Nina Munk at Vanity Fair describes how Harvard spent itself into a hole by imagining that its burgeoning endowment would continue to rise forever. Banking on an ever-rising bubble, Munk lays out how the administrator’s multi-billion dollar plans to recreate Florence in Allston (across the river) became a reproachful, possibly unfunded hole in the ground staring back at its visionaries, who must now, horror of horrors, install coffee and candy machines where once there were leafy cafes, if they are to pull back from the yawning financial grave. Yet it is the inadequacy of the “realignment”, the inability to take the steps which might save Harvard if it comes at the cost of alienating sacred cows that is the most sobering. One is reminded of why history is so tragic. It is because nothing is so impossible to undertake as the obvious.
The fascination of the Vanity Fair article is that it can be read as a parable. If the Titanic was a model of the Edwardian Age, then Harry Widener’s academic descendants have found themselves on another sinking ship of sorts. The fate of Harvard’s endowment closely tracked the nation’s own financial bubble. Here, acted out in microcosm by the Charles were the very follies that were taking place on a national scale. Even the names in the drama were shared, Larry Summers being but one. But there is no sense, in Munk’s article, of being on the Carpathia the night after the iceberg was struck. There is no feeling of relief; instead there is the sense that by the effect of some hideous dimensional machine, the survivors of the microcosmic disaster have been promoted to a higher order world and are fated to repeat with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy their voyage toward yet another mountain of ice on another dark sea.
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Wretchard,
I blundered on the Nina Munk article a day or two ago…I have to say, it made me feel a bit sad.
Harvard is an important, indeed crucially important, institution. I hope it can adjust to the new realities.
Jamie Irons
I cannot believe it is that bad for them. In a couple of yeas, when peoples trust funds are a bit more solvent, they will go around and rattle the cup. Soon they will be flush and they will be right back with the snouts in the air.
I would not be surprised to see the Oama administration throw some serious bucks in the are. I am sure that Harvard made out nicely in the Porkulus package.
The bankruptcies that should be addressed at Harvard are the moral and intellectual ones. If people like Gates and Obama are examples of Harvard, there is a profound problem with that institution. If their alumni had any decency, self respect or common sense, they would be shamed of their alma mater; Fat chance of that.
But it goes beyond that. Many of those “geniuses” on Wall St. who bear responsibility for this “crisis” there are Harvard graduates. It is one thing for Harvard to mismanage their affairs, it is another to deeply screw up the affairs of the nation, and it is quite another thing altogether to expect the taxpayer to cover their sorry rear ends while at the same time condescending sneering at them.
We have not yet heard an apology out of these folks. In fact, after being made whole again from the taxpayers purse they are down there back at it again. It is shameful, the whole business.
The Ivies have in fact become a symbol of much that is wrong with our society.
They are merely a filter for entry into the “New Nomenkaltur” in the “New Soviets” that the Democrats have created here. What a racket. What a con job.
We ought to pass a law that anyone with an Ivie degree may not be involved with government at any level whatsoever.
(We can write in a special dispensation for Wretchard should the need arise.)
Jamie, if Harvard were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, the world would be little damaged. In fact, it would be a better place. It is hardly “an important, indeed crucially important, institution”. Not at all. What a thing to say. It is only crucial to the self appointed elites of the “New Nomenklatur”.
One of the best things that could happen to this country would be to just shut down the Ivies. Period. Their graduates’ arrogant incompetencies do much harm and very little good. It is not just creatures like Obama or Gates–who are after all mere AA hustlers–but ones such as Summers and Reich who demonstrate just how low these institutions have fallen. Perhaps with the coming failure of this administration, places such as Harvard will finally gather the contempt that they so richly deserve.
(Disclaimer: I went to Ivies and taught in them. I have spent more than a little time in Cambridge, both of them.)
I would personally be laughing for days if Harvard ceased to exist. It could not come a moment too soon.
Mr. Fernandez, Have you ever read “Finding God at Harvard” and or “Finding God Beyond Harvard”?. I greatly enjoyed both.
Mongoose: +1 on the refutation of Mr. Irons
Larry Summers and Bob Rubin made the mess at Harvard and the one in Washington. Will no one rid us of these turbulent priests?
Have you ever read “Finding God at Harvard” and or “Finding God Beyond Harvard”?.
No I have not read them. The Amazon review says this collect of “candid reflections explode the myth that Christian faith cannot survive a rigorous intellectual atmosphere”. The early ’80s were a time in my life when God was far more vague yet more immediate than He seems to me now. Maybe it was because He spoke to me as a youthful sinner, and though doubtless I am still one now, I am an older one. The tones are different, though the voice is the same. Back then I held on to God the way a drowning man clings to a life preserver; it seemed that once I let go, then they would have me. But who were they? Well they were the voices who urged me to let go. You opened your eyes and looked around but nothing could be seen. Yet there it was like a doppelganger, visible just out of the corner of the eye.
Near as I could tell they were all the voices which urged me to lay back and enjoy the ride, for that was all there was; that and nothing more and it was my quest for more that was spoiling the moment, and the moment was all that lasted. It was the desire to press on; to ignore those voices, which constituted the spiritual dialogue for me. On that small margin rested the difference between Hope and Resignation. I don’t know whether this is what people mean by a struggle within a “rigorous intellectual atmosphere”. I suspect it is a struggle within all of us, whether we are simple fishermen on an outrigger or men driving to a warehouse stacking job in a battered car. Harvard, I think, is a place where angels in crimson contend with devils in red tights. The resulting clash is much more lively and the utterances done up in better grammar. The conceit is to think that the color or the grammar matters.
I can’t see Cambridge as an evil place. If it was infested with vanity it also brought along a good many to manhood. Ultimately you found what you were looking for when you got there. What you came for was what either saved or doomed you. But that was your lookout.
“if Harvard were to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow, the world would be little damaged.”
Then who shall stare down Cambridge?
Harvard could always do fine but they fell into the very trap they made betting on their infallability along with an ever expanding bubble, and finding new ways to pimp the ride until recruiting beligerent Saudi princes couldn’t pay for the pendulously obese bugets that they created for themselves.
Shame really.
Well, Wretchard. I hope that you cling to God still, and will continue to do so. We all can do little but climb a little more higher on the life-raft. Perhaps the lack of immediacy that you now feel is only this. Those voices you heard were your conscience (and his voice too), I’d wager. That you listened shows us just what sort of man you are. I doubt that Harvard had much of a hand in forging that aspect of you.
I will suggest that your experiences–not to mention your character–is atypical, and of a different time. Harvard has ruined more than it has redeemed. The very notion Harvard represents a “rigorous intellectual atmosphere” in anything other sense than the nominal is risible. “Tediously pseudo-intellectual” or “blinkered secular humanist atmosphere” would be more like it.
A great many most precisely get what they are not looking for, and right between the eyes too. Unfortunately, we all apparently have to live with the result.
Mongoose,
One of the best things that could happen to this country would be to just shut down the Ivies. Period. Their graduates’ arrogant incompetencies do much harm and very little good…
Guilty as charged. (Yale, Molecular Biology and Biophysics, 1969)
Jamie Irons
W – “The tones are different, though the voice is the same.
I remember hearing that voice. I always wonder if all of the angels you see in dreams are really there to help you or to tear you apart…
“Eckhart saw Hell too. He said: The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they’re not punishing you, he said. They’re freeing your soul. So, if you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.”
Annoy: Brown?
Well jamie, smoke em if ya got em.
Seriously, you know exactly what I mean.
” If we accept that we are dead and come to peace with that fact, we go to Heaven. If we cannot admit that we are dead and give into despair, we are doomed to Hell. ”
The movie Jacob’s Ladder is where I heard it first.
http://uashome.alaska.edu/~dfgriffin/website/jacobsladder.htm
Mr Fernandez at #7.
A major attraction to This Place is the faith that’s on ready and unapologetic offer. It provides us out here in the secular society with courage to face the oppressors.
Buckley wrote “God and Man At Yale,” which may well be a good companion volume to the above.
I went to Auburn in the late 60′s. I cant comment on any other place. We weren’t generally interested; to our detriment. It would have made a lot of arguments a shit-pot more interesting. (And more more difficult.)
No institution like Harvard or Yale is indispensable. Auburn on the other hand may well be irreplaceable. War Eagle!
We can celebrate the looming collapse of the New York Times more then that of the Ivies for two reasons.
First because as a corporation the Times is less capable of reform. A school replaces it’s student/customer base who are the bulk of it’s presence, every two to 7 years, depending on the unit considered. The faculty and staff turn over more slowly but senior tenured faculty are a fairly small group and, like with the SCOTUS, a change in Administration and political environment could produce dramatic shifts. The Times is the frozen expression of the personality of Pinch Sulzberger and as such may be the least reformable entity in America.
Second because while the Times is circling the drain due to the technical and market shifts that indicate that their influence would be declining under any circumstances our objections to the influence of Harvard and her peers is personal. The fact is that there is a need, a natural need, for elite educational institutions. If Harvard did not exist we would have to invent it. The problem therefor should not be how to get rid of Harvard but how to reform or replace it.
Why is there a Center for Gender Studies at any school? What legitimate heuristic or analytical purpose is served by diverting scarce resources to such a purpose? Just exactly what have the schools of Education or Sociology contributed to human knowledge in the last forty years? We just had a whole thread that touched on Skip Gates’ racist bailiwick. These and all disciplines should all be subject to periodic review. Chicago, to its’ credit, closed the Library School and the School of Education, which were famous in their day. More regrettably to me they also closed their renowned Department of Geography when they felt it could not keep to the standards expected.
See I only raise two reasons. I am getting better.
The only important, indeed crucially important, institutions east of the Mississippi are some John Deere factories. (Just getting in the spirit of the game)
It seems a long, long time, how sad
That JFK could say he had
The best of worlds with no exaggeration
He told the story with much glee
That now he had a Yale degree
And top of that a Harvard education
But this is now and that was then
And Ivies now, except for Penn
Have drifted far below the radar screen
Too many lefties in the gown
Too many sneers at those in town
They’ve sunk so low that people now have seen
That what once passed for elite schools
Are now just crappy cess filled pools
Where tender young’uns have their brain pans fried
With marxist liberal mumbo cant
From profs who scream their red rimmed rant
Then graduate to stride the world with pride
So Harvard now has an endowment of $30 Billion instead of $40 Billion.
Annual operating costs seem to be only a few hundred million. The big stalled building project is about $1 Billion — let’s call it $3 Billion after Harvard’s best & brightest are done with it.
Is there a problem here?
To those of us in the Great Unwashed, this looks like the sort of issue that a general from the Army Corps of Engineers or a graduate of the University of Idaho could resolve in an afternoon. But then, neither of them would be stuck on stupid.
If the denizens of an elite institution cannot manage the financial equivalent of organizing a party in a brewery, then maybe they are not quite as elite as they imagine they are.
I was once told by a PhD friend of mine, whose son graduated from Stanford (another elite university) that the biggest difference between Stanford and Ohio State was the connections and people that you met and made in your years of matriculation.
