This photo includes (I think!) all current members of the Harvard faculty whom I have taught. Thanks to everyone for making the effort to show up, and thanks to Eliza Grinnell for her typically masterful staging and camerawork!
Two questions. Am I missing anyone? And can anyone think of another Harvard professor who has had eleven of his or her students on the faculty simultaneously?
Left to right:
Peter Manuelian, Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology
Michael Mitzenmacher, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., Professor of Computer Science
Scott Kominers, Associate Professor of Business Administration
Salil Vadhan, Vicky Joseph Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics
Harry Lewis, Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science
Stuart Shieber, James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science
Margo Seltzer, Herschel Smith Professor of Computer Science
David Malan, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science
Rebecca Nesson, Lecturer on Computer Science
Jenny Hoffman, Professor of Physics and Applied Physics
Alexander Sasha Rush, Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Henry Leitner, Senior Lecturer on Computer Science
Everyone in the photo has a faculty appointment and took a course from me. Mitzenmacher, Vadhan, Malan, Seltzer, Nesson, Rush, and Leitner were also my TFs.
Bits and Pieces
Saturday, March 24, 2018
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
"Not discipline"
It should not be a surprise that after a year and a half,
Harvard has wound
up where it started
during Exam Period of 2016: Students who are members of unrecognized single
gender social organizations (USGSOs) will be barred from receiving certain
distinctions, including team captaincies and fellowship nominations. Does the phrase
"leadership positions supported by institutional resources" include
the presidency of the Crimson and of
the student body? These are the closest analogs that exist in student society
to central institutions of the American democracy, and it is hard to see why,
under the new regime, Harvard would leave these elected positions up to the
whims of the voters. It will be interesting to see that detail, given that the Crimson is editorially
in favor of the sanctions. Perhaps it will announce a policy of self-policing,
if the College chooses to exempt it.
It is worth saying a word about team captaincies, which have
been little discussed, perhaps because faculty know and care less about sports
than about Rhodes scholarships. Institutional interference in captain elections
marks the end of a long struggle, detailed in Ronald Smith's Sports
and Freedom. College sports began as a form of adolescent escape from
institutional control, and over the decades, as institutional control of
student life has relaxed until recently, institutional control over athletics
has become nearly complete. The selection of team captains was, until May 2016,
the last, tiny bit of unregulated turf where the students representing the
institution were free to make their decisions for themselves. No more, at
Harvard anyway (and Harvard is where all this started).
The crucial, lawyerly words in the announcement
by President Faust and William Lee (Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation)
are "not discipline":
The policy does not discipline or
punish the students; it instead recognizes that students who serve as leaders
of our community should exemplify the characteristics of non-discrimination and
inclusivity that are so important to our campus.
An otherwise estimable student who is sent away from the
Fellowships office upon disclosing her membership in some women's club might be
forgiven for thinking she has been punished. But at Harvard it seems, a word
means what the President and the Senior Fellow choose it to mean, neither more
nor less. By declaring that ineligibility for honors and distinctions are "not
discipline," what President Faust and Mr. Lee are saying is that the
Statutes are not implicated, the matter is not one for the Faculty to decide,
and no Faculty vote is needed to carry out the policy. A recent Crimson story
suggests that the College is debating whether it really wants to press its luck
with the Faculty by keeping this matter out of the Handbook for Students.
The Twelfth Statute states, in part, "The several faculties
have authority … to inflict, at their discretion, all proper means of
discipline …." And, if there were any doubt, the Fifth Statute states in
part, "Harvard College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are
together in immediate charge of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences," and
"Each faculty includes in its membership all the professors, associate
professors and assistant professors who teach in the department or departments
under the charge of that faculty." The Fifth Statute goes on to stipulate
a specific exception to the authority of the Faculty: violations of the
Resolution on Rights and Responsibilities, which may be handled directly by the
dean of a Faculty. By its specificity, this clause underscores the exclusive
disciplinary authority of the Faculty on other matters of discipline.
