The professors are the new barons of Wall Street, and they appear poised to accrue even more power. They are like “civil engineers … after a bridge collapse,” Patterson writes: they’re to blame, but they’re also needed for the rebuilding. The Quants is a great starting point for understanding how the members of this new financial elite brought down, and might again build up, our nation’s economy.

Simon Johnson, reviewing The Quants together with Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, gives a telling comparison between the Quants of today and The Best and the Brightest of the 1960s.  He writes:

there remain countless innovative ways for genius—stimulated by greed and groupthink and an open unregulated field—to lead us seriously astray and into more great danger.

Johnson, who contrasts “genius” with “wisdom,” sees the portion of Wall Street’s problems caused by the quants as part of a more general problem.  Self-confident genius academics come up with a new paradigm for how to do something (e.g. make foreign policy or trade convertible bonds); they leave the academy to put their ideas into practice while gaining power, glory, and riches; something goes disastrously wrong; the geniuses try to “solve” another problem.

In a recent column, Ross Douthat explains how this type of elite consolidates its power through crises:

Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it.

But their fixes tend to make the system even more complex and centralized, and more vulnerable…

As Douthat would have it, the last line of my review should read “how the members of this new financial elite brought down, and made themselves necessary for the rebuilding of, our nation’s economy.”

I think that Johnson’s and Douthat’s ideas are incompatible — and I think that Johnson is nearer to the truth.

Douthat’s argument ignores the possibility that some outside group will propose a new system to replace, rather than fix, the old broken one. Johnson affirms the existence of such groups. How simple was the State Department in the 1950′s?  How simple was Wall Street in the 1980′s? The 1930′s?  In each of those cases, an outside group took power and fundamentally changed the system. Such changes could not have possibly increased the power of those who fouled the system in the first place.

I’m happy with my weak-ish assertion that the quants “might again build up our nation’s economy” (although I should have used “financial system” in place of “economy”).  It is by no means necessary that they will be the ones to do so, but they have thus far been heavily involved in the recovery efforts, and no group seems to have a credible, paradigm-shifting solution.

Andrew Breitbart is a conservative political commentator and the founder of an online media empire: Breitbart.com, breitbart.tv, Big Hollywood, Big Government, and Big Journalism. He has also worked for the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report.

HPR: You’ve defended the Tea Party against charges that it is racist and violent or merely the work “Astroturf” organizers.

Andrew Breitbart: The most threatening thing in a Tea Party event I’ve gone to are people who dress their dogs in patriotic garb. These people have hand-made signs. It is not Astroturf. The opposition to the Tea Party is clearly Astroturf. Their signs are mass-produced. Organized labor is behind it: AFL-CIO, SEIU, the egg attackers I’ve caught on camera, Democratic Party field directors…

What’s interesting  is the power with which the Democratic Party can set the agenda and set up a baseline of propaganda. When the Tea Party movement started to emerge, the Democratic Party immediately called it racist and homophobic. It is a natural tendency of the cultural Marxist to use multiculturalism and race division in order to intimidate and marginalize a movement. It was expected. That’s why I go to the Tea Party events. I am not so much a political figure as a political media figure. I am trying to create equality in the mainstream media, so that the Tea Partiers do not have to be on the defensive against baseless accusations that cast their motivations in the worst, most horrific light.

HPR: What is the real meaning of the Tea Party in your view and what do you think is its proper role?

AB: There’s never a collective sense of being aghast when the Left organizes and protests and even gets violent. But there is a threat to the Democratic and media establishment when the conservative movement discovers the power of protest. Everybody thinks they are somehow not susceptible to the collective persuasion of media. We are immersed in a media world right now in which we are being inundated and hit from countless different angles. And the Democratic Party has understood far more than the Republican Party the power of popular culture, collective messaging, and aesthetics. Right now, the Tea Party is the sign of early adapters who are starting to recognize, “Wait, we can do the same thing that they’re doing.“

The media establishment is losing the viewership of red-state Middle America conservatives who have recognized that the media has behaved unfairly towards them for more than a generation. They’re starting to stand up and form an insurrection against the Democratic Party and the media. And both the Democratic Party and the media are threatened by this group of people. I’ve even stated that there may have to come a day when we do a Tea Party to the tune of millions of people on 6^th Avenue, Media Row in Manhattan, to show these people that we are serious, that we recognize the power of their propaganda. We recognize their power to frame decent Americans who are worried about the economic trajectory of this country, who are raising legitimate questions about who is going to pay for this Utopia, with baseless and reckless charges of racism.

HPR: We saw large increases in entitlement spending, an expansion of the national security state, and two wars under the Bush administration. Why don’t you think there was this kind of reaction then?

