Category: Harvard

Larry Summers: association with Jeffrey Epstein was a serious, but not urgent, problem

by philg

Larry Summers, veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations, was also a bigshot at Harvard University. I wrote about the first time he got axed from a Harvard job in “Women in Science” (2006):

[Summers] claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren’t more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.

Summers is in the news again… “Summers To Resign From Teaching Appointments, Relinquish University Professorship Over Epstein Ties” (Harvard Crimson):

Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year….

Association with Jeffrey Epstein was sufficiently serious that Summers must resign, but not so urgent that the resignation can’t wait until June.

Only loosely related, since nobody cares… what exactly did Summers do with the arch criminal Epstein? ChatGPT:

newly released emails from the Jeffrey Epstein estate show that Larry Summers privately consulted Jeffrey Epstein about his pursuit of a romantic relationship with a younger woman he described in the emails as his “mentee.” In one exchange from late 2018 and early 2019, Epstein even referred to himself as Summers’s “wing man” while offering advice on how to communicate with this woman.

According to news reports about the email release, the woman in question was Keyu Jin, a well-known economist who at the time was a tenured professor at the London School of Economics and a Harvard graduate. She was in her early 40s (around 43) during the period these email exchanges took place.

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When Harvard graduates try to use numbers (Dan Koh, Massachusetts candidate for Congress)

by philg

Consider Dan Koh, a candidate for U.S. Congress in Maskachusetts, the Smart State (TM). Wokipedia says that he/she/ze/they is a Harvard graduate, has a Harvard MBA, and was a senior official in the Cognitive Excellence Administration:

In 2021, Koh was named Chief of Staff to the United States Secretary of Labor, Marty Walsh. Later, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Cabinet Secretary at the White House. He concluded his service as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs

Here’s his/her/zir/their own tweet where he/she/ze/they attempts to do some budget arithmetic:

The first number in the tweet, “$30 billion for 10k more ICE agents”, caught my eye because it is only about one day of spending for our government (federal+state+local). The $30 billion figure turns out to be inaccurate/misleading as well. Brennan Center:

The budget also gives approximately $30 billion over four years to ICE to track down, arrest, and deport immigrants, allowing it to hire 10,000 new officers.

So it’s $7.5 billion per year, not $30 billion per year, and it covers all ICE agents, not just 10,000 new ones.

How far is $7.5 billion from covering the three items that this Harvard graduate imagines it will cover? ChatGPT to the rescue!

Prompt: On a nationwide basis, how much would it cost to – Cover all ACA subsidies for a year – End all Rx copays – Eliminate all medical debt. ?

Answer:

The Harvard MBA is off by a factor of about 30X, according to ChatGPT. The ICE funding, even if it were $30 billion per year, wouldn’t begin to cover just the first item on Koh’s list (ACA subsidies).

What’s interesting to me: (1) that this level of innumeracy isn’t a liability in American politics, and (2) that someone suffering from innumeracy to this degree wouldn’t check tweets with ChatGPT before posting. Let’s keep in mind that this person is a rising star among Democrats and is purportedly qualified to run a company (the Harvard MBA) where misunderestimating costs by 30X could lead to serious financial distress.

In case the above tweet is memory-holed:

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Getting a 20-year head start on ridiculing Larry Summers

by philg

Larry Summers is in the news lately for his association with Emmanuel Goldstein: “Larry Summers steps back from public commitments, ‘deeply ashamed’ by Epstein revelations” (Politico).

Was there anyone ridiculing him 20 years ago? Yes! See “Women in Science” from this very server:

Summers was deservedly castigated [fired from Harvard for musings regarding why there weren’t more mathematicians and physicists identifying as “women”] , but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren’t more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States. This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.

Is “early ridiculer” credit a thing?

Separately, remember that Larry Summers and Claudine Gay have nothing left of their careers other than lifetime jobs and monthly paychecks that will keep flowing regardless of how senile and incompetent they become.

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The death of two Harvard undergraduates, William Cowper Boyden III and William Stanley North III

by philg

It’s the Day of the Dead for our neighbors in Mexico.