I am sure there are fine instructors and learned men and women at Harvard that are unique, but there is truly a finite amount of “learning” that can be attributed to any college or university.
The enduring value of the “elite” universities is indeed the people that one gets to know, and the connections that are made; i.e., the degrees of separation from the movers and shakers of this world. The university that I once attended had an extremely brilliant member of the Chemistry department faculty who would one day earn a Nobel Prize (George Olah). I never had him as an instructor, but those that did and those that worked for him as graduate students were extremely well taught and prepared and had that connection to the Great Man (and he was, and is, too).
There is real greatness, and then there is the faux greatness that reputation is assigned to because of their celebrity or cache (such as Noam Chomsky at MIT or Cornell West, to name two).
So like it was said, if Harvard ceased to exist tomorrow, some other University would take its place as an “elite” school, where it is possible for the common folk to touch the hem of the great people and gain entry into their world. If that is what suits your notion of a valuable life, I guess.
When I read the police report on the Henry Louis Gates thing one thing that struck me as odd was that the Harvard Police showed up with Harvard maintenance people who set about fixing Gates’ door for him.
It turns out Harvard is Gates’ landlord, but the kind of a landlord who pays you around $300,000.00 per year to live in a very nice house in a very nice neighborhood. And gives you tenure on the deal, to boot! He’s a departmental head and sits on the esteemed and well endowed W.E.B. Dubois chair. No way he ain’t making bank on that and isn’t headed for emeritus status once his teaching days are over.
Gates’ home also seems to be the home of his charity, the Inkwell Foundation, which seems to have gone not a little bit awry and has not met its filing requirement for a while. Last time it did it had $177,000.00 on hand. It’s given out $27,000.00 in grants, almost exclusively to Gates’ colleagues at Harvard. That doesn’t count the $14,000.00 in artwork the charity owns.
Anybody want to guess where that artwork is?
The info I quote can be found at the Riel World View website that I won’t link to because of moderation.
What we have here is a rare look into a pampered, swanky lifestyle that’s the closest arrangement to royalty that exists in this country.
It is a sickening, indefensible, decadent, and very hard to explain entitlement given Harvard’s financial crisis much less the general pain being felt thru America’s vast fly-over country. We’re supposed to feel sorry for this elitist’s greivances? Gimme a break.
I think I’ve got to side with Whiskey on this one. If Harvard goes tango uniform, I’m gonna be laughing for a week.
Correction: Riehl World View website for HL Gates reporting.
btw – technical problem: it’s become impossible to edit posts anymore. The text keeps jumping up and down through the editing window and the cursor loses place with the jump. (Windows XP, IE
E. Nigma,
Just remember Stanford is America’s only Junior University. It is in fact The Leland Stanford Jr. University. Named in honor of the deceased son of the railroad tycoon, robber baron and Governor, L.S. Sr. But to really get a rise out of them just look around what has been built on the old family ranch and call it Taco Bell U. The real problem with that place though is that it violates the Iron Law of Academic Excellence, which states that great schools shall be located in places where bad weather and hostile poor neighbors help to drive the students into the library.
Maybe it was because He spoke to me as a youthful sinner, and though doubtless I am still one now, I am an older one.
Lately I’ve been watching Kings on NBC, and it’s surprising to see a drama on Network TV where the characters don’t just talk about God but actually talk to Him. And if God does not literally talk back, He does answer — and when He doesn’t it is sorely missed.
Now, when NBC first put it on last spring I saw a couple adverts for it but they didn’t really tell what the show was about. Kings ruling a modern city, the advert said. OK. Are they Drug dealers? Mafia? Wealthy Plutocrats? Real old style Royal Family? I admit I did not pay close attention to the ads, but the fact that it was a retelling of the story of David and Saul (Silas in the show) did not come through. It was on a few weeks before I read a synopsis of one of the episodes and realized what it was about. The story line sounded interesting, if only to see how it was handled. So I watched the first few episodes on the NBC website. Actually, they’ve done a better job than I expected (though I admit to low expectations). I’m not particularly religious myself and therefore find it intermittently hokey. But with so much betrayal going on (in biblical proportions, you might say) you can’t go too far wrong.
Naturally, it’s been canceled.
But what I found interesting is NBC seemed to avoid getting an audience for the show. I wonder if “the staff” found the religiosity embarrassing and just wanted it to go away. I believe it originally came with advertiser interest — advertisers who probably wanted to reach a certain “audience,” which NBC then refused to get for them. I’m just extrapolating there.
The voices are a metaphor for the realizations that come to us with the force of near-fact. Many, perhaps most humans, are always in a process of inner dialogue with themselves, as if they were completing a jigsaw puzzle, not simply of abstract elements, but of emotional ones and some which lie even beneath that level. And we hear with our whole selves, through sight, sound, even smell, all together and all at once. The whole comes at us like a completed sentence, and a writer simply strives to recast what is really a very complicated piece of information into words. Story=(words)(experience).
I think that if God actually “spoke” to us in natural language sentences the message would have be throttled down to fit the bandwidth of words, which in general cannot carry the freight of human experience. There’s a scene in Cool Hand Luke when Luke enters a church, with the prison guards hot on his tail looking for an answer. He hears nothing in that small chapel and yet gets an answer, and I tend to think that what Luke heard was that there was something in him worth defending; something that should never completely surrender. The was a voice, or near enough.
Harvard seems to be an organization that has more money that it really knows what to do with, and a rather elevated sense of its own value. After a generation or so, absent real-world feedback, the institutional memory that any other condition is even possible dims.
This detachment from reality usually lead to arrogance and hubris – an organizational “Don’t you know who I am?!”. Bad things start to happen.
Rather like GM in the 60′s. Newspapers until a few years ago. Or the Federal government today.
The evidence against Harvard, among others, is pretty compelling. Widespread magical thinking. Political fashion over merit. A sense of aristocratic entitlement. Large sums (in money and prestige) devoted to pseudo academic disciplines, e.g. Gates. Increasing focus on their internal organization, rather than actual education (Dartmouth stacking the Board to preclude materiel alumni input).
This sort of analysis led me to stop making contributions to my University a few years ago.
Cowboy @23
You are not alone. I just went through 3 weeks of computer hell. Problem? I accepted an upgrade of IE7 to IE8. And I too have XP – all on a computer only 6 months old.
After that, I could no longer copy and paste (even with keystrokes) or cut and paste. My backspace and delete keys stopped working. And things did jump around on the page. During that time, I thought Belmont’s edit function was unusable.
The disaster happens when IE8 is combined with XP. (You can google that.) And once IE8 is downloaded with XP, you cannot delete IE8!
So I went to Safari as a default browser, and have had no problems since. Can hardly believe that fixed it all, but it did.
#16 Herb
#16 Herb
I concur and would add as an additional ‘indispensable’ the ‘Old War Skule’ down in the great state of Louisiana.
Geaux Tigers.
Many, perhaps most humans, are always in a process of inner dialogue with themselves, as if they were completing a jigsaw puzzle, not simply of abstract elements, but of emotional ones and some which lie even beneath that level. And we hear with our whole selves, through sight, sound, even smell, all together and all at once.
To follow on Wretchard’s comment, I think it can also happen that the jigsaw puzzle moves closer to completion when one’s inner dialogue is heard and joined by a wise and understanding listener. Jamie doubtless knows what I’m getting at.
I can second Wretchard’s remark that he “can’t see Cambridge as an evil place,” only I would substitute New Haven. For all that we have all taken pot shots at the Ivies in the past few threads, there are some wise and morally good people in them as well as the arrogant and power-hungry.
I came to grad school with a great deal of internal pain and confusion related to growing up in an extended family that resented people with any kind of college education. Apart from an uncle who was a high school principal in the Allentown area, my cousins and I were all first-generation college students. My grad school advisor was (still is) a man gifted in what used to be called the cure of souls as well as learned in his particular specialty. Somehow he was able to enter the confusing Babel of voices inside my head and bring some order out of the chaos. For me, grad school became a process of spiritual as well as intellectual maturation. I’m certainly not saying that one has to go to an Ivy school to find this kind of wise and discerning mentor– I am sure that many BCers have encountered such people in many places and many different walks of life. But like Wretchard, I can say that God can speak to and touch that “something that should never completely surrender” anywhere, even in the Ivies.
Lifeofthemind asks why the Gender, Race, and educational studies departments, why the resources spent on them, etc.
I can answer that with the plotlines for the long-running (7 seasons) WB and CW series “Gilmore Girls” which appealed to teen girls and women alike. In it, the daughter of the heiress who had her at age 16, competes in a snobby all girls prep school to get into Harvard and Yale. She gets into Yale, not Harvard, and while there has a romance with a snobby, rich boy who’s mostly drunk but buys her lots of expensive stuff (like Birkin handbags costing 25K). He’s a media heir modeled on the Sulzbergers and the younger Murdochs. He mostly just drinks and is an a-hole.
Women just loved that plotline, and after several years of stagnation in the ratings, the story of fairy princess at Yale, among rich inherited aristocracy went gangbusters!
Harvard is the epitome of princess fantasies for the White female population, and would-be-princesses study “journalism” (ala the princess in “Gilmore Girls”) or education or gender or race. Mouthing the politically correct cant is all that is required. It’s like a finishing school for young ladies, only with “Chloe Does Yale” (by Natalie Krinsky) as the foul-mouthed, sexually explicit chaser. And yes, there is such a chic-lit book.
It’s easy enough to ridicule Harvard for its mismanagement of the endowment but it’s probably not that funny to those people who donate to the University. Presumably they expect wise stewardship of their dollars. The alumni should be asking some tough questions and demanding results.
Jamie @ 1:
Why? What does that place have that UT Austin or Baylor or Stanford or… does not? Crap. From my view coming from a state run school most of the problems in this country have come from the entitled peckerwoods from the Ivy League. The self appointed elite have just about ruined a once great country.
Like Mongoose says @ 2:
Preach it brother! I for one am exceedingly tired of being sneered at by my supposed betters who can do nothing but disparage us ‘hicks’ in flyover country. Without us, they would starve to death.
Sally, in 1995 Yale alumnus Lee Bass tried to give $20,000,000.00 to Yale and he was rebuffed in the end after much hand-wringing. The problem was that Mr. Bass earmarked his donation to found a chair, much like Professor Gates’ W.E.B. Du Bois chair, for the furtherance of studies in the culture of Western Civilization. His donation was kept for a year or two while they hemmed and hawed, and eventually they returned it (without interest). Western Civ. just didn’t fit in the increasingly radicalized campus climate, and the teaching of such was contrary to the direction of academe.
The offical reason given by Yale was that it could not accept monies with strings. If a donation came with requirements that committed the university one way or another, well that is too much. It erodes the sense of academic independence and can’t be brooked. Yale’s preferred donations were henceforth hoped to be blind donations.
In the article about Harvard that Wretchard linked we see evidence of this same battle at work. Harvard’s endowments are mired with strings. This is once again portrayed as a misfortunate and small minded constraints.