AB: If you’ve ever listened to conservative talk radio, there was no love lost with George Bush leaving the presidency. Many conservatives supported his wartime policy after we were attacked on 9/11, and the Right, which is much more oriented towards national security, recognized the collective threat of radical Islam to a great extent. They looked at the map and looked at where terrorist attacks had occurred around the world, and saw where the money was flowing, and noticed the demographic shift of unassimilated Muslims into Western liberal democracy, and recognized that we are going to have to figure out a long-term strategy to deal with it. It cost money to do.

George Bush tried to make accommodations. These were attempts to accommodate liberal entitlement programs, to try to make nice with the Ted Kennedys of the world. And he got burned for doing it. They still hated him, they still ridiculed his policies, and they still blamed him exclusively for votes that they took in favor of his war.

So George Bush was hoodwinked and bamboozled by the Democratic Party. He made accommodations with them that many would say were not wise, because he didn’t get as much bang for his buck as he could have. But he did make a commitment to the troops that he would follow through on the mission. He did. And I think history will look kindly on him for what he did.

The Tea Party is a radically different approach to what government is obligated to do, and the amount of money that should be put towards government as hundreds of billions in deficits turn into tens of trillions in debt. Tea Party people have legitimate concerns.

HPR: What do you see as your place, your niche, in the movement?

AB: I’m an individual. I don’t look for a leadership position. I’m trying to use my media savvy to protect these people, to guide them through a treacherous process. The media and Democratic Party have a political interest and self-interest in maligning them. Most of the Tea Partiers are not media-savvy. They’re not used to public debate and congregating publicly to vent their political concerns.

As a Jew, I guarantee you that if I sensed I was walking into a racist or anti-Semitic group of people I would run away from it. And I have not been shy to criticize [the Birthers]. The Tea Party has a series of legitimate grievances, and that to me is not one of them.

My involvement in the creation of the Huffington Post was an intentional sign to people that I believe, “May the best ideas win.” I believe in the free exchange of ideas. I helped to create a platform for the anti-war movement to exist. I am now trying to create a platform for the [conservative] side to be able to openly express its concerns about politics. The Left and its cultural Marxist tendencies, steeped in Alinsky and critical theory, tries to deconstruct every opposing argument into multicultural conflicts that put the other side on the defensive, as if they are secretly motivated by racism or homophobia. These desperate tactics are becoming too plain to the American people.

HPR: Do you think that it would benefit the Tea Party to stay as independent as possible of the GOP?

AB: Oh yes. I find it beautiful. Democrats are going to be put on the defensive about whether they are 100% for repeal or not. And the Republican Party is going to find that it now has checks and balances, which should have existed before, which would have kept the Bush administration more honest on issues of fiscal conservatism.

I believe in democracy. I believe in public debate. I am a staunch enemy of political correctness and the Left’s typical and predictable tactics of intimidation to stifle dissent. Wherever the Left finds itself in control, it stifles debate. Whether it is Cuba, or Hollywood, or the mainstream media. Wherever the orientation of the political Left becomes the dominant force, these tactics are used to shut people up.

I take this battle very personally. Having lived in L.A. most of my life, and I have an apartment in New York, I know how Leftists are. I know how they believe that their enemies are evil like Nazis. It’s not inexplicable that when given the choice between hiring someone who agrees with them politically and hiring someone they think is a Nazi, it is understandable that they would hire the non-Nazi. So that’s where I come from. I’ve witnessed and studied the Left. I find their tactics and their mindset deplorable and anti-democratic.

HPR: You have already launched several blogs focused on the “institutional Left,” such as Big Government, Big Hollywood, and Big Journalism, and you’ve said there may be more to come. Should we expect some kind of Big Academia, which would focus on the academy as a bastion of the Left?

AB: Yes. It’s going to be Big Education. It’s the one I will be the most passionate about, because that is the origin of this problem, that the Left took over academia at some point. There had always been a strong movement towards progressivism and even a movement towards economic Marxism during the 1930s and the Depression. But the arguments of economic Marxism never took hold in the United States in the way they did in other countries, because America had a unique makeup and a unique narrative. It was the idea that anyone could come from Ellis Island, and within a generation their family could pretty much be at the top of the heap.  So economic Marxism was not a particularly strong [ideology] in America.

But it was the Frankfurt School—people like Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Adorno, who fled from Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy—these people were Marxists who translated economic Marxism into cultural terms. That critical theory, that “deconstruction,” that language of [dividing] the country from e pluribus unum and split us up into little multicultural segments pitted against each other. And that is what I fight against—how the Left has used culture, especially academia, to pit people in groups against each other in order to achieve political gain.

