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?