Rav Soloveitchik, Rav Lichtenstein, Prof. Weidhorn, Prof. Flatto, Prof. Levy: My Five Greatest Teachers at Yeshiva University

I realized over the years since I graduated from Yeshiva College that so many of my teachers there imprinted upon me indelible lessons for life and learning. I have chosen here to recall five special teachers. I apologize to the many other wonderful teachers that I have omitted. I especially beg the forgiveness of those that I have chosen to so briefly and inadequately remember. Nothing that I say can do them justice.
[Periodic re-post -- to celebrate these great teachers.]

Crimson: Egyptology and Christianity Alive at Harvard

We guess it was a slow news week at Harvard.

The Crimson reports that a "Professor Revives Egyptology At Harvard". You can now enroll in Egyptian Aa: The Language of the Pharaohs, Egyptian 150: Voices from the Nile: Ancient Egyptian Literature in Translation, Anthropology 1250: The Pyramids of Giza, or Societies of the World 38: Pyramid Schemes: The Archaeological History of Ancient Egypt.

And you can now find Christianity at Harvard (although we thought it was there all along, they have a divinity school for heaven's sake). We are not at all sure why this is a story, "Faith Emerging: Students Find Christianity at Harvard".

Is Diaspora Jewish?

If you think Diaspora is Jewish, i.e., a term that describes the dispersion of the Jews over millenia from the promised land, then you would be correct.

But now the term refers to a new Internet platform, something that is not just Jewish. The Bits blog of the Times reports, "Diaspora, the Open Facebook Alternative, Releases Its Code":

On Thursday Diaspora, a social Web site that hopes to offer an alternative to Facebook, announced that its developers would be allowed to download the code used to build the new service and begin exploring and enhancing the Diaspora software.

Diaspora is the result of four New York University students who became frustrated by Facebook’s confusing privacy policy. As The Times’ Jim Dwyer noted in an article earlier this year, the entire project was a “call to arms” over Facebook’s less than transparent explanation of how its users’ data was being exposed to others and to advertisers.

And now be prepared for a slew of reports on Mark Zuckerberg in advance of the release of the new film about him and Facebook called, The Social Network. The New Yorker has a report "Letter from Palo Alto, The Face of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg opens up" by Jose Antonio Vargas, based on their research.

Zuckerberg is not going to let a film define his public persona. He's doing interviews.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his college dorm room six years ago. Five hundred million people have joined since, and eight hundred and seventy-nine of them are his friends. The site is a directory of the world’s people, and a place for private citizens to create public identities...more...

Roasted Kugel

Something strange going on in the world of Jewish Studies (as if that was a new thing). The journal JQR has published several negative articles on the work of James Kugel (hence "Roasted Kugel"). And the professor was not given a platform to reply. So he posted a rejoinder on his own web site.

THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, Vol.100, No.1 (Winter 2010)

• Review Forum: on James L. Kugel, How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now
• Problematizing the Bible . . . Then and Now, JOHN C. REEVES
• Two Introductions to Scripture: James Kugel and the Possibility of Biblical Theology, BENJAMIN D. SOMMER 
•  The "Real Thing": How to Read How to Read the Bible, WILLIAM KOLBRENER

We have been critical of Kugel's work for years. But he is always welcome to post his defense here.

Hat tip to Menachem Mendel.

Not one of our teachers was a champion

Elizabeth Green, a Spencer fellow in education reporting at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, has written a feature story "Building a Better Teacher" in the NY Times Magazine about a book by Doug Lemov to be published in April, “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”

It's an enlightening and stimulating article about what must be an equally challenging new book.

It made us think about how many very poor teachers we studied with over the years. Yes, even some of the teachers whom I have extolled in the past were as terrible at the art of teaching as they were brilliant in their cognitive mastery and presentation of their disciplines.

We don't know if this is part of the Lemov taxonomy, but on occasion we imagined that the champion exceptional teacher will know the interior nature of each of his or her students and teach to them according to their individual styles of learning, to draw out and develop their native talents. (Um, we wonder why it is that we cannot recall meeting such a teacher.) And we wondered how successful we have been at trying to do those champion things.

Is Lawrence Summers Jewish?

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers is a Jew.

In 2002 he wrote of himself, "I am Jewish, identified but hardly devout."

Summers is director of Obama's National Economic Council. He may at a later time succeed Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

CHE: Harvard: Where students don't matter much

Tragic. Harvard and many other research Universities do not even see their students on the radar. (Hat tip to Yochanan Hashlishi)

The 'Veritas' About Harvard
By Kevin Carey

What happens when the gods of high finance dump a gigantic pile of gold on the richest university in the world?

It sounds like the kind of hypothetical one might pose in a smoke-addled dorm room at 2 a.m. But it is, of course, what actually happened to Harvard University, along with a few of its elite competitors, over the last 20 years.

The answer is that the university reveals its true self. It shows the world what it cares about—and what it doesn't.

In 1990, Harvard had an endowment of about $4.7-billion. That was still a lot of money, about $7.7-billion in today's dollars. Only five other universities have that much money now. Over the next two decades the pile grew to colossal heights, $36.9-billion by mid-2008.

