Kennedy School economist Dani Rodrik has a new blog!

And pretty high-level thinkin' it is, too. All those who say that Harvard professors would have to dumb themselves down to write a blog—an argument I've never understood, since a blog is essentially a big, blank sheet of paper—should take a look.

So far, the economists at Harvard are leading the way into the blogosphere. Rodrik is already engaging in a pretty good debate with Greg Mankiw. "Now, neither of Greg's arguments is exactly right..."

Which Harvard humanist will be first to blog? Hurry, folks, or you will confirm Larry Summers' suspicions about the superiority of his profession as compared to the humanities....

Professor Rodrik, just one suggestion: How about a name for your blog?

In the Financial Times, Rebecca Knight writes about the challenges lying ahead for Drew Faust.

Some interesting quotes...

Thomas Cech gives his first interview about Harvard (that I know of) since the presidential search:

He says Harvard has not paid sufficient attention to undergraduate education. "Just like deferred maintenance on your buildings, you can live with it for a long time," he says. "When you are really that great, and have a great reputation, you don't pay much of a price for certain things – like undergraduate education – going downhill."

Former Princeton president William Bowen praises Faust:

"Her challenge will be to get people to work together, to think – and act – across traditional disciplinary lines," says Mr Bowen, a senior research associate at the Andrew Mellon Foundation, where Ms Faust is a trustee. "The power of persuasion is very important. She will need to encourage [the faculty], and to inspire. She will be good at that. She has a good sense of inter­personal relations."

Mr. Bowen, as I reported in 02138, did not support the choice of Drew Faust as president.

Also, some blogger pops off.

"Harvard needs to start a capital campaign because: one, it's overdue, and two, Allston is expensive," says Richard Bradley, author of Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University. Mr Bradley says that because Ms Faust is "not a celebrity academic, not a larger-than-life personality, or Harvard alumna", her appeal to donors is uncertain."

That's true, I did say that. Please note that I did not say she will not be good at fundraising; my quote is purely a "remains to be seen" kind of thing.

What if Larry Summers were receiving an award from a men's group about what a great role model he is for young men, and during a question-and-answer session, he referred to all the female undergraduates as "girls"?

People would be pissed off, right? Letters to the Crimson...dark mumblings...shaking of heads at the Faculty Club.

But that's exactly what Drew Faust did yesterday, with the genders reversed.

Yesterday the Harvard College Women's Center gave Faust an award for "professional achievement." As the Crimson reports, in a subsequent q-and-a, Faust shied away from talking business, declining to answer questions about her role in undergraduate life, and at one point asking Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 to answer a question about whether the recent focus on equal opportunity for young women had left undergraduate men neglected.

“It’s not a strategy on my part to deflect these questions to someone else,” she said, “but Dick, is there a concern about boys?”

Boys?

Let us hope that line prompted a few winces in the crowd.

Imagine Summers turning to Gross and saying, "Is there a concern about girls?"

A president whose gender was an important aspect of her choice, but who says she does not want to be defined by gender, would do well to be more careful with her language. After all, men aren't the only ones who can be sexist.

Incidentally, this is an unfortunate piece of rhetoric. As anyone who has followed Drew Faust over the past several months knows, it is exactly her strategy to deflect these questions to someone else. There's nothing wrong with that. If Faust doesn't feel that it's appropriate for her to discuss substantive matters in public, that's her prerogative.

But when the double-speak begins—"it's not a strategy on my part," when clearly it is—that's when a leader's credibility starts slipping away.

The Crimson has reported on this previously, but yesterday Marcella Bombardieri in the Globe reported that Dean Jeremy Knowles has stepped down from his post. Knowles is suffering from prostate cancer, which has apparently worsened in recent days. Knowles has apparently been receiving treatment for the disease for months, but told no one and took no time off from work until now.

“All we can do is wait and hope and wish him well,” Derek Bok said of Knowles at yesterday's faculty meeting.

We do indeed wish Dean Knowles well. Our prayers for a speedy recovery go out to him.

In the Los Angeles Times, David Greenberg wonders whether the media isn't too quick to judge men who make gaffes.

