INSURRECTION | The Constitution's Writers Feared Tyrants, including Mobs

David Lefer

January 19, 2021—The epiphany of January 6 will be two weeks ago tomorrow, when President Joe Biden will be inaugurated.

It is a good time to remember an event six years ago, long before social distancing put an end for a while to in-person events, that the Harvard Club of New York created a book expo. 

There I became interested in a book by David Lefer on The Founding Conservatives. I wrote about his book afterwards in a post on the Oxbridge Pursuivant blog site.

The book's theme is that in writing the Constitution conservatives like Madison and Hamilton were building in protections against hostile mobs. They had good reason. During the debate over ratifying the document, which took place in Philadelphia, a mob captured and took hostage some members of the state assembly to get them to vote their way.

Conservatives were concerned that they were trading American freedom from tyranny by George III and Lord North for tyranny by  mobs at home. They would have been particularly appalled by a political party or faction, whether on the right or left, trying to overturn the results of an election by appealing to a mob.

I was especially interested in what Lefer had to say about John Dickinson of Delaware. Another person that interested me was William Livingston, who represented New Jersey at the Constitutional Convention.

PORTSMOUTH ABBEY '58 | Day 1, Lunch at Castle Hill Inn

Entrance to the Castle Hill Inn, showing sculpture
and distant boat. Looking out to the Atlantic
Ocean, left. Photo by JT Marlin.

NEWPORT, R.I., September 29, 2018–The Portsmouth Abbey School Class of 1958 (or Portsmouth Priory, as we were known then) has started celebrating its 60th Reunion.

Our classmates this year include one who came from as far away as Peru, just for the event. (Three sets of Peruvian parents got together and decided to send their sons to Portsmouth 65 years ago.)

Within the United States, the classmates have come from Florida, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania.

Yesterday, several of us had lunch together at the Lawn at Castle Hill, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of Narragansett Bay.

This peninsula of Castle Hill went through several metamorphoses:

Castle Hill faces Jamestown's two main
islands.

• It began as a watch house in 1740 when England declared war on Spain.
• In 1810 a Spanish brig was wrecked near Castle Hill after a storm.
• The present house was built in 1874 for the scientist Alexander Agassiz. 
• Three years later he outfitted the house with an advanced laboratory. This lab was in due course replaced by the lab at Wood's Hole.
• Agassiz made his fortune turning around a nonperforming copper mine in Michigan, and used $1.5 million of it to fund a Museum at Harvard.



Looking across from Castle Hill
to Jamestown. Photo by JT Marlin.

• In the hurricane of 1938, Castle Hill became an island. The daughter-in-law of Agassiz panicked about the experience and sold the property.

Thornton Wilder was a frequent guest, who said of the bedroom where he stayed:

"From that magical room I could see at night the beacons of six lighthouses and hear the booming and chiming of as many sea buoys." (Theophilus North, Harper & Row).

Getting a head start on the Portsmouth Reunion, four members of the Class of 1958 and two spouses assembled for lunch at the Castle Hill Inn.

The youngest-looking of the group, Carlos Cleary, is the son of a classmate who could not attend, George Cleary. He is in Venezuela and was unable to leave.

Lunch at the Castle Hill Inn. L to R: Alice Tepper Marlin, John Tepper Marlin,
John Hayes III, Denis Ambrose, Jeanne Geddes, Carlos Cleary.

Later in the afternoon, the group went to for a tour of the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

POET BORN | July 28 – John Ashbery

Ashbery Receives National Humanities
Medal from President Barack Obama in 2011.

This day in Rochester, NY in 1927 was born John Ashbery. He is a time traveler in the way people thought of it before Einstein's followers started to think of it in scientific terms.

Ashbery grew up on his family's fruit farm near Lake Ontario. He went to a small, rural school, where they read some poetry, all of it classical.

Then he won, as a prize in a contest, Louis Untermeyer's anthology, Modern American and British Poetry. He said he didn't understand many of these contemporary poems, but he was fascinated by them – poems by Auden and Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

Ashbery attended Deerfield for his last two years of high school, from which he went to Harvard. He started writing poetry seriously and published his first book, Some Trees, in 1956, when he was 29.

I first met John Ashbery in the early 1970s, when I became a neighbor in Chelsea, NYC. His newest book was Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). Subsequently he published A Wave (1984), Where Shall I Wander (2005), and Planisphere (2009).

Garrison Keillor describes Ashbery as having been helped by a generous neighbor. As neighbors in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, John Ashbery and David Kerman  have themselves been generous.

An article in the NY Observer says that when Ashbery grew up on a farm, he didn't like it. He preferred living with his grandparents in the city to attend school. His grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester. When he was 12, Ashbery's younger brother died of leukemia. Ashbery spent most of his time by himself until a wealthy friend of his mother (the "generous neighbor") put up the money for him to finish high school at Deerfield. Ashbery explains:

By that time I had already discovered modern poetry. High schools used to have current events contests sponsored by Time, if the class subscribed to the magazine. They were quite easy. I won the prize of a book. Of the four that they offered, the only one I was vaguely interested in was an anthology of modern American and British poetry by Louis Untermeyer.

Garrison Keillor in a bio of Ashbery in 2014 gives us two quotes from Ashbery. One is about the fact that Ashbery's poetry is not easy. People say they don't understand it. Especially freshman students in college or high school who have to read it for their English courses. 

I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience. [Italics added.]

