The honor code discussion continues

The Honor code was discussed at the FAS faculty meeting yesterday. Dean Jay Harris presented it, and Melissa Franklin, Arthur Kleinman, and I commented briefly. Harvard Magazine has a fuller account than the Crimson. Professor Franklin asked the obvious question, given all the talk about this honor code being a way to bring students into partnership with the faculty rather than having the faculty act as their superiors. Why not expect the faculty to sign the honor code too?

But the discussion was thin because the materials to discuss were thin. The honor board was off the table for now. Even the report laying out the case for an honor code was off the table. A draft had been available last year via authenticated login, but was never made public. As I recall it was discussed at one poorly attended "town meeting,"not even a regular faculty meeting. I am not even sure it was generally available to students, whose support for an honor code was cited in the faculty meeting. I conclude I was, for some reason, not supposed to refresh my memory about what it said. (I found it eventually on the web site of the Secretary of the Faculty; the draft report is dated March 26, 2013, but it's confidential. Here it is, for those authorized to see it.)

Even what is likely to be the most sensitive question, whether students will be required to write out the mandated pledge on every piece of academic work they submit, was supposed to be off the table for discussion. Professor Kleinman sensibly noted that the form of the pledge was his biggest worry. It risked turning moral matter into a legal matter. Dean Harris seemed to agree, but immediately said that it was, after all, a legal matter; we couldn't escape that. Actually, I am not sure that followed. The rules about cheating are already in place; it seems to me that, unless existing rules about cheating are rescinded, the only new thing the mandatory pledge would add legally is a new rule that refusing to take the pledge would be unlawful. This point was muddy enough that I felt I should get absolute clarity. When Dean Harris said that students would be "asked to" sign the pledge or "expected to" sign the pledge, did he mean they would be required to sign the pledge? he answered in the affirmative.

So the lack of discussion was not surprising; we had little in the way of an argument to think about before the meeting (though those of us who had been at the Town Meeting had a bit more, to the extent we could remember the arguments in the report without a text to refer to). I continue to be troubled by the whole proposal for theoretical, practical, and what I am going to call humane reasons.

On the theory, I am with Morison, the historian of Harvard who described Harvard's aversion to pledges: "Our founders knew from their English experience that oaths are powerless to bind conscience. … Accordingly this academic vessel was provided with the barest possible code of statutes, and her master and crew, unhampered by oaths and religious tests, were left to exercise their best judgment, as God gave it to them." (History of Harvard College, pp. 339-341.) 

Interestingly, this is a disputed point. Not what the Founders may have thought, but whether they were right in thinking that oaths are powerless to bind conscience. To support the view that oaths are not powerless, a psychology professor cited a study concluding that people who were asked whether they were going to vote and said yes were more likely to vote than people who were not asked. I am not a professional psychologist, but it seems a stretch to use that as an argument for forcing people to take an oath. In any case, I find it repellent to turn this matter of academic integrity into an exercise in applied psychology. Perhaps we should just bring in folks from the advertising industry, who are so skilled at getting us to do things we might not otherwise do, to help us brainwash the student body. Surely, when we talk about academic integrity, we should honor the principle that each of us is in command of our free will. The really dishonorable thing would be to suggest that some random exogenous circumstance, the noise in the room or our failure to say our daily incantation, was a reason for our moral failure.

As a practical matter, I still don't know what problem we are trying to solve or why this change should be expected to change it. I try always to remember that the first step in solving a problem is to know what problem you are solving. We got no data, except for a number or statements to the effect that the research shows that schools with honor codes have less cheating than those that don't. But we got nothing in the way of data about our own cheating, whether it is really on the rise, who does it, whether certain courses are problematic, etc. We got nothing about whether the Ad Board is a problem, either because it is making bad decisions, or taking too much time or money in making them, etc. At a minimum, we ought to have some criteria for success or failure before we change things, unless we don't care about success or failure.

