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| Harvard and Yale: joining against a common enemy? |
“You know the world is going crazy when Yale alums are making donations to Harvard!” —Ross Eaton ’03 on the Yale Alumni Facebook group on April 16, shortly after the federal government began freezing grants to Harvard.
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| (Photo: NASA/Zuma Press/WSJ) |
In half a lifetime, Jonny Kim has achieved the American dream three times over. He was a Navy SEAL. Then he graduated from Harvard Medical School. And on Tuesday, he blasted off as part of his latest act: astronaut.His childhood was marked by tragedy:
When novelist Wesley Chu first learned about Kim, a 41-year-old father of three who is also a Navy pilot, his first reaction was awe.
His second: “Thank God my mom is not friends with his mom.”
After word of his feats spread, Kim became a global source of inspiration. And yet, to many of the same people who glance at his résumé and can’t help but compare it to theirs, he has also conjured up a bit of another feeling.
Dismay.
This has been especially true in the Asian-American community, where Kim, the son of South Korean immigrants, has been simultaneously lauded as a hero—and feared, only half-jokingly, as “every Asian kid’s worst nightmare.”
The worry: No matter what they achieve, their high-demanding immigrant parents will say Jonny Kim already did that—only better. “We accomplished all this stuff, but really, it’s what he did that matters,” Chu said.
Kim became an internet meme among Asian Americans, who frequently take to social media to express gratitude that he’s not a relative. NASA’s social-media posts about Kim are flooded with comments expressing similar sentiments. “As a fellow Asian, I hope my parents do not get to read this. But, safe journey my man,” one wrote.
It all started with trauma during his childhood in Los Angeles. Kim said he witnessed his father, who he described as alcoholic and abusive, pull a gun on their family. Police shot his father dead in their attic.No matter how successful, we eventually meet someone who is better than we are in our field of endeavor. (My revelation occurred in college.) Jonny Kim has yet to meet that person.
His desire to physically protect his mother and brother led him to become a Navy SEAL. But an Ultimate Frisbee ankle injury delayed his plan to join the Navy as an operations specialist. When he recovered, a recruiter steered him toward becoming a medic.
In 2005, Kim joined SEAL Team Three, serving as a medic and sniper, among other roles. He earned a Silver Star and a Bronze Star for treating wounded comrades during two tours in Iraq, an experience that motivated him to attend medical school.
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| You don't need this home if Susie just wants to go to Cal (Street view/Merc) |
A home listed for sale at $4.8 million on Friday in Palo Alto boasts that since its 2017 rebuild, the children of every subsequent owner have gone on to Harvard or Stanford, “paving the way for even greater achievements.”That's a lot of pressure on the child. If he or she doesn't get into Stanford or Harvard (or an Ivy or MIT or CalTech), the parents will have overpaid substantially for a comparable house that they could have gotten for at least $1 million less in other Peninsula cities.
“Now, it is ready to pass on its extraordinary energy to the next family,” the listing reads.
The five-bedroom, four-bathroom home appears to have been staged to highlight the children’s academic success — the framed diplomas and acceptance letters are poised above the mantel, featuring prominently in some of the photos.
New York’s storied Ivy League club circuit dates back to the 19th century. For years, these membership organizations were considered among the most prestigious in the country.
These days, say alumni and former members, the clubs have fallen out of fashion. The venues are victims of dated decor, mediocre food and in some cases lingering dress codes—for most of their histories, these clubs have required men to wear coats and ties—out of step with young alums.
The Yale Club changed its admission process to accept members without an affiliation to the university. Most anyone can now apply to the club if she or he has the endorsement of at least two members, according to a club document.
...Still, the clubs have loosened their rules to some degree over the past several years. For decades, dress codes have been a fault line between older and younger alumni. In 1999, the Yale Club became the first of Manhattan’s Ivy clubs to allow casual dress on Friday in an attempt to attract younger members and creatives.
The Yale Club today allows jeans throughout the clubhouse, and the Harvard Club now permits “casual attire”—except in two of its main halls after 5 p.m.