Dorothy Parker once said: "Millay did a great deal of harm making poetry seem so easy that we could all do it but, of course, we couldn’t." Ashbery tries not to make poetry too easy because he believes it should stop you in your tracks – he wants his poems to stop you and make you spend some time. Keillor cites Ashbery's poem "At North Farm", which follows. It has a time-travel aspect. 

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you? 

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

The basic problem with the science of time travel is that in order to travel in time, we would need to travel "at incredible speed" – incredible because weight is a function of speed. We would need to be very light, preferably weightless. The only way that science knows how to time-travel so far is in the mind. But that gives us an important degree of freedom.

Physicists have been driven by unexplained phenomena to come up with a hypothetical fifth dimension that could unite the dimensions of space and time. Until they tie up the loose ends, we will have to rely on time-travel in the mind. We will have to rely on poetry.

UNABOMBER | Arrested 20 Years Ago (Personal Comments)

L to R: FBI Special Agents Max Noel, Terry Turchie, Jim
 Freeman at BookExpo America 2014 in NYC. They
tracked down Kaczynski. Photo © 2014 by JT Marlin.

Apr. 3, 2916–This day in 1996, Theodore J[ohn] ("Ted") Kaczynski was taken into custody by FBI agents on charges of being a terrorist.

He was held responsible for the deaths of three people and the injuries of 23.

Kaczynski was indicted on multiple federal charges of murder and attempted murder using the postal service.

The deaths were attributed to mail bombs. Extensive evidence at the site included a live bomb and the original of the Manifesto that Kaczynski had sent copies of to The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Upon his first appearance, Kaczynski pleaded not guilty. He had arguments with his defense attorneys, who wanted to plead insanity; he viewed his deadly actions as legitimate political activity.

The perpetrator was called "the Unabomber" starting in 1980 because the targets of his bombs seemed to be universities and airlines. At the start of the Unabomber trial in 1998, the judge rejected his requests for a new defense team and pro se representation. On January 22, 1998 Kaczynski pleaded guilty on all counts and was spared the death penalty, a condition David Kaczynski required for giving the FBI information that would identify his brother as a likely suspect and allow FBI agents to find him.

Showing no remorse for his crimes, Ted Kaczynski was sentenced in May 1998–20 years after he sent his first bomb–to four concurrent life sentences plus, for good measure, 30 years.

Comment 1–Book by the FBI Agents

On May 30, 2014, as I was walking through the Javits Center, New York, checking out exhibits at the annual BookExpo America, a familiar face looked out at me from a blow-up of a book cover – my Harvard '62 classmate Ted Kaczynski.

The new book was by three FBI agents that tracked him down. They were signing books. My timing was fortuitous and I got their very first copy.

The book makes the point that the FBI was not well structured back then to deal with random violence of the kind the Unabomber undertook. As they say: "He was not [the FBI's] normal prey." For example:

• Although the letter bombs were addressed to individuals, they could have exploded anywhere along the way and were therefore loose cannons. 
• The FBI was also not well structured to bring in the kind of cooperation that David Kaczynski eventually provided, in return for assurance that prosecutors would not seek the death penalty for his brother (p. 269).

The authors argue that the Unabomber case helped bring about some reforms at the FBI to raise its effectiveness in addressing terrorist and random-bombing incidents. These reforms were implemented by FBI Director Louis Freeh in the years leading up to 2001, when Freeh left (in the spring of 2001) and Robert Mueller took over. The book's authors argue that the changes Freeh made helped prepare the FBI to respond to the 9/11 attacks, although they properly avoid giving any credit to the Unabomber for any of the reforms.

The details of the investigation are fascinating. As a general comment, the authors emphasize the importance of the cooperation of the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Unabomber's brother David. In the end, investigators can't do the job by themselves.

It's good to have the conduct of the investigation on the record, and to recognize the hard work of the agents in solving the case.

When the case was broken, the media tracked down virtually every member of the Harvard Class of 1962. When I introduced myself to Max Noel, the Supervisory Special Agent of the UNABOM [sic]  Task Force, he said he felt he had met every member of the class. The new book should help my classmates get some closure on the shock that one of us could do such things (see list in my second comment).

Kaczynski's entries in the quinquennial class reports of the Harvard Class of 1962 are unusual. His first address in 1967 was in Lisbon, Iowa. In 1972, he is in Lombard, Ill. In 1977, he's in Great Falls, Mont. Then in 1987 and 1992, his "last known address" is given as in Khadar Khel, Afghanistan. Then in his 35th Anniversary report in 1997 his address was listed as "unknown", even though, having been arrested in 1996, his location was surely the best-known in the class. In his 50th Anniversary report, the address of the maximum-security penitentiary is actually listed; he lists his Occupation as "Prisoner" and his 1998 multiple life sentences as "Awards".

Comment 2–Ted Kaczynski's 16 Bombs

What was Kaczynski's problem? After graduating from Harvard, he went on to earn his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and became a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He was considered a great mathematician. What was not to like?

The problem was, he was viewed as having emotional issues that got in the way of his work. His contract was ended in 1969. He turned his back on the system and became a radical environmentalist and Luddite.

He first tried to buy land in Canada, then in 1971 purchased a one-and-a-half acre plot near his brother David in Montana. From that point on until his arrest, Kaczynski just lived off the land, from time to time getting temporary work or taking a trip.  He wrote papers on his anarchical philosophy that in 1978 were rejected by two universities in the Chicago area, the University of Illinois and Northwestern. This rejection set Kaczynski on his path of revenge via 16 mail bombs:

1–To the University of Illinois from Northwestern, returned to Northwestern, where a security guard was seriously wounded opening it.
2–Another to a student at Northwestern's Technological Institute, injuring him.
3–A third that exploded on an American Airlines flight, causing injuries from smoke inhalation. 

