The Scotsman reports that the selection of J.K. Rowling as Harvard's Commencement speaker has some Harvard students in a "row."

"Previous speakers include kings, presidents and towering literary figures, so some students awaiting the ceremony have complained that 42-year-old Ms Rowling, the 144th richest Briton, won't be impressive enough.

Adam Goldenberg, a Canadian student who writes for the Harvard Crimson, the daily newspaper at the university, said: 'Our commencement speaker tricked parents into letting their kids read books filled with sex, murder, and homosexual role models.'"

Anyone who has read Adam Goldenberg's columns in the Crimson or his now-defunct, I think, blog, called Gadfly, must wonder if, in fact, Goldenberg is having a laugh at the Scotsman's expense. Because if it is serious, that quote is just stupid.

"The speaker for Class Day, chosen by students, is chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke. Class Marshall Alexander J Tennant said: 'When we found out JK Rowling was going to be speaking, we wanted to find someone that would kind of balance our graduation ceremonies.'"

Hmmm...perhaps I will start a little controversy by suggesting that, when men are chosen as the Commencement speaker, no matter what their profession, no one says anything about needing "balance" in the form of a serious male economist type.

In an article about Yale's growth under president Rick Levin, Wall Street Journal columnist David Wessell quotes Lawrence Summers on how American universities need to continually change to stay on top of the global higher ed world:

"American universities right now are pre-eminent," says Lawrence Summers, who was deposed as Harvard's president in 2006. "They have enormous advantages in wealth, in the attractiveness of the U.S. as a place to study and teach, in their demonstrated excellence. The threat to the top universities is not imminent. But Oxford and Cambridge didn't perceive the threat as imminent. The combination of Britain's losing relative economic ground and deep complacency, lack of major investment in science and technology and governance modes that favored internal equity over external competitiveness caused them to lose their position over two generations."

Yale's Rick Levin, Wessell argues, is not as "prominent" an economist as Summers—"prominent," IMHO, being a carefully chosen word—but has been a far better university president.

Mr. Levin is less prominent an economist than Mr. Summers and less prone to penetrating insights and politically incorrect one-liners, less visionary but more politically agile at changing an organization designed to resist change. His 15-year tenure offers a case study in expanding and redirecting a venerable institution that, along with public and private peers, is vital to American prosperity.

Levin's achievements have been quiet but profound:

Mr. Levin increased the size of Yale's campus by 50% last year, buying a 136-acre tract west of New Haven from Bayer HealthCare. The tract came with 550,000 square feet of modern laboratory space.

It seems to me that this purchase, though it doesn't attract the hullabaloo of the Allston campus, is hugely significant. It's typically Levin: quiet, undramatic, but effective.

How many years decades and billions of dollars is the Allston campus from completion?

And here Yale has quietly acquired an already functioning complex that's over 50% of the size of the Allston development....

Boston's Channel 5 reports that Massachusetts state representatives are weighing a plan that would impose a 2.5% tax on university endowments of $1 billion or more.

Currently, seven Massachusetts universities have endowments over that figure: Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Boston College, Smith, Tufts, and Wellesley.

The endowment tax is a popular idea among house lawmakers who have already voted to send it in a study proposal to the Department of Revenue.

The plan strikes me as a silly one on principle. Why punish a non-profit institution for raising, saving and investing its money wisely? It's like the state saying, well, we can't manage our money as well as you do, so we're just going to take yours.

Nonetheless, as long as these universities are ostensibly tax-free and getting richer and richer, pols are going to look at the piles of cash they're sitting on and think about skimming from it.

Unlike her predecessor, Drew Faust is said to have good relations with Boston mayor Menino. (Who is rumored to have passionately disliked Larry Summers.)*

But how are her relations with Beacon Hill?

This might be one of those situations where it'd be helpful to have a Corporation member [other than Faust] who actually lived in Massachusetts......

*Correction: I'm informed by someone who would know better than I that I've got the relationship between Larry Summers and Mayor Men ino exactly wrong, and that in fact the two had a very good relationshp.

A few weeks back, Drew Faust endured probably the only controversy (and a small one, at that) of her first year when she was quoted in Business Week as suggesting that smaller private universities and many public ones could not afford to compete with wealthy universities such as Harvard in the realm of scientific research, and should consider cutting efforts in that area while beefing up work in the relatively cheaper humanities.

After a flurry of how-dare-she retorts from presidents of such places, Faust insisted that she had been misquoted by the magazine, and Business Week kinda-sorta issued a retraction.