That is my battle. That is what Big Education will fight mercilessly using video cameras and Alinsky tactics, to make life hell for totalitarian Marxist professors. [Families] are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, or, God forbid, students are taking out hundreds of thousands in loans in order to be turned against the system that they are about to graduate into. And I was one of those idiots.

And now I’ve turned against my master, and I’m pissed.

Alexander Sherbany ’11 is the Managing Editor. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Photo Credit: Flickr (shalf)

In case you aren’t sick of the subject, I have written a full-length take-down of the recent Harvard Salient article on Ethnic Studies. It originally appeared in today’s Harvard Independent. Check out my HPR blog post from last week if you want the pithier, more sarcastic version.

An Embarrassment to Harvard Conservatives

Harvard conservatives, those Aristotle-citing, modernity-bemoaning, Western canon-promoting Young Burkes, are generally an earnest and thought-provoking bunch. The seriousness and sincerity of their views help to maintain their reputation in this overwhelmingly liberal community. But in the March 15 issue of the Harvard Salient, the house organ of the Crimson Right, Patrick T. Brennan embarrassed his fellow conservatives by attacking in outrageous terms Harvard’s recent creation of an Ethnic Studies secondary field. His article represents a departure from the lovably idiosyncratic conservatism that many people, including many liberals, expect from the Salient. Brennan’s views are not idiosyncratic; they are ignorant.

To put it bluntly, Brennan’s case against Ethnic Studies is this: people of color just aren’t interesting or important, and they haven’t contributed much of value. If you assumed that this sentiment would be couched in much more subtle terms, you’d be wrong. Brennan doesn’t shy from stating outright that the experiences of non-white Americans are “not of paramount importance to a university education,” and that many cultures have been “underappreciated or marginalized, often for good reason.” Embracing the label of “Eurocentric,” he doesn’t flinch from calling Women and Gender Studies “useless” and concern for diversity “imaginary.” The possibility that there might be as much value in Latin American writers as in Latin ones is laughable to him.

You might think that such prejudice is the result of simple unawareness of the world outside the Harvard Classics department. If Brennan would only read some Frederick Douglass or Gabriel García Márquez, he’d come around, right? But Brennan makes a point of showing that he actually knows some things about people of color, which makes his dismissal of their importance all the more offensive. He makes ostentatious reference to the Abbasid Caliphate, which he says was an exception to the rule of non-white ignorance, and to Martianus Capella, a Berber man who was, according to Brennan, “the first man to delineate officially the seven liberal arts.” You’d think that kind of accomplishment would spark Brennan’s curiosity: perhaps people of color have made other important contributions? The thought doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.

But politically correct liberals, Brennan and others say, value subjects like Ethnic Studies just because of their racial provenance, not their “actual” importance. If you really think about it, they imply, that makes liberals the true racists. But they disregard the possibility that “how people of color in the United States have historically experienced social and political institutions” might be a genuinely valuable subject of inquiry. For Brennan and his ilk, nothing that wasn’t considered important a hundred or a thousand years ago could possibly make the grade now. And they always neglect the fact that racial ideology influenced those long-ago determinations of importance.

The arrogance of Brennan’s point of view is startling. Conservatives like him see creeping totalitarianism in the academy’s cultural relativism, but they are the only ones policing the boundaries of respectability, ruling some people in and others out. They see themselves as victims of a dominant liberal culture but can’t point to anybody who says white people are unimportant or that Shakespeare and Cicero can’t be worth studying. Their beef is not that they’re being marginalized; it’s that they’re not being allowed to do the marginalizing. Brennan once told the Salient, for instance, that Virgil’s Aeneid is more brilliant “than every literary work produced in the Southern Hemisphere.” If he had said “in the history of the world,” it would have been understandable favoritism; when he decided to single out darker-skinned races for particular disapproval, it became something much worse.

At bottom, this sort of attitude stems from concern about the breakdown of authority. Yearning for clarity and simplicity, many Harvard conservatives gravitate towards traditionalism in the arts, authoritarianism in religion, and essentialism in philosophy. They came to Harvard and were dismayed to find that nobody here will tell them what to learn, nobody will dictate what they have to consider important. The Core Curriculum and General Education, as most recognize, are pale homages to the idea that there are things every smart person ought to know.

And on one point I agree with them: Harvard should get some spine and figure out what it really wants us to know and to do. But, as former Salient editor and current New York Times columnist Ross Douthat ‘02 pointed out at a recent Salient-hosted event, the idea that we need a stronger core curriculum doesn’t entail that it should be exclusively composed of dead white males. The canon can and should be broadened. The most important ideas in the world were not all written on papyrus — an invention of the Egyptians, by the way.