4–One to Percy Wood, president of United Airlines, who was injured when he tried to open the package.

5-11. Four to universities, plus one to a professor’s home, one to the Boeing Company in Auburn, Wash., and one to a computer store in Sacramento. Six people were injured, and in 1985 the owner of the computer store was killed–Kaczynski's first murder.
12–Attempted bombing of a computer store. A woman in Salt lake City saw a man with aviator glasses and a hooded sweatshirt place leaving what turned out to be a bomb outside the store.  The sketch of the suspect was released and Kaczynski stopped bombing for six years.
13–In June 1993, one severely injuring a University of California geneticist at his home,
14–Two days later, one to a computer science professor at Yale, who was badly injured. Several federal departments established the UNABOM Task Force.
15–In 1994, one that killed a New Jersey advertising executive at his home. Kaczynski had mistakenly thought this man worked on PR for Exxon after the 1989 Valdez oil spill.
16–In April 1995, one that killed the president of a timber-industry lobbying group.

Comment 3–Kaczynski's Citation of Jacques Ellul

Kaczynski sent a 35-thousand-word Manifesto to The New York Times and The Washington Post, saying he would stop the bombs if they published it. The Post complied. Kaczynski’s brother, David, read the Manifesto and recognized his brother’s ideas and language. He notified the FBI in February 1996 that he suspected his brother was the Unabomber. Kaczynski was arrested less than two months later.

One of the influences on him, Kaczynski has said (Alston Chase. 2003. Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist, W.W. Norton & Co., p. 111, 331) is Jacques Ellul's book, The Technological Society (translated by John Wilkinson. New York: Knopf, 1964. London: Jonathan Cape, 1965. Rev. ed.: New York: Knopf/Vintage, 1967). This book was found in Kaczynski's cabin when he was arrested and he said he had read it several times. His Manifesto covers some of the same ground.

My brother Randal Marlin happens to be a semi-retired philosophy professor at Carleton University in Ottawa and a specialist on propaganda (his book on Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion was recently republished in a new edition). He studied with Ellul at Bordeaux for a year. I wrote to Randal today and asked him to comment on Kaczynski's reading  of Ellul, whose philosophy is described as Christian anarchism. My brother sent me the following excerpt from his longer article on Ellul's philosophy:

Take for example the case of Ted Kaczynski, the so-called “Unabomber,” who killed people by letter bombs starting in 1978. Unquestionably, he echoed some of the ideas of Ellul concerning the technological society and he specifically mentions having read The Technological Society.  

Had Kaczynski also read Ellul’s Violence, he would have seen how, despite a large measure of agreement about how the technological imperative has shaped our modern consciousness and turned us into willing slaves, sending letter bombs to kill or maim those taking part in that imperative was not an appropriate response. 

The main and simple reason is the Christian premise underlying all of Ellul’s thought. But there was also Ellul the sociological and political analyst, who saw that such acts, far from damaging the technological system, only strengthen its worst aspects. Just as with the events of 9/11, the result is to induce fear and create support for new security initiatives, new technological devices to further reduce the scope of human freedom. So we have one very clear idea of how not to be Ellulian in the 21st C. 

Kaczynski, though a brilliant mathematician, appears to have been short on sociological and moral perception. His killings were supposed to awaken a public consciousness that would turn against modernity and view favourably his own back-to-nature vision of how to live. But his actions showed little empathy for his victims, suggesting a defective moral awareness, and his aim of transforming society was not achieved. To the extent he thought his actions would succeed he demonstrated inadequate sociological understanding. 

To be a true Ellulian, then, requires not just an understanding of his diagnosis of what is wrong with the world. It also demands at least a minimal respect for the constraints he places on morally acceptable action. Based on the teachings in Violence, there is no justification for killing people as Kaczynski did. Where is the love shown to the victims of Kaczynski’s bombings? (© 2013 IJES www.ellul.org Ellul Forum #53 November 2013 Marlin)

BIRTH | Jan. 31–Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer (1923-2007)

This day was born in 1923 in Long Branch, N.J., Norman Kingsley Mailer. (Long Branch is the small resort town on the Jersey Shore where I was married in 1971.)

He grew up in Brooklyn, went to Harvard, got drafted during World War II and served in the Philippines. He came home and when he was 25, in 1948, he had his first novel published, The Naked and the Dead.

His most famous book may be The Executioner's Song (1979) which along with Armies of the Night was awarded a Pulitzer. He was a prominent pioneer in the "New Journalism", combining factual reporting with the format and techniques of fiction–along with Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote. In 1955, Mailer and four others founded The Village Voice.

Mailer wrote daily from 9 to 5 till his death at 84. He said:

Over the years, I've found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material.

But he never wrote the great American novel, although he tried. The New Yorker thinks he should have written about his childhood in Brooklyn. But Mailer said:

It's very bad to write a novel by act of will. I can do a book of nonfiction work that way– just sign the contract and do the book because, provided the topic has some meaning for me, I know I can do it. But a novel is different. A novel is more like falling in love. You don't say, "I'm going to fall in love next Tuesday, I'm going to begin my novel." The novel has to come to you. It has to feel just like love. 

He died on November 10, 2007.

The Union Club in Boston - Formed in the Darkest Days of the Civil War

Dr. Edward Everett, former President of
Harvard, then the Union Club.

