvard's reaction to the Mearsheimer-Walt paper on the Israel lobby (which was half-produced on the shores of the Charles, where co-author Walt was a dean).

The LA Times sent the redoubtable Eve Fairbanks to report, and she came back with stunning news:

Instead of a roiling debate, most professors not only agreed to disagree but agreed to pretend publicly that there was no disagreement at all. At Harvard and other schools, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper proved simply too hot to handle -- and it revealed an academia deeply split yet lamentably afraid to engage itself on one of the hottest political issues of our time. Most professors I reached wouldn't speak on the record about the flap because they didn't want their feelings to become known on campus....

Most fishily, one Kennedy School professor who had previously gone public with his opinions clammed up completely, explaining cryptically to me that even chatting off the record about the paper isn't "the right thing for me to do at this time." Another senior Kennedy School professor admitted that he was baffled by the dearth of discussion of the paper. "We debate everything else here," he said.

This is too bad, and underscores what I wrote the other day about the NYTimes coverage of the paper. Here is one of the most important ideas to come along in years, and people are afraid of it still—the very people who should be doing the hard intellectual labor of exploring Walt-Mearsheimer, and saying what is true and not, and taking their ideas further, as I think they should be taken. That is hard and important work, and it's not happening.

I think the reason is because actually, and in spite of Eliot Cohen and Jerrold Nadler and Alan Dershowitz's denunciations, a lot of people agree with the paper. They may be afraid to say so outright, but the paper has greatly empowered leftwingers, and critics of Israel. Made them feel that their voices count, that they can play a role in the debate. Obviously that interpretation reflects my point of view, opposed to the lobby, but I'd point to Col. Larry Wilkerson's comments at the Middle East Institute. The former chief of staff to Colin Powell said that he had assigned the paper at the two schools at which he teaches, George Washington and the College of William and Mary, and he'd gotten "pushback" at both schools for even bringing the paper up. But he had a sly smile as he said it. The downfall of the neocons that we are all observing now—they appear suddenly to have become outsiders in an Administration that must regret the Iraq adventure—is related to this. Yes, I know: radioactive.

Good Morning America executive producer Ben Sherwood has resigned from ABC, according to three network sources. Sherwood, who agreed to the terms of the resignation in a meeting Thursday with ABC News president David Westin, will leave the network October 1, the sources said.

Sherwood, a Harvard graduate, Rhodes scholar and the author of two novels with a third forthcoming, has run the second-place morning program for two years--the two most successful in the show's history but still deflating ones, ratings-wise. During a period of high dawntime drama last May, the broadcast crept to within 40,000 viewers of NBC's long-dominant Today show, but has since fallen into a protracted slump. Nielsen Media Research released its sweeps ratings data today, showing that Good Morning America ended May 800,000 viewers behind its rival Today.

Sherwood is leaving behind a seven-figure contract, network sources said. He will return to his hometown of Los Angeles, where his wife is the co-chairman of Imagine Films and where he has an ailing parent, said two people close to Sherwood.

The relationship between Sherwood and GMA anchor Diane Sawyer is rumored to have soured in recent months, as ratings continued to slip. Last week's promotion of GMA anchor Charlie Gibson to the World News Tonight anchor chair put further strain on the ailing broadcast.

Still, a top ABC executive said the network will be sad to see Sherwood go and that he has "an open invitation to return to ABC News." In the meantime, the executive said, Disney will endeavor to find a role for Sherwood within the company that he can fill in California.

"We would like nothing better than for Ben Sherwood to continue to be the executive producer of Good Morning America for a long time to come," the executive said, "but that is not in the cards."

--Rebecca Dana

The keen reader will note that I complain about having gone to Harvard, all the way to the bank. O.K. But I was a University of Michigan student trapped in a Harvard student's body.

Here's my latest complaint. According to my calculations, by 2032, Harvard will be putting out more self-referential material for alumni on a weekly basis than the volume of The New York Times. At right is what came into my household just this week. There's a whole new magazine called The Yard. I think they should go daily soon, The Harvard Times.  read more »

My most successful item on this blog, to judge from comments, was called Harvard's Plagiarism Scandal, and was successful for two reasons, because I brought up issues of racism in the Kaavya Visnawathan case, and because Roger Ailes, the political strategist, zapped me and started an intense conversation. (Thank you, Mr. Ailes.) [Got that wrong too: comment was from a blogger named Roger Ailes--Weiss, 5/20] Here's what he said:

How is this Harvard's Plagiarism Scandal? Ms. Viswanathan didn't write the book for the Harvard Press, or for a course at Harvard. Harvard had nothing to do with her plagiarism or her book deal. Ruth Shalit is a New Republic scandal because the mag published her pilfered prose; Jack Kelley is a USA Toady scanda