Harvard spent the money on many things. But not a dollar went to increasing the number of undergraduates it chose to bless with a Harvard education. In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it enrolled slightly more than 1,600 freshmen.

That is remarkable stinginess. Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable, conferring a lifetime of social capital and prestige. The university receives many more highly qualified applicants than it chooses to admit. Because the existing class includes underqualified children of legacies, rich people, politicians, celebrities, and others who benefit from the questionable Ivy League admissions process, Harvard could presumably increase the size of its entering class by, say, 50 percent while improving the overall academic quality of the students it admits....more...

Times' Ethicist: Is Harvard a Good University Investment?

The Times' ethicist, Randy Cohen, takes up the question of whether it is more ethical to give your donation to Harvard or the Borough of Manhattan Community College.

We thought he'd focus on the practical issue of whether it's just a bad investment to send money to Harvard, given the poor performance of Harvard's endowment funds this past year, which some estimate have lost half of their value. If you gave a dollar to Harvard a year ago, they'd have made it into 50 cents now. Doesn't sound like a good idea.

But that's not what Randy inquires about. His concern appears to be framed as: where can you do the most good with money donated to educating our youth?

That expression of the issue seems to miss the major point, namely that research universities do not exist primarily to educate students. They are there to assemble faculty to create new knowledge through research.

We waited for years at Minnesota before we heard the "S" word come up in a faculty senate meeting or any other administrative setting. Students simply don't rate much attention at big schools.

I think what Randy means to say is if you want to affect students' futures, give to a school where the money collected from donations goes more directly to students and not to basic research.

We agree that the question raised is legitimate grist for the ethicist and for opinion mills in general. But the analysis offered in the Times falls short. See the discussion online for some additional insights into why.

Should You Give to Harvard?
Randy Cohen

The Issue
The fiscal year for major university endowments ended June 30, and schools have been reporting their results: not good. In the Harvard-Yale portfolio game, the latter was down 24.6 percent, while its rival lost even more, 27.3 percent. If you are an Ivy alum, this might seem a good moment to donate to your alma mater, to help rebuild its battered portfolio. But should you, given the power of education to improve people’s lives?

The Argument
Do not donate to Harvard. To do so is to offer more pie to a portly fellow while the gaunt and hungry press their faces to the window (at some sort of metaphoric college cafeteria, anyway). Even after last year’s losses, Harvard’s endowment exceeds $26 billion, the largest of any American university, greater than the G.D.P. of Estonia. By contrast, among historically black colleges and universities, Howard has the largest endowment, about $500 million, a mere 1.4 percent the size of Harvard’s. (Donors gave Harvard more than $600 million just this fiscal year.) The best-endowed community college, Valencia, in Orlando, Fla., has around $67 million, or 0.18 percent of Harvard’s wealth. This is not to deny that Harvard does fine work or could find ways to spend the money but to assert that other schools have a greater need and a greater moral claim to your benevolence.

Consider the students served by the two sorts of schools. An applicant who falls just shy of getting into Harvard is likely to go elsewhere. He or she will endure little suffering for having to muddle along at Brown or U.N.C. But for many other students, it is community college or nothing. At the Borough of Manhattan Community College, for example, a high percentage of those enrolled are the first in their families to attend college. Eighty percent of them work while going to school; 78 percent of them come from households with incomes of $25,000 or less. A lack of financing for these schools means higher tuition and fewer scholarships, which are serious obstacles to potential students. And while the Ivies do reach out to low-income students, Harvard’s sliding scale for tuition includes a bracket for families earning $120,000 to $180,000 a year, something that doesn’t come up much at B.M.C.C. It is fair to say that these schools enroll different constituencies.

And the well endowed serve a smaller constituency: nearly half of all college students attend community colleges, institutions that help keep alive the American promise of economic opportunity. On average, a male college graduate will earn significantly more in his lifetime than a nongraduate, a big thing to most families. Indeed, for many young people, community college is what stands between them and a life spent working a minimum-wage job or something not much better. Acknowledging the value of such schools, President Obama has proposed a community-college initiative. Support them, and you change people’s lives.

Support Harvard? The student paper, the Crimson, reported that in 2008 40 percent of the college’s graduates flocked “to lucrative jobs in business, consulting and finance.” For those who go on to Harvard Business School, the future is even rosier. Or at least greener. The median base salary for the B-school’s class of 2009 is currently $115,000; the median signing bonus adds another $20,000. These are starting salaries, during an economic downturn, for people who have never had an adult job (As some earlybird readers pointed out, B-school students do have work experience before enrolling.) Thus begins the next generation of wealthy alums with the wherewithal to give generously, perpetuating the status quo. Which might not be a bad slogan for the next fund drive. If you favor truth in advertising. And unsuccessful fund drives.

If we esteem higher education as a source of national prosperity, we should regard it as a public expense, like roads or national parks or the U.S.S. George H. W. Bush, the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier. (Cost: $6.2 billion. With a slight up-tick in the stock market, Harvard can buy four. And pay cash. And take no guff from Yale.) Many countries do just that. France has 81 universities that charge very little tuition. Some Belgian universities are setting tuition at 500 euros.

