Last week I attended a book party for "One Drop," a new book by Bliss Broyard about her family's hidden racial identity: her father, who died in 1990, was a light-skinned black man who "passed" for white for much of his life, and never told his children the truth about his ethnic identity.

Some of you may remember the story, which was originally publicized by Skip Gates in a New Yorker piece called "White Like Me—The Passing of Anatole Broyard." (I believe Gates has since reprinted it in a collection.)

In One Drop, Broyard recounts the story of how Gates came to write that profile, and, if you're interested in how Gates works, it is fascinating.

Broyard and Gates are originally introduced through a mutual friend, and Gates calls Broyard.

Broyard writes: I started out the conversation pacing back and forth in front of the counter—I was anxious about sounding stupid or ill-informed—but his easygoing manner and a conversational style peppered with words like "dig," "brother," and "crazy motherfucker" soon relaxed me..... Skip asked me queston after question..... After talking for almost an hour, Skip promised to put together a reading list for me and hung up.

Gates also encourages Broyard to write about her father, that it would make a wonderful and important story.

Before long, Gates calls and asks Broyard if she wants to have lunch. She agrees, but isn't sure of his motives.

I wondered briefly if his interest was romantic.....

Then Gates cancels because (this is so typical, it's a little funny), he has to go to Washington to receive an award.

But, he says, I've got some good news. Tina Brown wanted him to write about Anatole Broyard for a New Yorker profile.

Bliss Broyard isn't happy—she wants to be the first to break the news of her father, and she isn't ready to write about him. We hung up at a crossroads. As he continued to call throughout the fall, trying to win my cooperation—and by extension, my family's—my trash-talking buddy Skip rapidly disappeared. Messages from Henry Louis Gates, Professor Gates, Dr. Gates, and then finally Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. piled up on my answering machine. ...Eventually Skip realized he was barking up the wrong tree.

When the article is published, it is not unsympathetic—I read it at the time and found it moving and fascinating, especially because the Broyards grew up down the street from my childhood home, and Bliss' younger brother and I attended the same school—but it was still painful for the Broyards.

My family and I stood stiff with anger, blinded under the glare of this sudden spotlight. The characterization of my father as an obsessive seducer of women particularly upset my mother....

Some time later, Gates sent to Broyard a detailed genealogy, all the research that the New Yorker had done to establish the race of Anatole Broyard. A guilty conscience or the fulfillment of a promise to help Broyard write about her father?

As I read this, I don't particularly think Gates did anything wrong. It's arguable that he should have told Broyard in their first conversation that he was thinking of writing about Anatole Broyard, as he surely was, but on the other hand, lots of journalists troll for ideas in everyday conversations. (Pretty much all the time, in fact.)

But it's nonetheless a fascinating and not very attractive portrait of the way that an ambitious journalist goes about his business, and how a person's painful life story can be commodified both by an outsider and by a family member. (Because surely Bliss Broyard must have known what a fascinating book her father's story would make, just the kind of thing that the American literary intelligentsia would snap up, and how her father's life story could boost her own career.)

What makes this incident even more intriguing is that the New Yorker piece probably did help Bliss Broyard get her book contract, for more money than she would otherwise have gotten, I suspect.

So you see, journalism can be a pretty interesting business.

Yale reports that its endowment increased by 28% last year....beating Harvard's return by about five percent.

Yale's 28% return easily exceeded the 17.5% average for foundations and endowments over the period and beat all other endowments with at least $1 billion in assets that have reported year-end results so far, according to the Wilshire Trust Universe Comparison Service.

Of course, Yale's endowment of $22.5 billion is only about 2/3 of Harvard's $34.9 billion.

Yale's investment manager, David Swensen, has been in charge of the university's investments since 1988, and over the past decade he has beaten Harvard's return by an average annual 2.8%.

Among the other endowments which did better than Harvard's were Amherst, Notre Dame, the University of Virginia, Duke, Michigan, and Northwestern. No one did better than Yale....

Could this have anything to do with the departure of Mohammed El-Erian?