In fact, Faust's only mistake really was in telling the truth. It's unfortunate that she didn't have the courage of her convictions, because she was right. In fact, the situation for many public universities is more dire than that, thanks to funding freezes and budget cuts.

As Chronicle of Higher Education reports (subscription only), public universities such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison are so hard up for money, they're losing both scientists and humanists to Harvard and its peers.

The problem is money. Wisconsin's stagnating state higher-education budget has forced the university to keep faculty salaries far below average. When professors get feelers from elsewhere, they learn that a move can easily mean a whopping 100-percent salary increase—sometimes more.

The departures have hit the College of Letters and Science hardest.....

What universities are leading the salary charge? Rockefeller University has an average professorial salary of $191, 200. After that is Harvard, at $184, 800.....

Well after numerous other schools have received nine-figure donations, Harvard has finally landed its first from an alumnus, David Rockefeller. The money will go to support study abroad and for new "study centers" at the Fogg Museum.

Rockefeller's gift is a big deal for Harvard, and the university is making a hullabaloo about it, as it should. (The Globe gets so excited about it that the paper simply prints the entire Harvard press release. Bold journalism, Globe!)

But the real impact of this gift, at least in the short term, has nothing do with fine art or study abroad. The greatest impact of Rockefeller's gift for the foreseeable future is this:

1) It breaks a psychological barrier. Harvard has lagged behind other universities, such as Yale and New York University, in landing truly large gifts from alums. Rockefeller's gift can be portrayed as a vote of confidence in Harvard and an example that other grads should emulate.

2) It's a watershed, unofficial kickoff to the fundraising campaign that has been planned, and postponed, for most of the '00s.

3) It signifies the closing of one final door on the Summers era. According to published reports, Rockefeller had been preparing to make a similar donation in 2006, then decided not to after the forced resignation of Larry Summers. Conservative news outlets portrayed that as a show of anger at Harvard and support for Summers; it almost surely was not. People making contributions of that magnitude want to maximize its, and their, influence. Giving the gift during a transitional presidency (Derek Bok's) would hardly have accomplished that. By waiting, Rockefeller increased his influence during the presidential search process and gets the pleasure of yet another Harvard president kissing his ass.

So this gift is terrific news for Harvard and very, very good news for Drew Faust. It is not a ringing endorsement of Faust; the gift would have come sooner or later. But at the same time, Harvard presidents get blamed for things that they have not done or are not their fault, so who can begrudge them taking credit for things which are not entirely their doing?

The question about Drew Faust, I would suggest, is whether she's becoming a second Rudenstine: great fundraiser with little national voice. Harvard wasn't satisfied with that the last time. Would it be enough (Plus: she's a woman! the first one! History!) this time?

The Times of London reports today that it gained exclusive access to the cache of personal papers relating to Norman Mailer that Harvard recently bought from his former mistress, Carole Mallory.

Mallory, a former model and actress who met Mailer at Elaine’s restaurant in New York in 1983, suspected him of having an affair with a male friend, was worried that he might contract Aids and refused to indulge his fantasy of three-way sex with a gay man.

At another point she writes: “He asked me to wash his bottom. So SAD. He is so ashamed of what he likes.” On October 24, 1990, Mallory scribbled in a black spiral notebook: “I think Rick Stratton is his lover. One of them.”

Stratton, a novelist and convicted drug dealer, laughs off the suggestion, according to the Times.

“The outlandish claims of scorned women never surprise me,” he said.

Regardless of whether Mailer wanted to sleep with men or not, the narrative of Mallory's papers is tawdry and a bit depressing; their relationship never seems emotional, and as Mailer ages, and his sexual prowess declines, their sex seems more like unpleasant body work, a basic function that must be done but isn't as natural or enjoyable or even successful as it once so easily was.

The sexual marathons of the early encounters – “One orgasm down. Two more to go? I hope so” – soon turned into tawdry sprints as Mailer, who by then was wearing a hearing aid and suffering from gout, dropped by for sex once a week. In return he got an earful.

“Why don’t you get me an apartment?” Mallory complains in one draft letter. “You are using me and conning me just to get laid . . . If you cared about me you’d pay my rent.”

From the pleasures of the flesh to the prerequisites of survival...

It proved extraordinary and occasionally painful reading in a hushed library full of Harvard scholars, one of whom was poring over a volume of 15th-century sermons.