Brennan’s article represents the logical end point of the deliberately anachronistic philosophy of many campus conservatives. “Curricula,” Brennan says, “should be essentially conservative and permanent.” In his view, contra Douthat, the canon cannot change. It has always been the same and will always be the same, for if nothing in the last 2,000 years of world history has made change necessary, nothing will. In the mind of this type of conservative, we know nothing now that wasn’t known during the Age of Pericles or the Pax Romana. The only interesting academic debate is between those who prefer the former and those who prefer the latter.

What a shame to look at two thousand years of human history and conclude that it’s been one long decline. No sophisticated progressive thinks we’ve been marching uninterrupted towards heaven on Earth, but no serious conservative can compare the modern world to ancient times, or today’s America to that of the 1950s, and honestly long for a restoration. There might be some good traditions that we ought to bring back, some worthwhile values that modern society does not recognize. But an argument has to be made for each individual tradition and value. Nothing is good just because it’s old.

Brennan and his defenders ought to heed Douthat, whose conservative, traditionalist bona fides are unimpeachable. Asked what courses he would recommend for a conservative Harvard student, Douthat suggested finding the most left-wing professor on the faculty. He said that Harvard conservatives can get the best education of anyone here, because they can constantly be challenged, forced to discard preconceived notions and to defend what is actually worth defending. I wish Brennan could have heard this advice before he wrote his article. Maybe he would have stopped wondering why no one appreciates Virgil as much as he does, and started wondering why he can’t think of anyone interesting or important when he thinks about people of color. If this brouhaha leads him to begin that self-examination, I promise I’ll finally get around to finishing the Aeneid.

Photo credit: Flickr stream of TravelingMan

Approximately 17 percent of Harvard’s ladder faculty are minorities, an all-time high, up 23 percent from six years earlier. But progress on this front has been uneven: Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans represent just 6 percent of the entire faculty, a percentage that has essentially not changed since 2005. The only academic unit with more than 20 underrepresented minority faculty is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and that is due in large part to our outstanding department of African and African-American Studies.

One student on the Kirkland House email list humorously summarized in an 140 character tweet:

@harvard news flash faculty mostly white men (cept af-am, eh, skip). basically unchanged from 17thc working on it (read: another committee.)

Perhaps Faust’s promise of more committees and planning seems irrelevant because Harvard college students are less inclined than ever to notice faculty diversity. This semester, the only professor I have who is white and male happens to be the decidedly Russian economist Andrei Shleifer.

What do you guys think? Have you felt a lack of minority professors?

Full email after the jump.

Dear Students and Colleagues:

Five years ago, a pair of Harvard task forces examined how the University recruited faculty and offered concrete proposals to increase institutional support for women and minorities throughout their academic careers. I was proud to play a leading role in the work of these task forces, and I wanted to take this opportunity to assess the progress that we have made as a community in the intervening years.

Underlying the work of these task forces was a conviction that diversity makes for a stronger academic experience and a richer university community. “A diverse faculty is a strong faculty because it emerges from the broadest possible consideration of available talent,” the task forces declared at the end of their review. “The development, recruitment and support of outstanding faculty . . . provide the essential foundation of a great university.”

We have taken significant steps to address the challenges women face along the tenure track and to increase the number of men and women of color who teach and conduct research at Harvard. But reshaping a talented and well-established faculty is a long-term commitment, and much work remains to be done. While Harvard has made great strides in cultivating an undergraduate student body that is much more reflective of the world around us  — this year’s freshman class is the most diverse ever — we must strive to ensure that progress toward a more diverse faculty and staff keeps pace.

Central to the recommendations of the 2005 task forces was the creation of the Office of Faculty Development & Diversity, which has been systematically collecting and reporting data on faculty hiring and retention and ensuring that diversity is a factor weighed by every faculty hiring committee. We have also created the Ladder ACCESS program, which provides income-eligible ladder faculty with significant financial support for child care costs, and increased by 50 percent our investment in campus child care centers, to help faculty maintain a balance between the responsibilities of family and the demands of research and the classroom. Additionally, we started two programs that have helped increase the pipeline of young women and minority scholars who will be the faculty members of the future.

We have made some progress, particularly with regard to the number of women among ladder faculty. The most recent Faculty Development & Diversity annual report highlighted the fact that today a little more than a quarter of the faculty are female, up 16 percent from six years ago, and nearly all of that increase reflects changes in the senior ranks. It is worth noting that when I joined the deans’ group in 2001, I was the only woman; now we have five female deans.

Approximately 17 percent of Harvard’s ladder faculty are minorities, an all-time high, up 23 percent from six years earlier. But progress on this front has been uneven: Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans represent just 6 percent of the entire faculty, a percentage that has essentially not changed since 2005. The only academic unit with more than 20 underrepresented minority faculty is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and that is due in large part to our outstanding department of African and African-American Studies. Clearly, we must and can do better.