The Globe covers the simmering battle between CrimsonReading.org and the Harvard Coop.

For the students, this is a fight about the cheapest access to information.

"We're not out to be at war with the Coop," said Jon Staff, director of crimsonreading.org, who passed out fliers advertising the site outside the Coop yesterday. "It's sad that students have to choose which classes they take based on the overall cost of the textbooks."

And for the Coop, it's about the value of information that it works to compile.

Coop president Jeremiah Murphy said the store's reading list is proprietary information. The staff spends considerable time compiling the list, collecting the names of books required by professors and sorting books by course, he said. "The issue is, why should we give it out to anybody, particularly the competitors?" Murphy said.

It's really a classic fight of the Internet era, in which information wants to be cheap and old monopolies dig in their heels to try to maintain profit levels. Sorry, Coop—right or wrong, you know how this is going to go. Cut your prices or die.....

The New York Sun reignites the debate over curriculum and citizenship, reporting that students at Harvard and elsewhere can not pass a test on basic American history. Students at many of the country's most prestigious colleges and universities are graduating with less knowledge of American history, government, and economics than they had as incoming freshmen, with Harvard University seniors scoring a "D+" average on a 60-question multiple-choice exam about civic literacy.

...At universities such as Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Duke, and Berkeley, seniors scored lower on the test, available here, than freshmen, living proof of the broadening relevancy of the old Harvard adage that the university is a storehouse of knowledge because "the freshmen bring so much and the seniors take away so little.

Here's the test. If Harvard students can't pass this thing, the university is really doing something wrong.....

In the Times, Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw joins Al Gore and calls for the implementation of a carbon tax, and using the revenue gained to cut payroll taxes.

Yet this natural aversion to carbon taxes can be overcome if the revenue from the tax is used to reduce other taxes. By itself, a carbon tax would raise the tax burden on anyone who drives a car or uses electricity produced with fossil fuels, which means just about everybody. Some might fear this would be particularly hard on the poor and middle class.

But Gilbert Metcalf, a professor of economics at Tufts, has shown how revenue from a carbon tax could be used to reduce payroll taxes in a way that would leave the distribution of total tax burden approximately unchanged. He proposes a tax of $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, together with a rebate of the federal payroll tax on the first $3,660 of earnings for each worker.

This is such a smart idea—and payroll taxes are regressive, anyway—that it will almost surely never happen. (Sorry, that was cynical.)

What's really interesting is that Mankiw is an adviser to Mitt Romney, who has been vociferous in his opposition to any new taxes....

The University of California-Davis hhas rescinded a speaking invitation to Larry Summers.

After a group of UC Davis women faculty began circulating a petition, UC regents rescinded an invitation to Larry Summers, the controversial former president of Harvard University, to speak at a board dinner Wednesday night in Sacramento. The dinner comes during the regents' meeting at UCD next week.

...“The regents represent the leadership and public face of the University of California,” the petition states. “Inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the university community and to the people of California. It is our fervent hope that the regents will rescind this invitation and seek advice elsewhere.”

As some of you know, I have written critically of Summers in the past, but this is ridiculous, the height of political correctness. The shame of it is not just that the UC system regents have caved on an important principle (free speech), but also that other universities might, in the future, simply choose not to invite Summers and other controversial speakers, lest the PC police get up in arms....

...and the funny thing that Summers' opponents don't seem to realize is that there's no surer, faster way to turn him into a martyr.

There's an article about Howard Gardiner in the new issue of Harvard Magazine in which Gardner lashes out at the Bush administration...and here in National Review, Jay P. Greene blasts Gardner for his opinions.

In HM, Gardner says, “The right wing isn’t just taking over the country, it’s shanghaiing all our values. If there’s a Republican administration after the next election, I would join in efforts for some sort of secession. It’s not the same country anymore.”

