By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell
With the future of American democracy hanging by a thread (a few thousand voters in maybe seven states), let's turn to something really important: Harvard!
What's been going on in 02138 since the torrent of violence turned Harvard Yard into a re-enactment of the Kishinev Pogrom, at least according to the accounts of very credible Likudniks shrieking over having to confront Palestinians and others who don't share their views about the invasion of Gaza?
One bright spot is you won't have to hold that yard sale to support the University. Its endowment grew to $53,200,000,000, a reasonably tidy sum, representing a 9.6% increase over June 30, 2023, thanks to the geniuses at the Harvard Management Company. Of course, if Harvard simply moved the stash into an institutional S&P 500 Index Fund, it could have earned 23% (4416 to 5460), but then they would be investing just like any old dentist and not like a Master of the Universe.
Speaking of those private equity and other finagling Masters of the Universe, how are they doing? Former genius Eddie Lampert who turned not one but two legendary names in American retail (Sears and Kmart) into rubble had to close the last Kmart in America this week:
The last full-size Kmart in the mainland U.S. in Bridgehampton, New York will close its doors on Sunday. Kmart was once America's second-largest retailer, but a bankruptcy filing in 2002 along with the rise of online shopping doomed the chain. pic.twitter.com/YjMs0gVGl5
— CBS Saturday Morning (@cbssaturday) October 19, 2024
Don't wory about old Eddie though – he stripped every dime out of those franchises before they cratered!
Of course, the private equity geniuses who pulled the same stunt on eight Massachusetts hospitals got off scott free as well. The good citizens of Dorchester, Norwood, and Ayer were left without their beloved and needed hospitals, but there were some winners too, like those deserving lawyers:
Lawyers for Steward Health Care were awarded more than $36 million — or more than $420,000 per day in fees — for their work on the first three months of the company’s bankruptcy case.
New York-based law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges filed a request Tuesday for reimbursement of $36,255,939.14 for fees and expenses, which included rates for attorneys billing as much as $2,350 per hour. Other rates included $750 per hour for a law clerk, and up to $595 per hour for paralegals.
The rates “are no greater than the rates Weil charges for professional and paraprofessional services rendered in comparable bankruptcy and non-bankruptcy related matters,” the firm said in its filing. “Such fees are reasonable based on the customary compensation charged by comparably skilled practitioners in comparable bankruptcy and non-bankruptcy matters in a competitive national legal market.”
Well, that makes it OK! In fact it's a small price to pay for screwing over all those injured by Steward's malfeasance, if you ask – the lawyers! (PS: the bankruptcy judge rubber-stamped the payday.)
Now the private equity geniuses who made Sears and Steward what they are today have turned their attention to another venerable institution desperately in need of their advice, Harvard:
Last year, a number of prominent donors lashed out at Harvard University for its handling of reactions on campus to the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel. Some announced they would freeze donations until the university cracked down on student protesters, did more to combat antisemitism, and reduced its focus on diversity.
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| Plutocrats: Let's do to Harvard what we did to Sears and Steward! |
Harvard has made some changes since then, but the donors are not done: Two of the most outspoken, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and former Facebook executive Sam Lessin, are ratcheting up their campaign to reshape the university, each arguing Harvard is home to too much activism, that the university is lacking viewpoint diversity, and its bureaucracy has become bloated.
Yes, that's certainly the problem with Harvard: too much diversity and too few rich white men giving orders to the peons.
But lest you think that these billionaire finaglers were just hurling a few windy accusations, they actually prepared the most powerful persuasive and rigorous presentation known to Man: a deck of slides.
Now the issues facing Harvard are indeed difficult and complex. Let's take one: protecting members of the Harvard community from anti-Semitism. We can all agree that that's a good thing and that Harvard's longstanding anti-Semitic Jewish quota (abolished after World War II) was very bad.
But when you start to think about it (a nasty habit Harvard instills in a few students but apparently almost none of its senior faculty), it gets hard. It leads to questions like: what is anti-Semitism? who gets to define it? Does it mean anything a Jewish person disagrees with? Does it mean opposing the idea of Israel as a Jewish state?
Not to mention: from whom is Harvard obligated to protect its students? Anti-Semitic members of the Harvard community or any idiot on Mass. Ave.? If both, does the goal of protecting the Harvard community from anti-Semitism justify locking down Harvard Yard and keeping out those who simply want to get from the Square to the Broadway Market?
Here's a few more: What about protecting Palestinian and Arab students from anti-Arab prejudice? And what is that? If advocating for Palestine from the River to the Sea is anti-Semitic, what about the Likud policy of Israel from the River to the Sea? How is that OK?
And finally: how does Harvard create an open structure for resolving these complex and thorny questions?
That's a lot to cover in a slide deck
But slides are a bad way to resolve complex issues
- Lack of space to articulate ideas
- Inability to develop complex argument
- Tendency toward vague or inaccurate language
- Conducive to simplistic conclusions
But what do we know? We're not billionaires. Let's take a look at Ackman's subtle and sophisticated deck of slides.
We get to slide four before the wheels start coming off:
No it isn't.
Harvard College doesn't have a business. It has a goal, stated in the slide. Businesses are organized to make money. Other types of collective activities, like colleges, governments, armies, many hospitals, and other unimportant odds and ends, are similarly intended to serve other ends besides coining pelf for billionaire finaglers.
It's not just a poor choice of words as slide five makes clear to even the meanest private-equity intelligence:
So Ackman is arguing that because Harvard College enrollment is essentially flat, it's failing as a business? Does this make sense to you? Is your marriage failing because you have the same number of spouses you had 10 years ago? Should Harvard attempt to double its enrollment every 10 years? What's the point? We recall an old PBS show arguing (satirically) that we need to pay attention to public broadcasting because at the then-current rate of PBS stations doubling every ten years by 2050 there would be 32 million public broadcasting outlets.
If you doubled the number of students every ten years (a good growth rate for revenues of a for-profit business), there would be 24,000 undergrads today. Where would they live? Who would teach the little darlings? Not the senior faculty of course, based on past and current experience?
Would Harvard be better or stronger with an explosion of new undergraduates? Why?
There's more nonsense to follow. Slide 8 as others have pointed out tracks the rise in Harvard's list priced tuition without bothering to mention that the actual price paid is far lower, and that one-quarter of the entering class pays a tuition bill of $0.00, thanks to that huge endowment.
From there the deck descends into the usual bushwa about how Harvard faculty lacks diversity (true) because on the sole criterion of diversity Ackman values, more identify as liberal than conservative. What this has to do with the teaching ability of a Professor of Music, or Computer Science, or Biology is obvious only the Ackman and his fellow reactionaries.
Indeed, one would think that the key criterion for a professor of natural scienes is their belief in scientific fact and method. Neither of which is supported by the Tangerine-Faced Rapist that Ackman supports.
Plus we get the usual whine:
Really? Which ones? We can't think of any. Frankly, we think Harvard would be a far better place if its faculty shut its yap and turned its attention to its job: teaching stuff to people. The likelihood of that happening is zero.
By the way, what do these faculty members want to say that they feel they can't? And what do they see as the consequence for saying dumb s***? If it's getting dragged for saying dumb s***, let us make a modest suggestion: stop saying dumb s***, like when then-Harvard President Larry Summers mansplained that the reason the ladies don't have more STEM teaching positions is because their girl brains can't handle equations.
We're barely a third of the way through this dreck [Surely, deck – Ed.] and we haven't gotten to some of the dumbest stuff, so we'll have to stop here and pick this up another day.
Or, as Mrs. Bill Ackman likes to say, “I'll think about it tomorrow, because tomorrow is another day!”
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