In recent years, this hysteria has exacted apologies, resignations and other pounds of flesh...The sloppy, sexist remarks that former Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers made about women and science deserved a reprimand, but they didn't justify the loss of his job, which came fast and furious last spring.

I know and like David—he's a terrific historian—but he's wrong about something here, a mistake I want to point out since it's become so common, it's now almost a cliché.

Most commentators who write about Summers' exit from Harvard now conflate it chronologically with the women-in-science comments, as if the former hastily followed the latter—it came "fast and furious."

The conflation creates a causality that isn't accurate.

In fact, as we on this blog all know, Summers left Harvard more than a year after "the troubles," and could very well have survived "women in science" had he not begun making more missteps.

This matters for two reasons.

One, the suggestion that Summers was fired for exercising his right to free speech makes him an unjustified martyr.

Two, it obscures the fact that there were many other issues involved in Summers' resignation, some of which are ongoing at Harvard. (Debates over centralization and executive power, for instance.)

I don't expect that pointing this out will make any real difference, since this conflation has now become the conventional wisdom about Summers' ouster. (As Michael Kolber might say, sometimes the media is lazy.)

Perhaps I will rename this blog "Tilting at Windmills"....

The Crimson reports today on an important watershed in the partnership between Harvard and Google: In the next few weeks, students will be able to use the Hollis computer system to access tens of thousands of books from Harvard libraries that Google has digitized.

These books are out of copyright, so this move is a good one for both readers and writers.

But here's the worrisome part:

Although Harvard’s collaboration with Google currently only involves out-of-copyright books that are not too fragile to scan, [director of the University Library Sidney] Verba has said he hopes the project will eventually include all the books in the Harvard collection.

It's true: Verba has said this on several occasions, and that's alarming. Google's attempt to scan every book has profound and problematic implications for copyright and intellectual property issues. Those concerns have prompted publishers and authors to sue the octopus-like tech company.

But even though it is a move with huge public policy ramifications that will affect hundreds of thousands of authors, Verba's decision to cooperate with Google was never publicly discussed. It was, in fact, only announced after the decision had been made.

And just how did that decision get made? It followed a meeting between Verba and Sheryl Sandberg, a Google vice-president who just happened to be Larry Summers' chief of staff at Treasury. What a coincidence! Sandberg happened to meet with Summers before visiting with Verba.

Verba may not have known what he was getting into—or what he was being pressured to do. As he later told the Times, "It's become much more controversial than I would have expected. I was surprised by the vehemence."

This is why Harvard requires more transparency: to avoid, as the song says, dirty deeds done dirt cheap. The Google decision is one that will affect every professor at Harvard, but there wasn't a single meeting, forum, editorial or other means of public discussion that took place before the decision was made.

Instead, a single person at Harvard made this partnership with Google. I'm betting it wasn't Sidney Verba.

In the Washington Post, Al Kamen floats Larry Summers' name as a possible successor for Paul Wolfowitz, should Wolfowitz resign as head of the World Bank.

Some thoughts.

Would he be a good choice? This pick might run into fierce opposition. Obviously, Summers is more than well-versed in the issues...but I imagine that there are people there who never thought much of the draconian tight money policies he and Bob Rubin imposed on various nations during the 1990s.

Would he do it, though? I could argue it round or flat.... It's a high-profile job in the kind of work that Summers loves. But on the other hand, the second that he takes a new job, Summers will be held accountable for results in a way that he isn't now. Also, Summers is probably making much more money now than he would at the World Bank, where he couldn't rake in speaking fees and which would probably require him to step down from his hedge fund position.

Most interesting, though, this is more evidence of how Summers' reputation outside Harvard continues to rise like the proverbial phoenix.

Since when has it become the role of the university to make its students feel better when something bad happens?

The Crimson reports that some students are frustrated with the University for not publicly expressing its sympathy for the Virginia Tech victims and their families.

The University’s decision not to issue a letter immediately following the events left some students critical of the approach. Harvard officials yesterday posted a statement of sympathy online and announced a service to remember the victims at 10 p.m. tonight in Memorial Church.