Which takes me to the humanity of it all. It is not so hard to apply rules about plagiarism and other forms of cheating unflinchingly, and to mete out formulaic penalties. The only time it gets tricky is if the judgments being made are considered educational, because then you have to look into the soul of the miscreants and make subjective judgments about what response will prove, later in their lives, to have been most constructive. That requires maturity, maturity which in my experience even new deans do not have until they had been around the block for a year or two.

I have a lot of respect for students and how much smarter they are in many ways than the faculty are. I plan all my courses in collaboration with my undergraduate course assistants; they are much better than I am at anticipating how the incentives and rewards will work in the minds of students. But they are not mature enough to be making subjective, educational decisions about the souls of their classmates. The fact (if it is true) that students want an honor board is about as relevant as was the fact that students wanted, twenty years ago, to pick which House they would live in. It doesn't matter what a plebiscite would yield if it is an educationally inferior outcome.

If, on the other hand, we are giving up on the educational role of the disciplinary process, and turning it into a simple matter of crime and punishment, then the honor board may make sense. But I should not be blogging about the honor board yet, since it was explicitly divided from the discussion of the honor code, but of course these are connected. We can't discuss either without discussing both and without saying more about why we are going to do what is proposed.

[Corrected 2/9/14: "honor court" -> "honor code" in penultimate sentence.] 

I wonder if this was intentional

The designers of the metal slatted seating recently installed on the overpass in front of the Science Center could not possibly have realized that it would do this when the precipitation and temperature conditions were just right. Could they?

Why Are There So Many Course Lotteries?

I signed a lot of study cards last week, not just because I am Director of Undergraduate Studies and have picked up a lot of advisees this term from faculty on leave, but because it seemed like every other student who came in had two or three study cards for me to sign. They listed various combinations of courses, and while a few students just didn't want to decide until the last possible moment, most of them were waiting for the results of course lotteries – the process by which limited enrollment courses are whittled down to size when too many students want to take them.

Limited enrollment courses have been around forever. Seminars obviously have to be capped, because they wouldn't be seminars otherwise. I once decided to lift the cap on my freshman seminar from 12 to 15, because about 60 students wanted to get in. It was a big mistake. Talking in a group of 13 is different from talking in a group of 16.

Courses with unusual equipment or classroom demands sometimes have to be capped. Again, film courses have long been capped, because cameras and whatnot are costly.

As we move away from lecturing to flat-floor classroom teaching, the shortage of appropriate teaching spaces creates capacity problems. These are exaggerated, in the case of Computer Science, by huge enrollment swings in our direction. Our teaching facilities were not designed for the numbers of concentrators we have, and it is awfully costly to renovate space even if the space exists, which it doesn't. I know this is a problem in the lab sciences as well. It is a fair question whether the earnest efforts we have gone to in order to increase enrollments were matched by earnest planning about what would happen if we succeeded.

In some fields, enrollment caps are a response to a shortage of TFs. CS has this problem for graduate courses (yes, some graduate coursed draw multiple dozens of students). Most undergraduate courses use many talented undergraduate course assistants, a resource which happily grows and shrinks in almost direct proportion to the enrollments in the courses. In humanistic fields that doesn't work, and even a small reduction in the number of PhD students makes the TF shortage even more acute.

All that said, I can't ever remember a year when I had such a strong impression that lotteries are now accepted as a part of ordinary undergraduate life at Harvard. The difference is that a lot of the courses being lotteried are big courses, not small ones. They are General Education courses, not boutique courses on specialties that have suddenly become trendy.

The Crimson reports on this a bit today, listing some of the lotteried courses, and also noting, importantly, that not all "lotteries" are run the way the Numbers Game is run. What is politely termed a lottery is actually a second admissions process, as though, having gotten through the eye of the Admissions Committee's needle and made your way to Harvard, you should have to prove to a professor that you are worthy of enrolling in his or her Gen Ed course.