This has been going on for quite a while. Alumni have been trying to donate to what they perceive as “good” parts of these universities exclusively, and they’ve been issuing donations with caveats. Obviously, as in the case with Mr. Bass, they’ve met with mixed success.
So, what do you think the alumni are going to do? Stop giving? Continue giving with caveats? Be good little alumni and start giving blindly?
My prediction is that the universities will win in the end, if it really gets down to crunch time. If somehow Harvard had to make a last ditch appeal to its alumni to shore up the endowment they will bite the bullet. They will not let it go down. Their own personal prestige and social status is joined to it at the hip, for good or ill, and they’ll save it. For themselves and their own status they will save it.
Harvard could save themselves some dinero by firing the black professor who has somehow convinced himself that he’s too good to be arrested, even when acting out inappropriately and in a threatening manner.
The fact tht they choose to have such a person on their faculty *and* that they elect to kow-tow to him by sending Harvard maintenance people to take care of his personal property makes me really not care a lot about any other budgetary problems they might be having.
It would appear that Harvard has reached the same level of elite elevation as Berkeley, and that, as such, they are now part of the problem and not the solution.
(How long do you think it would take for a fiscal recession to affect all of those suddenly unemployed Harvard-educated Masters of the Universe on Wall Street?
36 NahnCee
Here is a link to the Riehl post that Cowboy mentioned in #22 and #23 regarding the possibility of fraud related to Gates’s foundation. Riehl suggests that Gates’s hyper behavior when the police showed up may have something to do with this little matter:
http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2009/07/a-gatesgate-at-henry-gates-bogus-charity.html
Wretchard @ 7:
Amazing. That’s perhaps the best (of many) reasons to return here…how best to say it; how to learn to say what is so deeply felt.
20. Kinuachdrach:
You got it.
Hurray!—Business schools report that the recession and dip in endowments has forced them to rethink their curriculum and change their emphasis towards “critical analytical skills,” and “ethics.” (I still remain cynical)
BUT!—personal experience also evidences (as do reports across higher ed literature) that schools in order to boost enrollements during the economic downturn are turning towards a more “interdisciplinary approach” to the curriculum. This is code for no discipline, no rigor at all and more attacks on a “traditional” (that is valuable and valid) educational canon.
…here’s a couple of interesting current ‘high hits’ (re Harvard’s problem) off a google news search:
from Motley Fool
from Reuters
Plus Professor of Victimology is off to Martha’s Vinyard
En toto, quite a picture.
Western Civ. just didn’t fit in the increasingly radicalized campus climate, and the teaching of such was contrary to the direction of academe.
Preserving Western Civilization is the main function of a University in the West. To depart from this invalidates the very reason such an institution exists.
This departure from this mission is exactly why we are in the mess we are in today.
Again, Universities exist to 1) Teach the works of the great to the mediocre; 2) Inculcate the values and virtues of our civilization to impressionable (and morally wandering) young people; and 3) Teach fundamental intellectual skills and professional knowledge and practices to those who can acquire them and use them properly. These folks at our universities today have stood matters on their heads. They imagine that they are The Great. In fact, thay have so campused entry to their ranks along Marxist lines that it is assured that they are at best mediocrities.They think that they are the home of the great creators and thinkers. It is an absurd notion–pure delusions of grandeur from a bunch of slothful professors who would last not a day in the real world. They have reduced the great accomplishments of Western Civilization to a false history and a cautionary tale. They have supplanted knowledge, reason and learning with jargon and sloganeering. They have twisted sober and rigorous intellectual inquiry into causality, sophistry, cant and frenzied propagandizing. They are knaves and fools, and sooner or later this will have to be dealt with.
To undo this this mess in higher education–and let us not kid ourselves, the transformation of Academe into Marxist indoctrination centers is a very real threat to our civilization–may require legislative action. We may have to force it on these institution.
It cannot go on this way. It just cannot. It is like indulging one’s son by allowing him to sell drugs out of one’s garage.
That Gates has the position he has is an insult to mind, body and soul. This cannot go on. Our “leading institutions”cannot be a place of harbor and support for those who would destroy us. It cannot be tolerated.
One hopes that a combination of the market and the withholding of all government fund would do this, but it may not be enough. The tale of G. Wallace, Kennedy and the Univ. of Alabama comes to mind.
this hellish demon that white Democrats are juuuust barely managing to keep from public view, that is, this thing they have done to black Americans, is dead certain to break out one of these days. Hope i’m still around to relish every moment of it.
A lampost and rope for every hour between Mary Jo Kopechne and OJ Simpson ought to clean up things nicely.
Yes, I think we should all be counting the lifeboats and calculating the right moment to take to them. The messages from the bridge are confused, perhaps deliberately so.
I think of all the social schemes and rackets, to the tune of trillions of dollars and usually half of my working days extracted from me like some Egyptian slave to pay for Harvard grads delusions and I think good riddance and thank god.
F’ Harvard. Yale, Columbia and a hundred other feather merchant palaces.
Has anyone else noticed that Mongoose has, of late, been unleashing fearsome salvos like a USN destroyer?
Go USS Mongoose!
yes –i’m lovin’ it! hope he’s taking his one-a-days & getting some exercise –
but ya gotta beware when you’re on a roll!
Cross posting my Comment at the Riel World thread. Thank you to Cowboy and PA Cat for pointing it out.
——
The abuse of PBS as a shill for projects used to raise many for favored members of the Nomenklatura sounds like a good story.
Gates produces, and is I would think compensated for, two shows. These are promoted by PBS and local affiliates. Other PBS shows, think Charlie Rose, run segments that add to the visibility and prestige of the project. Everyone connected with these programs is paid using charitable or taxpayer dollars. The publicity generated is used as a form of unpaid advertising to support Mr Gates’ for profit business.
Jobs for the boys. It’s the Chicago Way.
Well, a USN Destroyer is not a bad thing to emulate–in the right hands that is.
High praise indeed from the crew at BC, but I doubt that I am worthy of it.
I am royally PO’s by Obama and company and flummoxed by the citizenry’s response to the whole pack of villains. It has pushed aside my normal reserve and caused me to examine my own rectitude. Thus the postings.
I think that all would agree that Wretchard’s postings have been of the highest quality the last couple of months as have the ensuing discussions.
But thanks for the compliment, no better crew around than on the good ship BC–none more exacting either.
I know Wretchard blushes at the notion, but both the general tenor and quality of his thought tend to bring out the better in us all.
I always took the view that knowledge was not the sole property of any one school or group of schools. The underlying principles of any discipline do not depend on where you acquired them. I always worked a little harder to humiliate an adversary from an “elite” school.
Perhaps the biggest mistake of the “elite” is assuming that they are, in fact, elite.
Willie: You hold o this because you are, rightfully, concerned with substance and not appearance.
This would either bewilder or amuse all to many on the faculty at Harvard.
Buddy, well I have laid my share of eggs, I can tell you that.
Mongoose – When you work in the private sector, they expect results. There’s no room for theories that don’t work, or acting “stupidly”.
Tell that to those geniuses down at AIG and Citi.
Seems that the Holy Spirit is capable of whispering or swinging a sledge and everything in between.
The first book is a compilation of lectures the second goes into details regarding the difficulties in establishing Christian fellowship in a university that was founded on Christian principles but prides itself in its secularism today. If you have the time to read just one, please read “Finding God Beyond Harvard”.
See also the Veritas Forum for great mp3s and discussions. There are a couple by Donald Miller there.
Mongoose, keep your powder dry and fire at will bro!!
I sent the Harvard article to my brother who works in administration in academia. I expected him to laugh at Harvard’s arrogance and stupidity but, instead, he made an interesting comment that the worst thing about Harvard’s boom was its effect on other universities. Colleges operate in a market like any other business so when the market leader, Harvard, began investing in facilities and runaway salaries it had a ripple effect throughout the market as they had to do the same (or at least try do do the same) in order to compete (or at least to satisfy their whining faculty who thought they deserved to be paid “market rates”). Unfortunately, they aren’t as well endowed as Harvard so they often borrowed to fund their plans. This impacted not just the Yales and Stanfords of the world but the next tier of top public universities and other privates. As a result, the bubble is busting with great pain across the academic landscape. Not a pretty picture.
I don’t think that attributing the undesirable aspects of our political environment to academia is particularly useful. Nor do I think that changing a few seats in the House is going to right the ship. The problem is much deeper than that. It’s cultural, and I don’t think that the culture will change absent a shift in technology that rewards small cooperative groups and individualism.
Maybe I speak only for myself but the tenor of the comments I regularly see here and elsewhere on other so called conservative blogs suggest that we are stuck in Enlightenment values. I may still revere them but the culture does not. Individualism and the unique value of each individual have been deprecated nearly to extinction. Ask a leftie to define individual liberty and a dollar to a donut his/her answer will encompass some aspect of sexual licentiousness and little else.
American exceptionalism is an historical fact. Our ancestors, from no matter their country of origin, left their homes, families and cultures because they had an inner conviction that they could improve their lives and the lives of their progeny. And they did.
That gene pool still runs strongly but the opportunities for large scale individual achievement have all but disappeared. There is no frontier to settle. No new lands to conquer. Curiosity, courage and ingenuity have no immediately apparent outlet. We celebrate celebrity in sports, entertainment and politics because we still reward achievement even with the knowledge that we will never share the stage.
I don’t think that people have consciously surrendered their individualism so much as they see it as a losing game. When people staked out a plot on the frontier they could see and define what was theirs. They knew they were the only person in the world with the responsibility to make it work. Where does one go today to find that sense of empowerment?
Obama is POTUS because the culture demanded it. With Progressivism you don’t have to feel bad about not taking responsibility for your own life because you never had a fighting chance anyway.
That’s really the fundamental question, PB. “Is the frontier over?” If it is, then best let the technos, incompetent rent-seekers tho they are –run the anthill, and just forget about everything but doin’ a little fishin’ if n when they let ya.
i just think it’s too early to throw in the towel –we’re still innovating like crazy –there’s people alive right now who were on this earth when the Wright Brothers flew. Tokyo and Japan prove we can live fine interesting lives in crowded places so long as we have a few manners and see to world trade.
Compounding the fact that the frontier may have only shifted aspect, is the problem that in giving it up, too soon or not, we’ll never know because we’ll never get it back.
TXProl: they deserve it. If they would have stuck to their missions they would have less problems now. State universities were conceived as institutions to meet the needs of their home states, and mostly staffed by their home states’ citizens, not as showcases. Places like Urbanana, where thay have huge enrollments and multi-million dollar sports complexes, “arts centers” etc., have arrogantly pushed their concept of their mission well beyond servicing the intellectual needs of their state. This isreally a form of communism nestled inside an capitalistic society, and paid for on the taxpayers dollar.
Add on to this the terrible education that they are offering and it really is just a cynical hustle. These people are not entitled to this sort of existence. Further add on to this that they actually influence government policy. Once we understood that academics gave up a level of wealth (and power) to have a measure of freedom and leisure in order to pursue scholarship, and that they paid their keep by teaching. This notion has been abandoned. Salaries now are outrageously high given the output and the perks are beynd belief. Academics have become just another set of welfare clients, particularly at the State University level.
