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The economy's in the toilet, but at Harvard Business School, the tycoons of tomorrow have different concerns. Like finding the perfect getup for the big cross-dressing bash, and fitting in a little learning amid the nonstop schmoozing and boozing. The sound system at the Fort Point Channel warehouse is blasting power ballads on a Friday night in October, and the future titans of industry are wasted. This is understandable, because the future titans of industry are wearing pink feather boas, fishnets, and amateurishly stuffed bras. It's the night of Harvard Business School's Priscilla Ball, an annual rite that calls for...

Roger Kimball muses today on an old WFB line: In the early 1960s, Bill Buckley famously observed that he would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book than the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. After my post last weekend re Governor Palin, a number of readers modified the thought along the following: I would rather be governed by the first 500* names in the Wasilla, AK phone book than by the editors of The Harvard Law Review. (*Presumably reduced from 2,000 because, what with all those five-kid households, there probably aren't...

Last week, just before Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) big speech, Tim Cavanaugh and I attended a small fundraiser for Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee Wayne Allyn Root. The chatty Vegas sports bettor, memorably profiled by David Weigel two months back, was in a mind to talk about a fellow classmate of his at Columbia University back in the early 1980s, a guy by the name of Barack Obama. Root is no fan of the Democratic nominee: "A vote for Obama is four years of Karl Marx, and no one should be happy about that," he told us and a few...

He Graduated Without Honors. Senator Obama's life story, from his humble roots, to his rise to Harvard Law School, to his passion as a community organizer in Chicago, has been at the center of his presidential campaign. But one chapter of the tale remains a blank — his education at Columbia College, a place he rarely speaks about and where few people seem to remember him. Contributing to the mystery is the fact that nobody knows just how well Mr. Obama... performed as a student. The Obama campaign has refused to release his college transcript... The Obama campaign declined to...

Harvard University will launch an examination of the campus Police Department following long-running complaints that officers have unfairly treated black students and professors and, in an incident this month, a black high school student working at Harvard. President Drew Gilpin Faust announced yesterday that she has appointed an independent, six-member committee to review the diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts of Harvard police, the first review of its kind in more than a decade. In recent weeks, black student and faculty leaders have been pressing the university to address what they view as racial profiling by the predominantly white...

Orthodox Islamic lecturer, Texas attorney, adviser to Saudi billionaires...who is Dr. Khalid Abdullah Tariq Al-Mansour? Townhall links to a video in which civil rights activist Percy Sutton claimed he was asked by a certain “Dr. Khalid al Mansour”, supposed adviser to ‘one of the richest men in the world’, to write a letter of reccomendation on behalf of Barack Obama to help him gain acceptance to the Harvard Law Review many years ago. Mansour was raising money for Obama at the time,according to Sutton, a circumstance strange enough in itself. Townhall identifies the Mansour in question as a preacher from...

Harvard will launch an investigation into the campus police department after complaints that officers have unfairly stopped black students, professors, and other university community members because of their race. In an email to senior university administrators and faculty today, President Drew Gilpin Faust announced the creation of a six-member committee to review the police department's diversity training, community outreach, and recruitment efforts. It will be led by Ralph Martin, former Suffolk County district attorney and managing partner of the Boston office of Bingham McCutchen.

When Majid Ezzati thinks about declining life expectancy, he says, “I think of an epidemic like HIV, or I think of the collapse of a social system, like in the former Soviet Union.” But such a decline is happening right now in some parts of the United States. Between 1983 and 1999, men’s life expectancy decreased in more than 50 U.S. counties, according to a recent study by Ezzati, associate professor of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and colleagues. For women, the news was even worse: life expectancy decreased in more than 900 counties—more than...

Two HLS grads the focus of vice presidential speculation July 30, 2008 Barack Obama '91 and Tim Kaine '83 As presidential candidates Barack Obama '91 and John McCain prepare for their parties' nominating conventions, rumors are swirling around two Harvard Law graduates as likely vice presidential candidates. On the Democratic side, Governor Tim Kaine '83 of Virginia is being talked about, while Mitt Romney '75, former governor of Massachusetts, is frequently mentioned. Kaine is a first-term governor and an early supporter of Obama's campaign. Many political pundits have said that his selection would reinforce Obama's position as a Washington outsider....

...Harvard's endowment posted returns of approximately 9 percent through the first 10 months of this fiscal year, according to data from the University. The increase puts the endowment's value at around $38 billion as of this April, up from $34.9 billion as of last June...During the same period the S&P 500 Index lost 8 percent. So how did Harvard do it? Heavy bets on inflation...a full 24 percent of Harvard's endowment was a bet on inflation...