This seems crazy, and wrong. We got rid of limited-enrollment concentrations some years ago, on the theory that anybody should be able to get an education in any concentration [major] at Harvard, if they were willing to work at it. And now we have filters on Gen Ed courses instead? This is what Harvard students should expect for their $60,000 per year? Sounds more like Berkeley.

I wish I understood how this happened. In the old days, Bill Bossert used to repeat his lectures in Nat Sci 110, a classic Gen Ed course on computer science, because there was no lecture hall big enough to hold the whole class. That was extreme, but I wonder if there has not been an erosion of an old feeling that teaching was a mission, not just a job, and if a lot of students wanted to learn from you, it was an honor rather than a nuisance. One hears that some courses are limited just because … the professor doesn't like teaching big courses. That seems wrong.

It seems to me a pretty simple expedient would solve most problems of over enrollment in large courses. Teach them at 9am! That would dis-enroll the gut-seekers and schedule-fitters, and would leave the professor with only the most committed students to teach. I really don't know why my colleagues don't try this -- in fact why not make it a rule? Any course lotteried one year has to be offered at 9am the following year. Bingo. Many fewer lotteries.

Honor Code Snippets from Cambridge to Colorado

 “I attest to the honesty of my academic work and affirm that it conforms to the standards of the Harvard College Honor Code.” -- Draft Harvard College honor code, as reported by the Harvard Crimson, January 30, 2014. "Jake N. Matthews ’16 later suggested that faculty members, like students, should be required to sign a statement indicating their commitment to the honor code."

“We really want everyone to be honest,” said Sietse K. Goffard ’15, a member of the Academic Integrity Committee and the Undergraduate Council vice president. “That’s the whole point...of an ‘honor code,’ for everyone to be very open and candid about what they think.” -- Harvard Crimson, January 28, 2014

"As part of his professional work, [psychologist Fred Malmstrom] has surveyed almost 50 years of [Air Force Academy] graduates, asking them, among other things, how often they had broken the academy honor code vow not to 'lie, steal, or cheat, nor tolerate among us anyone who does.' The results of his surveys show a steady increase in proportion of cadets admitting to violating the code, from 28 percent in 1962 to 65 percent in 2010." -- Colorado Springs Gazette, January 10, 2014. 

"The worst cheating scandal in nearly 20 years at the Air Force Academy has prompted the Air Force to suspend the cadet-run system of discipline for honor code violations pending a thorough review of the academy's strict honor system. 

"The re-examination of the academy's honor code, in which cadets pledge neither to lie, cheat nor steal nor to tolerate those who do, stemmed from evidence of large-scale cheating on a senior-class physics test last spring. In June, 19 seniors were suspended for a year and the cadet-run Honor Boards, which investigate possible violations of the code, were suspended." -- New York Times,  September 15, 1984.

92 Air Force Officers Suspended for Cheating on their Missile Exam -- New York Times, January 31, 2014.

Should be an enlightening discussion on Tuesday.

Weird Investment Story of the Week

As sometime SAC Capital veteran Noah Freeman lectured Harvard back when he was an undergraduate, a fundamental problem with international business is that it places profit before ethics. Mr. Freeman is awaiting sentencing on insider trading charges. But this story is not about him.

Word began to reach my ears last week about Harvard's forestry investment in Romania. Forests sound like a good, clean business; renewable, green, and all that jazz. But it turns out that if you want to buy low and sell high, you may wind up buying opportunistically. And all opportunities are not what they seem. Bloomberg reports,

An investment agent who represented Harvard University faces charges in Romania that he took more than $1 million in bribes to induce the school to buy forest land at inflated prices. 

Dragos Lipan Secu arranged with unnamed sellers to artificially boost prices that Scolopax, a Harvard-owned company, paid for timberland between 2007 and 2009, anti-corruption prosecutors said in a statement Jan. 21, the day after Lipan Secu was arrested. 

