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Saturday, October 22, 2005
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Speaking of great blows To great men… It’s not Just Benjamin Ladner. UD is a woman and cries easily. Which is why her rainy Saturday in ‘thesda is already (at 8:23 AM) turning into a hankiefest. It’s not merely Benjamin Ladner’s cri du coeur (see below). Like a fool, before she’d properly recovered from that, UD went right for the business pages in today’s (soggy, muddy) New York Times, and a front page story about the recently departed Harvard fund managers, titled PUNISHING SUCCESS AT HARVARD. A j’accuse directed against President Summers and the group of Harvard alumni who felt that thirty-five million dollars a year in compensation for each of its money managers was unseemly at a non-profit educational institution, the article details every outrage visited upon men whose only crime was their spectacular success at raising Harvard‘s endowment (now pushing thirty billion dollars). First, the fools at Harvard missed the fact that “outside hedge managers who turn in investment performances like that of Mr. Mittleman and Mr. Samuels make far more than $35 million.” Second, Summers, who the Times writer has heard “always has to be the smartest guy in any room,” began peppering the fund managers with all sorts of questions (Summers is an economist), which to the fund managers “felt like meddling.” “But here was the real blow,” writes the columnist. Harvard just changed the rules, and capped fund manager salaries at twenty to twenty five million. Since there's really no other word for this, the New York Times writer says it again. It was “a crushing blow.” Indeed the imagination balks, trying to picture what it must have been like for those men on that dark day when they grasped that, no matter what they did, they could never hope to clear more than twenty-five million dollars a year. |