As standard-bearer of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama has ended the white-male monopoly on presidential nominations while extending recent domination by an even smaller, more elite minority — holders of Yale and Harvard degrees. Among the 12 nominees of the two major parties in the past 20 years, Obama (Harvard Law, '91) becomes the 10th to have graduated from one of the nation's two oldest, most prestigious major universities. All winners since 1988 have held a degree from Yale (George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush) while their opponents featured a mix of more Yalies (Bush Sr., John Kerry)...

Cambridge, Mass. - As the chiming of bells rang through Harvard University's campus among a field of caps and gowns last week, it was the final time they would be heard – the end of an era for the university, but also a new beginning. For the past 78 years, the 18 bells have hung high above Harvard's buildings, chiming on Sunday afternoons and every year at commencement. This summer, the bells will return home to ring at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow from which they were rescued in 1930 at the height of the Stalinist era, at a time...

Three Harvard psychiatrists facing a US Senate inquiry got a vote of confidence from their hospital as "beloved and trusted by thousands of grateful children and families." Senator Charles Grassley is looking into the doctors' failure to report payments of more than a million dollars in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007. A memo from top officials at Massachusetts General Hospital obtained by the Globe praised Drs. Joseph Biederman, Timothy Wilens, and Thomas Spencer as "pioneers in the field of child mental health" while also endorsing "closely managed" collaboration with industry and promising a review of conflict-of-interest...

The federal case against him is so strong that prosecutors had no interest in striking cooperation agreements with the ringleader of Spitzer's hooker-supplier, Emperors Club VIP, and his second in command, sources told The Post's Murray Weiss. Prosecutors have records of Spitzer's transactions, phone records and taped conversations with Emperors Club, and are confident they need little more to nail him on charges that could include violating prostitution laws and money laundering, sources said. Probers are also said to be looking into whether he used campaign funds to pay for his pleasures. The case against Spitzer includes the cooperation of...

A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according to information given Congressional investigators. [excerpt - click here to read the whole article]

Senator Kennedy is getting an honorary degree from Harvard. This is after, of course, he got kicked out in 1951 for cheating...and had to go back in 56 to actually get his degree. Kennedy??? A cheater??? Nonesense. You may be thinking how can they let him get away with this... They might as well let him get away with murder... Oh wait...

Inflated Costs of War by: Rachel Paulk, June 04, 2008 The Three Trillion Dollar War attempts to calculate the accurate total cost of the war in Iraq, covering factors not included in the government’s official $800 billion figure. Authors Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimate Iraq’s three trillion dollar tab by combining the budgetary costs of the war with their interpreted macroeconomic and social economic consequences of the conflict. When computing the budgetary costs of the war, the award-winning economists focus on four factors: current costs, predicted future costs, hypothesized “hidden” costs, and approximated interest. These scenarios are utilized to...

It's a long way from Harvard yard to Benedictine College. But this little Kansas campus could give Cambridge a big lesson in diversity. Benedictine held its annual commencement ceremonies this past weekend, and I happened to be there because I was the speaker. After all the degrees had been handed out, two young men in dress blue were called back on stage. Before their families, their classmates, and their teachers, these men raised their right hands and swore to "support and defend" our Constitution. And then Lt. Jeff Fetters and Lt. Michael Mundie were presented to their class as "the...

Well, now in Massachusetts they are looking to tax college endowments, university endowments that have more than a billion dollars in it. They say that by doing this, they can put more than a billion dollars a year into the state revenue. Legislators have asked state finance officials to study a plan that would impose a 2.5% annual assessment on colleges with endowments over a billion dollars. Now, the universities are very upset and here's quite possibly -- I want to frame this. I want to frame this. I want this on my wall of my office. When a nonprofit,...

Any Harvard student with the balls to participate in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) deserves our respect. Quite frankly, ROTC doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun. For four years, cadets and midshipmen wake up obscenely early in order to trek to MIT and get yelled at by their instructors. That’s an indignity that Harvard usually reserves for accounting students. If you want to know what visceral discomfort looks like, watch a Harvard ROTC student shuffle across campus in his military uniform. Banished by the Faculty in 1969 amid a rising tide of anti-war sentiment on Harvard’s campus,...