So it is important that the USGSO policy not be discipline,
because if it were discipline, and disciplinary action were taken against a
student without a Faculty vote authorizing that policy, that student could
challenge the action as not properly authorized. A private institution can do almost anything
to its students except fail to follow its own rules, and Harvard's rules are
that the Faculty is in charge of discipline.
The Corporation's decision to insert itself into student
life policy-making marks a change of incalculable significance. Their hand has
been strengthened by the Faculty's decision not to affirm its own authority by
passing my motion, and by the Faculty Council's almost unanimous support of
weird motions by Professors Allen
and Howell
which were both withdrawn before their sponsors were forced to explain what
they actually meant. As it turns out, according to the Lee-Faust proclamation,
instead of deciding on policy, the Faculty is reduced to monitoring an
allegedly non-disciplinary student life policy voted by the Corporation. Once
so diminished, it is unlikely the Faculty will ever reclaim its statutory
authority.
We are back to where we began, with a values
test, a litmus test for determining whether students "exemplify the
characteristics of non-discrimination and inclusivity." And along with
that, we are back to all the old contradictions and inconsistencies in that
litmus test. Why is a student in a multi-ethnic, socioeconomically
cross-cutting women's group less exemplary than a member of the Asian American Sisters, or the tenured faculty of the Mathematics
Department, both of which are de
facto less ethnically diverse single-gender organizations? Why does a
student become more exemplary by quitting an ethnically diverse Harvard
sorority and joining an ethnically homogeneous sorority with members from MIT?
The answer is that the whole exercise has not been about
increasing inclusivity but about getting rid of the final clubs, in a way that
will not invite a lawsuit. The policy may well not achieve either end. But it
would crush a variety of ethnically and even socioeconomically diverse private
organizations on the basis that they are not gender-diverse—ignoring the fact
that gender and ethnicity are not equivalent qualities. If they were parallel, Harvard
would prohibit single-gender rooming groups.
As I have said before, women
will be the big losers from this Corporation decision. The news
that the sororities plan to ignore the sanctions and proceed with their
recruitment should be taken to mean that these groups provide something that is
important enough that women are willing to pay a price for getting it. The
clause in the Lee-Faust letter about these groups is transparently
reprehensible:
We also recognize the concerns
expressed by women students about the deficiencies in the campus social
environment that have led many to seek membership in sororities. The College is
committed to continuing the necessary work of addressing these issues in ways
consistent with our broader educational mission.
Note the artful misrepresentation of what the women's
groups provide. The letter
from the 23 women does not refer to "deficiencies in the social
environment," a phrase that suggests room for parties or casual
conversation from which men should not be excluded. What these groups are
providing is far more consequential—support, mentorship, and empowerment. It is
insulting to dismiss these women's concerns as something the College is vaguely
"committed … to addressing" while
putting the sanctions into effect immediately.
There is a real problem with certain clubs, but it's never
been identified and the sanctions regime won't solve it. The sweeping
generalizations, the misuse of the worst of transgressions of the worst of the
final clubs as arguments for shutting down all the women's clubs—these are not
only illiberal but intellectually embarrassing. Alums old
and young
seem to be awakening to the fact that the nannying has gone too far.
Monday, November 27, 2017
The Price
Professor Ben Friedman gave the best speech during the
debate on November 7. He observed,
among other things, that if we have learned anything over the past year and a
half, it is that
the life of the Houses, those
jewels of the Harvard structure, is nowhere near as engaging to our students as
it should be, and in consequence it is losing out to life in other venues. What
have we done in response? An all-too-familiar feature of American business
behavior…is that when a firm’s product is losing out in competition, the firm’s
response is not to improve its product but to seek to get the regulators to
take its competitor’s product off the market. In effect, that’s what we have
been doing here. Think of what we might have accomplished—think of what we
still might accomplish—if we redirect the time and talent and energy that this
faculty has put into this two-year-long discussion…to thinking about how best
to re-invigorate life in Houses, rather than simply looking to shut down the
alternative that too many of our students now prefer instead.
(The entire Harvard Magazine editorial opinion from which
this passage is quoted is very much worth reading.)
