There’s this experience I have had of being at a party and encountering a businessman (sometimes a businesswoman, but usually not). Maybe he has an MBA, maybe he doesn’t. He finds out that I am a writer (or editor, teacher, whatever I am doing at that time) and begins asking me questions to figure out the economics of what I do: how many students do I teach? how many people does my podcast reach? He is trying to figure out if he can suggest efficiencies to make my work more productive—not realizing that those are not the most interesting metrics for the work I do, and also not realizing that, even if we could agree that I should be more “efficient,” he would actually have to learn a lot about my field before he knew the first thing about about making efficiency gains in it. But within 5 minutes, he is giving me unsolicited advice. Call him the advice bro.
Bill Ackman is, I think, an advice bro.
I am someone who is happy, or at least willing, to take truth from all sources. My politics don’t align with some of the enemies of Harvard (or Claudine Gay), like Bill Ackman and Christopher Rufo, but if academics aren’t themselves going to do a good job of coming down hard on plagiarists—and Claudine Gay’s blame-shifting op-ed, in which she never even used the word “plagiarism,” is pretty strong evidence of something rotten in Cambridge—then I guess academics have outsourced the job to hedge-fund magnates and whatever it is that Christopher Rufo does. And when defenders of Harvard/Gay/academics point to moral failings of Bill Ackman, or take delight in the plagiarism of his wife (hypocritical as he is), they are too often doing so to obscure the moral failings of the people they like.
However, I have finally decided—come to my own, unbiased, no-dog-in-this-hunt conclusion—that Bill Ackman is a world-class, 100-proof, Iron Man–level everything bagel of the first rank: a true advice bro. When it gets down to it, he thinks he could do Claudine Gay’s job better, and it steams him up that she, with her mere Ph.D., gets to run a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, when everyone knows that only businesspeople know anything about anything, because after all, they have universally applicable knowledge.
I also think Ackman secretly wants Claudine Gay’s job. Here is what he wrote recently in The Free Press; try to get through the sludge of prose to see his point:
The president’s job—managing thousands of employees, overseeing a $50 billion endowment, raising money, managing expenses, capital allocation, real estate acquisition, disposition, and construction, and reputation management—are responsibilities that few career academics are capable of executing.
Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives would also create more opportunities for diverse talent for the office of the university president.
Furthermore, Harvard is a massive business that has been mismanaged for a long time. The cost structure of the university is out of control due in large part to the fact that the administration has grown without bounds. Revenues are below what they should be because the endowment has generated a 4.5 percent annualized return for the last decade in one of the greatest bull markets in history, and that low return is not due to the endowment taking lower risks as the substantial majority of its assets are invested in illiquid and other high-risk assets.
The price of the product, a Harvard education, has risen at a rate well in excess of inflation for decades (I believe it has grown about 7–8 percent per annum), and it is now about $320,000 for four years of a liberal arts education at Harvard. As a result, the only students who can now afford Harvard come from rich families and poor ones. The middle class can’t get enough financial aid other than by borrowing a lot of money, and it is hard to make the economics work in life after college when you graduate with large loan balances, particularly if you also attend graduate school.
The best companies in the world grow at high rates over many decades. Harvard has grown at a de minimis rate. Since I graduated 35 years ago, the number of students in the Harvard class has grown by less than 20 percent. What other successful business do you know that has grown the number of customers it serves by less than 20 percent in 35 years, and where nearly all revenue growth has come from raising prices?
“Broadening the recruitment of candidates to include top business executives … ” Hmm…which “top business executives,” Bill? Could you be thinking of … Bill Ackman?
I also think Ackman secretly wants Claudine Gay’s job.
Now, I am not sure that MBAs or CEOs are even, by and large, particularly good at their jobs. Or maybe, like Elon Musk, they are, until they aren’t. What I do know is that people with Ph.D.s in religion don’t think we can run hedge funds or Fortune 500 companies, but people with MBAs will definitely share with you their opinions on how to improve religion departments.
This line of thinking is worth paying attention to, because a lot of politicians believe that the cure to what ails higher ed is to have fewer leaders who came up through the ranks, and more who are credentialed by business schools, or have experience in industry. I’m not persuaded.