...UC Representative Jon T. Staff V ’10 criticized the administration’s approach.

“Harvard certainly hasn’t done enough to respond to the tragedies that have happened in Virginia over the past week,” he said. “It is the responsibility of the administration to send some sort of message to the Harvard community and the Virginia Tech community about what happened.”

Um....why? Other than the fact that Harvard and Virginia Tech are both universities, Harvard has no connection to what happened. Why does the Harvard "community" need a statement that "Harvard" is sad? Of course people are sad. But Harvard is not Oprah; its job is not to hold its students' hands and make them feel better. Nor, frankly, would the Virginia Tech community give a damn if Harvard sends them "some sort of message."

What this episode suggests, I think, is how completely modern students have embraced the concept of in loco parentis, in which the university is supposed to play the role of parent to today's youth.

This infantilizing relationship between university and student, so challenged by students of the 1960s and 1970s, has come back in full force. It is only faulted when students lament alcohol restrictions during The Game. Now they want the University to give them a hanky. You can't have it both ways.....

In the Crimson, Lucy Caldwell writes about the "sensationalizing" of sexual violence in the Duke rape case and elsewhere.

So many facets of society have become so hypersensitive to such matters that we seem to be losing our ability to discern between legitimate issues of sexual violence and overblown or exaggerated circumstances... We’d do well to keep that in mind at Harvard this week, as the annual Take Back the Night events kick off. Take Back the Night, which began in the seventies, consists of candlelight vigils, rallies, and informational events aimed at promoting awareness of sexual crimes. This all sounds fine enough—preventing sexual violence is a laudable goal. The trouble is that much of the dialogue of events such as Take Back the Night ignores the fact that in many cases, preventing sexual violence hinges on sexual responsibility.

Hoo, boy. Prepare to get flamed, Lucy. (Not by me—I give you credit for guts, though I think your column lets men off the hook too easily.)

Now, this is an interesting idea:

As for Take Back the Night at Harvard, I suggest that at their closing candlelight vigil, they light a candle for the other victims of sexual violence politics—the ones who find themselves unfairly accused of serious sexual misjudgment. To acknowledge those victims—now that would be seizing the night.

There's about as much chance of that happening as there is of Al Sharpton apologizing for his role in the Tawana Brawley fiasco...but I think Caldwell is on to something.

Two interesting and connected pieces in the Crimson today. The first, by Sharon (no middle initial!) Wang details concern over the fact that international applications to GSAS haven't reached pre-9/11 levels.

Theda Skocpol and others suggest that the shortfall is due to increased competition from other universities for international students.

And second is a thoughtful editorial by Joshua Patashnik (the middle initial monopoly is breaking up!) called "Is Harvard American Enough?".

This is an issue that Harry Lewis first raised at a Morning Prayers talk early in the Summers era, and even though it's not widely discussed, it's a central question as Harvard prepares to take over the world. Even as Harvard searches for the best students from every country, should the university remain somehow fundamentally American? If so, why and how?

As Patashnik writes,

Harvard is indeed in peril of losing its American identity, but the problem is not one that can or should be fixed by a majority vote of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). At its root, this is a problem of emotion, rather than academics. The danger is not that future generations of Harvard students will lose the ability to study American labor markets, read Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” or write essays about the Atlanta Compromise. It is that they will no longer understand, on a gut level, why they are doing those things.

This is the kind of issue that Larry Summers would have raised, then squelched. Let's hope that Drew Faust has both the time and the inclination to pursue the question of what is evolving and what should be constant about Harvard's identity in a shrinking world.

Tommy Amaker brings some impressive credentials to his new job as coach of the Harvard basketball team. In 23 years as a player and coach, he's made 23 post-season appearances.

He also helps address a glaring problem in the Harvard athletic department: the absence of African-American coaches.

Now there's one. Better than none, still not enough.

But as the New York Times reports, Amaker does come with some question marks. Amaker was fired by Michigan on March 16 after six seasons. He restored the reputation of Michigan’s basketball program, which was reeling from N.C.A.A. sanctions when he arrived in Ann Arbor. ...But at Michigan, Amaker was sometimes viewed as being too principled to run a major college program.