Greene writes in response,

What would make him, and officials at Harvard, comfortable threatening secession in the alumni magazine? One possibility is that they think these comments actually appeal to the alumni. They are probably mistaken. While President Bush is no more popular among Harvard alumni than among other groups of east-coast intellectuals, talk of secession is almost certainly a bridge too far. The current student body and key alumni show no signs of wishing Harvard to stray into fashionable radicalism.

We know this from their reaction to the forced resignation of University President Lawrence Summers. Summers attempted to rein in some of higher education’s more extreme nonsense...

Lawrence Summers tried to restore to Harvard the notion that patriotism and academia were not incompatible. Howard Gardner’s comments in the alumni magazine are an attempt to move the ball in the opposite direction. The newly appointed Harvard president, Drew Gilpin Faust, has not yet indicated the course she would like Harvard to take. Will Harvard once again stand for the Union?

The point, I suppose, is to put Drew Faust on guard: The conservatives are watching.

He's gone.

Mohamed El-Erian's decision to resign as head of the Harvard Management Company gets play all over the major papers (and lots of other places too).

Bloomberg: ``It's a huge loss for Harvard,'' said Ken Rogoff, a Harvard economics professor and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, where El-Erian worked 15 years, in an interview. ``He is just incredibly impressive and dynamic and a brilliant person. I'm sure it won't be easy to find a replacement.''

The Times: In a long, if cryptic, statement, Mr. El-Erian said that he was returning to Southern California at the end of the year to be “closer to our family.” His wife and young daughter moved to Boston with him when he joined Harvard. He declined to comment further yesterday.

The Crimson: Benjamin J. Heller ’94, a managing director at the hedge fund HBK Investments who has known El-Erian professionally for a decade, said yesterday that El-Erian’s legacy would be his rebuilding of HMC’s internal management team in the wake of Meyer’s departure.

“Because of his credibility, he was able to get a lot of strong people, and hopefully they’ll stay,” said Heller, who was a Crimson editorial editor.

The Wall Street Journal: The surprise move by Mr. El-Erian comes barely 1½ years after he started at Harvard. The departure leaves the $35 billion university endowment looking for a new leader during a turbulent period in the markets. (A longer article is available to subscribers.)

The Globe: "In returning to Southern California to be closer to our [sic] family, I will miss my daily interactions with this special Harvard community," El-Erian said.

...The laborious executive search that finally landed El-Erian showed how difficult it could be to find a new executive to run the university's endowment. Harvard had offered the job to Bain Capital executive Mark Nunnelly in the summer of 2005, but he eventually declined.

Portfolio.com:

• • This has got to be a serious blow to Harvard, where his work of rebuilding the management team in the wake of Jack Meyer's departure is only, by his own admission, part done. ("HMC is still in a transition phase," he wrote in his John Harvard letter three weeks ago.)
  • Given that El-Erian was clearly making a long-term commitment when he moved to Boston, does this prove that that Harvard is genuinely bad at retaining talent?
  • Or is El-Erian just fickle? His tenure at Harvard was short, but not as short as his tenure at Salomon Smith Barney.... (Blogger: The rest of this is quite interesting.)

My take: Of all the appointments Drew Faust has had to make, this one will probably be the most closely watched, and either the most important or the second-most, after the FAS deanship. So...probably the most important. She's going to get a lot of advice on a subject that is way, way beyond her experience. Can she trust it? Will she know enough to make an informed judgment? Or will the Corporation handle this for her?

Replacing El-Erian is Drew Faust's first big test.

Barack Obama has pulled a campaign ad that appeared on the Amazon.com webpage for Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's "The Israel Lobby," according to the New York Sun.

The placement on the "Israel Lobby" page was unintentional, a campaign spokeswoman said, and the ad was gone hours after a New York Sun reporter notified the campaign of its location. "The ad has been removed from the site because the views of the book do not reflect the views of Senator Obama on the U.S.- Israel relationship," the spokeswoman, Jennifer Psaki, said.

As with all criticisms of the book, W&M can use this act to demonstrate the validity of their thesis that Jews are bad.

(Kidding!)

Meanwhile, in the Crimson, Paras Bhayani argues that the book version of "The Israel Lobby" is a kinder, gentler version of the original paper.

