(cc photo b dan4th)

More exciting adventures from the Ivy League:

[Martin] Peretz, the editor in chief of The New Republic and a former Harvard professor, had been scheduled to speak at the 50th anniversary celebration of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, scheduled for Sept. 25, according to the Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper. But the final schedule for the program does not list Peretz as a speaker. He is to be recognized, however, along with several other head tutors and directors of studies. [...]

An undergraduate research endowment fund in Peretz’s name was created recently by his family and friends, according to the Crimson, which also said that the fund’s proposed amount had increased from $500,000 to $650,000 in the last week from alumni contributions. The growth has been interpreted as an indication of alumni support to honor Peretz at the program.

I’m glad to see an enhanced level of attention being given to the fact that a semi-important figure in American political journalism is driven by racist views of Arabs and Muslims, as I’ve said before this whole farce mostly illustrates the absurd racket of fundraising at already-rich American universities. The Harvard business model is the exchange of money for prestige, and insofar as Peretz has rich friends willing to pony up cash Harvard is willing to bestow honors. If it becomes a problem, they may try to sweep it under the rug by, e.g., changing the speaker’s roster. But not accepting the cash isn’t on the menu, nor is refusing the perform the service in exchange for which the cash has been offered.

It’s true, of course, that well-intentioned Harvard donors could probably change things by threatening to withhold future contributions unless the honor is rescinded. But that would be a bit silly since people shouldn’t be giving Harvard money anyway. By the same token, the individuals responsible for establishing the Peretz Fund should consider putting their views of Peretz, Muslims, and all the rest to one side and asking whether an undergraduate research fund is a reasonable way of helping people. Are there no educational institutions in the world more in need of funds? Really?

Canaday Common Room entrance, former home of The Harvard Independent (my photo, available under cc license)

I realized dimly that New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz had apologized for his suggestion that Muslims should be denied first amendment rights. But until reading Tracy Jan’s Boston Globe article on the continuing controversy, I hadn’t noticed that he specifically reaffirmed his view that “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.”

This is relevant because in edition to being editor in chief of a fairly important DC political magazine, he’s scheduled to be honored by Harvard University since a lot of his famous and important friends got together a bunch of money to give to Harvard in exchange for Harvard honoring their friend. Since Harvard is in the business of raising money, they have every intention of keeping the money and going ahead with the honoring:

Harvard yesterday said it does not plan to block the honor of Peretz, who received his doctorate from Harvard. In a statement yesterday, university officials acknowledged that Peretz’s recent assertions have been “distressing to many members of our community, and understandably so.” But the statement also declared that “it is central to the mission of a university to protect and affirm free speech, including the rights of Dr. Peretz, as well as those who disagree with him, to express their views.’’

“We are ultimately stronger as a university when we maintain our commitment to the most basic freedoms that enable the robust exchange of ideas,” the statement said.

It’s really too bad that Harvard has chosen to take this tack. Obviously the only person in this conversation who’s questioned anybody’s right to “free speech” or exhibited a weak “commitment to the most basic freedoms” is Peretz himself. Equally obviously, Peretz’s right to be a bigot does not create a right to be honored by prestigious universities. My alma mater is doing a disservice to their brand and to public understanding of the issues by deliberately obscuring things in this manner.

It would be more honest to say that Harvard is a business run for the benefit of its faculty and administrators. The business model of this business is the exchange of prestige in exchange for money. Peretz has friends who have money that they are willing to exchange for some prestige, and Harvard intends to take the money. It is what it is.

As an alum, I’d like to pretend to believe that I find this particular transaction outrageous, but it merely goes to illustrate a point I’ve made before. If you’re a person of some means who wants to make a charitable donation to make the world a better place you have a lot of options available to you. And one of the very worst things you could do with that money is give it to a fancy university. If you’ve specifically decided that you want to make a charitable donation to a provider of education services in the United States, you should find one that has a good track record of serving poor students. There are plenty of charter schools and colleges that fit the bill, but none of them are famous fancy schools with multi-billion dollar endowments.

The proper reason to give money to Harvard is the reason Peretz’s friends are giving money. The guy has a deservedly bad reputation in many quarters, and in exchange for money Harvard University is willing to try to raise his reputation.

Peter Berkowitz offers some old whine in a slightly new bottle:

The political science departments at elite private universities such as Harvard and Yale, at leading small liberal arts colleges like Swarthmore and Williams, and at distinguished large public universities like the University of Maryland and the University of California, Berkeley, offer undergraduates a variety of courses on a range of topics. But one topic the undergraduates at these institutions — and at the vast majority of other universities and colleges — are unlikely to find covered is conservatism. [...]

But most students will hear next to nothing about the conservative tradition in American politics that stretches from John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt to William F. Buckley Jr. to Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan. This tradition emphasizes moral and intellectual excellence, worries that democratic practices and egalitarian norms will threaten individual liberty, attends to the claims of religion and the role it can play in educating citizens for liberty, and provides both a vigorous defense of free-market capitalism and a powerful critique of capitalism’s relentless overturning of established ways.

