Coals to Newcastle, hedge-funder profits to Harvard

  It's too bad that such Wall Street moguls as  hedge-funder John Paulson, to associate themselves with celebrity institutions, give vast sums to already rich places like Harvard, which he's handing $400 million. Imperial Harvard's endowment is about $36 billion.

It's his way of showing off.

This is when so many much, much poorer colleges and universities  primarily serving poor and middle-class students are struggling for money. Then there are the millions of people with not enough to eat and shoddy shelter.

Harvard, further cementing its role as ego-booster of, and co-conspirator with, Wall Streeters, will name its engineering program the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applies Sciences in return for his present. He went to the Harvard Business School, whose contributions to American well-being can be called ambiguous.

Well, I guess it's good for the Greater Boston economy.....

-- Robert Whitcomb

Plutocrats and their kids in the Ivy League

See how the super-rich help their kids get into and prosper at Ivy League schools. This piece might be the best example  yet of how America is no longer the land of opportunity it was long touted to be but a self-perpetuating plutocracy, where overwhelmingly the most important thing you can do for success in life is to pick rich, powerful and, preferably, pushy parents. Harvard and Brown universities are  paradises for this sort of thing.

Another is Dartmouth College. Read this.

David Warsh: Looking for a 'Jewish lunch' at Harvard

  SOMERVILLE, Mass.

What propelled Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics to the top of the heap? As Bloomberg Businessweek memorably illustrated in 2012, most of the leadership arrayed against the financial crisis was educated to the task at MIT, starting with Ben Bernanke, of the Federal Reserve Board; Mervyn King, of the Bank of England, and Mario Draghi, of the European Central Bank.

That they and innumerable other talented youngsters chose MIT and turned out so well owed to the presence of two strong generations of research faculty at MIT, led  in the 1970s and ’80s by Rudiger Dornbusch, Stanley Fischer, and Olivier Blanchard, and, in the ’50s and ‘60s, by Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow and Franco Modigliani.

Samuelson started it all when he bolted Harvard University in the fall of 1940 to start a program in the engineering school at the industrial end of Cambridge.

What made MIT so receptive in the first place?  Was it that the engineers were substantially unburdened by longstanding Brahmin anti-Semitism, as E. Roy Weintraub argues in MIT and the Transformation of American Economics?

Or that the technologically-oriented institute was more receptive to new ideas, such as the mathematically-based “operationalizing” revolution, of which Samuelson was exemplar-in-chief, a case made in the same volume by Roger Backhouse, of the University of Birmingham?

The answer is probably both.  The very founding of MIT, in 1861, enabled by the land-grant college Morrill Act, had itself been undertaken in a spirit of breakaway.  First to quit Harvard for Tech was the chemist Charles W. Eliot, in 1865. (Harvard quickly hired him back to be its president.)

Harvard-trained  prodigy Norbert Wiener moved to MIT in 1920 after Harvard’s  mathematics department failed to appoint him; linguist Noam Chomsky left Harvard’s Society of Fellows for MIT in 1955. Historian of science Thomas Kuhn wound up at MIT, too, after a long detour via Berkeley and Princeton.

But the Harvard situation today is very different. Often overlooked is a second exodus that played an important part in bringing change about.

Turmoil at the University of at California at Berkeley, which later came to be known as the Free Speech Movement, had led a number of Berkeley professors to accept offers from Harvard: economists David Landes, Henry Rosovsky and Harvey Leibenstein; and sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset among them.

The story, in the stylized fashion in which it has often been told, is that,  one of the four one day said, “You know, I kind of miss the Jewish lunch” [that they had in Berkeley].

A second said, “Why don’t we start one here?”

“How are you going to find out who’s Jewish?”

“We can’t. Some have changed their names,” said a third. Whereupon Henry Rosovsky said, “Give me the faculty list. I can figure it out.”

A month later, luncheon invitations arrived in homes of faculty members who had previously made no point of identifying one way or another.  And a month after that, a group larger than the original four gathered at the first Jewish lunch at Harvard.  The Jewish lunch has been going on ever since.

Rosovsky, 88, former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the second Jew to serve as a member of Harvard’s governing corporation (historian John Morton Blum, less open about it his Jewishness, was the first)  is the sole surviving member of the original group. Last week  I asked him about it.

“It was not the way things were done at Harvard. The people here were a little surprised by our chutzpah to have this kind of open Jewish lunch, reflecting, I think, the sense that the Jews were here a little bit on sufferance, I don’t think that feeling existed at Berkeley. Nobody was worried there about somebody sending an invitation to the wrong person.

“It’s a subtle thing. We left graduate school at [Harvard] for Berkeley in 1956. I wouldn’t say that Harvard was anti-Semitic, but just as in the ’30s, Berkeley was happy to take the [European] refugees, where Harvard had difficulty with this, there were notions [at Harvard] of public behavior, of what was fitting. Berkeley was a public university, nobody thought twice about their lunch.”