Harvard can't seriously think that problems with House life
are due to the clubs. Harvard cannot on the one hand credibly claim that
off-campus clubs so damage the Houses that students who join them should be
disgraced or even expelled, and at the same time build a "campus center"
to draw students out of the Houses, and encourage students to take faculty out to
lunch at local restaurants under the "Classroom to Table" program.
There is something bigger going on with House life than could be cured by shutting
down the clubs.
Let's stipulate—even though I don't believe it—that it is
Harvard's job to more fully manage students' social lives. (After all, one
reason students come to Harvard rather than, say, Bowdoin is because of the
greater opportunities to have fun and to do interesting things off campus. I
hope the next administration will be less socially oriented and will refocus us
instead on academic matters.)
Viewed from a very high altitude, the problem of social life
in the Houses has some unacknowledged origins. It is a familiar complaint that social
life is bad because the Houses are more crowded than they used to be, and more
crowded they surely are. That's unfortunate, but all things considered, I think
Harvard has made the right tradeoff in educating a few more students rather
than housing a smaller number in more spacious quarters.
The problems of social life in the Houses are more the
result of other changes over the years. One is that a college with a 1:1 sex
ratio generates more socializing—and thus the need for more social space—than
the all-male college for which the Houses (and the old clubs) were designed. The
pressure on social space became more intense as roughly the same number of
students became 50-50 men and women, and as significant changes occurred over
the same decades in the way young American men and women socialize with each
other.
Also, while Harvard was assuming from Radcliffe complete
social and residential responsibility for women students, it absorbed and
renovated the Radcliffe dormitories (in the Quad), but allocated Radcliffe Yard,
once the center of academic, social, and administrative life for women
undergraduates, almost entirely to graduate education and research. (Only
Agassiz Theatre remains an undergraduate building.) Inevitably, that put
pressure on other social and administrative spaces for undergraduates. (As has
the increasing number of College administrators.)
So Professor Friedman is right. We might have spent the last
year talking about the life of the Houses rather than the evils of single-sex
clubs. But the waste of time and energy that might have been devoted instead to
improving House life is only one, and not the most serious, of the costs of
this misadventure. I can think of several others.
The financial costs of the assault on the clubs are likewise
not the most serious, but the resulting antipathy of alumni and parents (such
as Heather Furnas)
can't be welcome. Yet it may not matter. Fundraising numbers are robust. Two
nine-figure gifts in the past decade have come from alumni of the professional
schools (Gerald Chan and John Paulson), not the College. It may be that, like
everything else in American society, alumni influence is tipping toward the top
hundredth-of-a-percent of an increasingly financially stratified population.
Has Harvard's fundraising model so shifted that the institution can afford to
be indifferent to alumni loyalty?
The cost that bothers me most is the personal cost to
students, especially women. Women will be the big losers if harsh sanctions are
imposed on members of single-sex clubs. When the sanctions were announced under
cover of exam-period darkness back in May 2016, did the President or the deans even
know how many women belong to such organizations? Nothing was said about
women's clubs in the initial announcements. Indeed, by citing sexual assault,
those announcements suggested that the moves were meant to help women. In September 2016, the President sounded
this half-hearted acknowledgment of the existence of women's clubs:
We need to be sure that we provide
women with networking opportunities, with the support they need. We need to
figure out the ways to do this. The women’s clubs have grown up because we, as
a community, have not done that adequately. And so I don’t think that being
this kind of organization — one that was created because something was withheld
from you — is the best way to address these women’s needs.
This is the sort of logic that the Letter
from 23 Undergraduate Women characterized as "astonishingly
patronizing." Women are not joining sororities because the doors of the
Porcellian are barred to them. None of the reports and pronouncements over the past
year make any attempt to understand the sociology of the sororities and women's
final clubs. No evidence has been presented that any of the ugly labels
attached during the debates to the male final clubs applies to any of the
women's clubs.