What an astonishing and depressing sentence—"too principled" to coach a basketball team.

Fortunately, Harvard athletics try to balance winning with principles, and the university doesn't believe that winning is so important—or athletics, for that matter—that they're worth corrupting the soul of the university.

Welcome to Harvard, Tommy Amaker. Sounds like you'll fit right in.

In the Crimson today, Johannah Goldblatt and Daniel Schuker report that the list of potential deans has narrowed. The two then report the names they have: Jeremy Bloxham, John Huth, Theda Skocpol, Nancy Rosenblum, Barbara Grosz, Jeffrey Frieden, Robert Sampson, Stephen Kosslyn, Allan Brandt, and Michael Smith.

Those names look familiar.

Oh, wait—I know why. Because eight of the ten appeared on this blog two weeks ago—a few nominated by you readers, but a few, such as Bloxham, Huth, Michael Smith and Allan Brandt, were initially reported by yours truly. (And one, Skocpol, the Crimson kinda-sorta admits is still a candidate, despite the paper's best efforts to knock her out of contention.)

Not that the Crimson bothers to mention that.....

Hey, Johannah and Daniel, I'm not asking you to cite this blog as gospel. On the other hand, when serious candidates for the deanship are reported here two weeks before your story, I do think a tip of the hat is in order. With the exception of Skocpol, those names hadn't publicly appeared in the decanal context anywhere before they did here.

(What happened to that ombudsman of yours, anyway?)

Incidentally, Barbara Grosz is a close advisor to Drew Faust, part of her kitchen cabinet. But I think it's unlikely that we'll see a president and an FAS dean from Radcliffe.....

Six years into the presidency of Lee Bollinger, Columbia has received a gift of astonishing magnitude: $400 million from John Werner Kluge. The money is to go to financial aid.

“I’d rather by far invest in people than buildings,” he said. “If I can infuse a mind to improve itself, that’ll pass on to their children, and to their children’s children.” He also reflected on the financial aid he received at Columbia: “If it hadn’t been for Columbia, my path in life would have been completely different.”

It's Columbia's largest gift ever, almost 10% of its relatively small $5 billion endowment, and one of the largest in the history of American education. It also shows the challenges facing Drew Faust and Harvard as a capital campaign looms: These sorts of gifts take time to develop...but how much time will Drew Faust have before Harvard's next capital campaign begins? Six months? A year? Her task will be huge, and the pressure proportionate.

Lee Bollinger, by the way, could have been Harvard's president, and indeed, wanted to be Harvard's president—but the Corporation bypassed him for Lawrence Summers, in part because, after one interview at a New York hotel, Bollinger declined to sneak out through the service entrance in order to avoid two reporters from the Crimson....

In San Francisco (natch), one high school psychology class has found a way to deal with its students' avalanche of college rejection letters— "rejection letter therapy."

According to the San Francisco Examiner,

Students bring their rejection letters to class. The most rejected student gets a prize, but the real competition is for the “worst letter” colleges. Harvard is running head and shoulders above the rest in the “most obsequious while maintaining utter insincerity” category. Harvard lets students know how “very sorry” they are to reject them. They then bestow three wishes, none of which they grant. First, Harvard wishes that they were writing with a different decision. Second, they wish that it was possible to admit the rejectee. Finally, they hope the student they deny will accept their best wishes.

Other awards include the "least number of words before you know you are rejected" category, and the "most emphatic rejection" category....

Is this the beginning of a backlash against the admissions insanity?

I'm all for civility on blogs, but I'd rather have freedom—which is why this proposed blogging code of conduct sounds like a bad idea to me.

As the Times reports,

Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

The two men want to create guidelines for blogs to follow; those that did would get to post little seals of approval, like the American flag stickers you used to get on your papers in first grade.

Harvard blogger David Weinberger sounds like he's on board with the plan, telling the Times, “The aim of the code is not to homogenize the Web, but to make clearer the informal rules that are already in place anyway."