The list of Barack Obama associates that hold views that clash with mainstream America is getting longer every day and now we can add another notch in the "anti-American" column of Obama campaign workers and supporters. This time we find that the Obama campaign's official blogger, Sam Graham-Felsen, has spent time in France participating in labor riots, has written for a socialist magazine, hung a communist flag in his home, and was a fan of Marx while at Harvard. Is this a case of the media not vetting another Obama associate? Why have we not heard of this man before...

As a parent, I am reevaluating the merits of the 160K investment I am about to finish making in my daughter's education at the University of Texas. It's not that UT isn't a fantastic school and that my daughter has not done well in her double major of Psychology and Spanish ( 3.95 GPA) it's just that I'm trying to figure out what she does in a year or so to get that back or to even leverage on it in the world that she will find herself.. Perhaps she can be a sort of Dr. Phil for Telemundo going...

BOSTON (Reuters) - Philanthropist David Rockefeller donated a record $100 million to Harvard University's undergraduate program, the largest gift by a Harvard alumnus in the history of the oldest and richest U.S. college. About $70 million will be used to expand Harvard's student travel and study abroad programs and $30 million will go to arts education, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, school said in a statement on Friday. Rockefeller, 92, the last surviving grandchild of billionaire oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, is listed by Forbes magazine as one of the 150 wealthiest Americans, with an estimated fortune of $2.7 billion. He graduated...

Feminism on Red Alert by: Deborah Lambert, April 25, 2008 Question: What would inspire a conference on feminism at Harvard to feature conservative viewpoints? Answer: When it’s organized by Professor Harvey Mansfield’s Program on Constitutional Government. The flyer told the tale, saying: “a genuine debate with DIVERSITY of views on THE LEGACY AND FUTRE [sic] OF FEMINISM” adding that “Ladies Receive an Additional 50% off" (at the free conference)…” According to Anthony Paletta, some of the guests at this unusual forum were taken aback at the sights and sounds of conservative speakers like Jennifer Roback Morse, Wendy Shalit and Christina...

Islamofascism: Separate gym hours for Muslim coeds. Calls to prayer. Lectures on Shariah finance. A campus in the Mideast? Nope. It's all happening at America's pre-eminent college.Over the past few years, Harvard University has received millions in endowments from rich Saudi and Emirate sheiks. Now it's returning the favor by Islamizing its campus and promoting the Shariah agenda of its new Arab masters. Recently, the Ivy League school has made special accommodations for the religious needs of Muslim students, including, and rescheduling of exams to observe Islamic holidays. And this weekend it hosted a $400-per-person conference on Shariah finance led...

For a long time I did not hear the beauty of church bells; or more accurately, I did not wish to hear it. They sounded only like Christianity, which in my early years was a vexing triumphalist sound--the pealing of history, from which my honor as a Jew required me to recoil. When the tintinnabulations of the Church of St. Francis Xavier on Avenue O reached my ears, they brought the message that I was a member of a minority. I was not acquainted with the liturgical schedule of the church, with the practical reason for the ringings--though I might...

  April 13, 2008   This cartoon/graphic is free for noncommercial use in emails, blogs, and forums.  iowapresidentialwatch.com

Cold War on Campus by: Malcolm A. Kline, April 07, 2008 The latest survey on academic bias has sent academics into their usual state of denial despite evidence of same that frequently stares them right in the face. “Taken together, 40 percent of the Americans in the survey said professors often use their classrooms as political platforms,” Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on April 4th of a Gallup poll. “When that many Americans think this happens often, higher ed has a problem,” says S. Robert Lichter, director of its Center for Media and Public Affairs at...

Colleges and universities are the richest institutions in the history of our nation --136 U.S.c olleges and universities have endowments larger than $500 million, 74 of which top $1 billion-- yet tuition continues to skyrocket while tax-free school endowments grow ever fatter. Lawmakers now question whether school endowments should remain unregulated and exempt from taxes, and are considering requiring schools to spend a percentage of their value each year, as private foundations must. Several schools have announced plans to dip into their endowments to defray students’ tuition expenses, but are they doing as much as they should in the area...

Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman touched off a fierce debate when he recently wrote in The New York Times Magazine that Islamic Sharia law represents the highest state of "the rule of law." But what many of Feldman's critics did not recognize is that his argument has been building over several years. Just as an old photographic print slowly becomes visible when immersed in developing solution, Noah's claims about the alleged virtues of Sharia first surfaced in his 2005 book, Divided by God written when he was still a professor at NYU. Three years later, Feldman, who helped draft...

