Excellence at Harvard

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Excellence at Harvard

Memo To: Larry Summers, President of Harvard
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Beating up the Black Guys

You know, Larry, how much I hate to give advice, but I see you have
gotten into difficulties with the
professors in the Afro-American studies department by picking on Cornel
West, one of its luminaries.
As the reports go, you hauled him into your office and lectured him on
his behavior, suggesting he
spend more time as a teacher and less time making hip-hop CDs and
flouncing around supporting
various politicians of dubious distinction, like Ralph Nader and Al
Sharpton. The fact that Professor
West is one of 16 so-called ?University Professors? of the 2000 or so in
the pool of Harvard?s ?College
Professors? makes him a perfect target for you as you establish your
authority as President. Yes, I
know you have had to apologize to Dr. West and the other offended black
folks, but I do think in the
long run you will find the other 2000 profs will love you to bits and
pieces for having opened the
question of Cornel?s competence. They really could care less about his
hip-hop CDs, any more than
they would if one of their own sang in a barbershop quartet, and from
what I understand the CD is of
the kind that Mother Theresa might have enjoyed. Indeed, my black pals
tell me it is exactly the kind of
hip-hop message the Afro department at Harvard should be sending out to
bridge the black-white gulf
among our young folk.

And how many of the 2000 profs were not flagrantly open in their support
of Al Gore in 2000? C?mon,
Larry. You know you played the race card, dragging Cornel into your
office and whacking him around.
Everyone knows you have an 180 IQ, more or less, so you would know he
would go public, and you
would be seen as Harvard?s White Hope. Your old boss, Bill Clinton,
showed how this could be done to
perfection when he hosed Jesse Jackson in 1992 for inviting Sister
Souljah to his Rainbow Coalition and
then denounced her nasty rap lyrics. It was so obvious that The New York
Times ran a headline:
?Clinton Plays Race Card.? Cornel West and Skip Gates and the other
black guys at Harvard have been
put in their place!

You must feel a special satisfaction today, Larry, having read Shelby
Steele?s masterful op-ed on
Tuesday?s Wall Street Journal editorial page. Shelby, a conservative
black guy, has been writing the
same stuff for almost a decade, about how ?white guilt creates black
power.? I don?t know about that.
Maybe it does and maybe it doesn?t. But Shelby does go to great lengths
to praise you for putting
Cornel in his place. Well I have to say Cornel is something of a
showboat, but he?s not a bad fellow. I
met him several months ago at the New York Hilton when I came in to have
dinner with Louis
Farrakhan, who was addressing the same hip-hop convention that Professor
West was participating in.
My only wonder is how he could be so palsy-walsy with Minister Farrakhan
in private and so distant in
public. I guess if he did show his face with Farrakhan you would have
brought that up when you hauled
him on the carpet, huh?

What occurs to me, Larry, is that you got to be president of Harvard by
being a showboat, although I
don?t think you ever cut a CD. I do recall your pals in the first Bush
administration got you the job of
chief economist of the World Bank. And you got the job of Treasury
Secretary even though you had
once wrote that you ?always thought that underpopulated countries in
Africa are vastly underpolluted?
and ?shouldn?t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty
industries to the LDCs
[Third World]?? Remember that? I also remember how you played palsy
walsy with the big banks in
December 1994, when Mexico devalued the peso, and the currency
speculators at the banks made a
quick several billion at the expense of Mexico?s poorest people. And
gosh darn, you took credit for
bailing out Mexico with a huge pile of cash, which they paid back with
interest. I said it was the
equivalent of you making a big doo-doo in living room and then asking
for a medal for cleaning it up. Ha
ha. Funny, no?

This leads me to inquire, Larry, when are you going to start hauling
Harvard?s economics professors
onto the carpet and asking them to step up to Excellence? Why start with
the black guys? Yes, I know
the economics departments of Princeton and Yale and Stanford have been
cranking out PhDs who do
their share of wrecking everything they touch. And Princeton even allows
your good buddy Paul
Krugman to write a twice-a-week column for The New York Times, instead
of keeping his nose to the
academic grindstone. But if I dare say, Harvard?s econ department has
done its fair share of visiting
poverty, death and destruction on mankind. Here is Larry Lindsey, for
goodness sakes, a Harvard PhD,
one of the gang that helped you get the World Bank job, now advising
President Bush on how to get us
out of the recession you and Alan Greenspan helped us get into.

In other words, people who live in glass houses should not throw bricks
at other people who live in glass
houses.  Don?t they teach that at Harvard?