Vanity Fair’s at it again.

Last month, an après le déluge article full of insider sniping about vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin appeared; this month, it’s an après le déluge article full of insider sniping about endowment fuckup Harvard.

McPalin fans can’t complain that VF‘s a tool of liberal elites, singling out their girl for ridicule; even a glance at highlights from the Harvard article tells you that Cambridge — epicenter of the snooty left — is going to take a very big hit.

Some of this stuff you already know — I mean, if you read University Diaries you already know it — but the VF writer runs some blood through the numbers. Like frinstance you know about “the eight-figure salaries some of [the] managers were pulling down” — (That’s eight, as in thirty million dollars a year apiece … Count the zeroes… 30,000,000 … Non-profit work… Good for the conscience… And good for the pocketbook!… ) — but maybe you didn’t know about the personalities raging around the numbers:

The longtime head of Harvard Management Company, Jack Meyer, quit to start his own hedge fund in 2005 after growing fed up with criticism over the eight-figure salaries some of his managers were pulling down and with persistent meddling from top Harvard officials. Two particular annoyances were Summers, who had been questioning Meyer’s investment strategies, and Robert Rubin, a member of the Harvard Corporation, who frowned on Meyer’s aggressive strategies and wound up on the “warpath” with Meyer, as one person put it.

When Meyer left, he took much of Harvard Management Company with him — including 30 portfolio managers and traders, as well as the chief risk officer, chief operating officer, and chief technology officer. The place became “like a Ferrari without the engine,” according to a portfolio manager who arrived after Meyer left. This angered Rubin, according to someone who knows him well: “In Rubin’s opinion, Meyer crippled the institution.”

If only Summers and Rubin, with their I-know-better-than-you personalities, had let things alone! The managers would have been happy with their ever-increasing salaries (Keep in mind that they were graciously taking a cut from what they’d have gotten in the private sector, and Meyer would understandably have wanted to reward them with tens of millions more in pay every year.); one university in the United States would have gone from having the GDP of Bulgaria to, say, the GDP of … the United States? And that would have done wonders for school pride… We’re Number One!… And instead of Meyer deciding that the best thing he could do with this meddling issue was take down his entire operation and destroy a school, he’d still be sitting there, happy as a bug!

Here’s a snippet of sniping:

The Harvard endowment soared from $4.8 billion in 1990 to $36.9 billion as of June 30, 2008, and in the last half-decade or so, the men and women who run Harvard seemed to have convinced themselves that the university’s fund would grow at double-digit rates for, well, eternity. “Apparently nobody in our financial office has read the story in Genesis about Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream—you know, during the seven good years you save for the seven lean years,” says Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School since 1967.

Dershowitz himself, though, doesn’t know much about economizing. He hires far too many people to write his books for him.

Fact is, Harvard — as I’ve suggested on this blog before — is an all ’round out of control drunk. Money and power, you know.

As with the Palin fiasco, when things come crashing down in the sober light of day, Vanity Fair moves in, with its glossy photojournalism and pesky reporters.

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UD thanks Tony.