April 10 - This evening Alice and I went to the Union Club for a Surf and Turf dinner. This private club has a distinguished history, of special note as we are between two 150th anniversaries - of Robert E. Lee's surrender on April 9 and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 14.

The club was founded not much more than two years earlier, in late 1862, by Bostonians who were concerned about the future of the American Union.

Article I of the club says: "The condition of membership shall be unqualified loyalty to the Constitution and Union of the United States and unwavering support of the federal government in efforts for the suppression of the Rebellion."

The club's first elected president, Dr. Edward Everett, was a man of great distinction - former president of Harvard, Governor of Massachusetts, Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Senator. The club was formal inaugurated on April 9, 1863 and Everett made a lengthy speech for the Union.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Two years later, to the day (i.e., yesterday, 150 years ago) Confederate General Lee surrendered his huge Army of Northern Virginia, which had been surrounded by Union General Ulysses S. Grant, at the Court House in Appomattox, Virginia. This made inevitable total victory by the North in the Civil War, although the war did not end immediately.

John Wilkes Booth - a famed 26-year-old actor who took the side of the Confederacy - responded to the increasingly bad news for the South by meeting with six friends. They decided to kidnap the president and abduct him to Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. They fixed a date on March 20, 1865 and lay in wait… but Lincoln failed to appear as he was scheduled.

Lincoln was assassinated five days after Lee's surrender.

Booth’s revised plan was the assassination of Lincoln, to give hope to those continuing to fight on desperately for the Confederacy. 

He found out that Lincoln was to attend Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre. Lincoln was in a private box next the stage, with his wife Mary and a young couple - Army Major Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris (Rathbone’s fiancée, daughter of one of New York’s senators).

Booth entered the box and fired a single shot (a one-ounce ball) at the back of Lincoln’s head with his .44 Deringer pistol at point-blank range. He then knifed Rathbone, who came toward him, and jumped onto the stage shouting, “Sic semper tyrannis!” (“Thus ever to tyrants!”) – the Virginia state motto. Booth broke his leg in the jump. He hobbled out of the theater and escaped on horseback.

This scene is reenacted here in a four-minute clip. 

The audience thought at first that the assassination was part of the play. When Mary screamed, only then did those present realize what happened. A 23-year-old young Army doctor (Dr. Charles A. Leale) went to the presidential box and found the president slumped in his chair, struggling to breathe and in paralysis. 

Booth had been recognized and he fled with David Herold across the Potomac to Virginia, where he was hunted down to a farmhouse. The soldiers torched it. Herold surrendered. Booth stayed inside until the heat became too intense. When he became visible, a sergeant shot him and Booth lived only three more hours.

Several soldiers carried Lincoln to a red brick boarding house across the street. When Dr. Robert King Stone, the Lincoln family physician, arrived in his carriage, he pronounced that nothing could be done for Lincoln, who had already been suffering from the health effects of being a wartime president. He had fainted two months earlier in an argument with his Attorney General over pardons for desertion.

The president’s body was taken to the White House and was in due course carried to the Capitol rotunda to lay in state. On April 21, Lincoln’s body was put on a train to his hometown of Springfield, Ill. Tens of thousands of Americans lined the railroad route. He was buried next his son Willie, who predeceased him, at Oak Ridge Cemetery, near Springfield.

Four co-conspirators including David Herold were convicted of conspiracy to murder and were hanged for this on July 7, 1865. The four included Mary Surratt, who ran the boarding house where the seven conspirators first met.

June 17 - The Ironic Origins of the SAT (with Comment)

The national office of the College Board, founded in
1900. The office is at 45 Columbus Avenue, NYC.

The following was posted this morning by Garrison Keillor on Writer's Almanac:

It was on this day in 1901 that the first standardized tests were administered by the College Board. Before standardized tests, many universities had their own college entrance exams, and prospective students were required to come to campus for a week or more to take exams. 

Since each college's exam demanded a different set of knowledge, high schools offered separate instruction for students based on which colleges they hoped to attend. Some colleges accepted applicants based on how well previous graduates of the same high school were doing at the college. Other colleges sent faculty to visit high schools, and if the high school met their criteria, then they would admit any graduate of that school. 

It was a confusing system, and as more Americans began to attend college, it was no longer practical. Between 1890 and 1924, the number of college students grew five times faster than the growth of the general population. In 1885, the principal of a prestigious boarding school wrote to the National Education Association asking them to reform the system. It took 15 years of discussion, committees, and arguments, but the College Board was finally formed in 1900. Its founders hoped to simplify curricula at the high schools, and make a college education accessible to a wider pool of applicants.  

Beginning today and throughout this week in 1901, the first standardized college entrance exams were given to 973 students at 67 locations (plus two more in Europe). More than a third of the students were from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Students were tested in English, French, German, Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. The tests were essays, not multiple choice, read by a team of experts in each subject. The experts met at tables in the library of Columbia University, and the essays were graded as Excellent, Good, Doubtful, Poor, or Very Poor. 

Columbia was one of the main forces behind the conversion to standardized testing — of the 973 applicants, 758 were applying to either Columbia or its affiliate Barnard. For the next couple of decades, the tests were in use but were not widely accepted. Only a small fraction of incoming freshmen took standardized tests, and there were only 10 colleges that admitted all of their students based on the test — some colleges looked at the test, but also provided their own entrance exams, and happily admitted students of any qualifications if their parents were donors. 

The early tests were considered "achievement" tests because they tested for students' proficiency in certain subjects. A couple of decades later, the College Board switched to "aptitude" tests, intended to measure intelligence. There were mixed motives for this change. On the surface, it made college admittance more fair and accessible to students whose high schools didn't teach ancient Greek or prepare students specifically for college. 

