Harvard to Begin Holding
Formal Title-Stripping
Exercises in the Yard
It's every administrator's nightmare. There are so many miscreants on the Harvard faculty -- plagiarists in the law school, larcenists and shit poachers in economics -- that the flood threatens to become overwhelming.
In response to looming institutional disaster, as well as to the larger public relations fiasco resulting from Harvard's refusal to discuss its faculty review and punishment with the outside world, Harvard has radically streamlined its procedures, and made public the central element of the punishment process: title-stripping.
All faculty found guilty of misconduct will be handled the same way: Nothing will happen to them unless they hold a named academic title, in which case they will be stripped of it.
Moreover, to placate the public, Harvard will institute a public title-stripping ceremony in Harvard Yard, where people can gather, witness, and record the formal shaming as it takes place.
In an echo of the famed
Alfred Dreyfus ceremony,
Harvard will dress disgraced faculty
in university gowns with special
Harvard epaulets loosely sewn upon
their shoulders. As faculty stand
alone in the emptied yard, crowds
along the edges of the yard will
watch as the university's president
marches up to the faculty member
and solemnly rips each epaulet off
of their shoulders -- an act symbolic
of the stripping of their titles.
The first ceremony, yet to be scheduled, will be a dual affair, featuring the two latest among the title-stripped: Andrei Shleifer and Martin Weitzman. Shleifer's case is well-known; details on Weitzman, from the latest issue of the Crimson, may be found below:
PROF DOGGED BY DUNG IS DEMOTED
Weitzman held the Monrad chair before being mired in manure muck
Andrei Shleifer ’82 isn’t the only Harvard economics professor to have been stripped of his endowed title after allegedly getting his hands dirty.
Martin L. Weitzman, the Harvard faculty member accused of stealing horse manure from a Rockport, Mass., farm in April 2005, has also recently lost his title as the Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Economics.
While the 2005-2006 Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) course catalog listed Weitzman as holding the Monrad professorship, he now appears in Harvard’s directories simply as “Professor of Economics.”
Losing an endowed professorship usually does not entail a salary cut, but it is perceived as a drop in prestige.
Former Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, who served as FAS’s chief through last June, declined to say yesterday why Weitzman is no longer listed as the Monrad professor.
“Consistent with its practices, the FAS is not in a position to comment on any internal personnel matter involving a member of its faculty,” Kirby wrote in an e-mail.
Contacted at his Gloucester, Mass., home Sunday, Weitzman said, “I just don’t want to comment on it.”
And Ernest E. Monrad ’51, who donated the money to establish the professorship that Weitzman held, also declined to discuss the matter.
Monrad is the co-founder of Northeastern Investment Management, a Boston firm that supervises over $1.3 billion in assets.
Morton Keller and Andrew B. Schlesinger ’70, both historians who have studied Harvard, wrote in separate e-mails that they could not recall previous instances where professors had been stripped of their titles.
Shleifer, who paid a $2 million settlement but admitted no wrongdoing after the Justice Department sued him for allegedly defrauding the U.S. government, recently lost his title as the Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Economics, apparently as part of the administration’s punishment. The change first appeared in Harvard’s online directories last Friday.
Harvard also paid $26.5 million last year to settle a five-year-long lawsuit over Shleifer’s work advising a U.S.-funded program to privatize the Russian economy during the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union.
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