A writer for The Nation finds the long Harvard job security of Larry Summers’ corrupt crony shocking — as does UD. But apparently we live in an old-style oligarchy.
Summers – “A man whose intellect seems genuinely invigorated by a debate with his billionaire sex offender buddy over the costs and benefits of first-class versus NetJet.” – has himself been taken out of commission, but good ol’ Shleifer keeps on keepin on.
Wow. That’s a hot one.
So the magic trick seems to be: You agree to be snowed by my impressive advanced degrees, and I spend decades signing off on/taking part in research fraud.
There’s too much grant money and associated professional advancement and oh yeah investor money at stake for anyone to care too awfully much about whether images or data emanating from top of the heap sites like Dana Farber is – you know … I mean – impeccably accurate … And as long as loser assholes like Sholto David don’t actually subject our work to close analysis it’s a win-win situation for everyone!
I mean except for sick and dying people. But we’re running a business here.
Lawrence Summers has so frequently been airbrushed, and has himself so frequently airbrushed others, it’s a miracle he and his cronies continue in the realm of visibility at all. Harvard law prof Lawrence Lessig (that’s him in my headline) doesn’t really care about that, though:
There’s little need to reform Larry Summers. He will, I suspect, pass quickly from Harvard’s orbit. But it is the culture that would have allowed Larry Summers to be protected that must now be called to account. How could Harvard have allowed this production of Hamlet without the Prince? And will it now commit to a practice that will not protect the elite among us… ?
As you know, UD has wondered for years how Harvard could have airbrushed so corrupt a figure as Summers for so long; she has also long speculated that the appointment of Ma Ingalls (à bas “excessive materialism”!!!) right after Summers was a crude reverse engineer.
I mean, crude but effective. Lasted for years, until Summers’ grody to the maxness eventually sucked the air even out of the most elite of airbrushes. You can sort of see the supersecret superelite Harvard Corporation secretly gathering back then to brushbrushbrush its president’s rep. You can see them sweeping dual-action, adjustable pressure tools over Summers glossies. Keep spraying! Tell no one! Tell Drew Faust to name her price!
Not sure, though, about Lessig’s Hamlet thing. He seems to have in mind a production of Summerskrantz and Epsteinstern.
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An enlargement of this theme.
People are right to sense that, as the [Epstein] emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances.
And C. Lasch, 1995.
To an alarming extent the privileged classes – by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent – have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards…. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure – of business entertainment, information, and ‘information retrieval’ – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline.
Both took/are taking far too long. Elites protect their own until absolutely pushed to the wall. Remember how lovingly Oxford clung to Tariq Ramadan! Remember Yale’s Michael Simons. Remember Robert “Two Chairs” Alpern.
[T]he connection between Summers and Epstein has long been public knowledge. Summers joined OpenAI in November of 2023, almost four years after the New York Times published a photo of him hanging out with Epstein at the sex trafficker’s Manhattan mansion, and six months after the world learned that Summers had solicited donations from Epstein on behalf of his wife’s poetry foundation. Undeterred, the Times itself hired Summers as a contributor to its Opinion section at the beginning of 2025... Prestigious institutions knew exactly who Summers was, and sought him out anyway, for years... [It all] reveals an American elite blinded to outrages occurring in plain view, due to the clubby nature of high society. All the way back in 2009, Summers offered some unsolicited advice to not yet-Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) about surviving in Washington. “Outsiders can say whatever they want,” he counseled, “but insiders don’t criticize other insiders.” As an empirical observation, Summers was right—the world does work that way, illustrated most grotesquely in the Epstein debacle.
Harvard continues to affiliate itself not only with Summers, but with his buddy, Mister Female Genital Mutilation himself, Alan Dershowitz.
A Harvard student argues that admissions based purely on the amount of money random parents give — and this sort of quid pro quo gift is typically, apparently, in the hundreds of millions — should be encouraged, and stuff like legacies and athletics not so much. Indeed, Harvard — laboring under a $53.2 billion endowment — would do well to increase the price of pure money admission, lest the school’s wealth drop by a perilous amount.