We can report some progress in building a more diverse non-faculty work force at Harvard. Sixty percent of our staff are female, 22 percent are people of color, and over the past five years the percentage of managerial and leadership roles held by minorities has increased. Still, minorities hold only 12 percent of these leadership roles, underscoring the fact that embracing the benefits of diversity does not automatically translate into a more inclusive place to teach, work, and study.

For this and other reasons, I am very pleased to welcome Lisa M. Coleman to our campus. Lisa steps into the position of Chief Diversity Officer and Special Assistant to the President, in which she will be responsible for developing a strategic approach to promoting diversity across the Harvard work force. Lisa, who has worked with such organizations as the Association of American Medical Colleges and Merrill Lynch, joins us from Tufts University, where she served as that institution’s senior diversity officer and as director of its Africana Center.

Five years after we took a deep look at how we could make Harvard a more inclusive place, it is crucial that we ask ourselves if we are doing enough today to foster an environment in which diversity is not simply valued, but cultivated in a systematic way. I have asked Lisa and Senior Vice Provost Judith Singer, who heads the Office of Faculty Development & Diversity, to develop a plan that will further our efforts to address pressing issues of cultural, racial, ethnic, and gender differences, and position Harvard to be a beacon of diversity in the future.

Judy and Lisa will be meeting with a broad cross-section of faculty members and members of the Harvard staff to seek advice about the most effective ways we can stimulate change at every level of the institution. If you have any suggestions, please contact them at diversity@harvard.edu. I know that they are eager to solicit ideas from as many members of the community as possible.

I expect that by Commencement, Judy and Lisa will return with recommendations about how we can further the commitment laid out five years ago to create a stronger, richer, more diverse Harvard.

Sincerely,

Drew Faust

But it was just at this point that the new romanticism of business so cleverly came in. Human imagination had never before conceived anything so fantastic as the idea that every individual is actuated in all his desires by an insight into just what is good for him, and that he is equipped with the sure foresight which will enable him to calculate ahead and get just what he is after. Nor did the imaginative flight pause with this conclusion. All the work of the world, from the most ordinary to the most extraordinary, is presided over by this omnipresent deity of calculating reason, who through his uniform presence in each separate individual is summed up by integral calculus into a virtually omniscient mind. Through its beneficent and overruling power, self-interest becomes a social lubricant instead of a cause of friction, and the zeal of each one to get ahead of everybody else promotes the general welfare. If there are those who seem to be left out of its distribution, there is always the assurance that the ways of Providence are proverbially mysterious.

It is characteristic of romance, of the glamorous and imaginative projection of excited emotion, to remain outside the sphere of argument. One is either inside the romance or outside it. It is true and is the standard of truth, if you are inside; it is silly or insane, if you are outside. Thus, when one says that the present world crisis is merely the consequence of the general acceptance of the particular romance which has gone by the name of business, one speaks from the outside. It is commonly assumed that the explanation of the economic crisis must be itself economic. So it must—if one stays inside the business dream. Since it is part of the dream that cool, far-sighted intelligence controls the operation of the energies and instruments by which desires are satisfied, one within the dream must seek for a rational explanation. From outside the romance, that fact itself gives the key to the explanation; we cannot call gambling an exercise of cool and calm rationality without sooner or later tripping up.

It’s a great essay. Like most of Dewey’s work: highly recommended, and highly difficult to summarize — so I’ll stay a bit more general. Dewey says that the Great Depression was a refutation of the romance that is economics. I’d say that today we’re in a similar position. The Financial Crisis made a mockery of the core institutions, people, and ideas that constitute the field of modern economics. It exposed the field as unable to do arguably its most important job as a descriptive social science — predict social phenomena. And it proved it unable to perform arguably its most socially beneficial function as a policy tool — prevent massive economic calamities.

It’s clear that just as our national economies will be restructured in the wake of the Crisis, so too must the discipline of economics itself.

To use Dewey’s word, modern economics is a” romance. “More than most social theories, it relies on an idealized picture of the world, one rife with bias, normative assumptions and “spiritual” depictions.  More than just a set of tools, economics is, as New Yorker writer John Cassidy says, an “austere theory of human behavior.” To economics, people are like black boxes. They have no psychologies, no values, no histories, no cultures. They buy and sell in marketplaces; they never get free lunches; and they act with perfect rationality and relentless greed. Assuming these things, we can explain everything. It’s a fairly brutal idea — the outwardness, the cool rationality, the greed — but it’s also inspiring. Like Marxism, it promises to endow man with the tools to conquer his world. But it does that only by dissolving the thick and complex social bases that constitute that world; it aspires to elevate man only by reducing him.

