The Times covers Skip Gates' new venture, TheRoot.com, and its odd connection to the genetic testing company he co-founded, AfricanDNA.

The third major part of the new site, titled “Roots,” will have online tools for people to build their family trees, link to or add information to other people’s trees and construct maps showing their ancestral trails. It will also urge people to have DNA testing, which can help them trace their backgrounds to specific ethnic groups and parts of the world. It will offer links to companies that do the testing.

One such company the site will direct people to, www.AfricanDNA.com, is co-owned by Mr. Gates, a relationship that would be prohibited at some publications.

“I don’t see a conflict of interest,” he said, because The Root will fully disclose his roles and will link to every company that does the DNA testing.

I find this all very odd. There is an entire section of TheRoot devoted to DNA testing; the very name of the publication is connected to genealogy; and frankly, there seems much more care devoted to the DNA testing part of the site than there is to the actual online magazine part of the site.

Is this a real magazine, or just a front for drumming up business for Skip Gates' new company?

In fact, TheRoot doesn't link to every other company that does DNA testing. It links to some of them—kind of.

When you click on a box labeled "DNA testing," a small "Disclosure" form briefly pops up—far too quickly to be read— then goes away and is replaced by a video. If you stop the process (for me, holding my space bar did it), you can actually read the box, which says,

Though TheRoot.com has a business relationship with AfricanDNA.com, which was co-founded by Henry Louis Gates Jr., there are many other companies that offer DNA testing services. Among those that you can choose from are RootsforReal.com, OxfordAncestors.com, The Genographic Project ( www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic ) and Ancestry.com. Companies aimed specifically at African Americans include AfricanAncestry.com. Prices and services vary by company.

In type that is about twice the point size, the disclosure form then provides a link: CONTINUE TO AFRICANDNA.COM.

Given that Skip Gates is all over the site, and that his affiliation with AfricanDNA.com is probably a selling point, and the site is designed to funnel traffic to AfricanDNA.com, which genetic testing service do you think most readers will go to?

As the Times points out, TheRoot.com is co-founded by Don Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. Graham should know better than to permit this kind of arrangement in a publication that defines itself as a magazine. It'd be akin to him devoting the entire editorial page of the Washington Post to a company in which he was a primary investor—every day.

Should the "Roots" section of TheRoot.com—fully one-quarter of the site—be considered an advertisement? (Yes.) Should the specifics of Gates' business relationship with AfricanDNA be disclosed? (Yes.) Should the exact nature of the site's "business relationship" with AfricanDNA.com be disclosed. (Well, obviously.) Can you trust the editorial of TheRoot? No.

I look, for example, at the first three "articles" on the site, which are about South Africa and Kenya, and I think, Are they there because of newsworthy events going on in those countries? Or are they there to further the readers' mental and emotional connection to Africa, so that they will start to think seriously about investigating their genetic origins?

The idea of an online magazine devoted to black issues is a great one. It's unfortunate that this magazine is fundamentally compromised.

He's got (yet) another gig: helping launch The Root, an online mag for black Americans. He's editor-in-chief—and he's also pitching tools to help blacks investigate their DNA history. Fascinating! Especially since Gates is an investor in AfricanDNA.com, a company he co-founded. (Watch Gates swab his own DNA in this video.)

Here's Gates' bio from the press release announcing AfricanDNA.com. Anything missing?

Long interested in genealogical research and DNA testing, Gates is the author of Finding Oprah's Roots, Finding Your Own (Crown, 2007) and the forthcoming In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past, to be published next spring (Crown, 2008). He is also the host and executive producer of the critically acclaimed 2006 PBS series "African American Lives" and its follow-up, "Oprah's Roots." "African American Lives 2" will be broadcast on PBS in February, 2008 in conjunction with Black History Month. Professor Gates is Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American and African Studies. Gates, an influential cultural critic, has written for Time Magazine, The New Yorker and the New York Times. The recipient of 48 honorary degrees and a 1981 MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award," Henry Louis Gates, Jr. received a National Humanities Medal in 1998, and in 1999 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

To be fair, Gates' Harvard title is noted early in the release. But it is remarkable that in the entire paragraph above, Harvard is unmentioned, as is any other university at which Gates has taught.

Well, Larry Summers works in a hedge fund, Skip Gates is becoming a business entepreneur. Has it occurred to anyone at Harvard that the university is paying its University Professors extremely well...so that they can go off and make fortunes doing things other teaching and research?