While cleaning up my mother’s possessions, I found a correspondence between my late father, apparently a friend of William Cowper Boyden III, and the young Mr. Boyden’s father. I couldn’t find much on the Web regarding the sad December 22, 1955 death of two young Harvard men, but the Crimson obliquely referred to them having been killed in a car accident:

The William Cowper Boyden III Scholarship and the William Stanley North III Scholarship, set up in memory of two College students killed while driving home for Christmas vacation, has a combined endowment of over $25,000.

I found the letters interesting because it seemed unlikely that a younger-than-average Jewish scholarship student like my dad (he skipped at least the last year of high school) would have been friends with anyone from such a well-established family, but also for the style of pre-email pre-ChatGPT correspondence. It’s also sad because so little trace is left of these two men.

19560110-bill-boyden-deathDownload
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Harvard Square: Queer Stoners for Palestine

by philg

A few photos from Harvard Square, August 2025…

Queers (“Lesbian Summer Camp”) and and “All Are Welcome” Rainbow Flag church:

A Harvard students-only dating app advertisement shows a happy couple that matched via the app:

Stoners (a healing recreational cannabis dispensary in the middle of Harvard Square):

For Palestine, a $7 million house whose fence is covered in “Genocide in Gaza” signage:

(Online property records indicate that the house is owned by two people who both have typically male first names.)

Speaking of “Free Palestine”, the riverside bike path in front of Harvard Business School:

The local high schoolers still walk past a homeless encampment and under a sacred Black Lives Matter banner to enter their temple of learning:

(Despite a death sentence, renowned graduate Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev remains alive and well and living comfortably at taxpayer expense, just as he did before bombing the Boston Marathon in 2013.)

Lots of people wear masks, indoors and out. The Staples that closed during coronapanic remains closed and the “social distancing” signs in its mini-mall are still there:

Remember that Long COVID “patients “survivors” are the real heroes:

I stopped into Harvard Bookstore to find an all-white/Asian staff and customer gathering. That’s not to say that Black Lives weren’t richly represented on the shelves, though:

What should one celebrate in a bookstore catering to an exclusively non-Black customer base? Black bookstores:

These photos were taken before Charlie Kirk got shot, but the Bookstore reminds us that if progressives don’t shoot and kill more Republicans, the still-living MAGA folks will “end democracy”:

Also, the “far right” control our elections, there is no need to follow orders from the Supreme Court (they hand out injustice, rather than justice), and the democracy that is about to be ended (or that has been ended?) was poisoned by racism:

Throughout all of this, remember that only a fool would believe that humans are divided into male and female:

When it is time to assign blame, though, it is easy to determine which humans can be classified as “men” (those who have imposed a patriarchy):

Back in Harvard Yard, the university advertises its now-free art museum (more than $50 billion accumulated so far at the “non-profit”) and shows a typical patron:

(I’ve never seen a Black visitor in this art museum.)

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New York Times and Claudine Gay

by philg

Check out the caption at the bottom of the photo in this recent New York Times article:

Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University, left the university only months after she started the role.

The tenured plagiarist, who can choose to collect a paycheck from Harvard every week until she is dead, even if her brain goes “full Biden”, “left the university” according to the New York Times. What does the Harvard web site say? “Claudine Gay is the Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and Professor of African and African-American Studies.”

A peasant reading the article might get the false impression that there were financial consequences in Academia for elite workers who break rules or make mistakes!

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Harvard’s latest win in court and the New York Times

by philg

“Judge Rules Trump Administration Illegally Canceled Harvard Funding” (NYT):

Harvard University won a crucial legal victory in its clash with the Trump administration on Wednesday, when a federal judge said that the government had broken the law by freezing billions of dollars in research funds in the name of stamping out antisemitism.

The ruling may not be the final word on the matter, but the decision by Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the U.S. District Court in Boston was an interim rebuff of the Trump administration’s campaign to remake elite higher education by force.

What does the multi-page article lack? Any background information on this judge. Her Wikipedia page:

Allison Dale Burroughs (born 1961) is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a United States district judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. She was appointed in 2014 by President Barack Obama. She is most notably known for rejecting the lawsuit Asian students brought against Harvard’s race-based admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2019).

