HARVARD THEN AND NOW: The fruit of These Elite Schools Today!

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2023

A failure to adjust: According to its own web site, it's "the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere."

As far as we know, that assertion is accurate. We're referring to the Harvard Corporation, a group which, by its own account, "exercises fiduciary responsibility with regard to the University’s academic, financial, and physical resources and overall well-being."

It's easy to poke fun at such groups. We'll do so before we're done.

Today, though, a sensible person's sympathies surely go to this congregation, which suffered a surprise, Christmas Day attack this week in the pages of the New York Times. 

Few had seen it coming! As we revealed yesterday, the headlines on the Christmas attack read exactly like this:

Print editions:
Claudine Gay Turmoil Brings Harvard Board Out From the Shadows

Online edition:
Claudine Gay Turmoil Forces Harvard’s Secretive ‘Corporation’ Into Spotlight

According to those headlines, the secretive group has been forced to emerge from the shadows. This has happened due to the turmoil surrounding Harvard's president, Claudine Gay.

For the record, this particular governing body seems to carry its secrecy only so far. For the names of the board's current members, you can click to its unencrypted web site once again.

Links are provided to biographical profiles of the various members. The shadows in which this board has lurked only extend so far.

Stating the obvious, there's no perfect way to assemble a board of this type. In an interesting passage from the New York Times report, an observer describes the good intentions surrounding the board's composition:

COPELAND AND FARRELL (12/25/23): The board meets several times a year, and members serve six-year terms that can be renewed once. How it identifies and chooses its members, who are known as fellows, is something of a mystery. Outgoing members help select their own replacements.

[Penny] Pritzker has been the principal point of contact for major donors and others seeking to counsel Harvard on the path forward.

The board seeks to build a well-rounded group of people who have complementary expertise to help govern the university, said Richard Chait, a professor emeritus at Harvard who studied governance in higher education and was an adviser when the Harvard Corporation expanded in size over a decade ago.

According to Dr. Chait, the board seeks to assemble "a well-rounded group of people who have complementary expertise." 

Tomorrow, we'll take a closer look at the board's current makeup. But with respect to the current board, let the word go forth to the nations:

As Copeland and Farrell report, Pritzker is "a billionaire businesswoman and an heir of the Hyatt hotel fortune." 

Balancing Pritzker's role on the board, Diana Nelson is co-chair of Carlson Holdings, a family enterprise (and Nelson is part of the family). Essentially, she seems to be one of the heirs to the Radisson hotel fortune!

A person might choose to poke fun at facts like those. We're going to leave that to others.

Stating the obvious, there's nothing "wrong" with being the heir to a giant fortune.  Stating the obvious, a person can be heir to a giant fortune and do great good in the world, operating with great success and with only the best intentions.

That said, there are many things going on in the world which cry out for correction. Today, we'll call attention to the imperfect basic skills which may sometimes seem to emerge from These Finest Schools Today.

What we have here is a failure to adjust:

This brief aside concerns a new post by Kevin Drum. Drum offers one of his standard complaints in a post which carries this headline:

Holiday sales were flat this year

Holiday sales were flat? In his post, Kevin quotes a news report in the Washington Post—a report which gushes in the following way about the direction of the economy:

SIEGEL AND GREGG (12/26/23): As 2023 comes to a close, holiday shoppers offered yet another sign that the U.S. economy will roar into the new year. On Tuesday, fresh retail sales data from Mastercard showed that consumers spent big on gifts, meals and apparel in November and December.... U.S. retail sales between Nov. 1 and Dec. 24 were up 3.1 percent compared with the same period a year before, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse, which measures sales in-store and online across various forms of payment.

As Kevin notes, it isn't until the report's fifth paragraph that the authors report an awkward fact:

That 3.1 percent jump in retail sales hasn't been adjusted for inflation! And not only that:

According to Drum, inflation from last November to this November was also recorded at exactly 3.1 percent. 

This seems to suggest that we consumers didn't "spend [especially] big" on gifts, meals and apparel this year. In fact, it seems to suggest the possibility that holiday sales were flat.

This very morning, we read Drum's post, then scanned the New York Times. Sure enough! On page B1 of its print edition, and high atop its Today's Paper site, the New York Times is offering a version of that very same report:

Holiday Spending Increased, Defying Fears of a Decline

Despite lingering inflation, Americans increased their spending this holiday season, early data shows. That comes as a big relief for retailers that had spent much of the year fearing the economy would soon weaken and consumer spending would fall.

Retail sales from Nov. 1 to Dec. 24 increased 3.1 percent from a year earlier, according to data from Mastercard SpendingPulse, which measures in-store and online retail sales across all forms of payment. The numbers, released Tuesday, are not adjusted for inflation.

In fairness, the Times offered its key disclaimer—these numbers have not been adjusted for inflation—in its second paragraph. But each of these newspapers gushed about the way the jump in holiday spending suggests that the economy is powerful, booming, strong.

Does that specific assessment really make sense? We can't say we're sure that it does. We can say that this sort of thing is extremely familiar.

Drum has written, again and again, about economics and business reporting in which major publications fail to adjust for inflation. Back in the mid-1990s, a similar, systemwide journalistic failure created several years of press corps confusion concerning the Gingrich Medicare proposal, and led us toward the decision to create this site.

In the current instance, does it make sense to draw major conclusions from those (unadjusted) spending numbers? 

We'll guess that it basically doesn't. That said:

As we pondered that Washington Post report, we discovered that its lead reporter is a graduate of one of our finest schools (Yale). The other reporters involved in this pair of reports emerged from Emory and Southern Cal, two other high-end universities.

On its face, it may not make sense to blame the Harvard Corporation for reporting which tracks back to Yale. Presumably, though, these reports passed through the hands of editors who may have come to us, live and direct, from four years on the banks of the Charles. 

Bungled technical work is amazingly common at the upper ends of our mainstream press corps. That's true in reporting on business and economic issues. It has also been true in persistently bungled and sanitized writing about public school test scores.

Such bungles are virtually endless. This sort of thing can be said to raise questions about the work of These Elite Universities Today.

Tomorrow, we'll return to the membership of the Harvard board. We'll try to take a closer look at the "well-rounded group of people" whose "complementary expertise" allows them to supervise their famous school's "overall well-being."

Along the way, we'll ask the obvious questions:

Just how well-rounded is that group? How complementary are their outlooks, skills and experiences? Should it necessarily be surprising if they've failed to offer the kind of direction their famous university needs?

Increasingly, a lot of somewhat embarrassing conduct is associated with Our Finest Schools, Harvard now included. President Gay's groaning performance last month in the face of Rep. Stefanik's inane questioning would be one high-profile example.

(Also, Stefanik is a Harvard grad! Who's accepting the blame for that?)

Tomorrow, we'll call the roll of this well-rounded board. On Friday, we'll recall the types of academic questions we've never seen asked or answered—questions involving a string of misty memories from our own freshman year.

The Hilton hotels are found on the board; the Radissons offer some balance. Increasingly, though, These Kids can emerge from Our Finest Schools without knowing how to adjust!

Tomorrow: Our Corporate Bodies, Ourselves