There's a case to be made that this doesn't matter, that Summers, Gates, et al bring renown to the university and are therefore worth the up-to$400,000 they are paid annually.

But they are certainly expanding the traditional role of the University Professor and, indeed, the university itself. It is no strange irony that the people who are supposed to represent the pinnacle of Harvard's scholarship are now pioneers in the corporatization of the university.

Ironically, one University Professor who did significant teaching, Cornel West, is the one most associated with not teaching.....

It becomes more and more apparent that Harvard's recent move to expand financial aid was primarily motivated by a desire to fend off political pressure from Washington.

Unfortunately, that strategem doesn't seem to be working. Yesterday the Times reported that the Senate Finance Committee has signaled that it will continue its push to compel "well-endowed" colleges such as Harvard and Yale to spend a greater percentage of their endowment annually.

The Senate Finance Committee, increasingly concerned about the rising cost of higher education, demanded detailed information on Thursday from the nation’s 136 wealthiest colleges and universities on how they raised tuition over the last decade, gave out financial aid and managed and spent their endowments.

... “Tuition has gone up, college presidents’ salaries have gone up, and endowments continue to go up and up,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the committee. “We need to start seeing tuition relief for families go up just as fast.”

A fascinating abandonment of the free market by Grassley...but then, since universities such as Harvard enjoy non-profit status even while they rush to monetarize everything they discover in their non-profit science labs, there is some legitimate government jurisdiction here.

This is a big test for Drew Faust...and truth be told, Larry Summers might have been better-equipped, given his Washington experience and economic know-how, to repel such Washington pressure.

It will be fascinating to see how Drew Faust responds....

The Times reports that it's not just Ivy-Plus schools who are "well-endowed"—it's exclusive prep schools such as Exeter and Andover. Exeter now has $1 million in endowment funding for every one of its students.

Exeter may be a particularly successful example, but its ballooning endowment also reflects a broader trend. In the 10 years through the 2005-6 academic year, the number of students at independent schools, which does not count parochial schools, rose just 11.6 percent, according to the National Association of Independent Schools. Over the same period, the average endowment per student, adjusted for inflation, increased by 93.5 percent.

Other schools mentioned included Harvard-Westlake in LA, Brearley in New York City, and Choate.

I've seen some of this at my own alma mater, Groton, for which I raise money. Groton, which is a small school of a little more than 300 students over five grades, has had to transform itself to keep up with larger competitors such as Exeter and St. Paul's. Where Groton once had its 8th and 9th grade boys sleep in cubicles with curtains for doors—sounds weird, but the kids loved it—the place now has dormitories, a gym, and a performing arts theater that are nicer than those, I'd bet, at most small colleges. It's a little ridiculous, but Groton feels it has to maintain this level of facilities in order to continue attracting the children of the wealthy who are the natural constituency of any prep school. (And no one's making a lot of money doing this; teachers at Groton get some nice benefits, but mostly they make their age.) It is a wonderful school and I was fortunate to go there, but it has become almost surreally luxurious.

(In one encouraging sign, Groton is now free for any student from a family whose income is less than $75,000.)

Why does all this matter? Because it shows again how the very rich in this country are pulling away from everyone else....

In the Times, scholarship consultant Roger Leheka and historian Andrew Delbanco, both Columbia-affiliated, take aim at Harvard and Yale's new financial aid plans with what is perhaps the most serious criticism yet of those new proposals. (Due more to the location of the argument than its novelty.)

Next year, each of these institutions will add more than $20 million to what they now spend on financial aid, reducing the cost of a college year for families earning $180,000 to $18,000, from $30,000. That’s good news for students at Harvard or Yale. But it’s bad news for many hoping to attend other private four-year colleges — and for the nation in general.

The problem is that most colleges will feel compelled to follow Harvard and Yale’s lead in price-discounting. Yet few have enough money to give more aid to relatively wealthy students without taking it away from relatively poor ones.

The authors point out that 99% of colleges in the U.S. have an endowment that is less than 1% of Harvard's.

And here's where it gets really interesting: The writers then note Larry Summers' stated concerns about the lack of lower-income students at Harvard and elsewhere, and suggest that this is a far more important issue than the extension of financial aid to middle-class families.

In 2004, Lawrence Summers, then Harvard’s president, pointed out that three-fourths of the students at selective colleges come from the top income quartile and only 9 percent from the bottom two quartiles combined. ....The problem Mr. Summers described is only growing worse.