But the biggest proponents of intelligence testing were college officials who were concerned about the rapid influx of immigrants — especially Eastern European Jews — to their student body. A Columbia University dean worried that the high numbers of recent immigrants and their children would make the school "socially uninviting to students who come from homes of refinement," and its president described the 1917 freshman class as "depressing in the extreme," lamenting the absence of "boys of old American stock." 

These college officials believed that immigrants had less innate intelligence than old-blooded Americans, and hoped that they would score lower on aptitude tests, which would give the schools an excuse to admit fewer of them. In 1925, the College Board began to use a new, multiple-choice test, designed by a Princeton psychology professor named Carl Brigham, who had modeled it on his work with Army intelligence tests. This new test was known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The first SAT was taken in 1926. These days, more than 1.6 million students take the SAT each year.

Comment

When I applied in 1955 for transfer to an American high school from one in England, I was required to take the high-school equivalent of the SAT. No surprisingly, I was the only person at my school taking it. My examiner, Fr. Timothy Horner (who subsequently came to the United States and headed up St. Louis Priory), relished the instructions, which were intended for huge halls of examinees. "All students will now pick up their pencils in their right hand. At the signal, all students will break the seal on the exam booklet and will begin answering the questions."

Garrison Keillor doesn't say it, but the irony is that the SAT tests showed that the undesired immigrants were highly intelligent. The alumni-children legacy preference continued, but I am told that official records show that it was not available for alumni children applying for scholarships. The idea seems to have been that if Harvard's continuance is partly dependent on wealthy donors, those that cannot afford to send their children without financial aid are not part of the relevant population.

Today, the highly intelligent applicants for whom an alleged quota exists at top universities are reportedly (see my letter of 2012) those whose parents immigrated from Korea, or those applying directly from Korea. In Korea, educational achievement is highly valued, and Harvard is a top brand.

COLLEGE GRADES | Inflation Since 1960!

December 22, 2013 – An A is not what an A used to be, it seems.

College grades have apparently inflated since my college days.

An A is now the most common college grade, according to an article published last year by Professors Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy:

In 1960, 15 percent of all college grades were A's.  The most common grade was a C.

In 2012, an A was the most common grade given nationally (43 percent). A's and B's together now account for 73 percent of all college grades at public universities and 86 percent of all private school grades. 

Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and former president of Columbia's Teachers College, similarly found:

• In 1969, seven percent of students reported an A- grade-point-average or higher.  

• By 2009, that number had risen to 41 percent. 

Even at Harvard? The Harvard Crimson earlier this month says yes. In "Substantiating Fears of Grade Inflation, Dean Says Median Grade at Harvard College Is A-," it reports that at Harvard, the "most common grade is A." The story has 504 comments as of today.

Rojstaczer and Healy say that student engagement has fallen and the average amount of study has declined from 24 hours a week in the '60s to 15 hours a week today.

Some universities including Columbia and Dartmouth, have begun issuing "honest transcripts", disclosing not only the letter grade the student received for each class, but also the average grade that the professor gave the entire class, thereby putting each grade in context. Thomas Lindsay reports this month (mindingthecampus.com) that a bill in Texas would require honest transcripts for students at Texas universities. .

Comments:

The "honest transcript" program has been championed by Republicans, presumably because they don't like liberal elites, even though the careers of both Bushes were assisted by these elites. Also, teachers are highly unionized and focusing on grade inflation can be seen as a way for those who criticize labor unions to demonstrate a collective laziness among students and faculty.

However, I don't know why this should be a partisan issue. As it stands, recent graduates from colleges with inflated grades can virtually all present themselves as above average among their college peers. However, honest transcripts are not a panacea:

1. Some classes are selective. The professor interviews you and decides who can take the course. In this situation, the presumption is that all the students deserve higher grades than in a less selective introductory class.

2. Some universities are more selective than others. A Harvard student is presumed to be better prepared than a second- or third-tier college. Should Harvard students be graded the same way as an unselective college?

3. Some departments are more likely to grade on a curve than others. Science and engineering, where knowledge is more easily measured, tend to grade more strictly.

4. In professional schools – business, law, medicine – grade inflation is less of a problem because professors know that the grades are directly related to a person's career and the task of sorting out the best students is taken very seriously. Being too generous to students could mean certifying people as capable of something that they are not. leading  to poor clinical performance.

What other considerations should be on the table?

RADCLIFFE | Sept. 1–Helen Keller Graduates

Helen Keller, graduate.

Helen Keller graduated from Radcliffe today in 1904. Garrison Keillor notes that she was "the first blind-and-deaf student ever to graduate from any college anywhere." She said, "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

Her portrait hangs prominently in the Harvard Club of New York City.

However, five years later, perhaps inspired by Helen Keller's graduation, Inez Milholland - a graduating senior at Vassar - applied to the Harvard Law School. She would have been the first woman admitted to the Law School. The faculty decided she was qualified. But the Law School administration ruled that the seat would be wasted on a woman.

So Milholland went instead to NYU Law School and worked with the Triangle Shirtwaist workers on their strike in 1909 and after their disastrous fire in 1911. She led, on horseback, woman suffrage parades in New York in 1912 and 1913 and the huge and violent suffrage parade in Washington, DC in 1913.

Should Harvard Be More Like MIT?