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| The Harvard Club: inviting guests is a good way to let them know you went there. |
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| Francesco Gino |
The investigative committee that produced the nearly 1,300-page document included three Harvard Business School professors tapped by HBS dean Srikant Datar to examine accusations about Gino’s work.After this incident and the Claudine Gay fiasco, it would be nice if Harvard people became less insufferable, but don't hold your breath.
They concluded after a monthslong probe conducted in 2022 and 2023 that Gino “engaged in multiple instances of research misconduct” in the four papers they examined. They recommended that the university audit Gino’s other experimental work, request retractions of three of the papers (the fourth had already been retracted at the time they reviewed it), and place Gino on unpaid leave while taking steps to terminate her employment.
Twenty-four hours after Hamas attacked Israel, Mr. Ackman “saw students supporting terrorists—Harvard students, no less.” With astonishment that hardened into outrage, Mr. Ackman witnessed 34 student groups at his alma mater “come out to say that Israel is solely responsible for the most heinous acts we’ve seen in modern history.”After reviewing Claudine Gay's, as well as MIT President Sally Kornbluth's and Penn President Liz Magill's, testimony before Congress, Mr. Ackman came to believe that their tepid response to student groups' calls for genocide against Jews was attributable to the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) practices that have pervaded campuses nationwide. On January 2nd he tweeted: [bold added]
Harvard wasn’t the only American campus where students railed against Israel and at Jewish classmates. But Harvard was the place to which Mr. Ackman, an “absolutely loyal alum in all respects,” had given $50 million over the years. “I lecture at the university multiple times a year,” he says, adding that he’s on the dean’s advisory board. Observing the protests, and the Harvard administration’s refusal to curb them, he mounted a mutiny of donors, calling on them to help drive Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, from her job. He feared that her continued presence at the helm would lead angry donors to stop giving. “I am personally aware of more than a billion dollars of terminated donations from a small group of Harvard’s most generous Jewish and non-Jewish alumni,” he wrote on Dec. 10.
Ms. Gay’s resignation on Jan. 2 was a result of her maladministration as well as of convincing accusations of plagiarism in her academic writings.
Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology which is the philosophical underpinning of DEI as advanced by Ibram X. Kendi and others, one is either an anti-racist or a racist. There is no such thing as being “not racist.”Claudine Gay's resignation on January 2nd was only the first battle in what may well turn out to be a long cultural war between wokeness and traditional values. Claudine Gay not only was criticized for her actions as Harvard President but for alleged instances of plagiarism on her scholarly work.
Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy, (and even climate change due its disparate impact on geographies and the people that live there), etc. that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist.
As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.
In order to be deemed anti-racist, one must personally take action to reverse any unequal outcomes in society. The DEI movement, which has permeated many universities, corporations, and state, local and federal governments, is designed to be the anti-racist engine to transform society from its currently structurally racist state to an anti-racist one.
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| Neri Oxman (WSJ photo) |
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| Henry Kissinger dated glamorous celebrities like Jill St. John (NY Post) |
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| Pre-1995 California's explicit consideration of race would have admitted a non-white, poor applicant but rejected a white non-poor applicant of similar achievements. (WSJ video) |
The Supreme Court found it unconstitutional to consider race in university admissions, eliminating the principal tool the nation’s most selective schools have used to diversify their campuses.A few personal comments:
Thursday’s 6-3 decision will force a reworking of admissions criteria throughout American higher education, where for decades the pursuit of diversity has been an article of faith.
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| Karen King holds the papyrus in question (Boston Globe/WSJ photo) |
"“Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . .’ ”According to journalist and book reviewer Alex Beam in the WSJ
A married Jesus would turn the Catholic Church on its head. The papyrus hinted at a wife named Mary, presumed to be Mary Magdalene, painted as a prostitute by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century. The New Testament, however, never mentions a marriage, other than in references to the Church or holy Jerusalem as Christ’s spiritual bride. Christ’s purported bachelorhood undergirds the Catholic doctrine of priestly celibacy. If the papyrus accurately described a wife of Christ, “this means that the whole Catholic claim of a celibate priesthood based on Jesus’s celibacy has no historical foundation,” noted Ms. King, a feminist scholar and expert on the apocryphal, second-century Gospel of Mary.
