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Sunday, January 23, 2005
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MAMA REALITY II
In her first Mama Reality post (see UD, October 27, 2004), UD described her masochistic craving for Reality Instruction (the term is taken from Saul Bellow) in all things. She just got a big satisfying wallop of Reality Instruction from Michael Lewis, in the business pages of The Providence Journal . He's writing about the Harvard story that dominated the news until Lawrence Summers began pondering aloud the vas deferens between men and women -- the story about the compensation of Harvard's soon to depart money managers (for background, see UD posts dated 10/17/04 and 1/1//05): “We have arrived at a point in the money-management game where the going rate for the people who play it well is indefensible even to the people who understand it. No one wants to be seen thinking it is normal for someone to make $25 million a year. But there's another reason for Harvard's reticence, touched on by the class of 1969. The modern university still likes to pretend that it is not a business. Or, rather, that it is a business when it is a seller, and a university when it is buyer. It charges people huge sums of money for its services, but then, when it employs them, invokes its special nature as an excuse to pay them as little as possible. Harvard can decline to pay its money managers market rates in the same spirit that the University of Oklahoma can decline to pay its football players anything at all -- because to do so would violate the sanctity of the university. Most of the time this above-it-allness is a convenient pose for a university. But this time it is a very expensive pose, as even freshman money managers can turn pro.” The gist of the reality instruction here is that there are two possibilities, and two possibilities only, for a university: 1.) The university may assume an arrogant, cynical, above-it-all pose and assert that it has some "special nature" or "sanctity" that absolves it from market forces; 2.) or it may get real and play along with the market in all things, since it knows the university is just another business. What's striking is that for Lewis there is nothing in between #1 and #2. There's not even a whiff of a hint of an intimation in what he has written that a university is indeed a special sort of thing, different from a profit-maximizing business; and that it is precisely the glory of excellent universities like Harvard that they produce the sort of alumni capable of posing, with clarity and a sense of responsibility, basic moral questions about limits. |