The authors don't come out and say so, but they strongly imply that Summers was primarily concerned with the plight of lower-income kids, while Drew Faust and Rick Levin are actually hurting lower-income students.

It is understandable that Harvard and Yale want to make themselves more affordable. But the way they’re going about it sets an example that is likely to make it even harder for low-income students to attend the best college for which they are qualified. Harvard’s stated motive is to stop prospective students from “voting with their feet” by choosing public universities or other private colleges. But surely this is not a very serious problem for a university that each year turns away hundreds of high school valedictorians and whose yield (the percentage of admitted applicants who enroll) is around 80 percent.

Is that fair? I'm not so sure—who knows if Larry Summers wouldn't have enlarged financial aid in the same way that Drew Faust just did? (After all, surely the original "free tuition" plan was not his idea, just as this recent enlargement was not Drew Faust's.) And it doesn't seem at all unrealistic to me that a family with an income of $150,000 would have trouble paying Harvard $50,000 of that. Moreover, will that 99% of colleges really take money away from poor kids in order to compete for kids with Harvard and Yale, when surely the applicant pool has little overlap?

Nonetheless, the impression that will linger in the minds of anyone who reads this piece is pretty clear: Summers right, current (unnamed) Harvard president wrong.

The answer, according to Leheka and Delbanco, is more government aid to colleges less "well-endowed," to quote a certain Harvard president—i.e., rich—than Harvard and Yale. Otherwise, America will be the loser, no matter who wins the Harvard-Yale game.

I think this line of criticism has now reached the point where Drew Faust and Rick Levin need to respond....

Larry Summers has been all over the news lately with his calls for an economic stimulus, delivered most recently in Congressional testimony on Wednesday afternoon—and it's having a restorative effect on his reputation.

"When Summers Speaks, Congress Listens," is the headline on a 1/16 Forbes piece on Summers.

His turbulent tenure as president of Harvard University well behind him, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers is still considered an important voice in setting the nation's economic course.

..."Fiscal stimulus is the single biggest issue on the economic policy agenda of the president, Republicans and Democrats, and it was put on the agenda by Summers," said Jason Furman, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based public policy organization.

Sloppy journalism alert: That last sentence should read, "...director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based public policy organization that was co-founded by Larry Summers and Bob Rubin."

The article quotes various members of Congress about how seriously they take Summers, and concludes,

Following his resignation, Summers took a yearlong sabbatical, and is now an economics professor at the Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Which reminds me—now that he's a University professor and all, does anyone have any idea what Summers is doing to earn that $400,000 a year salary?

The Crimson reports that 11 provosts from public universities have sent Drew Faust a letter strongly criticizing her recent remarks about public education in Business Week magazine.

...she was quoted as saying that public universities short on federal funds should leave expensive scientific research to their wealthier peers.

“We emphatically reject that notion,” wrote the administrators, who are provosts from schools such as the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Collectively, our institutions educate more than 380,000 students, produce 1 in every 8 American PhDs, and conduct more than $4.5 billion worth of research every year.”

In response, Faust has sent a letter to each provost stating that the BusinessWeek article “seriously misrepresented” her views. ...

“I did not say, and I do not by any stretch of the imagination believe, that our leading public universities—which have been so critical for so long to the nation’s scientific enterprise—should somehow cede the field to well-endowed private institutions,” she wrote.

But according to Business Week, that's exactly what she said.

Not that Faust seems worried about Harvard or other top-tier research schools. "They're going to be—we hope, we trust, we assume—the survivors in this race," she says. As for the many lesser universities likely to lose market share, she adds, they would be wise "to really emphasize social science or humanities and have science endeavors that are not as ambitious" as those of Harvard and its peers.

Herewith, I will give some free advice. (Though really, I ought to charge for this stuff.)

President Faust, if you really didn't say what you're quoted as saying, then call on the Business Week reporter to release the transcript of your interview.

But if you claim that you were misquoted and you don't call for the Business Week reporter to release the transcript, then, frankly, no one has any reason to believe you and you have compounded the initial error by looking political and disingenuous. Better to just admit that you said something dumb, apologize and move on.

Oh, and Crimson reporter Rachel Pollack, you really ought to have called Business Week for comment. Don't just let Drew Faust's denial stand there; ask the magazine if they misquoted her or not. Frankly, you ought to ask them to release the transcript of the interview. If they have nothing to hide....

There. That and $2 will get you a tall coffee at Starbucks, though not a particularly good one.

Yale has announced that it will match Harvard's recent financial aid increase--and raise the level to which the increase applies to $200,000 from Harvard's $180,000.

