Some further thoughts about Harvard

 Last month I wrote on this blog that Harvard wasn't very much like the University of Pennsylvania.  Because, I oh-so-brilliantly said, Harvard has an endowment sufficiently successful to allow them to wait out political tides "with ... a shrug."  

I have one more thing to say about the subject.

Oops. 

[The fellow above is he for whom the institution is named -- John Harvard -- the son of a butcher in Surrey.] 

Harvard did not shrug at the attacks on Claudine Gay.  I still suspect they were in a financial position in which they could have. 

Harvard, alas, is not William James' Harvard.  In that era they were amassing the cultural capital that they have been expending for much of the time since. 

Actually, I have the following to say about the subject too. 

The president of MIT, Sally Kornbluth, needs to make the point, publicly and often, that for some of those who are making the “two down and one to go” noises, this whole thing is really just a marketing campaign for AI software. It has nothing to do with anti-semitism, except that a Congresswoman offered them their set of targets of convenience under that banner. 

Bill Ackman has made it clear what this is about from HIS PoV. “No body of written work in academia can survive the power of AI searching for missing quotation marks, failures to paraphrase appropriately, and/or the failure to properly credit the work of others,” so academic institutions and periodicals need to install AI that all papers prepared for publication can be run through to confirm there are no such problems in it.

Now the really crucial bit. Ackman said “The best approach, however, is probably to launch an AI startup to do this job," — to create and sell the plagiarism-blocker AI — and HIS OWN HEDGE FUND would “be interested in investing in one".

TLDR version: “I’m going to be owning part of a start-up that will be ready to sell you some neat new AI. If you don’t buy it, I will work to have you fired.”

Doesn’t sound especially principled. Sounds like a cross between a hard-sell sales pitch and extortion.

And yes, somebody also has probably written something like this post this already. I wouldn’t know because I won’t be buying Ackman’s software. Livemint has put most of the pieces together, working with Ackman’s own posts on X.