I don’t want to get overly polemical here. (I’m sure I already have!) The fact is, I have a huge amount of respect for economics and the tools that it’s given us. We couldn’t live without those tools, of course. But the other fact is, economics is not sufficient. Not only do its prevailing theories fail to explain and predict our world, but the moral assumptions behind those theories often have the terrible effect of providing a glossy academic justification for a lot of what is gross in our world — voracious human greed, inequality, the institutional monopoly of elites, etc. I’ll state it in this way: by believing wholeheartedly in the romance that is “economic man,” we’d lose too much — too much experimentalism, too much creativity, and too much of the human daring and improbable striving that fail to fit in its models.

Added: Of course it’s true that not all economic theories rely on absurd human behavior models that tend to legitimate opportunism and greed. But most of them do. Behavioral economics is a great counter-example and success story, and its rise supports the fundamental point that the field is going to be changing substantially in order to deliver correctives to its models. As I say in the comments: that’s a good thing! Where economics will be ten, fifteen years from now we can only guess. But it will almost certainly be better. Economists and students that are using neuroscience and pyschology to correct the delusions of those models are indeed fighting the good fight, and they should be applauded.

Photo credit: Columbia Record

Miller has only two pieces of evidence supporting the idea that Harvard has insulted the study of religion. The first is that there is no Religion Department, just a Committee on the Study of Religion that relies on professors from other departments and from the Harvard Divinity School. But Harvard lacks a lot of majors that other schools have. Nobody complains about Harvard’s insult to journalism, or accounting, or criminal justice, or education. Certainly nobody can say Harvard is unfriendly to future lawyers and businesspeople, though there’s no pre-law or business major. Yes, Harvard’s religion program probably suffers from a relative lack of attention and funding and power. But different universities have different strengths, and Harvard doesn’t have to be, and certainly isn’t, the best at everything.

Miller’s other piece of not-so-damning evidence is that Harvard’s recent curricular reform produced a one-course requirement in “Culture and Belief,” rather than the proposed “Reason and Faith.” Miller notes correctly that among the courses that would count for this requirement are ones that have little or nothing to do with religion. But all the courses that should be there, are, and Miller’s unspoken and unproven assumption is that “Reason and Faith” would be any different from “Culture and Belief.” The truth is, all of these core requirements at Harvard are incredibly loose and general. The problem is not that Harvard doesn’t require you to learn about religion; the problem is that it doesn’t require you to learn about anything, really. It’s Brown with the trappings of Columbia.

Of course Harvard could be unfriendly towards religion in less formal ways. But why would that interest a national magazine audience? Miller wants to prove that Harvard has an institutionalized problem with religion and to recommend that its administrators, and secular liberals more generally, take religion seriously as a subject worthy of study. But she really offers no proof that Harvard administrators dismiss religion (in fact, she quotes ex-president Derek Bok expressing disdain for Steven Pinker’s hardcore anti-religion views) or that students and teachers of religion are slighted in some unusual way.

And I’d have to dispute, for my part, that a Harvard education is anti-religion even in subtle ways. Miller quotes a Catholic sophomore who does “not think there would be any openness to discussing God in any of the classes I took last year.” I can only assume this sophomore was taking a hardcore math curriculum. I consider religion only a secondary interest, so I haven’t even ventured to the Divinity School, but let’s do a quick rundown of my curricular history, for those who can tolerate it.

I fulfilled a science requirement by taking a class on evolution that spent a solid couple of weeks on intelligent design and other religious perspectives on the universe, and we had a great section discussing the relationship between faith and science. I fulfilled a literature requirement by taking a class that included a unit on ancient Roman religion; took a freshman seminar that dealt with the interaction between religion, morality, and law; and am now taking Intro to African American Studies, which of course deals extensively with the role of religion in the lives of African Americans and their ancestors. And now I’m taking a Social Studies tutorial on “Religion and Politics in Modern America.” You can get a decent dose of religion at Harvard without even taking classes that are explicitly or solely about religion.

I was interviewed by Miller for her article many months ago, and was disappointed that she did not use any of the quotes I gave her. After all, I totally reaffirmed her thesis: of course religion is important to study, I said, even or especially if you’re a nonbeliever. But I also said, or implied, that she was wasting her time with this article, because religion is not in nearly such dire straits at Harvard as she supposed. I wish she had at least quoted me, even if she wasn’t going to listen to me!

Photo credit: Flickr stream of pobrecito33.

Harvard Thinks Big was billed as an “important” event. Its Facebook page was ebullient. Expectations were high. “A dream team of 10 Harvard professors will each talk for 10 minutes about the 1 thing they’re most passionate about…Inspired by TED Talks (Ted.com) and motivated by what makes Harvard great — amazing professors, cutting-edge research, and breakthrough ideas…”

But somehow this doesn’t go far enough. As I walked out of Sanders Theater tonight I thought: Harvard Thinks Big could change this university.