I do not pity them one bit and I doubt that they “resisted” those whining faculty member very much. No one requires them to emulate the Ivies. Thay have bought into the whole bill of goods. Shame on them, and shame on us for letting them get away with it.
They are bankrupting families with the cost of college these days, and for what?
What bothers me about much of this line is the constant reference to the “great men” at one place or another. This is the same logic that will inform the Health Bureau’s rationing decisions. Most of this greatness is self assigned…and based largely on facility with the language…more than the quality of the thought.
Years ago I was impressed by the reputations of the great schools, but every time I met or, heaven forbid, had to work with one of its products, I was less and less impressed. Did I grow? or did they shrink? or more accurately was the place over hyped by the old school tie line? (Oxbridge left the same impressions as the Ivies, by the by.)
Each man starts out with a tool box. Each box is equipped differently. A southern black CAREER construction laborer is a marvel of economy of motion and focus on the task. Good tools used well.
Here’s your huckleberry –the source, the model, the ideal, the comfort, the power and the glory –of the New America Academy.
Duranty was only a man, but his road was and is wide and long and durable. It’s deeper than politics –politics are just an expession of it –it’s really a piece of the human brain. America the Ideal is a different piece. Both pieces are part of every human mind. Thesis and antithesis, which is which –your professor may have some ideas, whether he knows it or not.
Since when is trying to define the problem giving up?
Fighting Obama World in Washington D.C. is in polite terms is at best a rear-guard action and in the more vernacular is pissing in the wind. Cap n Tax and Obamacare are hitting the wall because of the costs, which is all well and good, but I don’t hear anybody saying that they should be buried because they are “wrong.” The notion that every productive American should become less wealthy so that the defined disadvantaged can benefit is perfectly acceptable – so long as it doesn’t cost too much.
My life, my liberty, my pursuit of happiness have already morphed in the popular culture into our lives and our pursuit of happiness. Maybe two world wars, industrialization, immigration and urbanization made that shift unavoidable. It would seem so.
The analogy doesn’t fit exactly but it’s close enough. The last century of the Roman Republic was a period of endless civil wars, enemies lists and executions. For the 400 hundred previous years the culture thrived because there were understood limits to political power. Marius and Sulla crashed through those limits and chaos followed. The culture was unable to handle the shock.
Augustus brought peace and civic improvements and for the next 500 years there was hardly a peep about restoring the republic. There was plenty of noise about lost republican values but it never went beyond that.
I think the 20th Century’s abandonment of civil boundaries had the same destructive effect on Enlightenment values and the Western culture that had grown from them. Whatever we had thought we had learned in the previous 500 years didn’t work anymore.
Whether by design or just because we’re all caught in an historical current Obama World is fragmenting society into protected groups and ideological classes. Making noise about classical values isn’t anymore effective today than it was in 18 AD. I don’t see the Big Idea that can stop that.
I can see how certain technology could break the trend but it doen’t exist yet on an economical scale.
Michael: Oh there are “great men” that shape our minds and civilization, but they were rarely academics, at least in the modern sense of the word, or if they were academics this was generally incidental to their accomplishment. They often are deeply hard to spot when they are alive and working too, particularly outside of the arts.
The point is that you are not going to create an environment that stamps them on demand out for there seems to be no rhyme or reason to how we get them. This is not to say that such men will not pass through these institutions, but they were not the product of these institutions nor is their work a function of their time in them. Often quite the opposite obtains.
But my criticism was more about academics indulging in the fantasy that they were of this group themselves or that modern academia is the place where these great minds and souls naturally abide, and thus demanding entitlement to special treatment. This may be an all too common conceit these days, but in reality this has rarely been the case in history. And, yes, given the prattle about “limited resources” it leads to some chilling conclusions. But this is a moral and imaginative failure of those who would push such solutions on us. It is not an indictment of the notion of having a little humility before greater thinkers, creators and doers than oneself. Nietzsche once said that “Humility before the Great will make you great.” Well, I do not know about that, but it will certainly make you a better person and, should you be a academic, a more reasonable and honest one.
No matter what the size of the Harvard endowment, it is doubtful that they will be the direct source of another Beethoven, Newton, Ambrose or Shakespeare. Those folks might not even get in given how PC these institutions have become. The world does not seem to work that way.
The great advances are mysterious, and yes, some are incremental and do not rely really on “great men”, but some advances–some of the greatest ones–most certainly do. It is really unclear to me that we are any better at recognizing this in our fellows and supporting them than we were at any other time in our past. But we need to be mindful of the fact that a great many advances do come from greater creative minds than most of us possess, particularly as we teach. We are not out there nurturing geniuses, we are teaching what has gone before to people who most decidedly are not geniuses, and what lessons we teach are most often the fruits of greater minds than ours. That is the whole point. When academics lose sight of this then we are in trouble. It is up to “the great” to nurture themselves it would seems.
All of this is not to say that somehow we must place a higher value on their lives, but in most cases this ethical dilemma is an artificial construct and philosophical excessive in the first place. All are God’s creations after all, at least to my way of thinking.
That being said, I am sure that there are folks in Academia that imagine their “brilliance” entitles them to better medical care then some “lesser soul”, and should push come to shove they would just let the “poor rube” wander off to die as they grab his “ration”. That just shows their immorality, vanity and self-importance, not their real worth or importance.
“…how Harvard spent itself into a hole by imagining that its burgeoning endowment would continue to rise forever. Banking on an ever-rising bubble…”
Whenever I see grandiose visions of the future, with mega buildings and spaceports, I wonder who is going to build all of this. What is the likelihood that in 100 years L.A. won’t be a disheveled hovel of old, unkempt buildings strung together with clotheslines and unincorporated taco stands. If a glorious future is to be built then upon whose toil will it rest, the emergent class of welfare hustlers and usurpers of endowment funds? No the government is creating a class of stalwart acolytes and the way to reel them in is to mismanage the economy. Putting the yoke to free enterprise can only be accomplished in a crisis and for now that crisis has come.
Mismanagement has come from our top universities and into our hallowed institutions of state. It starts as a youthful bluster, blossoms into a cultivated arrogance that graduates into deconstructionist larceny.
Our cultural elites abandoned hard work and the creation of hard goods, as their lifestyle was wont to do and drug the rest of the country along for the demise of empire. Harvard MBA’s bean counted us into this fiscal crisis. No one was left behind to do the work of men except for those “immigrants” who’d to the work that the Ivy Leaguers would refuse.
As far as I am concerned no elite education is complete without at least a year of washing dishes in a busy restaurant or walking the fields with a hoe in hand lest they should become aloof masters. I rather doubt that the likes of Professor Gates has ever felt the sting of true discrimination, the one that hands you a shovel and says that you are the bottom of the pile, dig; Po’ little rich man.
Annoy: add to that curriculum: 1) getting the crap beat out of you at least once, 2) getting fired, and 3) spending a night in jail. Would do wonders.
Wrichard writes:
“But there is no sense, in Munk’s article, of being on the Carpathia the night after the iceberg was struck. There is no feeling of relief; instead there is the sense that by the effect of some hideous dimensional machine, the survivors of the microcosmic disaster have been promoted to a higher order world and are fated to repeat with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy their voyage toward yet another mountain of ice on another dark sea.”
Good Lord, Mr. Fernandez, your writing and insights are truly profound.
Yes. Yes. One Euro-western cultural and financial Titanic after another, over the course of a hundred years. Hundreds, thousands, millions of lives and dollars lost in one bubble after another, whether financial, cultural, or military. The preferred solution of the elites: send another ship into the icebergs!
Heroes of their own Greek drama: Obama as classical hero, e.g. in his Denver acceptance speech stage-set; but so close to Oedipus and Creon. With no belief in linear history, and no fear of apocalypse, the post-modernists ensure disaster through their rejection of the reality of the inevitable linear progression of time and thus bring us close to serial apocalypses or even a final apocalypse (channeling Girard’s essay on Clausewitz here). At one time Americans feared mutual assured destruction; now, we enable the madmen (e.g. Khamenei) who devoutly desire, or at least threaten, an apocalyptic climax to history. We have cycled back to September 10, 2001. And Chloe does Yale (not sure how that fits in).
Another nautical disaster analogy: Obama as Captain Ahab, hell bent on pursuing and destroying the “White Whale,” obsessed with the whiteness, the evil of the whiteness of the whale, the whiteness inseparable from the whale. As the climax approaches, the Rachel’s captain asks Ahab to help him in a search and rescue effort for his whaling-crew that went missing the day before – and the captain’s son is among the missing. But when Ahab learns that the crew disappeared while tangling with Moby-Dick he refuses the call to aid in the rescue so that he may hunt Moby-Dick instead. Melville knew America’s tragic pre-occupation with race. There is always going to be an Ahab, tragically pursuing it for one sick reason or another.
So far the country has relied on the Sully Sullenbergers and Arthur Rostrons to save the day, or at least pick up the survivors. How much longer we can count on the skill and kindness of strangers I don’t know.
Via Wikepedia:
“The Carpathia was on its regular route between New York City and Fiume, when early on 15 April 1912 the Carpathia received a distress signal from the White Star Line ocean liner RMS Titanic, which had struck an iceberg and was sinking. Rostron was asleep when Carpathia’s wireless operator, Harold Cottam, by chance left his headset on while undressing for bed and so heard the signal. Cottam ran to Rostron’s cabin to alert him.
Rostron immediately ordered the ship to race towards the Titanic’s reported position, posting extra lookouts to help spot and maneuver around the ice he knew to be in the area. About 50 nautical miles (93 km) separated the Carpathia from Titanic’s position, but the Carpathia was the closest ship to respond to Titanic’s distress signal. Rostron and his engineering crew skillfully obtained the maximum speed possible from the Carpathia, coaxing her up to 17.5 knots – three and a half more than she was rated for. Even so, Carpathia, travelling through dangerous ice floes, took about 3½ hours to reach the Titanic’s radioed position. During this time Rostron turned off heating to ensure the maximum amount of steam for the ship’s engines and had the ship prepared for the survivors; including getting blankets, food and drinks ready, and ordering his medical crew to stand by to receive the possibly injured survivors. Altogether, a list of 23 orders from Rostron to his crew was successfully implemented before Carpathia had even arrived at the scene of the disaster.
When Rostron believed he was getting close to the Titanic, he had green starburst rockets launched to encourage the Titanic if she was still afloat, or her survivors if she was not. Carpathia began picking up survivors about an hour after the first starburst was seen by those in the lifeboats. The Carpathia would end up rescuing 710 survivors out of the 2,228 passengers[1] and crew on board the Titanic; at least one survivor is said to have died after reaching the ship. After consulting with White Star Line managing director and Titanic survivor J. Bruce Ismay, Rostron decided to turn the ship around and return to New York City to drop off the survivors.”