Lipan Secu collected bribes valued at 4.45 million lei ($1.3 million), as well as a 2007 trip to the Canary Islands and a Chrysler Sebring car, prosecutors said. He was also charged with money laundering, and his wife, Mariana, was arrested for complicity. The two are being held in preventive custody in Bihor county and are facing more than 10 years in jail.

Harvard is at two removes from the scandal (a consultant or contractor bought for a company Harvard owns), but, of course, Harvard is in the headline: Harvard Overpaid for Timber as Romanian Agent Held for Bribery. Dealbreaker is not satisfied with that, and rephrases some of the salacious details in its lede: Harvard Investment Agent Didn’t Want To Overstep His Bounds Re: Asking For A Slightly Flashier Bribe Than US News & World Report’s #19 On 2010 Affordable Midsize Cars List. The Bloomberg story points off to the Romanian press. Somehow Dealbreaker reconstructs, I imagine with a degree of literary license, the conversation between Mr. Secu and the folks who were bribing him.

“If I’m gonna do this for you I want a Cadillac. With the seat warmers.” 

“You’ll get a Chrysler Sebring and you’ll like it.” 

“Bull shit! Bull shit!”

If you read Romanian, I'd love to know how much detail is there in the news accounts or court documents.

In other business news,  the dean of the Harvard Business School issued a curious apology for HBS's past treatment of women. The problem with this sort of thing is that there would be no end of apologies for what are recognized in retrospect as past institutional sins. I guess I should seek an apology from the University of Michigan Medical School because someone there, having given my mother the opportunity to be one of the few women in the class, told her that she couldn't be a neurologist and had to settle for being a psychiatrist.

Seems to me Nohria might have done better to announce the changes he was making without trumpeting the apology so much. The changes are doubtless all to the good for today's students, both men and women -- why create the impression that you are doing them largely to make up for something your predecessors did wrong years ago? Anyway, if HBS starts paying reparations for its past mistreatment of women, I hope someone will let me know. Both my daughters went there.

Added January 31, 2014: The Crimson has a story about the Romanian timber investment. It links off to other reporting.

Another Triumph for a Crimson Alum

An alumna of The Harvard Crimson,  that is. "Former Gov. McDonnell and wife charged in gifts case," reads the headline in the Washington Post. The lead writer is Rosalind Helderman, who has been the bulldog pursuing this story for most of a year. The first story in the series, "Va. Gov. McDonnell on two-way street with chief executive of struggling company," is dated March 30, 2013. The Post has carried dozens of Helderman articles about McDonnell, and more about VA Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who had his own ethics issues. It's good old-fashioned investigative reporting, the kind a democracy needs to keep its politicians honest. It's slow, detailed, grinding work of a kind that it's hard to see being done by any form of journalism but newspapers.

Helderman should get a Pulitzer for this series.

Roz was class of 2001 at Harvard and was a Crimson editor. Among the beats on which she cut her teeth was … me. It was fun looking back at our early exchanges. The first story she did for which I was interviewed was on the potentially explosive subject of Harvard's compliance with Title IX in its athletic programs. She emailed me thirteen questions and wanted answers … that night. I did my best, from home and without a copy in hand of the self-study that precipitated the story. I dodged her last question, though: "What is the history of women's sports at Harvard?"

The next story was about the role of Radcliffe. In the no-harm-in-asking vein, Roz asked, "What is your general feeling about what students feel about Radcliffe?" I was too smart to bite on that one. "No useful purpose would be served by turning your story into one about what Dean Lewis *thinks* students think," I responded. That began a series of exchanges about Radcliffe College, from which I tended to learn more than she did. They culminated in Roz breaking the story that Radcliffe would merge into Harvard (April 20, 1999). She beat the official announcement by only a few hours, but she did get the story first.

A resourceful, fair, hardworking, careful journalist from the very beginning. The country needs more of them.