Rosovsky’s wife, Nitza, an author who prepared an extensive scholarly exhibition on  "The Jewish Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe'' for the university’s 350^th anniversary, in 1986, remembered that there were surprising cases. Merle Fainsod, the famous scholar of Soviet politics who grew up in McKee’s Rocks, Pa., asked  her one night at dinner if she knew his nephew, Yigael Yadin? “Apparently this was the first time he ever said in public that he was Jewish.” Yadin was a young archaeologist who served as head of operations of the Israeli Defense Forces during its 1948 war and later translated the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Rosovsky’s exhibition catalog tells the story in a strong narrative.  Perhaps a dozen Jews  graduated in Harvard’s first 250 years. But as a professor, then as president of the university, A. Lawrence Lowell watched the proportion of Jewish undergraduates rise from 7 percent of freshmen in 1900 to 21.5 in 1922.  Jews constituted 27 percent of college transfers, 15 percent of special students, 9 percent of Arts and Sciences graduate students, and 16 percent of the Medical School.  Harvard was deemed to have a “Jewish problem,” which was addressed by a system of quotas lasting into the 1950s.

The most outspoken anti-Semite in the Harvard Economics Department at the time that Samuelson left was Harold Burbank. Burbank died in 1951. Some 20  years later, it fell to Rosovsky, in his capacity as chairman of the economics department, to dispose of the contents of his Cambridge house. It turned out that Burbank had left everything to Harvard – enough to ultimately endow a couple of professorships.

So it was  was Rosovsky, by then the faculty dean, who persuaded Robert Fogel – a Jew and a former Communist married to an African-American woman, who he hired away from the University of Chicago – to become the first Harold Hitchings Burbank Professor of Political Economy. “He was the only one who didn’t know the history,” said Rosovsky. Fogel went on to share a Nobel prize in economics.

It is the hardest struggles that command the greatest part of our attention. But between Montgomery, Ala.,  in 1955-56, when the Civil Rights Movement for African-Americans really got going, and the Stonewall Inn riot, in New York, in 1969,  when homosexuals' rights started to get a lot of attention, a great many groups graduated to “whiteness,” as Daniel Rodgers puts it in Age of Fracture – including Jews, Irish Catholics. and, of course, women.

Whatever it was that MIT started, Harvard and all other major universities soon enough accelerated – in economics as well as the dismantling of stereotypes of race and gender. By the time that comparative literature professor Ruth Wisse asserted that anti-Semitism had brought down former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, virtually no one took her seriously.

David Warsh, a longtime economic historian and financial journalist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com.

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Harvard through the back door

  Harvard: Where a $36 billion endowment means that  anything can be turned into a course

Diana Anahi Torres: Elite schools a better financial deal

As high-school seniors start to churn out their college applications, elite campuses are trying to catch the attention of high-achieving and gifted low-income students around the country.

It may be hard to believe, but schools like Harvard University and Amherst College are opening their doors to more highly qualified high school students who grew up facing economic hardship yet can thrive in their campuses. Given the record sizes of the endowments supporting the most selective schools, these full rides won’t bust their budgets.

At $1.8 billion, for example, Amherst’s endowment amounts to about $1 million per student.

This means Harvard can turn out to be more affordable than your own state school. But the path from a poor neighborhood to an elite college, as Richard Pérez-Peña recently wrote in The New York Times, is almost impossible to travel without the support of teachers or mentors who know how to guide students through the process.

I’ve been there and I couldn’t agree more.

Consider many of my friends in Albuquerque, New Mexico, N.M.  Around two out of three of the students I grew up with dropped out of high school and at most 10 percent got a college degree. The rates are even lower when you account for race, class, immigration status and gender.

It took Alan Marks, a seasoned educator and Stanford University graduate who has dedicated his career to helping students in my community attend college and mentoring them, to introduce me to my potential.

Marks encouraged me to take demanding college classes while I was still in high school and to participate in extra-curricular activities I felt passionate about. He recommended summer courses, invited me on trips to visit campuses, helped me study for standardized tests, and told me that I should consider applying to the top schools in the nation.

By senior year I had a 4.4 GPA, five college-level courses under my belt, and an idea of the schools I wanted to apply to. But even with his guidance, I found the application process daunting.

The first time I looked at the tuition pages for the top-ranked schools, I balked. It cost upward of $55,000 a year to attend them, a price tag my mom, a domestic worker, and dad, an auto body worker, could never afford to pay.

“Their financial aid packages are generous,” my mentor assured me. You won’t have to worry.”

His encouragement and unyielding support led me to four years at Amherst College, for which I paid less than $10,000. The total was less than what I would have paid to attend one of New Mexico’s public universities for one year.

And the $10,000 paid for much more than four years of college classes.

Amherst’s comprehensive financial-aid package paid for my tuition, fees, room and board, two round-trip flights a year, health insurance, personal expenses, and research opportunities. All I had to worry about was a minimal student contribution. I paid for that with a mix of outside scholarships, summer jobs, and negligible student loans.

Amherst, however, is one of very few schools willing to do what it takes to boost its economic diversity. Thanks, in part, to the commitment of its former president Anthony W. Marx to attract students from all walks of life, at least 20 percent of its students come from working class and poor households.

But it’s not enough for these top colleges to offer generous financial aid packages to low-income students with great grades.

More educators and mentors who work with economically challenged yet high-achieving students need to encourage and help those kids consider applying to and attending those schools. And qualified, low-income students need to know that earning a degree from a top-notch school could turn out to be within their reach.

So, as I ask high school seniors who can relate to my story, what are you waiting for? Apply to your dream Ivy League universities. (The official Ivy League consists of Yale, Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.)

There’s nothing to lose except a great opportunity.

Diana Anahi Torres is the New Mexico Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, in Washington.

This piece comes via OtherWords.org.