Until that happy day, private donors will play their part, but they need not make the rich schools richer, the poor (comparatively) poorer. Instead, we could continue to encourage individual generosity with approbation and tax breaks, but add this stricture: only a portion of any donation may be earmarked for a particular school; the remainder will be distributed to needier institutions. That is, half of your donation could be pledged to Harvard, the rest would go to Howard and Valencia and the like. We’ll experiment with the proportions to find the sweet spot that aids the most students while discouraging the fewest donors. This reform need not be written into law. It should be accepted voluntarily by every donor and embraced by every university with a substantial endowment and a concern for an egalitarian society.

There is no imperative to shut down Harvard until B.M.C.C. matches its endowment; after all, we don’t ban donations to orchestras or animal shelters until all human disease has been eradicated. There are many kinds of good to be done in the world. But if you wish to promote education as a force for social justice, there are better and worse ways to do it. Ethics is not just intentions; it’s also effectiveness. We can frame the question as a conflict between two goods: donate to Harvard or donate elsewhere? Under the current circumstances, the more honorable course is to write that check to a community college or a historically black college or a small Catholic college or other modest institution that genuinely and profoundly transforms the lives of its graduates.

Google's scan of my translation of the Talmud of the Land of Israel Tractate Berakhot

The Talmud of the Land of Israel: Berakhot By Tzvee Zahavy

Published 1989 University of Chicago Press

373 pages

ISBN 0226576582

Preview

Parts of the book are "omitted" from the scan. You cannot browse the whole book but you can search it. Hence the whole book has been scanned but is not instantly available. Amazon has had this scanned in their system for several years.

Note: I dedicated the book to my rebbe and teacher Harav Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

Google says these are the book's "Key terms":

zeira, unit iii, hiyya, four cubits, yose, priestly blessing, yohanan, afternoon prayer, shema, sages say, yudan, scriptural basis, tefillin, verse says, yannai, tzvee zahavy, palestinian talmud, brown judaic, pene moshe

To cite this book: Citation Styles for "Berakhot"

APA

Zahavy, T. (1989). Berakhot. Chicago studies in the history of Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chicago

Zahavy, Tzvee. 1989. Berakhot. Chicago studies in the history of Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Harvard

ZAHAVY, T. (1989). Berakhot. Chicago studies in the history of Judaism. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

MLA

Zahavy, Tzvee. Berakhot. Chicago studies in the history of Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1989.

Turabian

Zahavy, Tzvee. Berakhot. Chicago studies in the history of Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Is Harvard University Antisemitic?

There is evidence that indeed Harvard University is antisemitic.

In April 2006, when they took the Harvard logo off the scurrilous essay coauthored by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government Dean Stephen M. Walt, we wrote a letter to the Crimson to protest that it was not enough.

The Walt essay subsequently became a book and everyone forgot that Walt was paid by Harvard to write the essay and the book. We are certain that his subsequent salary raises reflected credit for that "scholarly" work.

In 2006 we read an article about Harvard's Nazi Ties - cited below. And as we indicated in a previous post, John Coatsworth - a former Harvard professor of fourteen years - proved that the Harvard-antiSemitism link is still alive and kicking - with Coatsworth legitimizing at another ivy league campus the Iranian maniac, standing in, in our generation, for Hitler.

Here is a repost from my blog of 4/8/06:

The Harvard Crimson 4/7/06 :: Opinion :: Harvard Should Withdraw `Israel Lobby' Study

To the editors:

Re: "KSG Seeks Distance From Paper," news, Mar. 24.

The charge of a malevolent organized Jewish conspiracy is the most blatant form of anti-Semitism. In the 21st century, I find it insufficient that the Kennedy School of Government removed its logo from the scurrilous paper published last week by Kennedy School of Government Dean Stephen M. Walt and Professor John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. I find it insufficient that the most prominent educational institution in the world added a more prominent disclaimer stating that the classic racist views expressed in that work belong only to the authors.

I call on Harvard -- take that paper off your server and issue an apology to all persons of learning and conscience.

TZVEE ZAHAVY
Teaneck, N.J.
April 4, 2006

That was one approach -- and the right one in this instance.

The other was to publish contrary opinions and give the appearance of a genuine debate -- as Harvard did. But that was hate literature v. academic opinion -- not a valid point - counterpoint. Hence our view was preferable -- remove the hate literature.

Was this action by Harvard surprising? Not in the context of the data presented in the article, Harvard's Nazi Ties by Stephen H. Norwood, Professor of History and Judaic Studies, University of Oklahoma published by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. He tells us that among other Nazi-friendly actions:

Prominent Harvard alumni, student leaders, and some faculty assumed a major role in the friendly welcome accorded the Nazi warship Karlsruhe when it visited Boston in 1934, flying the swastika flag. Boston's Jewish community protested vociferously. President Conant remained silent. Officers and crewmen from the warship were entertained at Harvard, and professors attended a gala reception in Boston where the warship's captain enthusiastically praised Hitler... more...

[revised and reposted from 9/23/07]

Times: 1700 Years of Universal Talmudic Male Literacy Helped the Jews Succeed in America

Times op-ed writer Nicholas Kristof makes a startling observation in the midst of his analysis about why Asians, Jews and West Indian blacks have succeeded at an above average rate in America.