The New York Times on  Friday, April 5 had a front-page story by John Markoff on edX (which the Times insists on spelling EdX).  It was announced last year by President Deutsch (http://hvrd.me/JOVnQI). The NY Times story has about 1,000 comments.

Basically, edX has developed a way to grade exam essays without human intervention. It looks at concepts etc. In principle, with on-line lectures and on-line exams, a course can be designed and taped, and  put on autopilot, with no further involvement by the professoriate. Just IT guys to make sure everything is password-protected and identity-certain. 

The edX project is a joint Harvard-MIT project and it seems to be moving Harvard in the direction of MIT, just by virtue of the need for more IT people to make it all happen. 

What's going on? Here are some theories:

• Harvard has to become more of a place that enterpreneurial students like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg won't leave after a couple of years. MIT and Stanford know best how to turn students into startups and, if all goes well, billionaires.   
• The loss on the Harvard endowment in 2008 was about $11 billion, one-third of the total. As of 2012, the Endowment was down about $4 billion, but the $6 billion of debt to keep things running is costing about $0.5 billion a year in interest. 
• Raising more money is better than cutting, but cutting is more reliable. 
• The edX idea is sufficiently interesting and complex and potentially revolutionary that it may distract attention away from budget-cutting in the wake of the deficits.

Where is all this heading? Here are some possibilities to be on the lookout for, in the form of budgetary-relief recommendations to the administration. (It must be said that I do not necessarily endorse all these hypothetical recommendations!)  

1.Decentralize and privatize intra-mural athletics. This will save $3 million per year. The houses should fund their own programs with alumni appeals. Few people attend these events and they are a luxury Harvard can’t afford any more. If alumni object, let them pay for this stuff. Instead,  offer every student (1) a multi-purpose elliptical trainer in every living unit and (2) one free hour per month with a trainer. This will start a lifetime wellness program for each student. MIT has this right.

2.Invest in intercollegiate sports. This will eventually generate $3 million more per year. Savings from intramural sports should be invested in the major sports teams and Olympic-eligible athletes. We must encourage them. Sales of tickets to Boston-area fans will eventually generate $3 million more than we spend. Those state colleges know this.  

3.Step up scholarships in intercollegiate sports. This will generate $5 million more per year. Harvard needs professionals on the playing field. The pursuit of amateurism is nostalgic but antiquated. Amateurism discriminates against the poor by denying them an alternate track to Harvard. It also means we lose students to colleges with a more serious athletic program. Our stadiums are half-filled at best. We need world-class players, on the basketball court or on the football field. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

4.Cut staff in departments like modern languages, with too many professors. This will save $10 million per year. The best way to learn a modern language is to go to the country or countries where is spoken. Or buy a Rosetta Stone DVD. Average research productivity of foreign-language instructors is pathetic.  

5.Consolidate overlapping departments like History and English.Save $10 million per year. Today’s history is simply yesterday’s journalism, which is taught in the English department – or on the job. Some biographers’ work transcends journalism, but how many people can be as successful at it as Robert Caro, and even he spent years earning little money. In the free-content Google world, books don’t sell as well, and Wikipedia shows that thousands of people are willing to write and edit biographies and histories for nothing. Should Harvard be encouraging its students down this road to rags?

6.Cut out the small courses. Save $10 million per year. Department major requirements force students into wasteful apecialized courses – like Old English, which just provides employment for Old English professors. Elementary and remedial courses are inappropriate for a great university.  Unemployed English majors who teach basic English composition should be doing this in high school. In any case, Spell Check means spelling is just less important because if I get it wrong, Bill Gates will tell me.

7.Bury the dead languages. Save $10 million per year. Leave the dead languages like Latin and Ancient Greek – not to mention Old Russian, Old Anything - to the European and religious-based universities, where their value is better appreciated. The study of philosophy actually interferes with output. Every course that a student takes in philosophy is correlated, ceteris paribus, with a 5.4% decline in subsequent lifetime income. In a world where we are in a life-and-death struggle with India and China, we cannot afford to put distracting existential questions in the heads of our entering freshmen. Years 1-3 - Transfer all arcane languages to the Divinity School. Years 4-5 – Sell the Divinity School to a religious institution or some other narrowly based institute that wants another school to become more like a university.

8.Use money saved to strengthen STEM Faculty. This will initially cost $10 million per year, but will be made up by grants. The money we save by eliminating waste in other departments we can use to ramp up the departments that will make America more competitive, the so-called STEM departments:

- Science, especially biotech.

- Technology, primarily computer languages, aps and hardware.

- Engineering, primarily Internet initiatives.

- Mathematics to support the other three areas.

We need to institute a required freshman course on innovation, which will cover angel investing, venture capital, social entrepreneurship, initial public offerings, executive compensation, matching gifts, charitable lead trusts, charitable remainder trusts, naming opportunities and the lifetime  responsibilities of alumni. Books are being prepared for free distribution to explain the full range of charitable opportunities for those who have successfully mastered the innovation sequence.

9.Rethink the Allston Science Center as an incubator. This will save investing $6 billion over 5 years. The Endowment loss means the Allston Science Center had to be stopped. It should be rethought as gates to science and engineering, as an incubator or innovation center, open even to freshmen. Ample spaces should be provided for our growing number of business partners to kibitz on the ideas that are percolating inside. They need playbooks – a photo of every freshman’s face, books of biographies, and students’ output on specific projects, to be provided by much-expanded Harvard Tech-Transfer and Placement-IPO Offices. Maybe the new Science Complex will be named after a woman. How about the Marie Curie Center?