It wasn’t worth mentioning, in other words, that her previous ruling in favor of Harvard, allowing them to continue to discriminate by race, was overturned by the Supreme Court. Nor did the NYT have space for “Obama-appointed” anywhere in the article, despite the fact that justice right now seems heavily dependent on whether a judge was appointed by a Democrat or a Republican president (all three Supreme Court Justices appointed by Democrats, for example, said that it was constitutional for Harvard to sort applicants by skin color).

Update: The Wall Street Journal does the same thing, e.g., in “Harvard’s Pyrrhic Legal Victory” (editorial) and “Trump Administration’s Cuts to Harvard Funding Are Unconstitutional, Judge Rules” (“news”).

(Note that I personally don’t understand why Harvard, which officially says that inequality is “one of America’s most vexing problems” is willing to accept any federal money. Harvard is a rich institution in a richer-than-average state. One would think that they’d seek money from the Massachusetts state government and ask that all federal money be redirected to less-wealthy universities in poorer-than-average states, e.g., University of Michigan.)

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Remembering Atul Butte

by philg

Our friend Atul Butte has died at age 55, a great physician and medical researcher who couldn’t be saved by our most advanced medicines and technology. He was always cheerful and curious.

Of his many online lectures, I think this one captures his spirit and enthusiasm well:

He and I were on opposite sides of the “saliva-soaked face rags for the general public will prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission” debate, but it didn’t affect our friendship. Humans, even MD/PhDs, are social animals and it would have been tough for someone in the San Francisco Bay Area to take the “viruses are smarter than humans” position. Atul emphasized persuasion rather than coercion with respect to masks, unusual for an academic and doubly unusual for a University of California academic. (He did advocate coerced COVID vaccination, though, via employer mandates, and then COVID turned out not to be relevant to his own health and longevity.)

This is a sad loss for those of us who worked with Atul in the Boston area and, I’m sure, for the many younger researchers and docs whom he inspired. Also, on this Father’s Day, a terrible loss for his child. To channel Atul’s spirit, though, I guess we can be more optimistic about the future of medicine because of the techniques that Atul developed and taught to others. I’ll try to remember him every time I hear about a medical insight that came out of looking at a big data set.

From Atul’s PhD advisor:

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How did Harvard manage to keep both its federal money and its race discrimination policies?

by philg

Harvard University is in the news right now for its showdown with the Trump Administration. Remember that inequality is bad and also that the federal government should spend taxpayer dollars at the nation’s richest institutions in the richest states rather than at, for example, University of Mississippi, Ohio University, or University of Michigan (the 13th poorest state).

My question for today is how did Harvard keep the river of taxpayer cash going for so long given its explicit race discrimination polices, most famously in admissions and hiring, but also in selling theater tickets. From a 2021 post:

We have designated this performance to be an exclusive space for Black-identifying audience members. For our non-Black allies, we appreciate your support in making this a completely Black-identifying evening. We invite you to join us at another performance during the run.

Proof of vaccination or negative test results required to attend.

Maybe a privately-financed and privately-run theater could refuse to sell tickets to those with the wrong skin color (though it would seem to be contrary to the Maskachusetts state law), but how can a federally-funded enterprise do it?

Here’s Harvard, the operator of a one-race-only theater, claiming the moral high ground as a recipient of federal dollars:

There have been plenty of racists in the history of the United States, but right now I can’t think of any recent racists held up as morally superior to the average person, business, or institution.

Related:

  • Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which Harvard was found to be violating the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment requiring equal protection (but the Feds said “Hey, let’s just keep sending them money because they surely wouldn’t violate the Constitution ever again”?)
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One-year anniversary of Claudine Gay’s non-resignation resignation at Harvard University

by philg

Today is the one-year anniversary of Claudine Gay purportedly “resigning” from Harvard. NYT:

Babylon Bee had a different angle:

Less than a month earlier:

Being a supporter of the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), UNRWA, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in their struggle against the Zionist entity wasn’t a presidency-ending problem, but all of the examples of plagiarism were. The Crimson:

See also CNN.

What’s Claudine Gay, plagiarist, doing after “resigning” from Harvard due to plagiarism? Working at Harvard:

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