One thing to miss about the pandemic
This piece by Matthew Desmond blew my mind. Apparently COVID-era stimulus measures greatly reduced child poverty, and then we let the measures end, and child poverty is way back up. We threw away a once-in-a-generation achievement.
Light therapy for dogs
Nope, not a joke.
How could I not pass on this screen shot from an email I got from my vet’s office? I have no idea what they are trying to sell me, and I’m not buying, but it’s good for a laugh.
Farewell, cursive
I am a longtime scold about the disappearance of cursive instruction in our schools. I seem to have lost the battle. But glad to know we are still churning out articles about it. This one just ran in The Washington Post. As with the decline of literature in schools, the well-intentioned Common Core is to blame:
Since 2010, 45 states — including Maryland — and the District have adopted the Common Core standards, which do not require cursive instruction but leave it up to the individual states and districts to decide whether they want to teach it. …
“The Common Core State Standards allow communities and teachers to make decisions at the local level about to teach reading and writing . . . so they can teach cursive if they think it's what their students need,” said Kate Dando, a spokeswoman for the Council of Chief State School Officers, which promotes the Common Core. “The standards define the learning targets that need to be met to ensure students graduate from high school prepared for success in college and careers. . . . The decision to include cursive when teaching writing is left to states, districts, schools and teachers.”
Translation: cursive is not on the test, so only a teacher looking to shorten his or her career would spend time teaching it.
Me, podcasting
I am sick of hearing me talk about antisemitism and the Ivy League, but if you’re not, here is a good conversation with Yehuda Kurtzer on his pod, Identity/Crisis.
And if you have not yet subscribed to The Syllabus, my new(ish) pod about higher ed, check it out. This episode with Danielle Holley, the president of Mount Holyoke, is a fun romp through affirmative action, campus activism, the Supreme Court, women’s colleges, and more.
Who was Matthew Strother?
Yesterday, I received the latest newsletter of essayist and critic William Deresiewicz, and it included this passage, which I pass on to you, because I had no idea whom it was about, and now I am kind of obsessed:
Dear friends and readers,
I am making an exception to my general rule of using this newsletter for news of new work only because a project just launched that is dear to my heart, and I want to tell you about it.
I had a student, Matthew Strother, who became a very close friend. Matthew was a true seeker and reader and lover of life. It was his dream to create a kind of school for others like him: a retreat center that would run extended learning programs for adults. The programs would emphasize rigor, humanistic study, contemplation, and community. They would be free.
Matthew died last year before he could put his dream into practice. But some of us who loved him have taken up the torch to create the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life in upstate New York. Today, January 15, applications went live for three ten-day pilot programs that the Center will run this year, one each in spring, summer, and fall. Space is very limited; applications close February 29.
Thank you,
Bill
This dude really loves the internet
One reason I really love the podcast Conversations with Tyler is because Tyler Cowen interviews people who are apparently really important in worlds that are apparently important but in which I have absolutely no interest—econometrics, internet theory, interweb theory, web-nettery, inter-webbage, start-up culture, dot-commery—and makes them interesting to me. Sometimes the people are legendarily smart but say unbelievable things. Like, this week he interviewed one Patrick McKenzie. I am 45 minutes into the interview, and I still have no idea what Patrick McKenzie does for a living, but he apparently is huge on Twitter. Anyway, Patrick McKenzie said this:
I think that the internet is the capital G, capital W, Great Work of the human race in a lot of respects, that it is magical. It is an encapsulation of the best things about our society that is also tremendously, instrumentally useful in making all the good things better and ameliorating all the problems over sufficiently long time scales.
There is a kind of stunning beauty in how perfectly Patrick McKenzie said something designed to alienate and infuriate me. It’s as if he knows me, deep in my soul, and maybe hates me, but also really knows me, so deeply that even if he does hate me, I can’t really hate him back. I just want to buy him a hard cider and get to know him, because I need to figure out who could possibly believe this.
With that, I bid you a good week. It’s cold in Connecticut, and I love the cold.