Clone Harvard
Matt Yglesias and I both went to Harvard as undergrads, and I liked it a lot more than he did. In part, this is because I was a transfer student — my three years at Harvard were, for a lot of reasons, a lot more fun than my one year at Cornell. And I happened to make a lot of really good friends, mostly due to happenstance. Also, like Brad DeLong, I liked Social Studies. But a couple of things have soured me in the years since I left: the Summers incident, which was painful to watch; the (temporary) end of transfer admissions, which is a scandal, particularly as we see Harvard draw on its alternate list; and Brad DeLong’s minor masterpiece on Harvard-as-socialist-Yugoslavia.
So how can Harvard redeem itself?
There is no way that Harvard will pick up and move, sad to say. I’d be stoked if Harvard moved to Palm Springs or Monterey. But it also can’t scale itself up enough to effectively use its resources to improve the quality of education around the world while tethered to Cambridge. Yes, there is something to be said for providing a small, elite cadre of international students with a top-notch education and sending them home to spark fruitful change. In reality, a large swathe of these would-be change agents will assimilate into US elite culture, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It is a good, natural development.
But what if Harvard cloned itself in India, China, and elsewhere, perhaps through deep partnerships with existing, cash-poor universities in those regions? Something like this happens on a very small scale. Harvard can do better, by farming out faculty and by handing out healthy heaps of cash. Perhaps Harvard could also partner with HBCUs in the American South that focus on, for example, on training teachers and healthcare professionals.
<i>the Summers incident, which was painful to watch</i>
what? wasn’t it painful enough that harvard appointed such a Heteronormative Sexist Privileged White Male Racist to such a position of Power?
— razib · May 12, 02:38 AM · #
Not to bring up bad memories, but Cornell has started doing this in a somewhat less altruistic way — more receiving than handing out heaps of cash: the Cornell Medical School in Qatar just graduated its first class.
Go Big Red!
— Other Ezra · May 12, 03:42 AM · #
“wasn’t it painful enough that harvard appointed such a Heteronormative Sexist Privileged White Male Racist to such a position of Power?”
The whole biological world is “heteronormative”, and anybody elected to serve as president of Harvard is privileged. No amount of social enlightenment will change this.
The other charges are interesting, however. On the racist charge, I suppose the memo Summers signed in 1991 concluding that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that” — I suppose this could be construed as racist. To me it sounds like dry humor, or pointed satire.
And sexist? Like the scarlet letter of “Racist”, that’s a little too easy to throw around for my taste. Especially here.
For instance, it’s inarguable that some of the distribution differences between the sexes are due to biology — not just morphological differences, but cognitive differences as well. That’s just a fact.
For more, read Steven Pinker, another Arch-Hetero White Dude, but at least one who knows his shit and puts the data behind his arguments out there for others to see. And if you don’t like Pinker, read Beatriz Luna, who as far as I know (i.e., zero) has many black friends and gets down with the ladies
— JA · May 12, 03:48 AM · #
Uh, JA, he was being sarcastic.
I find people leaping to make Larry Summers a martyr for free speech deeply funny, considering he used the power of his presidency to squash criticism of Israel on campus throughout his tenure. Larry Summers has no standing to complain about impositions on free speech.
The truth of the matter is, Summers lost his position because he came to campus determined to insult and antagonize the faculty, and did so at every opportunity. And no good manager of any hierarchical system can do that. Management may control the wheels of power but the rank and file move them. You won’t find a CEO of a major investment bank going around deliberately insulting all of his bankers; it’s just not sound managerial policy. Summers made his own bed and can blame no one but himself for his dismissal.
But sadly, the Summers incident as broadly misunderstood simply follows the standard anti-PC storyline for too closely and satisfyingly for people to give it a genuine reading. I simply can’t understand people who unironically endorse the notion that political correctness continues to have any power or salience in this country. Political correctness has always and only been far less powerful than the backlash against it; indeed, it’s always been a backlash in search of a movement.
— Freddie · May 12, 04:10 AM · #
Freddie, not sure you know Larry Summers or the broad contours of the situation as well as I do. I certainly don’t think it was a free speech issue. Seems that political correctness is an issue you care about a lot. I don’t. I’m hard-pressed to think of a time when I’ve railed against it, really. Perhaps I have. I’m not sure. But yeah, I certainly didn’t do that here.
— Reihan · May 12, 04:22 AM · #
“Uh, JA, he was being sarcastic.”
You know, Freddie, you just might be right — though on Ygelsias’ blog that comment would have been issued in earnest. Nowadays you can never tell.