Jews and Chinese have a particularly strong tradition of respect for scholarship, with Jews said to have achieved complete adult male literacy — the better to read the Talmud — some 1,700 years before any other group...The parallel force in China was Confucianism and its reverence for education.

We thank Kristoff for his endorsement of the values and achievements of our learning. We think though that it's not just the literacy of the Talmudic culture, but also the content of what is taught.

A Talmudic life is a traditional, critical and examined life. The entire ethos of Talmudic society, as well as that of its correlatives in the other cases, that is to say, what people read and how they are taught to think - all of that is more important to achievement than the raw skills of literacy.

Here are a few other excerpts from the article.

Rising Above I.Q.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us.

Asian-Americans are renowned — or notorious — for ruining grade curves in schools across the land, and as a result they constitute about 20 percent of students at Harvard College.

As for Jews, they have received about one-third of all Nobel Prizes in science received by Americans. One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole.

West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher.

These three groups may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories. In the debate over nature and nurture, they suggest the importance of improved nurture — which, from a public policy perspective, means a focus on education. Their success may also offer some lessons for you, me, our children — and for the broader effort to chip away at poverty in this country.

Richard Nisbett cites each of these groups in his superb recent book, “Intelligence and How to Get It.” Dr. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, argues that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics.

“I think the evidence is very good that there is no genetic contribution to the black-white difference on I.Q.,” he said, adding that there also seems to be no genetic difference in intelligence between whites and Asians. As for Jews, some not-very-rigorous studies have found modestly above-average I.Q. for Ashkenazi Jews, though not for Sephardic Jews. Dr. Nisbett is somewhat skeptical, noting that these results emerge from samples that may not be representative.

In any case, he says, the evidence is overwhelming that what is distinctive about these three groups is not innate advantage but rather a tendency to get the most out of the firepower they have....

Perhaps the larger lesson is a very empowering one: success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive. As Professor Nisbett puts it, “Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.”

Richard Friedman Cooks James Kugel's Cholent

First Richard Elliot Friedman figuratively cooked James Kugel's cholent. Then Kugel [in BAR 34:02, Mar/Apr 2008] responded to Friedman. [Ancient Biblical Interpreters vs. Archaeology & Modern Scholars, by Richard Elliott Friedman BAR 34:01, Jan/Feb 2008.]

This exchange is painful to me to read. Friedman obviously searched high and low for a unity of method or purpose in Kugel's erudite brain dump. Frankly, Kugel does not purport to present a systematic treatise on the Bible. He honestly says in concluding his rejoinder to Friedman,

I think Friedman is wrong in supposing that his one-size-fits-all assessment is the only valid one. In any case, I have no such global solution to offer. All I tried to do was to set this question in its historical perspective by putting down almost everything I know about Scripture, its past as well as its present.

Kugel does not claim to make or prove any case. He thinks that sharing his knowledge will be of interest to others. He has every right to his vanity. As he is a celebrity professor from Harvard, indeed many readers are eager to see what he has been thinking all these years.

But this baffles Friedman and I can see why. He assumes that a book should attempt to make or try to prove some case. "Who wrote the Bible?" is a clear question and Friedman gives it an answer in his popular Bible book.

By contrast, "How to Read the Bible," is not a question. In fact, the book should be called, "How I Read the Bible" since it is not a how-to guide at all. Kugel is confessing in this tome his life story of reading the Bible along with ancient and modern sources.

Friedman picks up on this and accordingly sees the need for offering effusive praise to Kugel the man at the outset of his review. Sure you need to do this since the book is a confession of the inner musings of a special man.

But then Friedman searches for the questions that the book seeks to answer. And not surprisingly he cannot find any big ones. Puzzled, Friedman decides that Kugel must be answering a set of questions inaccessible to Friedman. He must be speaking in the code language of the Orthodox Jews.

In concluding his review, Friedman says,

We have rather moved on from their assumptions because the textual and archaeological evidence revealed that their assumptions were not correct.

I realize how hard all of this is for Orthodox Jews and possibly for fundamentalist Christians. I have sat and studied with them, not as opponents but with mutual respect. If there is any meeting point between them and the people who are persuaded by critical scholarship, it should be that both recognize the Bible’s value and both are committed to the truth. Kugel’s book can be an exceptional starting point for that discussion.

In this statement Friedman says that he does not understand the code and the discourse of the Orthodox and "possibly … fundamentalist Christians." But they seem to like the same Bible that Friedman analyzes. So they cannot be bad people. So he really does want to talk with them.

The value of Kugel's book for Friedman is to provide a window into the mentality behind that secret code of the Orthodox. I suspect the folks at Christianity Today feel the same since they want to recognize Kugel's book for its value on its own terms.

So now the question is whether this window into Kugel's thinking shows readers such as Friedman or the CT selection panel anything about how and what Orthodox Jews (as Friedman would have it) or all Jews (as Kugel would have it) think about the Bible.

Kugel appears to concede that he'd like his book to be received by the reader as, "How to Read the Bible the way we Jews Read it." And the conceit in that presumption is that somehow Kugel has reached the pinnacle of clarity on this matter because of his rich erudition.