Here's Bloomberg, which beat the Times by a day on the story:

Families with annual incomes under $120,000 will pay 50 percent less starting in 2008-2009, the New Haven, Connecticut, university said today in a statement. Parents earning less than $60,000 won't need to pay at all, the school said. Yale also plans to peg its 2008-09 tuition increase to inflation.

This last line may feel unimportant compared to the $200k news, but it isn't. Critics of university tuition hikes, such as Iowa senator Charles Grassley, have consistently wondered why college tuitions seem so much faster than the rate of inflation. (Fair question, right?)

Yale's announcement that it will tie its next year's tuition increase (I suppose a freeze is out of the question) to inflation suggests Rick Levin's sensitivity to the political buzz surrounding the issue.

``Yale's action shows that, despite some squawking, the sky won't fall when universities increase the amount of money they spend from their endowments, and when they do, it can mean big help for families struggling to pay college costs,'' Grassley said in a statement.

Harvard seized the initial high ground when it made its announcement. I wonder if Rick Levin hasn't just taken it back.

The Sun gives Drew Faust's new book, This Republic of Suffering, a rave review, one of a string of positive mentions the book has been attracting. (Could this book be a bestseller? I'd be mildly surprised, but not entirely; the Civil War always intrigues, Drew Faust is now a high-profile figure, and reading about the Civil War might be one way Americans can consider the Iraq war.)

"No one expected what the Civil War was to become," Ms. Faust writes at the beginning of her book, and it is the terrible surprise of the war, the inability of Americans to predict or prepare for its cost, that she so powerfully communicates.

The book sounds fascinating. But something else from the review jumped out at me—an unintentional insight, I think, into Drew Faust's leadership style.

As armies and governments tried to figure out how to bury so many corpses and assign the correct name to each grave, civilians back home evolved their own rituals and fictions to try to make sense of their loved ones' deaths in battle. Ms. Faust sheds light on both of these processes, thanks to her extensive research in official records and private correspondence. In general, she keeps her own voice muted, seldom imposing an interpretation, but allowing the dead to speak for themselves. [Emphasis added]

If you substitute—heh-heh—the word "faculty" for the word "dead," that bolded sentence pretty much sums up the way that Drew Faust has led Harvard since she was anointed president. And at least for the moment, it seems to be working: The place is calm, projects are chugging along, there's been nary a hint of divisive controversy on campus this year.

There is, of course, a chicken-and-egg question here: Did Drew Faust go into history because she's a good listener, or did she become a good listener through her historian's work, in which the voices of the past do, or should, matter more than the voice of their retriever?

And, of course, there's the interesting corollary about gender. What role did Faust's sex play in making her a good listener? Did she have to be, growing up an ambitious and intelligent woman in conservative Virginia, where women's proud voices might not have been encouraged in the public sphere?

(My grandmother ran for Congress from Yorktown, Virginia, around 1950, I think it was, so I know something of this.)

And another corollary: Any discussion of academic field, gender, voice and leadership style in this context can not help but lead to thoughts of Larry Summers and questions of how his voice, developed through years of family arguments and contentious econ seminars, infiltrated and shaped his own leadership style.

Does the field of history encourage listening more than the field of economics does? If so, why, and what are the implications? And how might that dynamic be shaped by gender, and how might it affect who chooses to enter that field?

The Times reports today that Larry Summers has invested in a new video-centric website called Big Think, ostensibly a "YouTube for ideas."

Big Think (www.bigthink.com) mixes interviews with public intellectuals from a variety of fields, from politics, to law to business, and allows users to engage in debates on issues like global warming and the two-party system.

[Calling all editors: Spot the grammatical error in that sentence.]

The site was started by Harvard alums Peter Hopkins and Victoria Brown, both former bookers on the Charlie Rose Show.

The Times reports that Hopkins finagled a meeting with Summers by convincing his assistant to put him on the schedule, and that after a year, Summers ponied up a five-figure sum.

“I’ve had the general view that there is a hunger for people my age looking for more intellectual content,” said Mr. Summers, who resigned as Harvard president in 2006 after making controversial comments about the lack of women in science and engineering. “I saw it as president of Harvard when I saw C.E.O.’s come up to my wife and want to discuss Hawthorne.” (His wife, Elisa New, is a professor of English at Harvard).

Sounds like an interesting site, and I wish it well. But I also wish that the Times, which has rhapsodized about Larry Summers for years now, would adopt a little more skepticism when it comes to his doings.