Financial News Online reports that Mohamed El-Erian has rejoined Pimco as co-chief executive and co-chief investment officer, and will also head a new bond fund.

Co-chief executive?

The title gives some indication of why El-Erian, who replaced Jack Meyer as head of HMC in early 2006, left Harvard at the end of 2007—a considerably shorter job tenure than Harvard had hoped. El-Erian had previously been a senior portfolio manager and head of the emerging market portfolio group at Pimco. Now, he seems poised to run the firm in the not-so-distant future.

El-Erian also left Harvard because of family concerns; his wife, Jamie, reportedly didn't like Cambridge and wanted to return to southern California. But his timing could hardly have been better—for him, if not for Harvard. Given the current recession, it seems unlikely that Harvard's endowment can this year match the double-digit returns to which the Harvard community has grown accustomed.

The New York Post reports that Harvard has bought an archive of papers relating to Norman Mailer collected over a decade of amorous couplings by the late writer’s erstwhile mistress, Carole Mallory.

The storied Ivy League institution - where the Pulitzer-winning author received a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering - has purchased a treasure trove of books, papers and letters relating to Mailer from his longtime mistress, Carole Mallory, including X-rated descriptions of their red-hot bedroom sessions.“There’s a 20-page sex scene from an unpublished memoir I wrote called ‘Making Love With Norman,’ ” Mallory told Page Six. “It’s very steamy. Norman was a real man and he knew what he was doing.”

Other Mallory lovers, according to the New York Observer, include Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, Sean Connery, Rod Stewart (she must like Scots) and Richard Gere.

One senses a memoir in the (love-) making….

Is academia the dreariest (white-collar) profession?

On the Atlantic.com, Megan McCardle proposes several explanations for why so many academics seem so unsatisfied with their lot.

They include (I'm paraphrasing):

—low pay relative to professions they might have gone into

— constant awareness of your place in the academic ecosystem

—low job mobility

—insufficient time for other, status-reassuring pursuits due to demands of career

I'd offer another: a nagging sense that the social status of professors, particularly those in the humanities, has declined substantially in recent decades.

It's an important debate for lots of reasons, not least that it may help to explain the Summers debacle. Already sensitive about their (sagging) place in the world, professors won't like taking marching orders from someone who's come from the world of politics to tell them what they're doing wrong.... What say you?

In The New Republic, literary editor Leon Wieseltier has accused Andrew Sullivan, the magazine's former editor, of anti-Semitism for writing this sentence about Bill Kristol, after Kristol questioned Barack Obama's faith:

"A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his faith."

Those words prompted Wieseltier to write,

Ponder that early adjective. It is Jew-baiting. I was not aware that only Christians can judge Christians, or that there are things about which a Jew cannot call a Christian a liar. If Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew. So this fills me with a certain pascal wrath. Nice litle blog you have there, Obama boy. Pity if frogs or locusts should happen to it. Let me people be!

To which Sullivan responds,

To be called a “Jew-baiter” in the pages of a magazine I was once proud and honored to edit, and which I love and support, is an extremely wounding blow. It is also untrue and unfair.

…I agree wholeheartedly with Leon that, “if Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew.” It is because he is a cynic about faith, and a ruthless partisan indifferent to the truth when it cannot be harnessed to the wielding of power.

….when accusing someone of “Jew-baiting,” a writer might be a little more careful in his own use of language. I am 44 years old, a former editor of the magazine Wieseltier works for, married, and adult. And yet this is the tone of Leon’s scorn: “Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy.”

Little? Boy? African-Americans and gay men have had one thing in common over the decades and centuries. When we are being put in our place by our superiors, we are called “boys.”

Just for the record, I’ve had my tiffs with both of these writers. But on balance, I think Andrew is a very sweet guy who truly wants to do what he can to make the world to be a better place, while Leon, for all his many gifts and a truly remarkable mind, is not particularly interested in improving the planet, and moreover, can be one of the meanest people I’ve ever encountered, particularly when he harnesses the power of his pen to conjure insult.

Not for that reason, however, I’m going to take Sullivan’s side on this one. Perhaps his criticism of Kristol was inartfully phrased, but Andrew’s no anti-Semite, and any hint therein was certainly not deliberate.But Wieseltier’s “Obama boy” language was artfully phrased—a play, of course, on YouTube’s “Obama girl,” and at the same time deeply patronizing, and, yes, possibly homophobic—and its double meaning was very much deliberate. All of the double meanings in Leon’s prose are deliberate; he does not leave accidents within his work.

