Frank Rich, New York Times:
… Last month the president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, contributed a stirring essay to The Times regretting that educational institutions did not make stronger efforts to assert the fundamental values of pure intellectual inquiry while “the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism.” She rued the rise of business as the most popular undergraduate major, an implicit reference to the go-go atmosphere during the reign of her predecessor, Lawrence Summers, now President Obama’s chief economic adviser.
What went unsaid, of course, is that some of Harvard’s most prominent alumni of the pre-Faust era — Summers, Blankfein, Robert Rubin et al. — were major players during the last two bubbles. As coincidence would have it, the same edition of The Times that published Faust’s essay also included an article about how Harvard was scrounging for bucks by licensing a line of overpriced preppy clothing under the brand Harvard Yard. This sop to excessive materialism will be a scant recompense for the $11 billion Harvard’s endowment managers lost in their own bad gamble on interest-rate swaps…
Yes, in the blink of an eye Harvard University has gone from a pigsty under Lawrence Summers to The Little House on the Prairie under Drew Faust — complete with homespun tales about the evils of materialism.
If you buy that, you — like Summers with those interest-rate swaps — will buy anything.
October 19th, 2009 at 7:47PM
I may have said this already, but being an investment manager for Harvard’s Endowment Fund is traditionally considered the top of the profession, a great thing to have on your CV if you are a finance/investment type person.
The best-of-the-best.
October 19th, 2009 at 8:58PM
And of course Harvard students, who can’t major in business, will stop flocking into the highest-paid fields after college. Sigh . . .