Some Russian Money Flows Back to Harvard

Remember the Harvard-in-Russia scandal? In case you missed it, here is how it went, as I summarized the story in the Huffington Post:

In 1992, Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard professor and a close friend of Summers since Shleifer's college days at Harvard, became head of a Harvard project that directed U.S. government money for the development of the Russian economy. Tens of millions of dollars in noncompetitive U.S. contracts flowed to Harvard for Shleifer's Russian work, and his team directed the distribution of hundreds of millions more. Through the mid-1990s, complaints accumulated in Washington about self-dealing and improper investing by the Harvard team, and by mid-1997, the Harvard contracts had been canceled and the FBI had taken up the case. For two years it was before a federal grand jury. 

In September, 2000, the government sued Harvard, Shleifer, and others, claiming that Shleifer was lining his own pockets and those of his wife, hedge fund manager Nancy Zimmerman--formerly a vice president at Goldman Sachs under Rubin 

Soon after, when Summers became a candidate for the Harvard presidency, Shleifer lobbied hard for him in Cambridge. Rubin assured the Fellows that the abrasiveness Summers had exhibited at Treasury was a thing of the past. They named him president--in spite of what was already known about his enabling role in the malodorous Russian affair, and the implausibility of a personality metamorphosis. 

Summers did not recuse himself from the lawsuit until more than three months after his selection as president, and even then used his influence to protect Shleifer. The Fellows--including Rubin, whom Summers added to the Corporation--fought the case for years, spending upwards of $10M on lawyers. But in 2005 a federal judge found Shleifer to have conspired to defraud the government and held Harvard liable as well. To settle the civil claims, Shleifer paid the government $2M and Harvard paid $26.5M; Zimmerman's company had already paid $1.5M. Shleifer denied all wrongdoing, and Harvard disclosed nothing about any response of its own--a departure from its handling of misconduct by faculty farther from the center of power. 

Summers remained close to Shleifer, yet claimed in a February 2006 faculty meeting to know too little about the scandal to have formed an opinion about it. This prevarication brought a gasp from the assembled faculty and solidified faculty opposition to the Summers presidency.

The definitive tick-tock on this unhappy mess is David McClintick's "How Harvard Lost Russia," which appeared in Institutional Investor. The narrative is full of minor characters, including one Leonard Blavatnik, also a Russian emigre with American citizenship. Here is what McClintick had to say about Blavatnik:

In 1994, Shleifer and Zimmerman, with the help and advice of Leonard Blavatnik, a New York-based Russian emigrant and a member of the Forbes 400, placed $200,000 in a Blavatnik vehicle called Renova-Invest, which invested in a group of Russian corporations that were being privatized under Shleifer's guidance. The companies included telephone operator Rostelecom; oil and natural-gas behemoth Gazprom; aluminum smelters in the cities of Irkutsk, Sayansk and Bratsk; Vladimir Tractor; and oil producer Chernogorneft. The U.S. government alleged in its complaint against Harvard, Shleifer and Hay that these companies benefited financially not only from Shleifer's advice on privatization but also from AID-funded assistance, including free legal services. When Blavatnik was merging several aluminum companies in which Shleifer and Zimmerman had invested, Hay and other AID-funded lawyers worked on the merger documents at no cost to Blavatnik or the companies. According to a U.S. statement of "undisputed material facts" submitted with the lawsuit, Hay was aware of some of the private investments of Shleifer and his wife, which were violations of the bars against private investment in Russia. 