But if you’re right, my apologies to Razib.
— JA · May 12, 04:33 AM · #
What is the purpose of Harvard? From everything I have read, it’s not about providing the best education. I think Harvards main purpose is to be the most elite university it can be. That’s why it has the admissions policy it does which systematically winnows the elitest from the eliter. It’s not meritocracy either. To even be in the game, to have the access to the resource required to put together a winning application, you have to have weathy, highly educated parents. There are a few exceptional individuals who can make it, but the are a small minority. In the top 100 universities it’s all about putting together the most elite class possible. Why is such energy put into this? What is the anthropological/sociological/economical reason for this? Is the $35 billion dollar endowment connected to this obsession with trying to be the most elite? Does it perpetuate a hierarchy? Is it just one of those systems that gets started for reasons that are no longer relevant but then are self-perpetuating, like the electoral college or the apendix? Why does this sytem exist? I don’t really see much benefit from it to society at large.
— cw · May 12, 04:48 AM · #
NYU is doing something along the lines of what Reihan is advocating. NYU is literally cloning itself in Abu Dhabi. A recent article in New York Magazine gives the account of NYU’s expansion: http://nymag.com/news/features/46000/
— va · May 12, 05:00 AM · #
“You know, Freddie, you just might be right — though on Ygelsias’ blog that comment would have been issued in earnest. Nowadays you can never tell.”
right. this happens all the time; i say something really, really, bizarre and people take me seriously. i don’t know what that says about the blogosphere….
— razib · May 12, 05:09 AM · #
The funniest thing about this thread is the idea of somebody – anybody – giving Razib a book recommendation in the field of cognitive science. That’s just a massive amount of blog-related dramatic irony.
— Tim · May 12, 05:11 AM · #
CW, the answer is that Harvard et. al. create user-costly instruments of economic signaling.
See Michael Spence’s Nobel Lecture for more.
— JA · May 12, 05:19 AM · #
Tim, I know! I think next time I’ll click on the little red name.
— JA · May 12, 05:22 AM · #
“CW, the answer is that Harvard et. al. create user-costly instruments of economic signaling.”
I agree. A harvard degree is like having the biggest set of antlers.
— cw · May 12, 05:24 AM · #
Reihan, all your proposals are excellent, and I wholeheartedly agree.
I have a keen interest in higher education (because I am a victim of it) and the case of US universities is an especially appealing one because, as self evidently superior as they are to all the alternatives, they have incredible inertia. In particular, it seems criminal to me to be sitting on all these billions of dollars and not do anything particularly ambitious with them.
Even though I think the French grandes écoles system is failing and unjust, they do have an advantage: because they are poor, small and nimble (and always competing with each other), they tend to be more innovative. Grandes écoles open secondary campuses in foreign countries, they consider study abroad and internships as a normal, and even mandatory, part of the curriculum, they are fond of dual degrees and other academic partnerships… All of these may be questionable endeavors, but at least they show more audacity than the average Ivy League.
One thing which I would love to see (and I realize this is a pipe dream) Harvard do would be to eliminate racial preferences for admissions (something which churns my stomach, as with any self-righteous European) and replace it, or at the very least supplement it (which is less unrealistic) with a system like Sciences Po’s “conventions ZEP“: partnerships with high schools in troubled areas where promising students of difficult backgrounds are helped along in their curriculum and granted preferential admission.
This would be brilliant because it would encourage people who wouldn’t otherwise apply to colleges or prestigious colleges to do so. Richard Descoings, Sciences Po’s Dean, explains that the conventions have changed the mentality in partner high schools, because staff now look at pupils not just as pupils, but as potential Sciences Po students, and are therefore much more mindful to seek out untapped potential.
Furthermore, such a program would create ripples. The program would doubtlessly be prestigious: even those who don’t get into Harvard would be helped by the “Harvard High Schools Program” (or whatever) label to get into other good schools. No doubt Harvard’s main competitors would start similar programs. Plus Harvard students would get to actually meet poor people (ok, that was mean).
Such a program would be relatively easy and cheap to set up, and it would surely have a tremendous impact (or at least there’s not much to lose by trying). Why it hasn’t yet been done boggles my mind.
— PEG · May 12, 08:41 AM · #
I started writing a comment last night like PEG’s suggesting the Ivies establish branded high schools, but got distracted by something shiny on the internets. Anyway, I totally agree that this is the best way to manage incoming class diversity. If you want your freshman class to be diverse, go build farm schools that teach the sort of students you want applying.