It’s an interesting model. There are currently 2,781 billionaires in the world, and let’s assume a healthy chunk of them (Musk has eight children and counting) want their kids to go to Harvard. Straightforwardly monetizing Harvard admissions – setting the price as clearly as countries offering citizenship, for instance, set prices – and taking a lot of billionaire kids every year, would top up that b$53.2 by a good amount.
Assuming Harvard’s goal is at least a one hundred billion dollar endowment (which I think most reasonable people would consider a pretty solid pile, plus a rainy day fund), and say they want to reach that goal in ten years (again, a reasonable aim) you could do the math with not much trouble and simply let billionaire applicants know what the winning number would be.
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OTOH –Mr UD proposes targeting much-childed billionaires… oh, okay, here’s a partial list —
— and communicating to them that there will be an auction. Brilliant.
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Update: Gevalt. My buddy Philip tells me the correct ‘number of Muskian progéniture’ is 13.
Update: 14.
Plenty of lefties find a $53.2 billion nonprofit intellectual community (Harvard) a little hard to grasp qua concept; read Robert Reich and many others. Indeed the graphic and grotesque injustice of superfatcat money-hoarder Harvard amid hundreds of struggling meritorious schools is a far leftier… visual... than right. The right is where no-ceiling-on-personal-and-institutional-wealth people like Greg Mankiw, Eric Cantor, and Lawrence Kudlow hang out; it’s predominantly the left that cares about wealth inequality.
Gregory Conti acknowledges that “skepticism” (I’d call it revulsion) in regard to small singular institutions hoarding billions and billions of dollars is not “an intrinsically right-wing proposition.” Nor should it be. But he correctly notes that, in the last few years, most democratic politicians, to their shame, have left the Ivies alone to play with their money, and that it’s the right which has pushed for endowment taxes. Indeed there’s a weird inversion here – the lawmaker lefties who should militate against the degenerate and destructive greed of some of our universities don’t give a shit, while the lawmaker righties who have no problem with greed and don’t like taxes do give a shit. Hm.
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Conti will go on to argue that left-dominated elite universities have no one to blame but themselves for their impending tax doom; if they’d been high-quality, neutral seekers after wisdom rather than woke noisemakers they wouldn’t have raised the hackles of conservative, vindictive legislators.
Go to any of, say, the 20 private colleges with the largest endowments and just look at the signage posted throughout campus for events, programs, services: You will find that at every one they convey a near-identical blend of culturally progressive presuppositions, identitarian appeals, and therapeutic argot.
Okay so I spent years teaching at GW (I know; not rich and elite enough; but hear me out) and years tromping around Harvard (father-in-law was a Harvard prof), and I’ve been visiting/writing about universities for decades. Here’s what you’re likeliest to see posted around most elite schools: Information about campus worship services. Dates/locations of standardized tests. Rentals near campus. Political signage from all sides – pro-Israel, anti-Israel, etc. Cultural event/lecture notices. Lowkey appeals to use campus health services if you are feeling down. Student suicide is a serious problem, and I’m not sure what “therapeutic argot” is bothering Conti, but the phrases I can recall are things like you’re not alone and talk to someone.
Nothing is more exactingly identitarian than fraternities and secret societies and houses, but these cliques are, by definition, not going to plaster statues of Elihu Yale with come-ons.
And as to the quality argument: Ivies have long handed down gentlemen’s C’s and welcomed Jared Kushners; they’re famous for it. Legacy admits are quite a thing, and they’ve watered down quality bigtime forever.
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No, for ol’ UD the only real argument in favor of taxing endowments in the many billions has nothing to do with right or left. It’s socially destructive for outrageous wealth to lie in the exclusive hands of small entities, personal or institutional. Are you okay with Elon Musk romping through the federal government, firing everyone and shutting everything down? Should have thought of that before you let him accumulate 420 billion dollars. Do you think it’s weird that one of Harvard’s recent presidents fucked its endowment to the tune of one billion dollars because no one was able to stop him from using it for high-risk credit default swaps? And that he freelanced for a hedge fund while president? Way woke, babe.
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UD thanks Rita for the link.