PB, what i meant to get at was not any accusation of anyone giving up, but –well, the word ‘resist’ that O has used at least twice in ref to “those who oppose”. ‘Resistance’ in the sense of futile obstruction of the tides of history, was the tone & inflection. IOW, time is against the frontiersman. This is kind of a bitter pill, as as soon as it is accepted there is no cause to further resist and those who do are mere obstructionists and reactionaries. That’s doom. We need a winner frame. The frontier is still there. Space, the sea, the inner self, the desert, the poles, international comity, the herbal cures of the Urangi tribe, molecular biology, the conquering of cancer –there’s frontiers out the yingyang out there –they are a state of mind –we just need to observe the dialectic and not let ourselves be tricked into framing our own selves the way the Tranzis want us to be –docile and predictable. there, that’s my rant –i probably missed your point by a mile but it wasn’t personal –just me jumping to conclusions.
“One hopes that a combination of the market and the withholding of all government fund would do this …”
You realize, of course, that the current government and its mega-funds are in the hands of the Enabler in Chief who is personal friends and a supporter of the egotistical (and questionable in other ways) professor in question?
The real question is why do we alow Harvard to build up a $30 or $40 billion tax free endowment in the first place when you know all they are going to use it for is ti influence publi descision making in all the wrong ways. It and the other tax free foundations exist without even the control of a privately invested board i.e. stockhoder to give even the tenth generation of worthless offspring of the original founder a name to put on their business cards.
I believe the universities need reform in their corporate govervence even more the than the private sector. Endowments larger than what a school atually needs to survive a very rainy day also need to taxed at the highest existing rates. They should not be sitting in a privileged position when it comes to other investors because they will distort the market.
No sympathy here for Harvard and in fact if I am in charge they are going to be paying taxes on the earnings from that endowment.
I agree with the comments on the essential institutional lack of utility of our “elite” universities; once they get outside of fields that are characterized by quantifiable results. In other words, the farther they get from the iron laws of reality; the more they resemble the function of a football bat.
I do tend to disagree with the idea that once everyone’s trust funds get more flush, that the endowments will flow in once again. I see no indication that, barring the type of systemic change that necessarily involves lamp posts, rope, tumbrels, and pock-marked walls; that such general prosperity will ever return. YMMV.
There will, however, be government money shovelled at the elite institutions; however devalued that money may end up being. But the effect will be to exacerbate the current trends. How much money would go to a hard science program, when the results might say refute the theology of AGW? Instead, expect a kind of Lysenko-ism to take over the science departments; where the results are determined by the strictures of “Obama Thought”.
Enrollment will shrink, precisely because of the role as a gateway to the Nomenklatura. Can’t have the proles contaminating the indoctrination of their betters, further cannot have them getting ideas that they can become one of those betters or maybe even supplant them. Thus, dependency on the government teat will grow exponentially.
As much as it pains me, I have to give a higher rating to the French; for they are ahead of this trend and are better at it. Their École Nationale d’Administration furnishes the “Enarchs” that run all aspects of French government and much of the state controlled segment of their economy. They are as insufferably smug as our Ivy League Commissars, and as devoted to their own ideology of superiority over everyone else. However, they do have a minimal streak of pragmatism that allows them to realize when ideology threatens the Auric Ovum-laying goose; and adjust accordingly before total collapse. Our own Commissars, pushed by the theories coming out of their alma maters and amplified by the propaganda organs of the State [staffed by similar alumni]; tend to think that more strident denial of reality is the solution to the real world.
Perhaps we are in need of a new Gibbon. It is not our Empire that is falling, but our Republic. The question is, whether we have come too close to our equivalent of 44 BC to reverse the trend.
Subotai Bahadur
“The only important, indeed crucially important, institutions east of the Mississippi are some John Deere factories.”
Bob don’t forget the the Harley fatory in York, PA
Joe Hill,
You could make an argument that the American endowed universities are in a position analogous to that held by the English monasteries before Henry VIII ordered their dissolution.
Bohica – Sorry Old Boy but the only good thing that ever came out of Ella’s Shoe or Baton Rouge for that matter was an empty bus headed for Mississippi.
Roll Wave!
Buddy says, somewhat colloquially:
there’s frontiers out the yingyang out there
Buddy, I swear, at times it seems like that in a some where and a some time, you and I have sat and drank beer and scotch together.
May God strengthen your arm, sharpen your eye, and steady your trigger finger.
–back atcha, programmer –yessir, windage & elevation, windage & elevation –
heh –thanks, programmer –same-same –and, windage & elevation!
***
(and as the Bard in The Tempest said)
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
Wrichard’s posts always have great titles, in this case “Flatland.” Wikipedia has a good entry on the novel.
In the case of current politics, I suppose the Dems and Ivies/elites are Flatlanders and Obama the Point, who cannot fathom any dimension other than his own, a point. They cannot comprehend the Sphere.
“Once returned to Flatland, the Square finds it difficult to convince anyone of Spaceland’s existence, especially after official decrees are announced – anyone preaching the lies of three dimensions will be imprisoned (or executed, depending on caste). Eventually the Square himself is imprisoned for just this reason.”
It seems to me Harvard has managed to accumulate a huge endowment, far in excess of what it needs to survive a rainy day and has nothing useful on which to spend it. By useful I mean an investment that actually has a chance of covering its own costs. If Harvard were a publicly traded corporation it would have been saved from its own bad decision making and greed by a “corpoarate raider” who would have bought it and broken it up and sold the pieces to pay the purchase price and in the process returned that excess capital in the endowment to some productive use elsewhere in the economy.
Instead we write laws that encourage the accumulation of under performing assets at colleges and universities and in other foundations. What would Steve Jobs or Google or Walmart for that matter do if they looked in the bank account and found out they had $40 billions sitting there not doing much of anything? They would go into full panic mode. Capital needs to be put to work by capitalists or we all suffer. I mean Harvard is sitting there with $30 or $40 billion and hasn’t even opened a franchise in Chicago or New Haven or the Bay area. What is wrong with this picture???
Of course I done most my actual book learning at a community college in Alaska so what do I know. Nothing that ain’t in any econ 101 book or a first year corporate finance book.
From Joe Hill:
The real question is why do we alow Harvard to build up a $30 or $40 billion tax free endowment in the first place when you know all they are going to use it for is ti influence publi descision making in all the wrong ways. It and the other tax free foundations exist without even the control of a privately invested board i.e. stockhoder to give even the tenth generation of worthless offspring of the original founder a name to put on their business cards.
Actually Joe, I, for the life of me, don’t understand why we throw hundreds of millions of dollars in government grants, student loans, etc to individual institutions, (cumulatively in the tens of billions) to places like Harvard, that violate routinely our citizens rights to free speech and equal protection. We the taxpaying public have let this arrogant bunch of traitorous commies run off with billions in public funds and to make matters worse, we have let them rub our noses in it to boot.
I think all these oh so find palaces of higher learning need to be put on a very short leash financially, and be called to account for their many and massive sins.
Chloe Does Yale fits in because it speaks to an aristocratic, female-centric, rigidity pre-occupied with the modern equivalents of the King’s Balls and such: parties, status, status-climbing through “correct” views and so on, along with fairly decadent behavior unconnected to the outside world.
Meanwhile, technology’s spread means even failing/failed nations like Pakistan and Iran can have nukes, dubious control over them means the death of major Western cities and quite likely, no retaliation until more and more Western Cities die.
The Royal Europe of Kings and Dukes and the “King of Bohemia” ala Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia” died in the trenches of WWI. Amidst shell-fire and gas. The whole of new-Royal America and Europe of Chloe Does Yale and Sex and the City will die in a nuked out NYC, London, Paris, and Boston.
What replaced Royal Europe, with a smattering of popular influence, from London to Moscow, getting more Royal as one moved eastward, was a set of nationalism and socialism, with more female-oriented rule to the West and more male-oriented rule to the East.
It remains to be seen what form the post-nuked Western Cities rule will be in the West, but rest assured that is coming. It will not be Hope and Change, rather quite likely some form of nationalism, ethnic identity, and various forms of both revenge and intimidation. It is quite certain that the “New Girl Order” as City Journal’s Kay Hymnowitz celebrated the hip, fashionable, young single women spending lots of money on luxury consumer goods and embracing careers of hip and fashionable designers, marketers, and so on will simply vanish in the nuclear cinders of NYC and other dead cities.
The new cities will be the new suburbs. So diverse and spread out it’s impossible to nuke more than a fraction. Sprawl is beautiful.
I’d like to take a moment and plug New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Small school, middle of nowhere, awesome education. As long as you want to be an engineer or scientist…
Reading the linked article and the comments has made me surprisingly sad. Here is my first thought. From page 1 of the linked article when Smith, the department chairman tells students about the budget shortfall:
Smith sighed. If only it were that easy. His colleague Evelynn Hammonds, dean of Harvard College, answered this time round: “I’d rather use the words ‘reduction,’ ‘shifting things around,’ ‘reorganizing’—rather than saying something that says ‘cuts,’ which implies you whack the heads off flowers,” she said. “What we’re trying to do is make those kinds of priority-driven changes.”
This pararaph sets the tone for the entire, surrealist article. That a college dean would say something this vapid to a roomful of allegedly-educated people is astonishing. That no one stood up and said, “That’s nice, now will you please give us an answer?” is pitiful. It’s like the scene in “The Hunt for Red October” when the Secretary of State listens to what the Russian Ambassador has to say and responds, “Now can we dispense with the bull?” except NOBODY DID IT. All of these people are going to duck and weave and point fingers and do everything they can — to do nothing, because they don’t know what to do. What they will do is fill the air with sound and fury that signifies nothing and accomplishes nothing.
This is our ruling class. And that’s when I realized that for the first time I understand the origins of Palin Derangement Syndrome.
God help us.
Earth bears scars of human destruction -A Canadian astronaut aboard the International Space Station
“This is probably just a perception,
but I just have the feeling
that the glaciers are melting,
the snow capping the mountains is less than it was 12 years ago when I saw it last time,”
Thrisk said.
“That saddens me a little bit.”
Feelings, wo-o-o feelings,
wo-o-o, feelings again in my arms.
Feelings…
YouTube – Feelings – Morris Albert
FEELINGS
Feelings, nothing more than feelings,
trying to forget my feelings of love.
Teardrops rolling down on my face,
trying to forget my feelings of love.
Feelings, for all my life I’ll feel it.
I wish I’ve never met you, girl; you’ll never come again.
Feelings, wo-o-o feelings,
wo-o-o, feel you again in my arms.
Feelings, feelings like I’ve never lost you
and feelings like I’ve never have you again in my heart.
Feelings, for all my life I’ll feel it.
I wish I’ve never met you, girl; you’ll never come again.
Feelings, feelings like I’ve never lost you
and feelings like I’ve never have you again in my life.
Feelings, wo-o-o feelings,
wo-o-o, feelings again in my arms.
Feelings…(repeat & fade)
- Morris Albert
The Root Causes of PDS
Be sure to see pics and video.