Possible guidelines might include banning anonymous comments and the right to delete harassing or threatening comments.

The latter seems obvious to me; just as newspapers don't have to run every letter they get, blogs don't have to publish every comment someone leaves. But banning anonymous comments entirely is a mistake. In my opinion, it's generally a healthy thing when people comment by name, but on the other hand, sometimes people don't want to, and that's fine too, as long as they're not hiding behind anonymity to be malicious.

The Times cites several examples of bad behavior behind this drive for a web code of conduct. One woman who writes frequently about her family now has to live with a website parodying her which incorporates copied photos of her daughter. One female blogger was threatened with death. Another woman was e-heckled during a public speech in which the audience was allowed to post simultaneous commentary. She lost her temper.

Death threats are, obviously, unacceptable. But these other things, unpleasant though they may be, seem predictable. Don't want someone to make fun of your daughter? Don't post pictures of her in a public space. Can't handle a little heckling? Don't give lectures.

(On a side note, I do think it's deeply unfortunate that so much of the anger is directed at female bloggers. Clearly, some guys have issues. This is a longer conversation.)

Seems to me that these bloggers are finding out what journalists have always known: There are always a few crackpots out there, and more than a few nasty, unhappy people. Deal with it.

The Simpsons. Even after all these years, it's still brilliant and funny. Sometimes, things are around so long that we take them for granted, but has any show on television ever been this good for so long?

I think of this because last night Harvard grad and Simpsons writer Mike Reiss gave a talk at the University of Rhode Island. Sounds like it was pretty funny.

Some of the better lines:

Asked if it took infusions of drugs to write the Simpsons, Reiss said, "You can't write The Simpsons on drugs. You can write Spongebob Squarepants on drugs."

(Sounds about right to me.)

Asked to create oxymorons similar to "Simpsons family values," Reiss responded, "McDonalds food, Fox News, and President Bush."

He also added that "President Bush is like Satan with a learning disorder."

Which, to me, is unfair to Satan and people with learning disorders.

Most intriguingly, Reiss spoke about the value of a Harvard education:

Reiss, a 1981 alumnus of Harvard University, compared a Harvard education to burning $150,000 in your backyard. He quickly corrected that statement, saying it was more like $180,000.

Unfortunately, the URI article doesn't go into more detail. But it goes to the question we were talking about yesterday: Is it worth it? Is Harvard still worth the lost years of childhood, the overwhelming pressure, the money?

In the Times, Sam Dillon writes about the wave of applications to Ivy League schools this year. (It's already the most e-mailed piece on the Times' website.)

It was the most selective spring in modern memory at America’s elite schools, according to college admissions officers. More applications poured into top schools this admissions cycle than in any previous year on record. Schools have been sending decision letters to student applicants in recent days, and rejection letters have overwhelmingly outnumbered the acceptances.

A few factoids: Harvard accepted nine percent of its applicants, the lowest in its history. Columbia, accepting 8.9%, was even more selective than Harvard With 23, 956 applicants, Stanford attracted about a thousand more potential students than did Harvard.

The cliche, of course, is true: Those of us of a different generation would almost surely not get in to these schools were to be judged by current standards.

But the question is, How much pressure can modern kids handle? How many extracurriculars can they perform? And are they sacrificing their childhood in the process?

I wonder if there won't be some kind of a backlash coming, or if the pressure to do more and more earlier and earlier will just continue to build. Anyone checked out teen suicide rates lately?

The Crimson today publishes an editorial that seems to have two purposes: thanking Theda Skocpol for her service as GSAS dean while justifying its earlier story in which anonymous faculty members tried to torpedo her shot at the FAS deanship.

In just two short years under her leadership, she has accomplished much, the Crimson writes, somewhat awkwardly.

Then, after one sentence in her favor, the Crimson follows with three paragraphs detailing how controversial she is.

The paper brings up her long-ago tenure fight and mentions that she once called Harvard "the most arrogant university in the Western world."