At 8:00pm fourteen hundred students were in line to attend the event. The first speaker, Daniel Gilbert, said that if gay sex was causing global warming “we’d be on the streets in a riot.” Our brains are wired to care about sex and food. (Matthew Kaiser then rejoined, to begin the second presentation, “I’ll just say: gay sex does cause global warming…But only if you do it right.”) At one point, David Malan told us that a phone book four billion pages long could be ripped in half only 32 times. To end the night, Tim McCarthy called America a “protest nation.”

The event was, in every way, exciting and Harvardian. The theater was buzzing and warm. As I sat there I thought (as I often do, but rarely as much as tonight) how lucky I am to go to a school where such an event could happen — could be organized, could be executed, and could be attended, so well.

But at its core the event was subversive. It forced us to confront assumptions we make about the nature of knowledge itself. What makes an idea “big”? Must it compel us, be useful to us, must it matter? Who determines that? The existing practitioners in the discipline or the world? And who should listen? And why? What, Harvard Thinks Big ultimately asks us to grapple with, is the purpose of public discourse in our age and what does Harvard, the university, have to do with it?

Consider the way ideas change and add to other ideas. When Steven Pinker, a psychologist, presented on the decline of world violence over time, one thinks of an earlier presentation, Kaiser’s “Killing the Boy,” on the metaphorical violence embedded in our social notion of boyhood (the boy’s value, he says, derives from his death). Growth Violence. These themes linked to Maria Tartar’s discussion of childrens’ literature, the Little Red Riding Hood, the child seductress, the fallen pray. Red Riding Hood comments, in an ironic way, on Andrew Berry’s discussion of population genetics (growth, seduction, death); and “Killing the Boy” on  Glenda Carpio’s declamation on hip hop art (outsiders, violence, boyhood). When Tim McCarthy, the final speaker, called America a nation “obsessed with tomorrows” one thought back to Daniel Gilbert, the first speaker, who explained that our brains are physiologically unable to prepare for our tomorrows.

Violence. Sex. Growth. Hope. These are themes that no one department is equipped to handle alone. Harvard Thinks Big gave us the opportunity to experience knowledge in the round.

More than just a fun night, Harvard Thinks Big was a glimpse at what the university could be — big ideas released from the confines of their disciplines, the biologist’s big ideas mixed with the historian’s, the lit professor’s with the pyschologist’s, theirs with ours, Harvard’s big ideas with the world’s. Louis Menand in his new book, The Marketplace of Ideas, argues that the academy has professionalized the production of knowledge and has turned each discipline into a system dedicated to its own perpetuation, a “self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields.”

Harvard Thinks Big is an indication of what an alternative might be.

In a country built on individual liberty and promise, that feels deeply unfair. If a teenager spends much time studying, excels at an instrument or sport, and garners wonderful teacher recommendations, should he be punished for being part of a high-achieving group? Are his accomplishments diminished by the fact that people he has never met – but who look somewhat like him – also work hard?

Now, Ms. Miller clearly has lots of opinions about what a “fair world” would look like, and what education is supposed to be all about. (Remember, this is the woman who wrote the Boston Globe editorial a few months ago called “My Lazy American Students.”) She and I could probably quibble all day long about the “justicial,” Kantian categorical importance of things like high GPAs, SATs and nice recommendation letters — my view, for the record, is that these things are pretty non-predictive of the sort of achievement a just society should be promoting, things like creativity, critical thought and democratic experimentalism. And furthermore, GPAs and SATs are highly determined by sociological factors, like culture, affluence, familial support and, yes, ethnicity, which are distributed unfairly. A world where SATs and high GPAs matter less is not a world I’m prepared to protest against (or write Boston Globe articles about).

But the fact is, this entire argument is a big waste of time. Ms. Miller seems to think that certain achievements should “entitle” a person to admission, that people “deserve” or “earn” admission. In reality, the opposite is closer to the truth. As Louis Menand has argued, certain admission “spots” (think of them as needs that the university wants to fulfill) create, as it were, the applicant’s opportunity to fill them. There are no Platonic, unchanging qualifications for a spot at Harvard. Instead, as new needs come about, new spots open up, old ones close down, and an opportunity for admission shifts, erratically, from one student to the next. One year ivy league school X identifies a felt need for a flute player with a certain background and with certain aptitudes. The next year it doesn’t. The real question is how fairness can even be said to apply in such a convoluted, unpredictable process.

The biggest change in college admission is an explosion of demand. In 1932, 1,330 people applied for admission to Yale, and seventy-two percent got in. Today, around 26,000 people apply to Yale, and about 7.5 percent get in. The instrumental value of the University is higher than ever before (see Peter Orszag’s discussion of the “wage premium” of a college education) and, in turn, the demand for a university education is greater than ever before.