How truly sick do you have to be to love this country?
“Naked virgins plow the fields in India”
PATNA, India – Farmers in an eastern Indian state have asked their unmarried daughters to plow parched fields naked in a bid to embarrass the weather gods to bring some badly needed monsoon rain, officials said on Thursday.
“Actually Joe, I, for the life of me, don’t understand why we throw hundreds of millions of dollars in government grants, student loans, etc to individual institutions, (cumulatively in the tens of billions) to places like Harvard, that violate routinely our citizens rights to free speech and equal protection. We the taxpaying public have let this arrogant bunch of traitorous commies run off with billions in public funds and to make matters worse, we have let them rub our noses in it to boot. ”
—
Rub our noses and rob our wallets to kill babies:
Planned Parenthood made over 200 Million Dollars killing babies last year.
This year, our masters in Washington give them millions (billions?) to kill more babies in more places.
17. Lifeofthemind:
I beg to differ, Life of @ 17
(for the first time)
Being a business, even the Times is ahead of Haavard.
Deep cuts in costs result in profit for ‘New York Times’
Revenues at The New York Times, doyenne of the US media industry, are being ravaged by the advertising downturn, but a hike in the price of the newspaper and deep cuts in operating costs are insulating shareholders from the worst of the recession.
—
The paper’s parent company surprised Wall Street by turning a profit in the second quarter, thanks to a 20 per cent reduction in costs across the group, which also includes regional papers such as The Boston Globe and the internet site About.com.
“As we continue our transition from a company focused primarily on print to one that is increasingly digital in focus and multiplatform in delivery, online advertising revenues are a more important part of our mix,” Ms Robinson said. “For the balance of the year, we are focused on developing innovative new products and platforms based on our high-quality journalism, particularly in the digital area.”
Lifeofthemind = Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries to pay his own bills and to reward his supporters with estates. There is no point in dissolving the universities or the foundations because they are already for the most part in the hands of the far left. In the march through the institutions they were targeted first and that is where guys like Bill Ayers, Skippy Gates and that ersatz Indian out in Colorado have their benefices.
I’d say a good Viking raid is what these institutions need. The Vikings were the corporate raiders of the 9th and 10th centuries. Whenever those churches got too full of gold and silver the vikings would make sure those underperforming assets were out to more productive use. Hank just used the money to nurish his gout and pay his doctors. If he wasn’t shooting blanks all the time we might have avoided royal absolutism and some nasty wars of religion.
this is going against the grain of this thread but I thought I would post a new product of harvard’s medical school which will literally accelerates evolution. that is, while the tools for reading dna are good…the tools for writing dna —up until now — have been bad.
///
Led by a pair of researchers in the lab of Harvard Medical School Professor of Genetics George Church, the team rapidly refined the design of a bacterium by editing multiple genes in parallel instead of targeting one gene at a time. They transformed self-serving E. coli cells into efficient factories that produce a desired compound, accomplishing in just three days a feat that would take most biotech companies months or years.
Researchers rapidly turn bacteria into biotech factories
Just commented on the Pal2Pal blog of our lovely Sarah on BHO’s sinking poll numbers.
http://tinyurl.com/kq7zdh
——-
Are there any brakes on this roller coaster? My expectation is that BHO’s core support will sink to 25% and hold between there and 20%. That will put him in the negative range at no less than -15. If the strong negatives rise above 45% and the mild positives sink below 20% then the Democrats will have to start looking at their options. If there is a serious move to replace Joe Biden with someone who can at least act presidential then we know that the plug is being pulled on this administration. My expectation is that they will go down fighting and cause as much damage as possible on the way. They have nothing to lose.
Charles (#88),
You point to what I meant in referring to Harvard as an “crucially important” institution (hard for me to cough those words out as Yale person!).
Many in the thread attacked this notion, and not without good reason, but I was really referring to the hard sciences, mathematics (with which I am obsessed), and even — in some rare cases, like Professor Mansfield* — the humanities.
*[http://preview.tinyurl.com/l32sxf]
Jamie Irons
LotM (#89):
Dumb question, but — how do you get your (tiny or otherwise) URLs to come out bolded and “clickable”?
Jamie Irons
Two observations, the Gates thing was not about race, not ever. It is about a pompous ass. Gates reaction to having the police call at his residence was not the reaction of a “Black man in America” reacting to a potential run in with the cops. No self respecting “black man” I know would react the way Gates reacted to the stimulus of a police man at his door. He is a self important, pompous ass. I hope Harvard insisted on a UA after such a demonstration of stupid.
As for the fate of Harvards endowment funds. It should be considered a jobs program. The guys making the big bucks in growing the fund were turned out, just when the guys (supposedly) with their experience could have make a difference in plotting the fund’s course through troubled waters. That the projected outlay for all the projects and not including operating and tuition, is roughly half of what the fund is now worth is not a bad sign, better to spend that money on the projects while the dollars in hand will cover the costs. Inflation is going to just kick the heck outta those greenbacks. My two cents today, worth the same tomorrow. It will just require more to cover the cost.
went to a day long wedding yesterday and didn’t do much today but boob tube and blog. this afternoon I saw a show about the demise of the megafauna in australia. they got it down to +-46,000 years ago. It was a lush country and then it turned dry. but there had been many perturbations before that the big critters survived. why this time did they die. I feel asleep before the answer. but they were awfully suspicious of the aborigines. an interviewer with an aborigine heard the latter relate “yeah that science pretty much tracks with our dream time.”
Jamie Irons,
Nothing fancy, I copy and paste, no surrounding symbols or nesting.
Our host does his best, as in enabling the comment 10 minute edit. We are all used to having tools and buttons for html editing, url links, pics, vids, bold, italics etc. My guess is that PJM at first hoped for a more technically slick product and the expertise they wanted to draw on proved unavailable.
# 87 Joe Hill
I’d say a good Viking raid is what these institutions need. The Vikings were the corporate raiders of the 9th and 10th centuries. Whenever those churches got too full of gold and silver the vikings would make sure those underperforming assets were out to more productive use.
I’m not disagreeing, at all. Just saying that when the Vikings came to call, there usually was a rather rapid, traumatic, wet, and messy re-arrangement of who was in charge of the monasteries. Just saying.
#89 Life of the Mind
If the strong negatives rise above 45% and the mild positives sink below 20% then the Democrats will have to start looking at their options.
Once again, no argument with your basic premise, but given the cavalier, if not completely dismissive, attitude of the regime to both the rule of law and that piece of parchment we call the Constitution; the scope of the “options” available to them is somewhat wider than you envisaged. I note that up until a few decades or so ago, throughout human history the most common method of changing governments was coup d’ etat in one form or another. Peaceful transitions by what were considered legitimate means were a relative rarity.
They have nothing to lose.
indeed.
Subotai Bahadur
Mr. Irons, First get Firefox for your browser if you don’t already have it. Then add the “Text Formatting Toolbar”. This will enable clickable bolded links as you see.
“This impacted not just the Yales and Stanfords of the world but the next tier of top public universities and other privates. As a result, the bubble is busting with great pain across the academic landscape. Not a pretty picture.”
Could not have happened to a more deserving bunch of bliss ninnies and do gooders.
imho one consequence of 21st century science will be that the deserts will be turned green the world over — including australia and the deserts inland of southern california. Plus energy will just pulled from the darndest things. the invention mentioned above will make the fabrication of algae oil adapted to specific water environments — a breeze. Its very timely that exxon has decided to invest 600 million in this stuff.
90. Jamie Irons:
Its the hard science that’s the real deal. Its the soft science that causes problems.what does that mean? well consider above. there’s new cool biotool. it has the power to do great things in the right hands and great mischief in the wrong hands.without a deep grounding in the bible there’s a lot of chimera’s coming our way.
@91 ji
I am not sure about the “tiny urls” but a lot of blog software have Mod-rewrite tools that automatically shorten the urls (at the server level). Maybe a computer expert like Wretchard can explain.
Whiskey wrote: “The new cities will be the new suburbs. So diverse and spread out it’s impossible to nuke more than a fraction. Sprawl is beautiful.”
A while back, on a trip to Houston, I had to go from a meeting in downtown to another in the northern part of the metropolitan area — an hour’s drive on free-flowing Interstate highways. I whiled away the time wondering what my report back to Osama bin Ladin would have looked like, if Osama had paid me to recommend ground zero for the shipping container nuke he just happened to get from Iran.
I eventually concluded that the recommendation would have to be — don’t waste the weapon in Houston, look elsewhere.
I-10 in west Houston is wider than the crater made in the New Mexico desert by the Trinity nuclear explosion. Set off a nuke in Houston, and most city residents would not even know about it until they saw it on the evening news. A hurricane packing the energy of many North Korean nukes hit the city — and Houstonians just picked themselves up, shook themselves off, and started patching things up.
A nuke in Harvard yard might make a difference (positive or negative, depending on your point of view). A nuke in Houston — not so much.
btw I mean chimera here in the Greek sense of animals that were made of a whole bunch of different animals.
When this sort of thing happened with humans you got centaurs or minataurs in greek mythology or elephant men in indian mythology. Its my theory that these critters represented 1st millenia bc meditations on the the clash of time and eternity in the souls of men. god’s or goddesses mating with men or women to produce beasts.
the problem represented by these creatures was this: how do you live in both time and eternity…because man is made for both.
this problem was resolved imho in the God Man Christ (the son of God and a Virgin)in whom we unholy creatures –are enabled each by faith through God’s grace to enter into the presence of the living God.
A strange notion–but one that has been running around my tiny rat brain as I have been reading the comments on this thread, is whether something akin to the Peter Principle can apply to institutions as well as people. Institutions like Harvard come to mind. They may have been good turning out people suited for dealing with the problems of the year 1950, but are they suited for turning out people who have a world view needed to deal with the problems we have today?
I have a hard time trusting anyone who believes that they are one of the “best and brightest,” which is one of the things the Ivies inculcate into their students. If you truly believe that you are the “best” or the “brightest” the odds are that you actually don’t fit within either category.
You can say what you want to say, but the true Original Sin consists of the belief that “I CANNOT BE WRONG, AND TO HELL WITH ALL THE EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY”
Harvard can build up a $30M endowment just as it’s Prof Gates can run a charity with much more $ coming in than going out…….
“Set off a nuke in Houston, and most city residents would not even know about it until they saw it on the evening news.” –Kin
Although I was not born until well after the Trinity test I would think the whole of Houston would know fairly quickly if a Trinity type nuke were detonated in the city.
“At the time of detonation, the surrounding mountains were illuminated “brighter than daytime” for one to two seconds, and the heat was reported as “being as hot as an oven” at the base camp. The observed colors of the illumination ranged from purple to green and eventually to white. The roar of the shock wave took 40 seconds to reach the observers.[13] The shock wave was felt over 100 miles (160 km) away, and the mushroom cloud reached 7.5 miles (12 km) in height.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_(nuclear_test)#Explosion
The incident I feel was the lynchpin to the nationwide collapse of academic rigor was the occupation of the Columbia Administrative offices by radicals and students in 1968. I mind a famous photo in the newspaper with a bunch of students arrayed in revolutionary machismo with shotguns, bandoliers, and pistolas. I can’t find that by any net search this afternoon, but there’s a text reference to a Juan Gonzalez, recently working at the New York Daily News, who testified to having seen a stack of rifles that had been smuggled into the building by strike sympathizers.