Come to think of it, that is the underlying assumption of the class of religious leaders that we call rabbis. Due to their special knowledge, they achieve individually and as a class a special religious charisma. It's nice when rabbis speak or write in well-reasoned common sense ways to state a proposition and prove it -- which they often do. But it is not required of them. Their positions of charismatic authority allow them to take a great deal of leeway. Even the raw brain dump of a rabbi carries inspiring significance for the follower.

Kugel speaks in this rabbinic mode in his magnum opus because that is how he sees himself after all -- as a rabbi.

Ever respectful to the rabbi, Friedman speaks well of Kugel the man and his learning in his opening sections of his review. Richard more comfortably wears the robes of the academic and hence cautiously circles back around to say that he does not understand the purpose of Kugel's book, that it must be because it is written in Orthodox code, and that he would like to hear more from Kugel and the Orthodox.

I frankly have to side with Friedman. I'd like to hear more from the learned professor Kugel about how he solves the problems of scholarship and makes new knowledge for some community -- be it academic or religious.

Friedman has shown his commitment to this cause and has brought significant progress to his field of endeavor throughout his career. The solutions he posits to the questions he answers in his books and articles can be sifted through and built upon by those who come next.

Kugel has thought great thoughts and now shares them with all of us. These notions will hang in the Jewish wing of the museum of great thoughts for the appreciation of the cultured viewer.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. [repost from 3/18/08]

US News Ranks Yeshiva U 9th Most Popular

With all the bad new lately for my alma mater Yeshiva University, it was nice to see the positive news that the school is ranked by US News the 9th most popular in the nation, ahead of (other) highly esteemed institutions like Brown and Columbia. The bigger story in this list is that the Mormon school BYU is ranked #2.

Most Popular Colleges: National Universities

So which colleges do students really want to go to? One way to find out is to look at a school’s yield, the percentage of applicants accepted by a university who end up enrolling at that institution in the fall. The figures in this table are from the fall 2007 entering class and show the admit yield and overall acceptance rate. If a school has a high yield (a large proportion of those admitted enroll), it means that the school is most likely very popular with a top reputation and that the students are highly motivated to go there. A very low yield means that the school could be a “safety” or second choice for many of those who apply. Colleges use yield as a key factor in determining how many students they need to admit each year.

	U.S. News Rank	Accep- tance Rate	Yield
Harvard University (MA)	1	9%	79%
Brigham Young University--Provo (UT)	113	74%	77%
University of Nebraska--Lincoln	89	62%	71%
Stanford University (CA)	4	10%	70%
Massachusetts Institute of Technology	4	12%	69%
Yale University (CT)	3	10%	69%
Princeton University (NJ)	2	10%	68%
University of Pennsylvania	6	16%	66%
Yeshiva University (NY)	50	69%	65%
University of Florida	49	42%	63%
Columbia University (NY)	8	11%	59%
Brown University (RI)	16	14%	56%

Is the Harvard University Medical School Corrupt?

Yes, according to the article in today's Times, the Harvard University Medical School is a corrupt entity.

The article, "Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary," tap dances around the issue in a variety of ways. For reasons that we cannot fathom, the writers and editors of the Times simply do not want to use the "c" word to describe behavior of the faculty of that med school. No doubt though, what the article chronicles is pure and simple corruption.

Faculty are paid handsomely by the drug companies and, in turn, the professors give to the snake oil salesmen the imprimatur of "Harvard" -- the world's leading education brand.

The example that kicks off the Times' story tells of students who instead of receiving unbiased medical training from their instructors, are now subjected to infomercials for drug companies masquerading as course lectures.

In the scenario, the professor blows off a student who asks about why cholesterol drugs cause a significant number of people to become sick. Turns out -- he's been paid by the cholesterol drug companies to deflect such questioning.

Whoops. That is the definition of corruption in any dictionary -- students who are paying for real training -- instead are given worthless infomercials.

Aren't there racketeering statutes that cover this kind of conspiracy?

Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary
By DUFF WILSON

BOSTON — In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.

Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

“I felt really violated,” Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. “Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn’t as pure as I think it should be.”

Mr. Zerden’s minor stir four years ago has lately grown into a full-blown movement by more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and sympathetic faculty, intent on exposing and curtailing the industry influence in their classrooms and laboratories, as well as in Harvard’s 17 affiliated teaching hospitals and institutes.

They say they are concerned that the same money that helped build the school’s world-class status may in fact be hurting its reputation and affecting its teaching.

The students argue, for example, that Harvard should be embarrassed by the F grade it recently received from the American Medical Student Association, a national group that rates how well medical schools monitor and control drug industry money.

Harvard Medical School’s peers received much higher grades, ranging from the A for the University of Pennsylvania, to B’s received by Stanford, Columbia and New York University, to the C for Yale... more racketeering news...

We told you so: Universities lost 50% this year - right out of the pockets of students and faculty

Posted last year on 1/25/08. We warned you. (Lots of other people were squawking too.)

We told you - Spend the endowments. Did you listen? No! You lost 50% of your value. Why? So your endowment managers could collect big bonuses. So your presidents could get enormous salaries. And you threw away money that should have gone to students and faculty.

That was a crime. So here is the repost. Read it and weep.