That said, I think Andrew was wrong in his criticism of Kristol, whose column doesn’t seem so objectionable to me. I disagree with it, but I don’t find it offensive….

The conclusion? It’s Hillary’s fault. The nastiness with which she has infused this campaign is spreading; she is dragging all of us down into her gutter.

I’m half-joking about that. But I’m half-serious, too…….

At a Richmond luncheon for Harvard alums last week, Drew Faust was introduced as not just the first woman to be Harvard president, but the first Southerner, which is actually kind of interesting. I'd like to hear or read someone's thoughts about how that side of her persona might affect her leadership style.

Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star columnist Ed Jones, himself a Harvard alum, liked what he saw from Faust.

She has a way of mixing the funny with the weighty. And she's a good listener, a description that didn't fit her predecessor.

Asked if her gender helps shape her presidency, Fausted noted with a smile that some have said that her strengths match those often associated with female leaders. But then she suggested that her brother in the audience might want to comment on whether she really is "kinder and gentler."

Isn't it interesting how Faust can ascribe specific qualities to a gender without getting in trouble?

(As opposed, of course, to her predecessor.)

The New York Times is reporting that Facebook is settling its lawsuit with the founders of ConnectU, for whom Mark Zuckerberg once worked.

The ConnectU people, brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and their friend Divya Narendra, had hired Zuckerberg to work on a social networking site, but charged that Zuckerberg stole the idea from them and created Facebook.

As the Times reports,

They say that he stalled on the project for months while nurturing his own idea and ultimately starting TheFacebook.com. The case cast doubts on Mr. Zuckerberg’s ingenuity, and discovery efforts turned up some embarrassing material — like his diary. Facebook clearly needed to make the suit go away before a widely expected initial public offering that could come as early as next year.

Most commenters treated the case as if the Winklevosses and Narendra were just gunning for some easy money. But in 02138's investigation of Facebook's origins, I got the impression that they were genuinely pissed off at Zuckerberg and sincerely believed that he had done them wrong.

I imagine they feel vindicated by this settlement....

As the Globe reports, Harvard's FAS voted yesterday to publish scholarly articles and research online for free.

Hundreds of professors voted unanimously for the change at a faculty meeting that culminated several months of meetings debating the move.

...Under the plan, Harvard officials will create an office and repository for professors' finished papers run by the university's library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. It would probably be called the Office for Scholarly Communication.

Would someone at Harvard please do the obvious thing, and initiate a university-wide plan to help professors set up their own web pages, so that they don't need an "Office of Scholarly Communication" (that's really what you're going to call it? Sheesh.) but can simply post their papers on their websites?

This is an interesting idea, because it will surely undermine the traditional peer review process, but might just make an entire audience of readers into peer-reviewers. (But we'll see if the OSC website has a "comment" function. I'll happily be proved wrong, but I'll bet you the answer is no.)

In the Chronicle for Higher Education, Princeton scholar Stanley Katz has some concerns about the Harvard plan:

The point I want to make about the Harvard proposal is that it can be seen as a move to undercut nonprofit publishers as well as the commercial behemoths (if it is truly a proposal to post all Harvard faculty articles on the university Web site). Depending on the details, it might also be a proposal to bypass peer review, unless Harvard plans to set up its own peer-review process. What social science and humanities faculty have to debate is the merits of entering the world of preprint article circulation that has served the scientists so well. Our scholarship is, I think, significantly different that that of the scientists. Both copyright and publisher peer-review have a long and useful past in our world, and we would do well to think through the implications of abandoning them — though it is hard to imagine that this is what Harvard actually has in mind.

The Harvard president continues to insist that Business Week misquoted her in saying that smaller/less "well-endowed" schools than Harvard would be "wise" to focus on the humanities rather than the sciences.

In this letter to Business Week, Faust alleges that the magazine's mischaracterization of my beliefs through out-of-context quotations and erroneous insinuations has created a serious misimpression of my views.

...I did not say and emphatically do not believe that our leading public universities, which have been so important for so long to the nation's scientific enterprise, should somehow cede the field to well-endowed private institutions.

[Emphasis added, and not just because I'm occasionally immature; I am amused by the, um, length to which Drew Faust goes to avoid saying the word "rich," or even just "wealthy." The phrase harkens back to the world of advertising, I believe, and specifically the phrase "nicely equipped," which Dodge introduced to describe the Dodge Neon about a decade ago. But I digress.]