And then, having established that she had a "penchant for controversy" from the get-go, the Crimson jumps ahead 20 years to her public opposition to Larry Summers. And, just as its reporters did in their earlier hatchet job, the paper quotes Jeremy Knowles describing her leadership style as "gently unambiguous." One suspects that Knowles did not intend his little joke to buttress the argument that Skocpol manifests—wait for it—"the strong-willed tendencies [sic] of Summers' tenure."

A couple of points.

First, the Crimson has now twice compared Skocpol's leadership style to that of Summers. (In its news analysis piece, it said that she came to mirror the controversial president that she once opposed.)

Two comparisons to Summers, which we all know is like asking someone when he stopped beating his wife. And yet...one searches in vain for a single example from the Crimson of Summersian behavior. Surely if so many professors are riding a "wave" of discontent, there must be one anecdote, one story of a dust-up, one example of imperious behavior that the Crimson could use to support its analogy?

I'm waiting....

Point two. For the second time, the Crimson frames Skocpol's tenure fight as defined by its "controversy." Hello? She won, folks. How often does that happen? (Has it ever otherwise happened?) Don't you think that for Derek Bok to overrule a denial of tenure, something egregious had to have gone on? This is like saying that if a woman truthfully accuses someone of rape, then the woman is "outspoken." It's known as blaming the victim.

And was it controversial for Skocpol to speak out against Summers? Certainly not among the anonymous professors now criticizing her. She reflected a sentiment that a clear majority of FAS professors felt, but not all wanted to say. Maybe with a little historical revisionism, speaking out against Summers becomes controversial. It wasn't at the time—not within FAS.

It's troubling the way this editorial uses anonymous assertions from the news story to justify its portrayal of Skocpol. Was there a "wave of uncertainty" about her candidacy? In the original story, two anonymous professors said so. In the editorial, this becomes "by many accounts."

In the original news story, anonymous sources told the Crimson that president-elect Drew Faust has expressed skepticism [about Skocpol as FAS dean]...perhaps sensing professors' wariness.

Huh.

To whom did Faust express this skepticism? [The Crimson doesn't say whether it asked Faust for comment.] To Skocpol? Or to the professors to whom she may just have been listening sympathetically, appearing to agree? (This is a thing that leaders sometimes do.) And what exactly did she say? These professors couldn't give a quote, a paraphrase, of her words? After all, they were there when she expressed this skepticism...weren't they?

The Crimson should have pushed for more specificity before printing such a damning assertion from anonymous sources who may have been hearing only what they wanted to hear.

Nonetheless, there it is again in the editorial, which has University President [sic] Drew G. Faust voicing doubt about Skocpol's bid for the deanship...

Finally, after all this, we get to a more level-headed consideration of Skocpol's achievements as dean.

Let me be clear: Everything the Crimson says about discontent with Skocpol and her leadership style may be true.

But in relying upon anonymous sources, omitting specifics, and negatively characterizing Skocpol's history at Harvard, the Crimson fails to establish the veracity of this argument. Moreover, by printing a "news analysis" and an editorial without first running a straight news piece about Skocpol's tenure as dean, it has failed to establish a factual record upon which to base its analysis and opinion.

Both in its earlier news analysis and in this editorial, the Crimson has fallen below its usual high standards of accuracy and fairness.

Yesterday I had a terrific e-mail discussion with a Harvard prof who had had some experience blogging at another university and wanted to chat about why Harvard is, in my opinion, troglodytic on this score, and why I think it matters.

Our conversation ranged from whether humanists are less collegial than scientists (very possibly), whether blogging is a good use of professors' time, and what aspects of Harvard culture (whoops, typed "vulture" by mistake) might be resistant to blogging.

I could write a long essay on this—and be careful, or someday I will—but in brief, here's why I think academics should blog.

1) Blogs disseminate information. 2) They create a community of people with similar interests, and they attract people who might not otherwise have become interested in a particular topic. 3) They provide a casual forum in which a writer can lay out raw or untested thinking and invite feedback and constructive criticism. 4) They democratize and invigorate the relationship between teacher and student. 5) They democratize academic knowledge. 6) They have consequences that we can not predict but inevitably challenge us to think and learn in new ways. 7) They pressure their creators to think about how to make their work relevant and accessible to interested audiences.