[Derek Bok] said the issue of tackling legacies had become more urgent than when he ran Harvard, because the competition for places had intensified and the evidence for reform had strengthened. He said he was unconvinced that abolition would weaken fundraising efforts, but in any case “there comes a moment when it becomes more important to do the right thing”.
And now that Harvard has a fifty billion dollar endowment, I think it’s time we dipped a toe in the water! Fuck it man! Let’s do the right thing!
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Update: You’ve got 50 bill and hoard it. This poor little widow had only one bill and she made medical school free in perpetuity for all students at Albert Einstein! You could easily do that for some of your schools, but you’re about rich, not poor, people.
Curiouser and curiouser. The title refers to a number of pro-Israel billionaires who recently sponsored a fund-raiser for the North Carolina Republican leading the federal harassment of Ivy League universities for their purported anti-semitism.
These same lads – shockingly – are going after the manifold tax breaks that make it possible for Harvard University both to be designated a non-profit organization AND be worth around eighty billion dollars … or something like that number… I mean, there’s the endowment, whose amount we know; but there’s also real estate, about which we don’t know — so this is UD‘s probably pretty lame estimate of Harvard’s pile of dough…
… What the fuck make it a hundred billion. There are other assets. Make it five hundred billion. Who the fuck knows.
Anyway, a lot of these pro-Israel billionaire guys are working against their own interests, cuz they’re the very moneybags who have over the years given SOOOO much of their loot to Ivies like Penn and Harvard that they’re practically running the places, but they couldn’t have given so much and gotten so powerful without the tax breaks against which they’re now militating! Ya falla?
An understandable error! Most people cannot comprehend/believe that one university’s endowment is over fifty billion dollars; and Harvard will be at one hundred billion before you know it, which will be that much harder to assimilate as a reality.
Even a New York Times opinion writer (plus, UD assumes, a bunch of editors who reviewed her column) finds herself rendering a reasonably large endowment as an amount in the hundreds of millions, rather than as an amount exceeding the GDP of 120 nations.
Here’s a simple trick to help you remember: Just repeat aloud ten times FIFTY BILL FIFTY BILL with a stress on the b.
She has resigned.
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[T]he important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
So here’s UD‘s take on that one. Although it sounds unpleasantly snobby and snippy to say things like “has not written a single book,” it’s true that in many fields (not all), books are the currency, and UD too was surprised that one of the world’s preeminent universities chose as president someone with, yes, a “thin” scholarly record.
Yet if Gay hadn’t plagiarized throughout her career, UD would have let the thinness go, mainly because Gay seems to have moved from scholarship to administration pretty early, and if you’re a brilliant administrator (I have no idea whether she was), it’s arguable that you can be expected to ease up on your writing.
And listen — excellent essays can often have greater accessibility and impact than books. Think of ground-breaking essays by S. Huntington, J. Nash, R. Putnam… If one of Gay’s had been – not as staggering as those, but interestingly original, and seriously influential – UD also would have had no problem. A great essay, in any field, can sometimes demonstrate your scholarly quality better than a book. So for me the thinness is not about the lack of a book in particular; it’s about the lack of some form of impactful intellectual work.
I have heard from a source that is reliable but a step or two removed from the situation that the Harvard Corporation has asked President Gay to resign and she has refused. Gay has apparently said that if she is fired, she will sue. Gay has retained her own counsel. I can’t 100% confirm the above is true, but if it is, I am sure the Board is concerned about what may emerge in legal discovery in the event of litigation.
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Sounds plausible, I guess. In general folks are sniffing far too eagerly around the SOOOOper secret Harvard Corporation…. You remember Bagehot: “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.” When people leave you alone every day to play to your heart’s content with fifty billion dollars, you’re unlikely to want that situation to get fucked up.
… because of that school’s perceived inadequate response to the Hamas atrocities, you know how this blog — which for years has condemned anyone giving anything to an institution currently hoarding close to fifty four billion dollars — feels. Same goes for other obscenely overendowed Ivies. If this event helps narcissistic hedgies discover legitimate uses for their charity, tant mieux.