10.Move ahead cautiously with distance learning options. Maybe $50 million  per year. The collaboration with MIT on the edX program is an exciting way to get past William Baumol’s cost disease problem. We are still teaching the way Socrates did centuries ago! The huge lecture hall was one innovation, but we can reach so many more people with on-line videos. One charismatic professor on line – and we then put our graduate students to work grading the exams and papers! A concern is that competition among on-line programs may drive down price. How do we maintain the integrity of the Harvard brand? If Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg had been on-line students, would they have been as successful? We don’t know, do we?

50th Reunion at Harvard - Class Composition

Note (December 19, 2012): I wrote the following letter to the East Hampton Star in June 2012. I refer to "unconfirmed scuttlebutt" that the Jewish quota at Harvard has been replaced by an Asian quota. The American Enterprise Institute has documented a 14-18% Ivy-wide quota (it certainly appears "as if" they have such a quota). http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/12/at-the-ivies-asians-are-the-new-jews/
This is I believe my first-ever link to the AEA on this blogsite. Sunlight is a great disinfectant.  John Tepper Marlin.   

Changing Composition
    Springs
    June 25, 2012
To The Star:
     Helen Rattray’s report (Connections, June 14) on Chris Cory’s 50th reunion at Yale prompts me to compare a couple of her comments to last month’s 50th reunion at Harvard, which I attended with my wife, Alice.
    It is instructive to watch in the parade of alumni/ae the changing composition of the classes before and after 1962. The 1960s saw a huge disruption in college admissions. In the 1950s there appears to have been a modest push for more Catholics at Harvard, but this is not so visible in the parade. The push in the 1960s for more minorities and in the 1970s for more women caused much more consternation.
    I attended a small Catholic prep school, Portsmouth Priory (now Abbey), having spent three years already at another Benedictine school in England. The Class of 1962 at Harvard included seven graduates of Portsmouth, two of them via advanced placement. Given that the Portsmouth senior class numbered 35 students, the school was pleased.
    Meanwhile, while Yale had two (some say three) African-American students in the class of 1962, Harvard had 11, with a slightly larger class than Yale’s. The 50th reunion attendance in Sanders Theater was 100-percent white, as far as I could tell. One of the Harvard 11, W. Haywood Burns, was elected a 1962 class marshal and went on to become dean of the City College of New York Law School at Queens College. However, he died at 55 years of age in a 1996 Cape Town car crash.
    Once the civil rights era of the 1960s took hold under President Kennedy, affirmative action in admitting minorities became the new goal. But within a few years, the search for gender equality hit Harvard Yard. In 1970, the 50th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving U.S. women the right to vote, was celebrated with a huge parade in New York City that featured both Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. It had taken 50 years between the 15th Amendment enfranchisement of black males until the 19th Amendment. Young women in 1970 were not going to wait that long again to press for equal opportunity in college admissions.
    The story of the struggle at Harvard over Radcliffe admissions during the years before and after 1970 was told in April 2012 by Helen Lefkowich Horo­witz, a college dean, who received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969. Students and the National Organization for Women campaigned for an equal male-female ratio at Harvard when the ratio of men to women at Harvard was fixed at 4 to 1.
    To understand what the women were up against then, here is what the dean of freshmen, F. Skiddy von Stade, no doubt exhausted by the implications of a rapidly changing composition of the freshman class, had to say about the idea of admitting equal numbers of men and women:
    “When I see bright, well-educated, but relatively dull housewives who attended the Seven Sisters, I honestly shudder at the thought of changing the balance of males versus females at Harvard. . . . Quite simply, I do not see highly educated women making startling strides in contributing to our society in the foreseeable future. They are not, in my opinion, going to stop getting married and/or having children. They will fail in their present role as women if they do.”
    Ms. Horowitz comments: “I’m sure his niece, the great mezzo Frederica von Stade, would have shaken her head at this, if her schedule permitted.”
    The dean of admissions in 1970 issued a report that opposed changing the 4-to-1 ratio. But five years later the Strauch Committee recommended gender-blind admissions and this seems to be, formally, the rule now.
    Are there still quotas at Harvard? Formally, no more. But the admissions office would doubtless be forgiven for keeping on eye on the composition of the class to avoid surprise imbalances at the end of the process.
    The unconfirmed scuttlebutt is that the anti-merit quotas that used to keep out New York City Jewish kids are now most likely to be keeping the numbers down on admitting so many talented Koreans applying from overseas or Korean-American families in the United States. I am pleased to say that a Korean-American from the Harvard Class of 1962 was very much present at the 50th reunion.
    Sincerely,
    JOHN TEPPER MARLIN

HARVARD | College Admissions Policy 1958-2012

June 9, 2012 –Attending my 50th Reunion at Harvard last month, and especially watching in the alumni parade the changing composition of the classes before and after ours, was instructive.

It helped me put into perspective Harvard admissions policies. In the 1950s there was a modest push for more Catholics, in the 1960s a stronger campaign for more minorities and in the 1970s an unstoppable opening of the gates for women.

Of these three decades, the biggest impact was the third because it totally changed the ratio of women to men.

1950s

When I applied to Harvard in early 1958, the recruiter who came to Portsmouth Priory (now Abbey) School seemed to want to admit as many seniors there as possible. One reason is that some seniors had good scores on the SAT and Advanced Placement exams. But something else was going on. It was before the words "affirmative action" gained currency, but Catholics were sought out in the 1950s.

I was working on hometown news in the Harvard News Office in 1959-62 and one of my stories was about a second-generation Italian-American in the Cambridge high school system who was employed in the cafeteria in Dunster House, where he was discovered by an admissions officer and became a student at  Harvard in 1957.