Harvard University has moved to make Muslim women more comfortable in the gym by instituting women-only access times six hours a week to accommodate religious customs that make it difficult for some students to work out in the presence of men. Men have not been allowed to enter the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center during certain times since Jan. 28, after members of the Harvard Islamic Society and the Harvard Women's Center petitioned the university for a more comfortable environment for women. Harvard Islamic Society's Islamic Knowledge Committee officer Ola Aljawhary, a junior, said the women-only hours are being tested on...

Academics Downgrade Socialized Medicine by: Malcolm A. Kline, March 25, 2008 Throughout the Twentieth Century into the new millennium, academia has been the incubator for a flood of ideas on how to nationalize health care. Now, it seems, academics themselves are admitting that it doesn’t work, even as various presidential candidates still float ideas to provide “universal health care.” The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) at Harvard recently compiled a survey of 20 developed countries. As relayed by John Goodman of the free-market National Center for Policy Analysis, the NBER concludes that: 1. There is no general relationship between...

Researchers at Harvard say that publicly voiced doubts about the U.S. occupation of Iraq have a "measureable effect" on insurgents there. Periods of intense news media coverage in the United States of criticism about the war, or of polling about public opinions on the conflict, are followed by a small but quantifiable increases in the number of attacks on civilians and U.S. forces in Iraq... The increase in attacks is more pronounced in areas of Iraq that have better access to international news media, the authors conclude in a report titled "Is There an 'Emboldenment' Effect? Evidence from the Insurgency...

The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School. The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago's South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in...

Harvard student database hacked, posted on BitTorrent By Robert Vamosi, CNET News.com Friday, March 14, 2008 12:03 PM Harvard University says about 10,000 of last year's applicants may have had their personal information compromised. At least 6,600 Social Security numbers were exposed. Worse, a compressed 125 M-byte file containing the stolen student data is currently available via BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer network. In a statement published Monday night Harvard officials said the database containing summaries of GSAS applicant data for entry to the Fall 2007 academic year, summaries of GSAS housing applicant data for the 2007-08 and 2006-07 academic years, and...

Matthew du Mee was one of more than 2 million college-bound students in 2001 to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT. But he was one of only a tiny handful who received a perfect score. Within weeks, the nation's most prestigious schools – Harvard, Yale, and Stanford among them – began courting him. Du Mee turned them all down, choosing instead a tiny new school with, at the time, fewer than 100 students, no accreditation and no name outside of homeschooling circles. The school was Patrick Henry College, created as haven of sorts for the nation's brightest homeschooled students,...

Continued demands for special treatment have netting the Muslim lobby gains in the West. At Harvard University, Muslim discomfort at having to mingle with unbelievers at the campus gym led the administration to announce a new schedule aimed at easing this discomfort. Under the new schedule, dhimmis will be able to workout 2-4 a.m. Monday-Friday, and 10-midnight Saturday & Sunday. All other times are reserved for the umma. Students unclear on which group they belong to are referred to the Koran for guidance. In the Netherlands, the government has pressured the media to prevent the airing of Geert Wilders’ film...

JOHN Howard is earning tens of thousands of dollars each time he trumpets his former government's achievements to American audiences. The former PM yesterday continued his farewell speaking tour of the US with a speech at Harvard University. Celebrity publicist Max Markson said American organisations were being charged $50,000, plus travel and accommodation costs, to hear Mr Howard speak. He is represented by the Washington Speakers Bureau, which also has comedian John Cleese and former British PM Tony Blair on its books. Mr Markson said the speaking fees earned by Mr Howard in the US were reasonable, given his international...

There had to be a murky racial subtext in there somewhere; every attack on Obama contains one if you’re just willing to look hard enough. I thought TPM would be the ones to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but instead it’s Orlando Patterson, drinking in a critique of a black candidate that features sleeping non-black children and concluding, naturally enough, that it’s quasi-Klan propaganda. I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother...

Right on the heels of Harvard’s capitulation to Sharia mores at its Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center, the Harvard “academic” community indulged an ideologue with much grander aspirations for implementing Sharia, UCLA Professor of Law, Khaled Abou el Fadl. My dear friend and colleague Hillel Stavis had the morbidly fascinating experience of witnessing this pseudo-academic fraud peddle his paltry wares March 5, 2008 at Harvard’s Divinity School, during a lecture entitled, non-sequitur, “Conceptualizing Islamic Theology: Sharia and Human Rights Doctrine”

While vitamin D’s role in strengthening bones is well established, its links to cancer and immune-system malfunctions have only recently emerged. At the Harvard School of Public Health, nutrition experts say large segments of the population don’t get enough vitamin D and are urging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to raise the daily recommended dose, from 400 international units to 800. For an update on what’s known so far about this important nutrient, the Harvard Public Health Review spoke with HSPH Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology Edward Giovannucci. *** Q: What are the documented benefits of vitamin D? A:...