Of course, academic talent is not scarce enough to use as a selection criterion, which is why the Oprahfied “life narrative” standard has come to dominate college applications. This seems hard to reconcile with prep schools — maybe the new system would spell the end of both racial preferences and Oprah-based admissions.
— Matt Frost · May 12, 09:41 AM · #
Matt: I only envisaged partnerships with existing high schools but creating high schools is even more exciting!
This makes the lack of ambition on the part of the Ivies all the more shocking.
Maybe the article on the Swedish schools system Reihan linked to earlier holds the answer: it’s in the interest of successful non-profit schools not to grow or make ambitious moves, since the lengthening waiting lists only increases their selectivity. Meanwhile, it’s in the interest of for-profit schools to grow because, well, they make more profit.
Is making Harvard for-profit the solution? Harvard became so impressive after its “privatization” in the early 19th century. Maybe it’s time to finish the process?
(I realize we are deep in Fantasyland, here. That’s a place I quite enjoy.)
— PEG · May 12, 10:31 AM · #
My impression was, Harvard is doing something liek what you’re proposing, at least in South Asia. As for satellites in the deep South or West — no, thanks, let’s do these kids a favor and bring them to civilization, shall we? Please?
Freddie, at the very least that’s unfair, and I think it’s flat-out deliberately misleading. Summers certainly pissed off a lot of the faculty. But it certainly seems not to’ve been his intent. I think it’s more fair to say he lacked the political skills for a job which is in truth a very very political job. But, damn, Freddie, surely you’d agree that a lot of faculty are, well, prima donnas, and “insulting and antagonizing” them ain’t particularly hard. I have a problem with the “free-speech martyr” storyline — look, there’s some thing some people in some positions should damn well know better than to say at some fora: that’s vague but Summers should’ve known better in the case the free-speech martyr types invoke, and besides he’d pissed off a lot of people after the Bok/Rudenstine conciliatory approach. But what you’re selling up there isn’t right either; Summers wasn’t really a suppessor of speech.
— Sanjay · May 12, 01:28 PM · #
But yeah, I certainly didn’t do that here.
I wasn’t talking to you.
— Freddie · May 12, 03:25 PM · #
I like PEGs idea. I think that is great. But if you want to deal with this country’s educational problems then you have to exercise some kind of racial preferences, either in college, or more effectively, starting in pre-school. Because a big chunk of the kids not getting well educatied are the black, hispanic, and native american kids. These kids need more resources: better teachers, better facilites, a lot mroe support staff (psychologists, social workers, reading specialists, etc…). So they cost more money to educate well. To direct extra money to them at the expense of white middle-class students is to exercise racial preferences. You can muddy it up a bit and use poverty as a criteria, but there are problems that poor black, hispanic, and native american kids have, that poor white kids (in general) don’t. Language for instance. Working in schools, I have learned that a good definition of fair is: every kid gets what they need.
— cw · May 12, 03:40 PM · #
“If you want your freshman class to be diverse, go build farm schools that teach the sort of students you want applying.”
I like this idea, but I’m trying to imagine how it would all play out. How quickly would these farm schools become, if not absolute prerequisites for Harvard admission, then such significant factors that the effect on a candidate’s admissibility would be indistinguishable (especially if the number of undergraduates stays the same)? Further, while this may supply a steady stream of formulaic diversity, wouldn’t it box-out the other, more unlikely individual accidents of admissions that also add to the overall diversity of a campus (this might be self-serving, since I was one of those “unlikely”, lower-middle kids coming out of the deep-South public school system who actually got into Princeton and Duke (didn’t apply to Harvard), but I worry about the effect of all this on underprivileged Americans who don’t fit the diversity standards — you know, like white southerners who survive some of the worst public schools in Western Civ.).
Reihan’s cloning idea would alleviate this, but the socio-economic signaling benefits of a Harvard-as-socialist-Yugoslavia almost guarantee that nobody within the university’s power-structure will see the wisdom in diluting the Harvard brand — especially for such theoretical benefits as more education and distributed ideational uplift. And PEG’s idea might nullify this, but I wonder what the exchange rate in America is between raw profit and social prestige. If it takes a lot of the former to equal the latter, I don’t see any incentive for Harvard to change.
— JA · May 12, 03:56 PM · #
Ugh, let me rephrase: I wasn’t trying to suggest you did, Reihan, just that many who have responded to the Summers incident have. As for your superior knowledge of the situation, of course you know more than I do; but I still think what I said is true.
— Freddie · May 12, 08:11 PM · #