The attack on all clubs demonstrates exactly the indiscriminate
stereotyping we hope students will avoid in other contexts. The women's clubs
operate quietly, and women have their good reasons to join them. They provide
something (actually, different things to different students) that those
students find useful, supportive, or empowering. There will be a cost if what the
clubs provide is taken away, and it is shameful that Harvard trivializes that
cost. God save us if our graduates use such uninformed, ideological methods
when they go to Washington to craft social policies for the nation.
The governance question, detailed
several times by Professor James Engell, was skirted but not settled by the
outcome of the November 7 vote. Is the Faculty in charge of the discipline of
undergraduates, as the Statutes plainly state? The president refused to say.
She recently said that anything that has to be put in the Handbook will be
voted by the Faculty, but claims uncertainty about what matters those might be.
At the same time, attempts have been
made to confuse "the Faculty" with "faculty," for example
by referring to the Clark-Khurana committee as a "faculty committee,"
even though barely half of its members held even the lowest of faculty
ranks. The Faculty is an allegedly
self-governing corporate body, with statutory responsibilities, committees of
elected members, and binding formal votes, while "faculty" could
refer to anyone with a faculty title whom the administration chooses include in
its deliberations. The wording of the Howell motion
("it is the responsibility of the faculty and administration of Harvard
College") deceptively blurs this distinction—there is no faculty of
Harvard College, and conjoining "the administration" as an equal
partner cedes to the administration the statutory authority of the Faculty of
Arts and Sciences.
Finally, and related to all these concerns, the handling of
the sanctions has created mistrust that will not easily be repaired. The source
of the mistrust is that a badly conceived plan was promoted on the basis of a
preposterous dogma: That single-sex organizations are inherently odious, that
the very idea of a single-sex organization should excite the same revulsion as does
the Ku Klux Klan. (Somehow while all this was going on, President Faust found
time to speak at the inauguration of the new president of Wellesley College.) That
lie (which has also corrupted
the "inclusivity" initiative) created many inconsistencies and
absurdities—for example, that the Women's Center is morally superior to a women's
club because men can use it, or that the Black Men's Forum is OK because it
isn't a forum for black men. This explains why the rationale kept shifting, though
never enough to explain why some harmless organizations had to be killed off
along with the dangerous ones.
The assertion of authority by Senior Fellow Bill Lee in a
recent Crimson interview
tends to confirm what I suspected.
This attack on single-gender social organizations started at the Corporation
level, as a risk mitigation endeavor. After one Title IX lawsuit, and a long history
of bad behavior at certain male final clubs, Harvard's legal governors were
worried about the extent of its financial exposure, and so the president and
deans took the most aggressive actions against the clubs of any administration
since the late 1990s. But their plan of action was couched in moral language
rather than the language of safety and risk, and resonated with certain lines
of progressive thought.
So even though this all started because some of the clubs
posed risks, students were never told to stay away from them, only that students
should hate them. Since the lawyers (I am sure) shot down any idea of treating
women's clubs differently from men's, or some men's clubs differently from
others, the category of offensive organizations kept morphing by expansion, not
contraction.
And the administration, having crawled out onto a precarious
moral limb to much applause, could not admit that the original motivation was a
perfectly reasonable worry about student safety and Harvard's financial
exposure. To be sure, the worst behaviors of the worst clubs kept getting
cited—in fact, one speaker on November 7 cited a recent hazing death of
fraternity pledge at a state university in arguing against my motion. One
faculty colleague described this as "emotional blackmail," but I bet
it swung a few votes. Sadly, the death of a Harvard undergraduate barely two weeks
earlier suggests that loneliness may be a more serious death risk for Harvard students—and
as the letter from the 23 women observes, that risk factor seems likely to be
increased, not decreased, by shutting down the off-campus clubs.
The night before they were released, a member of the College
administration showed me the letters
from Dean Khurana and President Faust announcing the sanctions regime. My
immediate reaction was, "No one will believe you." That is, no one
would believe that the stated reasons for the crackdown were the real ones. Now
the Senior Fellow has expanded his unprecedented involvement in the structure
of undergraduate life by declaring that the as yet unnamed next president of
Harvard will not change the policy that was announced so abruptly and unwisely
on May 6, 2016.
This has been a nightmare for Veritas.
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