…

In 1994, Shleifer and Zimmerman, with the help and advice of Leonard Blavatnik, a New York-based Russian emigrant and a member of the Forbes 400, placed $200,000 in a Blavatnik vehicle called Renova-Invest, which invested in a group of Russian corporations that were being privatized under Shleifer's guidance. The companies included telephone operator Rostelecom; oil and natural-gas behemoth Gazprom; aluminum smelters in the cities of Irkutsk, Sayansk and Bratsk; Vladimir Tractor; and oil producer Chernogorneft. The U.S. government alleged in its complaint against Harvard, Shleifer and Hay that these companies benefited financially not only from Shleifer's advice on privatization but also from AID-funded assistance, including free legal services. When Blavatnik was merging several aluminum companies in which Shleifer and Zimmerman had invested, Hay and other AID-funded lawyers worked on the merger documents at no cost to Blavatnik or the companies. According to a U.S. statement of "undisputed material facts" submitted with the lawsuit, Hay was aware of some of the private investments of Shleifer and his wife, which were violations of the bars against private investment in Russia. 

Shleifer is still a Harvard economics professor. I did not think this story was likely to come around again, until I read a piece by Connie Bruck in the January 20 New Yorker called "The Billionaire's Playlist." The billionaire in question is Blavatnik, and the story is about his purchase of Warner Music, and how he got to be so rich (reportedly he is worth $18 billion). In addition to summarizing the same information I quote from McClintick above, Bruck adds some more color. Blavatnik played games with some paperwork -- changing an investment from Shleifer's name to Zimmerman's in an apparent attempt to avoid those pesky conflict of interest rules after the fact -- and then relied on Zimmerman when he needed to raise some big money:

[Blavatnik] had turned his access to Americans into funding for his Russian ventures. In 1997 and 1998, Zimmerman's fund had made bridge loans that helped Blavatnik and his partners invest in Russian companies. According to Chernys's testimony, those loans amounted to at least forty-three million dollars.

Bruck quotes "an expression that is popular among Russian businessmen: 'Never ask about the first million.'" She also quotes American entrepreneur Sam Zell about why it was so difficult to compete against Blavatnik in those days. "Start with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and go from there."

Blavatnik has recently become a major philanthropist. His $117 million dollar gift to Oxford University resulted in the naming of the School of Government after him. He gave Harvard, from which he earned an MBA, $50 million to fund a life science entrepreneurship accelerator. He is part of the host committee welcoming president Faust to London today.

I suppose we could look at it this way: Blavatnik has used the wealth he began to accumulate with his sketchy business dealings with Shleifer to repay the $26.5 million fine Harvard paid, with $23.5 million in interest.

It's a small world. Another Russian who plays a prominent role in Bruck's tale is Viktor Vekselberg, Blavatnik's business partner and the man whose foundation paid for casting a new set of Russian bells so the originals could be returned from Lowell House to their original home in the Danilov Monastery in Russia (a story told several years ago in the New Yorker).

It's more than a little discomfiting. But so is a great deal of fundraising; the tradition of people who have become wealthy in less than honorable ways elevating their reputation through their charitable donations has worked to the benefit of many a church, university, and city over the past couple of millennia. (There are plenty of Harvard case studies -- Buddy Fletcher, for example. For that matter, Gordon McKay, the donor of my chair, was no angel.) I believe that universities are the kidneys of  the nation -- they purify their tainted nutrients.

As long as they don't get corrupted themselves, of course. As long as they don't give the tiller to people unfit to steer the ship. As long as they don't have to lie about their donors' character in exchange for the largesse -- and that is a tricky one, since attaching a donor's name to a school or a fund is a way of honoring them for who they are, not just for what they have given. As long as the money donated is merely malodorous, and not known to be the fruits of criminal activity.

I hope the Blavanik money meets that low standard. Because students are watching, and they learn from everything we do. What is the lesson here? And because the world is watching, and as I blogged last week, it is already skeptical about our motives.

And we should not forget that there is another way. Donors exist who are selfless and give not to enhance their social standing or to make up for past sins. Some people -- Larry Lebowitz, for example -- give in honor of others, and let their identity be known only in the hope that they will inspire others to do likewise. Their own names appear nowhere, and they are satisfied to have helped unknown beneficiaries in the distant future. I wish there were more of that humble spirit in this world, and more ways of showing our appreciation for it.

(penultimate para revised 9:30am 1/20/14)