Perhaps as a result of the reaction to the essay, the authors take pains in the book to show that their criticisms of the Israel lobby can be applied to other lobbies, while also spending more time tracing the American-Israel relationship. The authors also clarify many of their criticisms, bringing a less inflammatory tone to the book as a whole.

Perhaps, but this is a lose-lose situation for W&M: Toning down the thesis diminishes the amount of attention the book will generate, but won't diminish the amount of criticism.

I have a friend who always used to clean rental cars she was returning to the rental place, purging them of food wrappers, newspapers, empty bottles and the like. Since this was before rental companies threatened to fine you for leaving a rental car in a state of disarray, I always found it odd.

"We're paying for them to clean the car," I would say to her. "Why do their work for them?"

It made no difference; she just thought it was the right thing to do.

I've always thought of that whenever I hear Larry Summers' axiom, "In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car," quoted by Tom Friedman about a bazillion times.

In fact, I thought, some people do clean their rental cars. They may not take them to a carwash, but the use of the term "wash" is a clever red herring, because while people might not go that far out of their way, the principle at hand is cleaning, and lots of people clearly do clean their rental cars—and that suggests an interesting and irrational kind of economic behavior worth considering.

Apparently I'm not alone in feeling this way, because Tod Lindberg in the Weekly Standard has a piece about this exact issue.

I got to thinking about it the other day when I got back from the carwash with my rented car. Alas, I am quite confident from my subsequent research that I will not go down in history as the first person to wash a rental....

There's a converse that I wish someone would also study, which is why people trash things that, in theory, belong to them. I live near Harlem where, I think it's safe to say, there's not exactly a culture of environmentalism, and I see people throwing their garbage on the street—their street—all the time. Cigarettes, fast food wrappers, Red Bull cans, etc.

If the ostensible theory behind not washing a rental car is that people don't take care of things they don't have an investment in (the case for home ownership, right?), then why do people abuse things in which they do have ownership?

Or perhaps there is a false assumption there.

The Israel Lobby was reviewed a few days ago in the Times of London, and thanks to a poster, I'm just now seeing the review, by Max Hastings.....

Its argument is readily summarised. The authors support Israel’s right to exist. But they are dismayed by America’s unconditional support for its governments’ policies, including vast sums of cash aid for which there is no plausible accounting process. They reject the view articulated as a mantra by all modern American presidents (and 2008 presidential candidates) that Israel and America share common values, and their national interests march hand in hand.

For Europeans, all this adds up to a bleak picture. Only America might be capable of inducing the government of Israel to moderate its behaviour, and it will not try. Washington gives Jerusalem a blank cheque, and all of us in some degree pay a price for Israel’s abuses of it.

This is the first positive review I've seen...and I suppose it lends credence, though not necessarily veracity, to W&M's argument that the review appeared in an overseas forum.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard's Harry Lewis makes the case for a core curriculum, doing his best to reinvigorate a discussion that Harvard is desperately trying to avoid.

Within academe it is hard to inspire support for a core for a simple reason. We have not come to agreement — indeed we have had little discussion — about the purpose of higher education. In the absence of any big concept about what college is supposed to do for students, both students and faculty members prefer the freedom of choice that comes with the elective curriculum. We would each rather do our own thing than embrace our collective responsibility for the common good. But the argument that students have nothing in common is false, and the conclusion that a college education should have no core is wrong.

...Harvard's 2006 report on general education, from which the new curriculum emerged, was a striking effort to define a core. The professors who produced the proposal labored under difficult and thankless conditions. They had to start from scratch in an atmosphere of administrative instability. With the faculty under interim leadership, their idealism fell victim to turf battles in a series of redrafts and amendments. In dubbing one required area of study "The United States and the World," they were accused of implying that the world was merely America's "backyard."

One wonders if Lewis' attempt to get people thinking about what it truly means to educate Americans will gain traction, or if everyone at Harvard just wants this nasty curricular business to go away.....