Times: Politicians to Universities: Greedy Pigs! Spend Your Endowments

Somehow Universities lost their way. They amassed piles of capital in their endowments and began to think they were capitalists. They turned off the spigot for the students, wept to the faculty about the severe budgetary constraints that they faced, and turned on the bonuses for the fund managers and presidents, and now they must answer to congress for their blatant exploitation of the citizenry of our republic.

When I was helping to raise an endowment for our tiny department at the University of Minnesota, I was told that we had to spend 5% a year on programs and we planned accordingly. Apparently that rule has been ignored by the big boys and now the stuff is hitting the fan.

And I remember scratching my head for days after the University of Minnesota announced record fund raising success for its endowments out of one side of its mouth and pleaded poverty to the public out of the other side of its mouth, insisting on zero salary increases for faculty and tuition hikes for students.

Twenty years ago this behavior across the academic industry was unethical, immoral and criminal. It has continued unabated. Millions of dollars tucked away in endowments has now increased to billions of dollars. The real question here is how much has America suffered with inferior education for its students, with faculty research and teaching that never took place, because of the greed of University administrators and endowment managers?

An entire generation of students has been cheated out of tuition. An entire generation of professors have been exploited with sub-par wages, labs and budgets. All this so that dozens of universities can amass piles of capital and make millions of dollars for the administrators and money managers.

This is a corruption of an industry that goes far beyond the Enron or Worldcom scandals. It's a perversion of the entire concept of the non-profit organization.

It's high time that we begin to see some university fund managers and presidents marched off in handcuffs to serve their time in prison for cheating the public - students and teachers - out of the charitable donations that were meant for them.

And while you are locking up those crooks, you might also start sending some hefty bills to the donors who took tax write offs for money that never went to non-profit purposes.

A curse is descending on all the sleazy donors, all the avaricious endowment managers and all the greedy university presidents.

You know who you are and you will all rot in hell for what you have done.

Senate Looking at Endowments as Tuition Rises
By KAREN W. ARENSON

The Senate Finance Committee, increasingly concerned about the rising cost of higher education, demanded detailed information on Thursday from the nation’s 136 wealthiest colleges and universities on how they raised tuition over the last decade, gave out financial aid and managed and spent their endowments.

The committee also asked about endowment-related bonuses paid to college presidents and endowment managers.

The move came as a record 76 colleges and universities achieved endowments of $1 billion or more in the last fiscal year, according to a report released this week. Harvard’s endowment, the largest, grew 20 percent, to $34.6 billion, while Yale’s, the second largest, grew 25 percent, to $22.5 billion.

“Tuition has gone up, college presidents’ salaries have gone up, and endowments continue to go up and up,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the committee. “We need to start seeing tuition relief for families go up just as fast.”

The committee, which has a central role in setting tax policy, has been pressuring universities to use more of their wealth for financial aid and threatening to require them to spend a minimum of 5 percent of their endowments each year, as foundations must. The committee pointed out that donations to universities and their endowment earnings were both tax-exempt.

Seeking to head off Congressional action, wealthy universities have been rushing in recent months to expand financial aid, in some cases using more of their endowments to increase assistance to low-income and upper-income students alike. Harvard recently said it would increase aid for families earning up to $180,000 a year, and Yale said it would help families with annual incomes of as much as $200,000.

The request for information came in a letter, signed by Mr. Grassley and the committee chairman, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana. It provided a strong indication that the committee was not backing off the idea of requiring colleges to spend more of their endowments.

Mr. Grassley said that the information gathered in the next 30 days “will help Congress make informed decisions about a potential pay-out requirement and allow universities to show what they can accomplish on their own initiative.”

University officials expressed surprise at the broad information request and concern about Congress mandating how they use their endowments.

“I believe that Senator Baucus’s and Grassley’s intentions may be admirable,” said Robert J. Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, “but understanding university finances is an extremely complex matter, especially in public colleges and universities.” Berkeley’s endowment is roughly $3 billion.

Henry S. Bienen, president of Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., said that while he believed that putting more information into the open “will help eliminate many myths and misunderstandings,” he rejected the proposal that universities be required to spend 5 percent of their endowment assets each year.

“Universities are not like foundations,” Dr. Bienen said. “They have operating budgets which they cannot easily adjust with the ups and downs of markets. They cannot easily turn off spigots.” Northwestern, thanks to a recent cash infusion, now has a nearly $7 billion endowment.

University officials noted that an economic downturn would reduce the returns on endowments while creating more demand for financial aid. “People have got used to the last few years of wonderful endowment growth,” Dr. Bienen added. “It does not always happen.”

Lynne Munson, an adjunct research fellow at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and a vocal critic of college spending practices, said the committee’s request was “unprecedented but important, because colleges and universities have kept endowment spending secret for so long.”

“Parents, donors and all taxpayers deserve to know how these tax-free endowment funds are being spent,” Ms. Munson said.

Although the Senate letter is not a subpoena, a spokeswoman for the committee said that it was rare for a nonprofit entity not to cooperate with a request for information.

College tuition has been rising faster than inflation and colleges have adopted complicated aid programs and discounts that have made the pricing of an undergraduate education at an elite college as complicated and varied as the pricing of airline seats.