The Crimson, where I first read about this exchange, reports that Business Week "backed off" its quotation.

Mmmm....sort of.

Here's what Business Week said:

Editor's note: Upon review of the tape-recorded conversation between our reporter and President Faust, we believe we reported her comments fairly.

Asked specifically how lesser endowed universities can survive, given the resource advantages of the Ivy Plus schools, President Faust identified the decision of some institutions to "emphasize social science or humanities and have science endeavors that are not as ambitious as those of some of the institutions you've been talking with...." She concluded that "those kinds of balances are one thing," by which we understood her to mean that such balances are one thing the institutions could do to survive.

President Faust did not, however, say such schools would be wise to use that strategy, a word we used (without quotation marks) to characterize her comments. We appreciate her clarification of her remarks.

In the Crimson, University spokesman John Longbrake says this about that editor's response:

We’re pleased that the magazine has acknowledged that the quotes from President Faust were taken grossly out of context,” he said, “and further that they recognize that the author’s choice of language mischaracterized the tone and meaning of her conversation.

"Grossly out of context"? That isn't quite what the magazine said, either, though I can't blame Longbrake for putting that spin on it.

So it's a bit of a gray area. It sounds to me like Drew Faust probably did mean that "lesser endowed" universities would do well to scale back their science investments, and the truth is, she's probably right—they can't keep up. As Michael Kinsley once pointed out, this is the definition of a gaffe: Telling the truth. But the magazine might have made this a little more explicit than she put it.

No one's really the winner here, but Business Week doesn't come out smelling like roses, because, as the Crimson reports, the magazine has declined to release the tape of its interview with Faust, saying it has a policy against doing so. That's complete and utter bullshit. What possible rationale could there be for such a policy other than, "We don't want to have to defend our editing process"?

Here's my own policy when it comes to editing interviews: I'm very aggressive with transcripts, and I frequently, though not always, cut and edit heavily. But no edited quotation can change the intent, context, language, and meaning of the quote; it has to reflect accurately the intention of the speaker. There's no scientific basis for determining that, but your conscience is a pretty good judge. Business Week's refusal to release the transcript makes the magazine look like it has something to hide.

The Times today covers a subject oft-discussed on this blog: the widening gap between rich and not-rich colleges and universities.

...America’s already stratified system of higher education is becoming ever more so, and the chasm is creating all sorts of tensions as the less wealthy colleges try to compete. Even state universities are going into fund-raising overdrive and trying to increase endowments to catch up.

I wrote in the last issue of 02138, "Harvard's billions are undoubtedly a blessing. But in ways that no one seems to have expected, they are also becoming something of a burden."

If I may pat myself on the back, in ways that I didn't expect, that statement seems to be increasingly true—especially as federal attention to and pressure on this issue grows.

“These institutions continue to build up their kitties,” said Representative John F. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts. “They say it is the schools’ money. But it is not all the schools’ money. Some of it is. But when a donor gives them money, he is able to give more because he is not paying taxes. So some of what they have is federal money, every student’s money, every family’s money.”

“It may be time to change tax policy,” Mr. Tierney added.

Uh-oh! That would be very, very bad for Harvard.

Also troubling for Harvard, in a subordinate kind of way, is the fact that Larry Summers has completely defined this issue as his, rather than Drew Faust's. The Times (online, anyway) has a photo of Summers with the caption, "While he was president of Harvard, Lawrence H. Summers used endowment returns for expansion, financial aid and research."

What's interesting, and what Drew Faust and her handlers should be concerned about, is the fact that he has become so publicly identified with this issue. Would Faust not talk for this article? Or did the Times not even bother to call her?

Dr. Summers said that when investment returns were particularly high he believed spending at wealthier universities should go higher, too. “There is a temptation to go for what is comfortable,” he said, “but this would be a mistake. The universities have matchless resources that demand that they seize the moment.”

The Times might have wanted to speak to an FAS professor to see how Summers' spending priorities affected other areas of the university. But as I've previously written, the Times and Larry Summers have a long and loving relationship. And Summers is quite good at using that relationship; note how his quote—"a temptation to go for what is comfortable"—is ostensibly about endowment spending, but could easily refer to Drew Faust as opposed to, say, himself.

Smart guy, that Larry Summers.

That said, the money issue comes at a particularly tricky time for Harvard: As it prepares to go public with a massive fundraising campaign to pay for Allston. How will donors feel about giving more lucre to the world's richest university, by far?