Harvard

Follow Up: Harvard B-School Says It is Improving Itself

Byuclafaculty

Some loyal blog readers may recall our earlier posts (back in September) on attempts to reform a reported frat house climate of the Harvard Business School.  We carried this quote from the NY Times: (M)any Wall Street-hardened women confided that Harvard was worse than any trading floor, with first-year students divided into sections that took all their classes together and often developed the overheated dynamics of reality shows. Some male students, many with finance backgrounds, commandeered classroom discussions and hazed female students and younger faculty members, and openly ruminated on whom they would “kill, sleep with or marry” (in cruder terms). Alcohol-soaked…

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Brown Joins Harvard in Rejecting Fossil Fuel Divestment

Byuclafaculty

We have noted in previous posts that there is a student group that has been using the public comment period at the Regents to push for pension and other fund divestment of fossil fuels. (The demand involves both extraction industries and some utilities.)  It is part of a national student movement.  If you scroll back to our links to Regents meetings, you will be able to hear those demands. Recently, as we have noted, Harvard rejected the demand.  See http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/04/harvard-rejects-call-divest-fossil-fuels.  Today, Inside Higher Ed is reporting that Brown University has also rejected it.  See http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/10/28/brown-u-rejects-call-sell-holdings-coal-companies. Given the current anti-pension initiative…

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MOOc comes to Harvard Business School

Byuclafaculty

From Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Harvard Business School is quietly developing its first online learning initiative, which it hopes will make HBS the world’s top provider of high quality online business education. The move has the potential to shake up the nascent online education market and give the elite business school a toehold  in the world of MOOCs, or massive open online courses.  It’s a high-stakes gamble for HBS, which has one of the world’s best-known—and carefully burnished—educational brands. John Fernandes, the chief executive of the business school accreditation group Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, called Harvard’s move a “watershed”…

The Harvard Business School Frat House is Classy

Byuclafaculty

On Sunday, we posted a link to the NY Times piece on the Harvard Business School and its frat house atmosphere.  Now the Times is running a piece saying the class divide among the students is even more of a problem:  …In recent years, second-year students have organized a midwinter ski trip that costs over $1,000, while others, including members of “Section X,” a secret society of ultrawealthy students, spend far more on weekend party trips to places like Iceland and Moscow… When Christina Wallace, now the director of the Startup Institute, attended Harvard Business School on a scholarship, she was told…

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Trying to Reform the Harvard Business School Frat House

Byuclafaculty

[No, the title of this posting is not the official title of the article excerpted below from the NY Times.  But that’s what it seems to be about.] BOSTON — When the members of the Harvard Business School class of 2013 gathered in May to celebrate the end of their studies, there was little visible evidence of the experiment they had undergone for the last two years. As they stood amid the brick buildings named after businessmen from Morgan to Bloomberg, black-and-crimson caps and gowns united the 905 graduates into one genderless mass.  But during that week’s festivities, the Class…

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So it continues at Harvard

Byuclafaculty

Back in April, we noted that it was becoming evident that the way to show erudition was to begin answers to questions with the word “so.”  See our earlier post for references at http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-to-answer-any-question-with.html On Harry Shearer’s Le Show radio program, he began to provide a “So’s of the Week” feature.  For those blog readers who might have thought that the so-thing was a passing fad, we – through Shearer – provide evidence from no less than Harvard that it continues. So click on the link below:

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Would it get under your skin if university administrators poked around in your emails?

Byuclafaculty

Located in Boston, not far from Harvard Some blog readers may recall the brouhaha that erupted at Harvard when some administrators poked around in university emails trying to discover who was leaking info about a student cheating affair.  A dean apparently ended up resigning when the email searching became known.  The Boston Globe is reporting that a Harvard-commissioned report has determined that the administrators were acting in “good faith.”  See http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/07/22/outside-counsel-harvard-acted-good-faith-covert-mail-searches/jvB5oSwd8MZL2m0wlTuLSP/story.html.  A shorter version of the story from Inside Higher Ed is at https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/subscription/1400ab32f5244acf. Moral: Don’t put anything in email you wouldn’t want made public. Unless, of course, you believe…

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Harvard Was Shocked and Appalled that Emails Weren’t Private: Now Comes the Aftershock

Byuclafaculty

In an earlier post, we noted a brouhaha at Harvard in which a dean authorized a search of other deans’ emails to determine if any of them had leaked some information about a cheating scandal. Faculty at Harvard were shocked and appalled that such a search could occur. We noted that at public universities, emails you may think of as private really aren’t.  Apparently even at private institutions, the same cautionary note applies, although for other reasons. Even if you use a private email account such as gmail to send messages to recipients at UCLA or any public university, the…

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At Harvard, Apparently, Many Faculty Feel that the Oversight of Online Courses Was Overlooked

Byuclafaculty

From the Harvard Crimson: Fifty-eight professors from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences requested in a letter Thursday to FAS Dean Michael D. Smith that he appoint a faculty committee to draft “ethical and educational principles” that would provide a framework for FAS engagement with HarvardX, the University’s curricular contributions to edX. The letter, shared with The Crimson by one of its signatories, asks that those principles be brought to a faculty vote in the 2013-2014 academic year. “It is our responsibility to ensure that HarvardX is consistent with our commitment to our students on campus, and with our academic…

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Verily, verily, Harvard seems to be in the news these days

Byuclafaculty

First there was the Ferguson apology: http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2013/05/how-to-be-really-famous-at-harvard.html. And now there is the Richwine PhD.  From Inside Higher Ed today: Veritas: Goddess of Truth Debate over a new Heritage Foundation report critical of proposed change in immigration laws has set off scrutiny and criticism of Harvard University for approving a dissertation in 2009 by one of the report’s authors. Some critics say that the dissertation’s suggestion of a long-term gap in the IQs of Hispanic immigrants and their descendants and the IQs of other groups is based on discredited theories that have been used to justify many forms of discrimination over…