Most colleges have far lower endowments and charge less than the ones the committee is addressing.

The committee’s letter, asking for detailed financial information from the universities and colleges across a decade, signaled that lawmakers plan to get deeply into pricing policies. It asks for both the sticker price of tuition and the average and median prices paid by students year by year for 10 years.

The committee questioned how the colleges recruit low-income students and how much they spend on these efforts. It also asked who decides when tuition increases are necessary.

In the matter of endowments, lawmakers sought year-by-year growth and investment returns, and fees paid to investment advisers.

The senators moved a day after the National Association of College and University Business Officers released its annual endowment study, which showed that the 76 colleges and universities with endowments of $1 billion or more had seen their value rise 21 percent over the previous year. Despite good returns, however, they spent on average only 4.4 percent of their endowments.

Mr. Baucus and Mr. Grassley noted the “explosive” growth and said, “That is good news because much good can be done now.”

Times: Recession Slams Harvard

The president and VP of Harvard have issued a warning to their deans. Expect tough times and major cuts.

Here is my peeve. I thought university endowments were meekly ambitious pools of money, meant to be recession proof. After all, schools depend on the returns for their daily expenses.

It turns out that university endowments were plundered and now squandered by fund managers looking to make enormous returns to justify their equally out of proportion salaries and bonuses.

This of course is irresponsible behavior, no two ways about it.

Now the academic community - students to professors - must suffer - and indeed the near term future looks particularly bleak for the campus elite.

From the end of the article in the Times:

In their letter, President Faust and Mr. Forst said that to have the cash necessary to meet demands and minimize risk, the school would issue “a substantial amount of new taxable fixed-rate debt.” Harvard also plans to convert a significant amount of short-term tax-exempt debt into bonds with longer maturities, so it can reduce its exposure to volatility and continue to finance operations and other priorities.

The school also indicated concern that just as Harvard was suffering the worst endowment returns in its history, it stood to be hit by declines in other revenue streams — presumably contributions and tuition, as families find themselves increasingly in need of financial aid.

Times: Minnesota Court Ruling Unleashes a Crisis for "Charities"

The Times does more than report the news. It collates events into trends and reports on cultural shifts - like this one.

When University presidents and administrators pocket gigantic salaries and live off of expense accounts, are they employees of non-profits? Non-profits with $billions in the bank? Non-profits that give no charity? Non-profits that plan to charge ridiculous amounts for football tickets?

Something is seriously wrong in this regard with the new Rutgers football ticket plan:

The bill will run more than $3,000 for one of 852 club seats, and more than $17,000 for one of 28 four-seat loge boxes. The seat itself is only $650 for the seven home games, but the big bucks go toward the annual, partially tax-deductible gift.

Big bucks! Tax deductible - so that more of the same can be built, bought and paid for? It's not just me saying that something is wrong - something stinks in the state of non-profits. It's now a whole lot of officials charged with regulating the public good who are blowing their loud whistles:

Exemptions for Charities Face New Challenges
By STEPHANIE STROM

RED WING, Minn. — Authorities from the local tax assessor to members of Congress are increasingly challenging the tax-exempt status of nonprofit institutions — ranging from small group homes to wealthy universities — questioning whether they deserve special treatment.

One issue is the growing confusion over what constitutes a charity at a time when nonprofit groups look more like businesses, charging fees and selling products and services to raise money, and state and local governments are under financial pressure because of lower tax revenues.

And there are others: Does a nonprofit hospital give enough charity care to earn a tax exemption? Is a wealthy university providing enough financial aid?

In a ruling last December that sent tremors through the not-for-profit world, the Minnesota Supreme Court said a small nonprofit day care agency here had to pay property taxes because, in essence, it gave nothing away.

The agency, the Under the Rainbow Child Care Center, charges the same price per child regardless of whether their parents are able to pay the full amount themselves or they receive government support to cover the cost.

“We were shocked,” said Michelle Finholdt, who founded the center in 1994 and scraped together the money to buy a building in 2002. “There are a lot of other organizations in our area that we’re similar to, and they are exempt from property taxes.”

The tax-exempt status of charities costs local governments $8 billion to $13 billion annually, according to various rough estimates.

And local assessors are not the only government officials scratching their heads over which groups deserve privileged tax status. Congress has threatened to impose a requirement that wealthy universities make minimum payouts from their endowments and raised questions about whether nonprofit hospitals are really all that different from their for-profit — and tax-paying — competitors.

And, concerned about the way some churches are spending money, the Senate Finance Committee has asked for detailed financial information from six evangelical ministries asking them to justify their tax exemptions.

Others are questioning whether some tax-exempt nonprofits, primarily universities and hospitals, have accumulated so much wealth that they should no longer be considered charities. In Massachusetts, where Harvard’s endowment has reached $35 billion in assets, legislators are weighing whether to impose a 2.5 percent annual assessment on universities with endowments of more than $1 billion. more...

Times: Science Concludes You and All of Your Friends Should Stop Smoking

It's so important to stop the massacre of 400,000 Americans each years that is caused by the cigarette corporations.

Now the Times says that quitting in clusters, social groups, is the most effective way.

So get together with two friends and quit today!