University administrators were reluctant to risk the sort of violent suppression of that would cause outrage from parents and alumni. I believe that was the first instance of the radicals extracting major concessions from a University administration by “non-negotiable demands” and the naked threat of lethal violence embodied in the images of occupying students boldly ransacking the President’s office, smoking his expensive guitars, and packing heat.
In short order, students found they could intimidate gutless administrators into giving up any pretense at academic rigor – pass/fail grading, Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Oppression Studies – those subjects are not per se wrong for academic scrutiny. The conspicuous problem is that they were established almost universally in panicking disregard for well-established standards of peer review, research, and due diligence.
As a result we have a plague of opinion and vengeance-driven accusation presented as scholarly research and established science. We are in the thrall of an army of intellectual frauds like Gates, unquestionably clever but unwilling to admit to ANY limit on his own genius, daring anyone to question his right to pronounce any judgment or claim as indisputable fact any surmise that crosses his fevered mind, whether it be within or without his area of “expertise.”
Houston is pretty large – about 40 miles x 40 miles.
See http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/gmap/hydesim.html
for an interesting web tool to visualize the blast zone.
@104–Mad Fiddler
Yes indeed–the curse of our times: when cowardice and tantrums entitle one to respect rather than contempt. Ah–but that is the current Narrative. As an old Danish proverb laments lawyers and painters can soon turn black into white. I guess they didn’t have journalists or Oppression Study professors when that proverb was created or they would have included them as well.
#99 Kinuachdrach
A while back, on a trip to Houston, I had to go from a meeting in downtown to another in the northern part of the metropolitan area — an hour’s drive on free-flowing Interstate highways. I whiled away the time wondering what my report back to Osama bin Ladin would have looked like, if Osama had paid me to recommend ground zero for the shipping container nuke he just happened to get from Iran.
I eventually concluded that the recommendation would have to be — don’t waste the weapon in Houston, look elsewhere.
That would depend on whether their targeting parameters were symbolic [as they have largely been] or strategic. If they are thinking strategically, there are at least two separate targets either of which would be worth the expenditure of the nuke. If they are thinking symbolic, there is a third. And all of these are in addition of the population loss.
Targeting Houston would also have the extra advantage from the foreign enemy’s point of view of exacerbating the fault lines of our nation. After New York was hit, the whole country rallied around it. If Houston was hit, I can very easily see an only slightly muted version of the 9/11 celebrations on the West Bank taking place in any number of Blue State areas. Including the very universities we have been discussing.
Subotai Bahadur
That would depend on whether their targeting parameters were symbolic [as they have largely been] or strategic. If they are thinking strategically, there are at least two separate targets either of which would be worth the expenditure of the nuke. If they are thinking symbolic, there is a third. And all of these are in addition of the population loss.
If they are going to go symbolic, it will boil down to a choice between Washington DC or New York City. It would be a huge psychological blow but otherwise, as far as producing actual goods and services that people want to buy, it really wouldn’t be that much of a hurt.
The strategic targets are much less obvious. The Midland-Odessa area in Texas (have you ever heard of it before?) was high on the list of USSR targets to take out in the event of a nuclear war. Why? Because the major pipelines of gas that supplied the West Coast originated from there. Take it out and you shut down much of the Western half of the US.
#108 Tcobb
Actually, I was thinking in terms of the original posting, of Houston alone. And my symbolic target is in Greater Houston. Nationwide, yes NYC or DC are primaries. But I would add LA to the list, and perhaps SF and Chicago. Keep in mind, the Jihadists are symbolically at war with the decadence of American culture. While it would be somewhat of an “own goal” for Al Quada to hit LA because it would take out their own allies and much of the funding for the Democrats; LA is the source of the media culture that Al Quada hates. Similar logic could be used, to a lesser extent, for SF. Chicago as a “second city” in the Midwest would spread terror away from the coastal enclaves.
I knew about the pipelines. Anyone who wants to provoke nightmares should spend some time looking at the national infrastructure and its vulnerabilities; and consider the nature of the enemy we face.
Subotai Bahadur
Why would DC being nuked and the disappearance of the current administration AND the House AND the Senate AND the various inept bureaucracies be a huge psychological blow, and not engendering a national sigh of relief at being able to start all over again and get it right this time?
Cool web-tool that Old Guy points out. LA would be hard to seriously hurt, too, with one itsy bitsy nuke. Especially if it went off down south near Long Beach port. Although the granola eaters would be pretty hysterical about radiation poisoning, given how they feel about cigarette smoke.
with one itsy bitsy nuke.
An itsy bitsy nuke sent up a great big spout
Down came the radiation, and washed the city out
Out came the fires, and burned the city up
And the itsy bitsy nuke had wiped the city out
from rimes for our times
#110 NahnCee
While to BC-ers, the loss of the history, etc. if DC were hit would be more than counterbalanced by the chance to regain the Constitution [albeit without the original]; you have to remember that to at least 52% of the country, life is not possible without the beneficent guidance and charity of our Lords and Masters on the Potomac. And internationally, the world would regard us as having been defeated if this was to happen; especially if it was followed by inaction.
Once again, with LA, you only have to destroy your specific target to have the effect you want. Any further losses are bonuses to the attacker.
The web tool also does not account for other than overpressure effects. Tie in both thermal [raging firestorms a' la Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, or Yokohama]and radiation, plus total disruption of city services, and realize that most of the deaths will occur due to secondary causes other than initial blast [fire, lack of medical care for injuries, in the short term dehydration, lawless conduct, and possibly starvation eventually] and a single nuke could take out LA as a functioning entity for a long time.
Keep in mind that our cities have grown beyond what the areas can support. Within a day of loss of water pressure post a detonation there will be deaths from dehydration, especially in summer. Most cities have at most a 3 day supply of food on hand in stores and warehouses and are dependent on constant shipments of food. And the inhabitants of LA are not exactly renowned as a homogeneous population who are exemplars of civic virtue and self control in crisis.
Evacuation will be made all but impossible in the short term due to the disruptions caused by the detonation, lack of organization for such evacuation, a collapse of civic leadership, and one can be pretty sure an unwillingness of neighboring communities to take in the refugees.
There is no silver lining in the short to medium term to a strike on LA.
Subotai Bahadur
Tcobb @ 100:
“…whether something akin to the Peter Principle can apply to institutions as well as people…”
The Peter Principle applies to managers who rise their level of incompetance and was operative in the 1980′s. In the 1990′s the Dilbert Priciple came into operation: “Systematically promote the least-competent employees to management, in order to limit the amount of damage they’re capable of doing.” Get them out of the way of the useful ones so as not to impede the business operation. Also, “The Dilbert Principle draws upon the idea that in certain situations, the upper echelons of an organization can have little relevance to the actual production and the majority of real, productive work in a company is done by people lower in the power ladder.” (H/T The Wikipedia entry on The Dilbert Principle.)
I do believe The Dilbert Priciple is operational for institutions of higher learning. I.E., the more Progressive or PC that institution is, the more it resembles those Ivy League schools discussed and the more operational that The Dilbert Principle is. That real learning is done elsewhere, you know, at those icky old state schools like Texas A & M or UT Austin or Ga. Tech, etc. The Ivy League is just a training facility for the elite who think they are destined to rule us rubes. So far we have allowed them to be correct. That may be changing.
Just a thought.
Re: Trinity Test at White Sands. There was light seen at Santa Fe which is more than 100 miles away. My Mom maintained that the critters were disturbed right before and during the test. Some also heard a low rumble that resembled distant thunder but was longer in duration. Of course, the actual date of the test was not known but the local populace did know that there were strange things going on ‘up on the hill’. Los Alamos is sometimes called Lost Almost by the locals. It is said the Oppenheimer had been there when it was just a boys school and felt that he had gotten ‘lost almost’. My family knew original scientists from the project who stayed there until the 80′s.
It’s unlikely there would only be one nuke. The object being to sow confusion and panic, a couple or three, maybe, with an announcement and promise of more to come, even if they are non existent. People would be pouring out of the cities.
I agree with NahnCee: Old Guy’s link is very cool. It was nice to learn that a direct strike on downtown Houston would only cause some window damage to my house. I just hope the prevailing winds at the time are from the west…
But y’all are all missing the key strategic value of a nuke-strike on Houston: wiping out the Belmont Club, which we all know is based there.
.
L3
Correction to my #104:
“…smoking his expensive guitars…” should have read
“…smoking his expensive cigars…”
Oops.
Further memories and musings on Gates and the general decline of the Academy:
Henry Louis Gates in one of his reminiscences of his undergrad years recalls the black students protesting the trial of Bobby Seale in the New Haven Courthouse just a few blocks from the Old Campus. He says it had become increasingly clear that those Black Panthers who were on the outside trying to enlist the support of students – especially black students – were a bunch of thugs.
Earlier in the spring of 1970 there had been handbills in cities all up and down the East Coast calling for a hundred thousand “freaks” to gather in New Haven to protest this trial. Bobby Seale, the Panther’s national leader, was accused of ordering the execution of Alex Rackley, a police informant who had infiltrated the New Haven chapter.
I remember attending a huge gathering at Ingalls Rink, the modernistic concrete Eero Saarinen design modeled on the Loch Ness critter. Panther Lieutenant David Hilliard and some of his bodyguards hulked on the stage in floor-length dark brown leather coats and dark glasses, scanning the crowd of Yale students in prolonged hostile silence. It was never clear what the point of the exercise was, because when Hilliard at last spoke, it was a vicious tirade, filled with “fuck you” “fuck your culture” “fuck your school” “fuck your police” “fuck your courts” “fuck your church” and (did I mention?) “fuck you all.” (Check out his 10-Point Plan, in big bold letters on his website, which also mentions he is available at reasonable fees to speak to your organization.) At one point, a guy approached the stage, and Hilliard’s bodyguards leaped on him and beat him to bloody tottering speechlessness, despite the crowd shouting for them to cease and desist.
What a bizarre moment. The crowd of highly moral students insisted that the poor brain-dashed guy (a foreign grad student as it turned out) be allowed to speak, I guess thinking he’d now paid for a turn at the mike. Unfortunately, he was unable to get a single syllable out. Those bodyguards were thorough. After a while, people started to leave, as there was a distinct sense of having witnessed a moment right out of Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will.”
As we walked back to the residential colleges, a low haze reflected a glaring red light that made a lot of us think the city was aflame. It was just a dinky apartment fire somewhere past the med school, but it was dramatic.
Hours later, a couple of smallish bombs exploded at the rink, but everyone had left. Nobody claimed credit for the bombs. Just more chaos.
Mr. Gates has the arrogance to claim that the Black students persuaded the rest of the student body to go on strike to support the black students and the Panthers.