For example:

1) Does a five-figure investment really justify putting Summers front and center in the story? Wouldn't it be nice to know, as Times reporter Tim Arango does not appear to, what the total capitalization of the site is?

2) I'm sure that many people Larry Summers' age are looking for intellectual content. Are they really looking for it on the web? Be honest: Would you watch a five-minute interview with Pete Petersen? Or John McCain on the question, "Is ethanol overhyped?"

3) Could Larry Summers name two of the multiple CEOs who asked his wife about Hawthorne ?

4) A three-second Google search shows that Hopkins was a "Weissman scholar" at Harvard—he interned at NBC News in London—and apparently met Summers at an event for the scholarship's beneficiaries. Probably worth mentioning.

5) It's also probably worth mentioning that the real, relevant connection here is not Harvard, it's the Charlie Rose Show, on which Summers has appeared numerous times.

6) The Times might also have mentioned that Summers was one of the founding contributors to "Open University," the New Republic's academic blog, and something one might consider a forerunner to Think Big. Why is it worth mentioning? Because from all appearances, Open University is a complete dud—the last post there was five days ago—and as far as I can tell, LHS has not written for it once. Seems relevant, right?

So, interesting story, poorly reported. The New York Times, it seems, can not help but dance to whatever tune Larry Summers plays.

Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee win in Iowa.

I think this is a mixed result for anyone who wants to see a Democrat win this November, for two reasons.

One, Hillary is one Democrat guaranteed to drive Republicans to the polls.

Two, I think Mike Huckabee is a bit of a nut. But he may just be a stronger national GOP candidate than Mitt Romney (obviously, he was the stronger candidate in Iowa). On the one hand, he doesn't believe in evolution; on the other hand, not all of his positions are insane, and some are surprising for a conservative Republican. He's obviously warm and personable, and he doesn't have the Mormon problem.

Here's one frustration I have: If you read some media accounts, you'd basically get the impression that Hillary, John Edwards, and Romney should drop out today. Here's Adam Nagourney in the Times: "Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards...both vowed to stay in the race." And that's in the third paragraph of his piece....

Well...duh. Of course they're going to stay in the race. It's been too close to call for weeks now, and after one caucus, they're going to drop out? Silly.

Here's the Washington Post: With a huge campaign fund and much of the party establishment behind her, Clinton will have significant assets to employ in the coming contests. But Obama also has a massive campaign fund and has already begun to put organizations into the later-voting states in what his advisers have anticipated could be a lengthy and brutal battle in the weeks ahead.

Much better.

The Globe, to its credit, is also more level-headed than the Times. Its main piece on the outcome makes no such pronouncements, and it even runs a news analysis piece saying that history doesn't always bode well for the early primary winners.

I slag the Globe a lot, so I want to give it a big shout-out here for cooler political reporting than in today's Times.

Harvard's recent expansion of financial aid has sparked all sorts of interesting conversations, some of which, I think, the University might not have expected. First, in the Boston Globe, college consultant Steven Roy Goodman questions the university's motives, saying that altruism had nothing to do with it.

Now the Crimson goes to the trouble of reprinting an article from last October in which it asks that question that one so often hears, Should Harvard just pay for all of its students?

[For many the idea of a free private college education is a fantasy, as tuition rates around the country climb upwards at alarming speeds with no end to the rise in sight. According to “Making Harvard Modern” by Morton and Phyllis Keller, Harvard’s own tuition has skyrocketed from $2,600 in 1970 to $22,699 in 2000 and currently sits at $30,275, up 5.3 percent from last year. The 21st century has seen the introduction of several initiatives to address prohibitively high tuitions among elite institutions; some, including Harvard, have even moved to eliminate parental contributions from low-income students. But with an endowment larger than some countries’ GDPs, the question becomes: is Harvard doing enough? Why can’t Harvard be free for all students]?

It's an interesting question in a sort of, let's-get-mildly-drunk-and-talk-of-wild-hypotheticals kind of way. But it's actually a great question for the powers-that-be at the university to have kicking around, because it keeps the conversation from focusing on potentially more problematic issues. Such as:

Why does Harvard tuition consistently rise faster than the rate of inflation?

Given Harvard's enormous wealth and profit-making ventures, should the university remain tax-free?

Should Harvard, as some in Congress are suggesting, be required to spend five percent of its endowment annually?

Harvard's endowment will almost certainly pass $40 billion this year, and hit $50 billion in 2009. These questions are only going to get more pressing.....