For Smokers, Quitting Is Tied to Social Circles
By GINA KOLATA

For years, smokers have been exhorted to take the initiative and quit: use a nicotine patch, chew nicotine gum, take a prescription medication that can help, call a help line, just say no. But a new study finds that stopping is seldom an individual decision.

Smokers tend to quit in groups, the study finds, which means smoking cessation programs should work best if they focus on groups rather than individuals. It also means that people may help many more than just themselves by quitting — quitting can have a ripple effect prompting an entire social network to break the habit.

The study, by Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, followed thousands of smokers and nonsmokers for 32 years, from 1971 until 2003, studying them as part of a large network of relatives, co-workers, neighbors, friends and friends of friends.

It was a time when the percentage of adult smokers in the United States fell to 21 percent from 45 percent. As the investigators watched the smokers and their social networks, they saw what they said was a striking effect — smokers had formed little social clusters and, as the years went by, entire clusters of smokers were stopping en masse. So were clusters of clusters that were only loosely connected.

Dr. Christakis described watching the vanishing clusters as like lying on your back in a field, looking up at stars that were burning out. “It’s not like one little star turning off at a time,” he said. “Whole constellations are blinking off at once.”

As cluster after cluster of smokers disappeared, those that remained were pushed to the margins of society, isolated, with fewer friends, fewer social connections. “Smokers used to be the center of the party,” Dr. Fowler said, “but now they’ve become wallflowers.”

“We’ve known smoking was bad for your physical health,” he said. “But this shows it also is bad for your social health.”

Smokers, he said, “are likely to drive friends away.” more>>>>

Scientists Searching for the Mechanisms of Wisdom

Just what is wisdom? An absolutely provocative inquiry in the Times Science Section.

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
By SARA REISTAD-LONG

When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.

Jacqui Smith, a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current research, said there was a word for what results when the mind is able to assimilate data and put it in its proper place — wisdom.

“These findings are all very consistent with the context we’re building for what wisdom is,” she said. “If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they’re going to have a nice advantage.

Washington Post: Women Who Quit Cigarettes Live Longer

My mom passed away 8 years ago - killed by cigarettes.

If you smoke, please quit and live.

Women Who Quit Smoking Lower Heart Risks Quickly
By Amanda Gardner, HealthDay Reporter

(HealthDay News) -- New research shows that women who quit smoking have a 21 percent lower risk of dying from coronary heart disease within five years of extinguishing their last cigarette.

The risks of dying from other conditions also decline after quitting, although the time frame varies depending on the disease.

"The harms of smoking are reversible and can decline to the level of nonsmokers," said study author Stacey Kenfield, whose report is in the May 7 issue of theJournal of the American Medical Association. "For some conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, it can take more than 20 years, but there is a rapid reduction for others."

"It's never too early to stop, and it's never too late to stop," added Kenfield, who is a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

Smoking is still the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. Not only does tobacco smoke cause lung cancer, it is also implicated in heart disease, other cancers and respiratory diseases.

According to the World Health Organization, an estimated 3 million people in industrialized countries will have died as a result of tobacco use by 2030, and an additional 7 million people in developing countries face the same fate.

This research is a continued follow-up on the Nurses' Health Study, a large trial involving more than 100,000 women. Scientists now have 22 years of data on the participants.

Current smokers had almost triple the risk of overall death compared with women who had never smoked.

Current smokers also had a 63 percent increased risk for colon cancer compared with never-smokers, while former smokers had a 23 percent increased risk. There was no significant association between smoking and ovarian cancer.

And women who started smoking earlier in life were at a higher risk for overall mortality, of dying from respiratory disease and from any smoking-related disease.

However, a smoker's overall risk of dying returned to the level of a never-smoker 20 years after quitting. The overall risk declined 13 percent within the first five years of abstaining.

Most of the excess risk of dying from coronary heart disease vanished within five years of quitting.

For chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the return to normal took almost 20 years, although there was an 18 percent reduction in the risk of death seen within five to 10 years after quitting.

And the risk for lung cancer didn't return to normal for 30 years after quitting, although there was a 21 percent reduction in risk within the first five years compared with women who continued to smoke.

Many previous studies on tobacco use had focused on men and on lung cancer, the authors stated. They also only looked at smoking status at the beginning of the study. "We got smoking information every two years, so we feel we have a more accurate estimate of current and past smoking," Kenfield said. "We saw increased risks for current smokers [than previous studies], and we think that's because we know who the current smokers are."

"This shows the power of quitting smoking," said Dr. Jay Brooks, chairman of hematology/oncology at Ochsner Health System in Baton Rouge, La. "We've known this for a number of years, but the beauty of this study is it is a very large and well-studied group of people. When I tell people to quit smoking, I say the effect of the heart precedes that of the lungs. If you've smoked, you need to be cognizant that you're still at an increased risk of lung cancer."

More information

Visit the American Lung Association for more on women and smoking.

SOURCES: Stacey A. Kenfield, Sc.D., postdoctoral research fellow, department of epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston; Jay Brooks, M.D., chairman, hematology/oncology, Ochsner Health System, Baton Rouge, La.; May 7, 2008,Journal of the American Medical Association