Bull.
Shit.
He is sadly deluded, or he is flat lying.
I never once in all those weeks saw a single black student stand up before any of the meetings *I* attended and give any request or impassioned speech supporting the Panthers. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nichevo.
Mighta happened somewhere. I also missed out on the brave pronouncements of Wm. Sloane Coffin and Kingman Brewster, God Rest their pointy little souls.
Most of the students in Branford residential college who decided to stay, voted in favor of suspending classes out of a desire to minimize the University as a target for the rage of all the expected freaks and radicals, and this seems to have been a very widespread sentiment. I took some hasty first aid re-training, painted a red cross on one of my white jackets from working in the dining hall, and prepared to minister to wounded idiots. Turned out only the demonstrators had gas masks, and no major confrontations materialized. The freaks ate thousands of pounds of fresh green salads and brown rice, liberated all the civil defense canisters in the basements, and fucked in their sleeping bags at all hours, to freak out the proper middle class students.
The whole business was reduced to backpage news just days later, by the “Parrot’s Beak” invasion, which led to the protests and much-publicized student deaths at Kent State and Jackson State.
What strikes me most about Gates is that while he acknowledges that the Panthers were thugs, and that the Black students finally recognized they were being set up to serve as fodder by the Panthers, he still chose the strategy of doing his best to destroy the culture that provides all his loot.
…been listening to Hendrix again, MF?
Back flashes.
Too much LDS.
#54 Mongoose – What the geniuses at AIG and Citi did worked very well indeed – for them.
The banking system in the whole of the Western world needs root-and-branch reform. What started out as a way for new productive industries to get the capital for startup has degenerated into a system that produces nothing and supplies ridiculous amounts of money to people who have never done a day of real, productive work in their entire lives, and never will.
And they are still at it. Royal Bank of Scotland, which now has the UK Government as majority shareholder because of the stupidity and greed of the people who ran it and still run it, is still handing out £700,000 (about $1,000,000) bonuses to people who do nothing except people who shuffle paper from one pile to another.
mmm that LDS –makes utah’l and why’d
Mad Fiddler (#116):
Your post made me think of my first father-in-law, who passed away a couple of years ago in his nineties, Henry A. “Ham” Mattoon (his nickname constructed from his initials). He was an executive creative director of McCann-Erickson in NYC in the forties through the early seventies, was extremely witty and could well have served as the model for Jon Hamm’s “Don Draper” in the superb series Mad Men (though he was not as good looking as Hamm!).
Anyway, once we were talking about the Beatles and the subject of Ravi Shankar (sp?) arose, he had no idea of who Ravi was, so I explained he was this really famous sitar player.
Without losing a beat he quipped, “Well, I’ve always said, what this country needs is a good five-cent sitar.”
Only those d’un certain âge will get this one, of course.
(Thanks to LotM and JFSanders031 for the help with my URL question.)
Jamie Irons
Jamie Irons,
a good five-cent sitar?
I’ll by that for a dollar!
The new economics, with the sitar to be delivered FOB, that is by a Friend Of Barack.
Musical talent unlikely, I’d rather spend my time smoking one of Fidel’s cast off stogies.
once over the phone i ordered five cent cigars and got five sent cigars for five bucks each. i complained, and ended up with five sent five cent five scent cigars. Even at five cents the other four scents sent made no sense since cigars have only one scent
I once tossed the top Harvard grad of ’41 (JFK’s class) down a flight of stairs when that old drunk tried to “acquaintance rape” my female housemate. I don’t imagine the Kopechne family is too fond of Harvard grads either. The Bobsey Twins who made “Good Will Hunting” apparently took “Noam Chomsky 1 and 2″ repeatedly while at Harvard. A friend and I stopped by a couple of Cambridge bars on our way down from skiing in Maine, oh, so many years ago, and we were baffled that the girls there only wanted to talk about academic stuff — over beers. Good. God. Yep, I was an actual Good Will Hunting — Matt Damon only played one.
I can think of one good experience out of Harvard: an old and dear friend of mine was the editor in chief of the Harvard Law Review. Yeah, that one, in the pre-Obama days. She had the good sense to be a libertarian, and worked on me until I became one. Also, my nicest step-sister went to Harvard. There, that’s it. I’m done. Harvard can go away now.
I was amused to read Kinauchdrach’s post on nuking Houston. [The only reason I watched "Independence Day" was to be amused at the inefficacy of an airborne nuke over the interchange at 610 and the Southwest Freeway. That's where I learned to drive. Houstonians know nothing you can do about that interchange will ever be enough. But I digress.] Since I was born there of course I thought of Houston at the mention of urban sprawl, and it’s nice to see visitors notice the charm of the place.
Ike, the last hurricane that blew through caused a lot of damage, and it took weeks to restore power. A fair number of Houston bloggers could find power to blog but not to run their homes. They were recounting their and their neighbors’ efforts to clean up. (Ever cleaned out a freezer a couple weeks after the power went out?) It was nice to read that recent arrivals have gotten into the spirit of Houston, which is to get it done without much fuss. Of course they’d notice if you nuked Houston. The point is, it wouldn’t stop them.
Over Independence Day weekend I met a retired gentleman who went back to school to get a doctorate in psychology after he already had his M.D. He said the psychology department was terrified of him. He described their first meeting where the entire department were too uncomfortable to speak to him and just stood on one side of the room and looked at him. I wonder what it was they were afraid he would do? Expose them as frauds?
He said the psychology department was terrified of him. He described their first meeting where the entire department were too uncomfortable to speak to him and just stood on one side of the room and looked at him.
Makes you wonder what kind of reception they’d give to a serial-murdering sociopath. No, wait, I think I know the answer to that one.
The Bobsey Twins who made “Good Will Hunting” apparently took “Noam Chomsky 1 and 2″ repeatedly while at Harvard.
It shows. IIRC Damon’s character was plugging Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” in a bar scene.
Speaking of meeting for beers, I was hoping Officer Crowley could/would wear a wire to his drinkfest.
“It’s unlikely there would only be one nuke. The object being to sow confusion and panic, a couple or three, maybe, with an announcement and promise of more to come, even if they are non existent.”
You’re anticipating we’ll be nuked by Russia, China or France then, since I don’t think anyone else has more than three.
Charles, sorry, rewriting dna is unlikely to affect human evolution, whose genomes have been frozen by cultural streams.
Nahncee, you might just be forgetting the useful idiots across the pond. I say “useful idiots” because, for reasons that probably include wanting to make serious money on the lecture circuit after leaving office, the UK government of the time (translation: Cherie Blair) decided to support a badly-planned war against the wrong target as revenge for 9/11.
Nevertheless, we have nukes. God only knows why (American governments were hostile at worst, and condescending at best, to the UK for most of the twentieth century and continue to be) but we are unlikely to use them on you.
We are not Airstrip One or the 51st state yet. Despite the utterly craven bowing of the knee that constitutes the recent extradition treaty – which among other things, in case you haven’t been following the story, will probably result in an autistic teenager getting 60 years of hard time for the terrible crime of exposing the criminal incompetence of the US military’s computer security “experts”.
Bogie wheel @129: No way could Officer Crowley wear a wire. The Secret Service would have to take it away, no matter how sympathetic they might be. Over at neo-neocon I suggested he take his chief of police, but now I think his drinking buddy should be his union rep.
What race is his union rep?
Fletcher – I thought about mentioning our Special Friends in England as potential nukers-of-Houston, but given the general state of disrepair of your isles, wasn’t sure if you still have more than three nukes left that will work.
Dear Wretchard,
Was my post last night too long, or did the string of “f-bombs” I quoted from Mr. David Hilliard of the Black Panthers trigger a Kill-post routine?
“Too much LDS.”
Didn’t know Mormoms smoked guitars. Live and learn
Joe,
“don’t forget the the Harley fatory”
Now that is one marvelous typo!
LOLOL!!!
Mormoms smoked What?
“At the time of detonation, the surrounding mountains were illuminated “brighter than daytime” for one to two seconds, and the heat was reported as “being as hot as an oven” at the base camp.
Hot as an oven — sounds like a summer’s day in Houston. Any summer’s day.
It is worth remembering that the Harvard crowd and their ilk decided for their own reasons in the aftermath of WWII that nuking the enemy was much worse than firebombing them (as the Brits had done to the Germans) or simply pillaging, raping & murdering the enemy (as the Russians had done to the Germans). Our best & brightest decided that radiation was a special evil which would render the land uninhabitable for eons, despite the evidence that Japanese were growing watermelons in Hiroshima shortly after the event.
In the book “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman”, the author describes watching the Trinity test from 20 miles away. A flash followed by a blast. Sounds sort of like the summer afternoon lightning storms so familiar to Houstonians. Others watched the test from 6 miles away — they all survived. There were structures much closer to the test than that, which you can still visit today.
Perhaps it was a little flippant of me to suggest that Houstonians would not learn of a nuclear blast until they saw it on the evening news. They would probably learn about it from local radio before that.
Obviously a nuclear explosion in a US city would be horrible event, but reality would fall short of the expectations of the Political Correct graduates of our “elite” institutions.
“don’t forget the the Harley fatory”
Alas I kouldn’t afford a keyboard with a see.
aktually it just stiks a lot. But then again why do we really need seas?
Joe Hill,
WE SAW THE SEA
Follow The Fleet, 1936 Movie
(Irving Berlin)
Fred Astaire
We joined the Navy to see the world
And what did we see? We saw the sea
We saw the Pacific and the Atlantic
But the Atlantic isn’t romantic
And the Pacific isn’t what it’s cracked up to be
We joined the Navy to do or die
But we didn’t do and we didn’t die
We were much too busy looking at the ocean and the sky
And what did we see? We saw the sea
We saw the Atlantic and the Pacific
But the Pacific isn’t terrific
And the Atlantic isn’t what it’s cracked up to be
They tell us that the Admiral
Is as nice as he can be
But we never see the Admiral
Because the Admiral has never been to sea
We joined the Navy to see the girls
And what did we see? We saw the sea
Instead of a girl or two in a taxi
We were compelled to look at the Black Sea
Seeing the Black Sea isn’t what it’s cracked up to be
Sailing, sailing home again
To see the girls upon the village green
Then across the foam again
To see the other seas we haven’t seen
We owe the Navy an awful lot
For they taught us how to do the Sailor’s Hornpipe
And they showed us how to tie a sailor’s knot
But more than that, they showed us the sea
We never get seasick sailing the ocean
We don’t object to feeling the motion
We’re never seasick but we are awful sick of sea
(HT lyricsplayground.com)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVYxekAaFRU
LotM,
Hell of a song, and a fine film.
When one sees what passes for “dancing” in modern films and on TV, one sorely misses Mr. Astaire, who so famously could do all that Ms. Rogers could, but in regular heels and going forward.
Jamie Irons
Ah how I long to see the z any z even the Zuider Zee and there to play sweet zee shanties on my xylophone
131. winslow:
Works for me. Hope you’re right.
There are other definitions of chimera.