So we have a basic supply-side advantage to the universities: an excess of demand gives universities a lot of discretion in determining the make-up of their class. We might disagree with the things they choose to prioritize, but, ultimately, it’s the university’s prerogative to make those priorities. Why? Because, ultimately, it’s the universities’ diverse institutional needs that the admittees are being selected for to fulfill. Harvard “needs” future professors, lax players to fill the stadium and it needs students interested in launching themselves into careers of political power and economic excess. Harvard also “needs” to create expansive international networks and to make old alumni happy.

Harvard’s diversity thus has nothing to do with “reverse discrimination” or “regular discrimination” or any of that. It’s a function of the huge pool that Harvard has to select from and the slightly less huge number of needs that Harvard’s looking to fulfill.

If you want to criticize universities, then, criticize them not for discriminating against anyone, but for turning the admission process into an essentially random crapshoot, a high-stakes contest where applicants have no good way of knowing the roles they are being selected for to play or the rules by which that selection is made. Few people know or can know why one student ultimately gets in and another ten do not. And Ms. Miller is no help in making any of this clearer.

Photo credit: Sarah Ross’ flickr stream

In a recent email to the university, President Faust invited the Harvard Community to participate in the “Harvard Catalyst & InnoCentive Prize for Innovation.” This experiment in crowdsourcing seeks to bring the Harvard community together to propose new questions and suggest new answers related to Type 1 diabetes. As the website states:

“This challenge is an exercise in tapping the knowledge of the widest possible community and encouraging the formation of new teams and new forms of collaboration around a specific topic area,” said Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Eva Guinan, MD, director of the Harvard Catalyst Linkages program and the other collaboration leader. “Type 1 diabetes is a good example of a disease that has touched many people at Harvard and elsewhere personally and professionally. As a result, they may have questions or ideas that could help spawn new collaborations and areas for research.”

Traditionally, researchers balance the need to collaborate, the need to “build on the past,” against the need for individuals to have authorship and ownership. And typically this collaboration is contained within any given discipline. This experiment is exciting because it pushes the boundaries of this collaborative exchange, opening up doors to all sorts of thinkers, from scientists in other fields, to non-scientists, to students from all backgrounds and education levels. With any problem in society, a constant stream of fresh ideas is necessary to keep the solution-finding process creative and innovative. The diversity of thoughts and experiences of the many different contributors in a crowdsourcing environment allows a constant rethinking of problems. Social scientists call this the “spill over” effect. It’s one of the key drivers of innovation.

While this experiment seems to be promising for scientific research, crowdsourcing would likely be beneficial to other areas as well, especially in public policy matters. It is not exactly easy for our ideas on health care or civil rights reform to be heard by politicians. There is a constant stream of interests groups (with far more money) competing for the ears of Congressmen. Congress and the president should seriously consider finding ways to open their doors to the ideas of the masses. The Obama Administration has made many efforts to get the general public more involved in government. At change.org, the general populace can submit “innovative ideas for addressing challenges our country faces.” Visitors to the website can vote for their favorite ideas, and the top ten will be presented to the Obama Administration at the end of the year. This website seems to be a great portal, but a quick glance at the 2009 winners reveals the problem. Winning ideas included “Legalize Marijuana,” “Health Freedom IS our first Freedom,” and “Pass Marriage Equality for LGBT Couples Nationwide.” None of these ideas is particularly new, and no one in the government seemed to care about these winners as the results were barely mentioned by the media. Quite obviously, political ideas are political by nature.

Crowdsourcing must be more than a long discussion or a veiled political campaign. It must be focused on innovating and populated by serious people. Harvard’s experiment is seems promising — or, at least, more promising than Obama’s. Only time will tell.

Photo: Flickr stream of gaspi

What I’d be interested in reading is something on the sociology of the economics discipline. How did people come to believe the cluster of ideas that that got us into the Financial Crisis? That’s an historical and sociological inquiry. What are the social factors that got a whole group of people to believe fraudulent economics? I like John Cassidy’s New Yorker piece “After the Blowup” (gated, Harvard LexisNexis) because he seems to want to start the process of answering this:

In the course of a few days, I talked to economists from various branches of the subject. The over-all reaction I encountered put me in mind of what happened to cosmology after the astronomer Edwin Hubble, in 1929, discovered that the universe was expanding, and was much larger than scientists had believed. The profession fell into turmoil. Some physicists stuck to the existing theories, which posited a stable universe. Others, Albert Einstein included, tried to adapt the old models to Hubble’s data. Still others attempted to come up with a new account of how the galaxies formed; it was this effort that ultimately produced the theory of the big bang.