“[Ms. King’s] ideological commitments were choreographing her practice of history,” Mr. Sabar writes. “The story came first; the dates managed after. The narrative before the evidence; the news conference before the scientific analysis.”Ideological objectives have subverted premier education and news institutions that once held the search for truth (veritas) to be their highest calling.
No single activity is essential to the college experience, as the coronavirus has proved. One need not reside in a dorm, or participate in-person in an advanced seminar, or play poker all night, or eat in the dining hall, or join a fraternity, or study in one of many campus libraries, or do the laundry needing a roll of quarters, or cheer for Old Blue together with thousands of students and alumni, but eventually it stops being "college".everyone is bracing for the prospect that the Ivy League is going to take a pass on football this fall.
Calvin Hill (Yale '69) was in multiple
Pro Bowls a half century ago.
Officials from the Ivy League will announce on Wednesday the status of athletics for the 2020-21 academic year. The best-case scenario is that fall sports will shift their competitions to the spring of 2021. At worst, fall sports will be called off with no chance for seniors to recoup their lost year of eligibility...
Unlike teams in the top tier of the Football Bowl Subdivision, the Ivy League does not bring in millions from ticket sales or nine-figure television deals. There’s less revenue at stake if games don’t happen. Other small conferences have the same situation...
all face the specter of elevated costs that accompany testing athletes frequently. Broad public health guidelines from the NCAA suggest that athletes should be tested at least once per week. Frequent testing is potentially a $100,000 addition to a budget.
The 49ers' use of their fullback would seem inexplicable to football traditionalists. He very rarely carries the ball. Yet he is in on many of the offensive plays. His value lies in his versatility.By any modern standard, Kyle Juszczyk shouldn’t be playing in the NFL. He went to Harvard, a school that was important in football about a century ago. And he plays fullback, a position that was important when teams ran the wishbone toward goal posts that were planted at the front of the end zone.
Kyle and Kristin Juszczyk
But there’s one team that feels differently. A few years ago, the San Francisco 49ers didn’t just sign Juszczyk. They made him the highest-paid player in the entire league relative to other players at the same position. Juszczyk makes more money than the second- and third-highest paid fullbacks combined and carried the ball a grand total of three times this year.
Although technically a fullback, he played tight end and H-back in college, giving the 49ers the flexibility to motion him out and place him in any number of roles. It allows San Francisco to completely change the way the offense might look without changing the actual players on the field, a tactic that can prevent the defense from substituting and frustrate defenders schematically.Kyle Juszczyk sounds like the Draymond Green of the 49ers: very good at seeing the whole field, can play a variety of positions, talented but not blessed with superstar physical abilities, and most importantly understands his coach's complicated schemes and recognizes on any given play where and in what role he's needed the most. On another team he wouldn't be as valuable, but like the Warriors with Draymond, he is integral to their scheme and is paid much more than another team would pay him.
In the fiscal year that ended June 30, Yale University earned a return of 20.2% on its endowment, easily topping the 15.4% gain reported by Harvard University. Yale’s performance was the best among the eight Ivy League schools, while Harvard’s was the worst.Ultimately, however, size matters: Harvard's endowment ($36.4 billion) is still much bigger than Yale's ($23.9 billion), and the absolute rankings are unlikely to change for the foreseeable future. [Note: if both Yale and Harvard were to duplicate their respective performances in the current year--and without considering contributions, withdrawals, and expenses--Yale and Harvard's portfolio would increase by $4.8 billion and $5.6 billion, respectively. The much larger base that Harvard starts from ensures that the richest stays that way.]
The rout was the fourth victory in a row over Harvard for David Swensen, who manages Yale’s $23.9 billion endowment, and his eighth in the past decade.
By all accounts, including his own, Fisher didn’t make much of an impression on the people of Texas. Hutchison was reelected in a twenty-point landslideDick Fisher has surprises sprinkled throughout his resume. His father struggled to make ends meet, moving the family to China, California, Mexico and Florida during Richard's childhood. As a child, Richard spoke Spanish better than he did English. He worked summers at a greasy spoon, got a scholarship to prep school, and ended up in the Ivy League.