Since Berkowitz specifically calls out Harvard, and since I went there and no how to navigate its course catalogue, I thought I’d look into this.

In the coming year, the Harvard Government (i.e., political science) department is offering exactly six courses on “Political Thought and Its History.” Two of the six courses (Gov 1060 “Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy” and Gov 1061 “The History of Modern Political Philosophy”) are taught by Harvey Mansfield and so I trust the right won’t be slighted in his presentation. One is Eric Nelson’s Gov 1074 “Political Thought of the American Founding” which name checks John Adams in its three-sentence course description. There’s also Gov 1094 “The Jewish Political Tradition,” Gov 1092 “The Past and Future of the Left,” and finally Gov 1072 “Moral Issues in Contemporary Politics” which promises to “weigh both sides of arguments over such issues as economic redistribution, the rights of women and racial minorities, the political status of the family, the regulation of the beginning and end of life, and the conduct of foreign policy.” That doesn’t seem to me as if conservative thought is being ignored. Now you could fairly say that Harvard simply isn’t offering an especially large quantity of courses on the history of political thought in general but that’d be a very different complaint.

Meanwhile, the course with the most students and the most direct policy relevance is the introductory economics course that was taught by economist and Republican Party operative Martin Feldstein in my day and is currently taught by economist and Republican Party operative Greg Mankiw.

No doubt there is some college or university somewhere for which Berkowitz’s complaint is valid, but he specifically cited Harvard as an example and it doesn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny. My initial impulse on reading his article was to crack a joke about how people don’t study conservative ideas because conservative ideas are of such low quality. I’ll restrain myself from saying that, but suffice it to say that the research methods and evidentiary standards being employed by Berkowitz and the WSJ op-ed page don’t exactly make a strong case for inculcating young people with the conservative approach.

When I was in college, people used to joke about Harvard being a gigantic hedge fund that just happened to run a university as a sideline. These days, the university still has its faculty, its students, and (most importantly of all) its reputation, but the hedge fund seems to have run into a ton of trouble. It’s not only—or even especially—that they’ve lost money in the downturn. Rather, the crux of the matter is that some of their more exotic investments seem to have got them stuck in a nasty liquidity squeeze that’s forcing budget cuts.

Felix Salmon remarks:

And maybe Harvard’s alumni might start giving a lot more now than they have in the past. After all, until recently, any giving from alumni was dwarfed by the investment gains of the endowment, and so the incentive to add another drop to the bucket was greatly reduced. Now, by contrast, cash from alumni is desperately needed to meet the university’s annual liquidity requirements. It might even feel better, giving money when you know it’s going to actually be spent, rather than giving money simply to augment some gargantuan endowment.

My advice to my fellow alumni would be: Don’t.

If you want to give money to an educational institution, do some research and find a charter school in your metropolitan area that’s obtaining good results with a demographically unfavorable group of kids. Or find help our a regional public college of little repute that provides valuable educational services and could really use the money. Sure, if your checkbook is fat enough to finance a research endeavor that could make a major contribution to discovering an HIV vaccine or something it might make sense to invest in a world-famous university. But as a general matter, fancy schools that are already rich and famous and overwhelming serve students from privileged backgrounds are not a good target of charitable giving.

I remember when I was at Harvard hearing a lot about how the endowment there wasn’t just big, it was exceedingly well-managed. You know, by people so smart they impressed Harvard smartypantses with their smarts. But not smart enough to dodge a downturn, it seems:

Harvard officials say the university’s largest-in-the-nation endowment lost about 22 percent of its value, or $8 billion, in the four months since the end of the last fiscal year. [...] They say the university should plan for a 30 percent drop in endowment value by the end of next June.

[Executive Vice President Edward] Forst tells The Harvard Crimson student newspaper that the 22 percent estimate may be conservative because some university money is handled by external managers that have yet to report figures.

Of course a 30 percent loss isn’t actually so bad given the current market climate, especially if the university really did get larger-than-normal returns during the upswing years. So maybe these guys really do know what they’re doing.

Meanwhile, giving money to wealthy elite universities still doesn’t make much sense. If you want to donate to something in the educational field, find a small, un-famous school that seems to be doing a decent job and could really put money to good use and help them out. Or find a local charter school (or my friend Komal’s school in Boston) that’s getting good results with disadvantaged kids and help them.

Speaking of smoking, the confidence in the economy of America’s elite is sure to be shattered by the news that Out of Town News, the newstand smack in the middle of Harvard Square, is shutting down. The internet had basically made its core business model obsolete some time ago. The general idea, as witnessed by the name, was that you could buy all kinds of “out of town” publications there, thus serving the news needs of the university’s geographically diverse community. But people still buy other stuff — I used to buy cigarettes there, and sometimes Diet Coke (but soda’s cheaper at the university vending machine), but I think cigarette retailing is a declining industry as well.

Note that the closing of Out of Town News is part of the dystopian vision of The Handmaid’s Tale.