Here are some theories about why Harvard humanists don't blog: 1) Humanists don't get the Net. 2) Harvard has a profoundly hierarchical culture, and those who work at Harvard buy into it almost always. Blogs break down barriers and challenge hierarchies, and as such they present a threat to the professional status of an academic cohort that is already feeling insecure. 3) Harvard is conservative and doesn't like change and innovation, particularly within the FAS. 4) Harvard profs spend more time writing for journals, which have more tangible consequences for professional advancement—even if far more people read blogs than read journals. 5) Harvard profs worry that their writing on blogs may not be as polished and sophisticated as their published writing, and the idea of easy access to the rough drafts of their histories unnerves them. 6) Harvard has a conservative, conformist culture which does not reward people who take chances and speak their mind, but punishes those people. 7) Blogs require time, and busy Harvard profs don't want to put time into something with no immediate material or professional payout.

I thought about these theories, especially #s 3 and 6, last night as I had insomnia and was reading the latest issue of Wired.

Two articles in the magazine talk about how corporations are experimenting with unprecedented levels of transparency—and how their candor is paying off in better customer relations and intellectual excitement within the corporations.

"The See-Through CEO" talks about this concept of "radical transparency" in a way that made me wonder how much Harvard could benefit from such an experiment.

Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups - and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right - and wrong. Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, dishes company dirt and apologizes to startups he's accidentally screwed. Venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak. In February, after JetBlue trapped passengers for hours in its storm-grounded planes and canceled 1,100 flights, CEO David Neeleman tried to deflect the blast of bad publicity by using YouTube to air his own blunt mea culpa. Microsoft, once a paragon of buttoned-down control, now posts uncensored internal videos - and encourages its engineers to blog freely about their projects (see page 140). The very process of developing ideas, products, and messages is changing - from musing about it in a room with your top people to throwing it out on the Web and asking the global smartmob for a little help. That's how this article was written: I've been blogging about it since I started, and some of the reader input I received is reproduced on these pages.

And I think of Harvard's instinctive hostility to the press, its circle-the-wagons mentality whenever something "bad" happens, the secrecy it promulgates in a hundred different ways. Yet such values are contrary to the spirit of the university; imagine the burst of knowledge, discussion and debate that would be sparked if Harvard tried some experiments in radical transparency.

An example: I understand that trying to turn lectures into Podcasts—not that many humanists would even think of this—requires navigating through horrendous bureaucratic red tape.

I'll bet you it doesn't at Stanford.

And here's a little experiment: Do a search for "Yale" in iTunes podcasts, then search for "Harvard." One of these universities gives away most of its podcasts, one makes you pay for most of them. Guess which makes you pay?

Another example: Why couldn't Drew Faust start a blog? Lots of university presidents already do. (Harvard minds will instinctively think of reasons why this is a bad idea. That reflex alone is telling.)

Perhaps Commencement speaker Bill Gates could shed some light on this. Another article in Wired, Operation Channel 9, talks about how the company created a website on which it aired video of internal deliberations. At first, lawyers and some executives freaked out about it. Now Channel 9 (read the article, the origin of the name is pretty cool) is admired in the business world as one of the most progressive and exciting new business strategies in a company that could really use them these days.

Why couldn't Harvard create such a website upon which it posted, say, the faculty meeting deliberations over curricular reform? A preliminary meeting of an admissions committee? Even—gasp! shock!—a meeting of the Corporation?

Again, Harvard minds will think of reasons to say no. But here are two good reasons to say yes. One, other places will do it if you don't, and Harvard will be left behind.

And two, Harvard humanists, let's face it: You folks are in trouble. Your disciplines are being marginalized, you're not getting any money, no one's reading books any more, the sciences are getting a whole new campus! Are you feeling anxious? You should.

I happen to think that such experiments—blogging, webcasting, podcasting, and so on—will help spread your important work and increase your professional status. But even if it doesn't, hell, what have you got to lose?