BOSTON - In a test of Harvard's famed open-mindedness, the university has banned men from one of its gyms for a few hours a week to accommodate Muslim women who say it offends their sense of modesty to exercise in front of the opposite sex. The policy is already unpopular with many on campus, including some women who consider it sexist. "I think that it's incorrect in a college setting to institute a policy in which half of the campus gets wronged or denied a resource that's supposed to be for everyone," said student Lucy Caldwell, who also wrote a...

What can a 19-year-old guy in jogging shorts do at Harvard that a rich Saudi sheik who sponsors terrorism can’t? Get banned from the building. Six times a week, Harvard kicks all the guys out of the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center at the request of the Harvard Islamic Society. This is to accommodate those female Muslim students whose faith won’t let them work out in front of men. In the old days, Harvard would have laughed if some Catholic or evangelical mother urged “girls-only” campus workouts in the name of modesty. Today, Harvard happily implements Sharia swim times in the...

Harvard Sets Women-Only Hours for Gym, Complying With Muslim Students' Request Sunday , March 02, 2008 In response to a request by female Muslim students, Harvard University has created women-only workout hours at one of its campus gyms. The decision has angered some students at the Ivy League university. Since Jan. 28, the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center has been open only to women from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Mondays. The change was prompted by a request from the Harvard College Women's Center, which was approached by six...

Harvard University has moved to make Muslim women more comfortable in the gym by instituting women-only access times six hours a week to accommodate religious customs that make it difficult for some students to work out in the presence of men. Men have not been allowed to enter the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center during certain times since Jan. 28, after members of the Harvard Islamic Society and the Harvard Women's Center petitioned the university for a more comfortable environment for women. Harvard Islamic Society's Islamic Knowledge Committee officer Ola Aljawhary, a junior, said the women-only hours are being tested on...

Students Defect from Sciences Published On 2/7/2008 1:31:21 AM By ADITI BALAKRISHNA Crimson Staff Writer CLARIFICATION APPENDED As Harvard prepares to stake its future—and at least $1 billion of its funds—on the sciences, undergraduates are fleeing the discipline in large numbers, opting instead for concentrations in the social sciences and the humanities. According to a cross-analysis of data from the admissions department and the Harvard College facebook, there is a wide gap in the number of students who wish to pursue science at the start of their freshman year and the number of students who actually do. Between one-third and...

Paced by Harvard University's staggering $34 billion stockpile, 76 colleges now boast endowments over $1 billion after robust returns on their investments over the past year, according to an annual study being released today. Harvard's endowment rose by nearly $6 billion over the past year, a nearly 20 percent increase. Yale University's endowment, the nation's second largest, rose to $22.5 billion, a 25 percent increase. Stanford University, Princeton University, and the University of Texas system rounded out the top five. Among colleges with endowments greater than $1 billion, the median one-year return was 21 percent. Nationally, the median return was...

Paris Hilton is heading to Harvard University, but not to study she will be named its Woman of the Year.

For anyone who has spent any considerable amount of time on this campus, Harvard students’ knee-jerk liberalism and militant atheism, or, at least, militant hostility to religion, is more than apparent. An integral part of any misguided teenage rebellion includes perfunctorily discarding the formalities and traditions long observed in one’s family: Sunday mornings spent in church, obligatory dietary restrictions, and even a baseline belief in God. Thanks to cartoonish caricatures of Evangelicals in the media, religion immediately connotes images, in the minds of the self-styled intellectuals at Harvard, of provincialism, stupidity, and Republican Party politics—things to avoid. Yet, despite this...

Friends of slain former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto are mourning the passionate politician, nicknamed “Pinky” during her years at Harvard, where she made her mark as a fierce debater, cake baker and defender of her homeland. Bhutto, a 54-year-old mother of three, led an extraordinary and tragic life marked by great accomplishments, yet marred by controversy, imprisonment, exile and ultimately her murder yesterday after a rally in Pakistan. “In some ways, every Pakistani knew her. It was like when (Princess Diana) died in the U.K. and when (John F. Kennedy) died here,” said Adil Najam, a Boston University professor...