Portsmouth is a fine Benedictine monastic school that was and is the school of choice for many Catholic parents in the United States, Canada and several Latin American countries. Naturally it was an early target for raising the number of Catholics entering Harvard. Besides me, Harvard admitted six other Portsmouth graduates to the Class of 1962, five of us from the Portsmouth Class of 1958 and two additional classmates via Advanced Placement from the Portsmouth Class of 1959. I speculate that the reason for the new attention to Catholics was the up-and-coming status of a Harvard graduate in Massachusetts, Senator John F. Kennedy, who was being talked about as a possible Presidential successor to Dwight Eisenhower.

1960s

But here's the kicker. While Harvard's Class of 1962 includes seven graduates of Portsmouth (which has a graduating class of 35), it admitted - according to a classmate, though I wasn't able to confirm this with data on the distribution of the Harvard '62 class via Google - just eleven African-American students from throughout the United States of America. The Reunion audiences in Sanders Theater were 100 percent white, as far as I could tell. One of the eleven, W. Haywood Burns, was indeed elected 1962 Class Marshal and went on to become Dean of the CUNY Law School at Queens College. However, he died at 55 years of age in a 1996 Capetown car crash.

Harvard no doubt has continued to seek out Catholics in high schools throughout the country that weren't committed to being feeders for the Catholic universities, but once the civil rights era of the 1960s took hold under President Kennedy, activists like Haywood Burns pressed for affirmative action in consideration of African-American students. Never again would Harvard admit so few minorities.

1970s

But the civil rights movement for America's people of color was rapidly overtaken in the 1970s by the search for gender equality.  The 50th Anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving U.S. women the right to vote, was in 1970 and was celebrated that year with a huge parade in  New York City that featured both Gloria Steinem and the late Betty Friedan. It had taken 50 years from the enfranchisement of black males in 1870 with the 15th Amendment to the 19th Amendment. Young women in 1970 were not going to wait that long again to press for equal opportunity in college admissions.

The story of the struggle at Harvard over Radcliffe admissions during the years before and after 1970 was told in April 2012 by Dean Helen Lefkowich Horowitz, who received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969. Students and the National Organization of Women campaigned for an equal male-female ratio at Harvard. (Until 1962, the women students at Radcliffe took the same classes as Harvard students but were given a Radcliffe degree. Starting in 1963, women attending Harvard classes and fulfilling Harvard requirements started getting a Harvard degree.) The ratio of men to women at Harvard was fixed at four to one.

To understand what the women were up against, here is what the Dean of Freshmen, F. Skiddy von Stade, had to say about the idea of admitting equal numbers of men and women:

When I see bright, well-educated, but relatively dull housewives who attended the Seven Sisters, I honestly shudder at the thought of changing the balance of males versus females at Harvard. ... Quite simply, I do not see highly educated women making startling strides in contributing to our society in the foreseeable future. They are not, in my opinion, going to stop getting married and/or having children. They will fail in their present role as women if they do.

Dean Horowitz comments: "I'm sure his niece, the great mezzo Frederica von Stade would have shaken her head at this, if her schedule permitted."

Harvard's Dean of Admissions Chase Peterson in 1970 issued a report that opposed changing the four-to-one ratio. But five years later the Strauch Committee recommended gender-blind admissions and this seems to be, formally, the rule now. 

The Unabomber,Ted Kaczynski, 
Harvard '62

Thoughtful admissions policies are not just good for the country and good for Harvard–they can also be good for the students themselves. Would Theodore J. Kaczynski have become a serial murderer if he hadn't gone to Harvard at 16? 

He was too young–so was I, and so were probably the other entering Harvard freshmen who were 16, of whom I know a few–and he should have been admitted with a recommendation that he take a "gap year" off to travel or study before entering college. Probably today that is what would have happened.

Kaczynski lists his occupation in the 1962 50th Reunion Class Report (the "Red Book") as "prisoner". Under "awards" he lists are "eight life sentences, issued by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, 1998." 

A Beautiful Day - Harvard Tops Yale 45-7

John Tepper Marlin

Robert Trentlyon is a member of the Class of 1950 at Yale. He called to invite me to join him at the Harvard-Yale game this year, which took place on Saturday. For many years, Bob has gone to The Game with two friends, his college roommate and Ambassador Walter Carrington, Harvard ’52, whom he met when both were involved in Students for Democratic Action. One year neither of Bob’s colleagues could make it, so I joined Bob in lieu of the other two. Harvard came from behind and won. Bob consoled himself at the time, by muttering: “Well, at least Walter isn’t here to gloat over me.”

Bob Trentlyon, Yale '50

I met Walter on Bob’s 80^th birthday. This year the three of us went to New Haven on Saturday, November 19. Bob is a former NYC newspaper publisher (Chelsea-Clinton News etc.) and a prominent civic leader, his POV distinct from that of his classmate, the late Bill Buckley Yale ’50. Bob told me that Yale calls the Class of 1950 its “greatest class”, swelled by GIs to twice the pre-war size of 800. We took the 7:55 am New Haven RR train from Grand Central (see photo). It was so crowded with young fans that many had to stand.

In New Haven, we met up with Walter, who came down from Boston. He served Presidents Carter and Clinton as Ambassador to Senegal and Nigeria and before that headed up the Peace Corps in Africa during the Kennedy-Johnson era. We took the Yale Club bus to the stadium for $15, round trip. We purchased general admission tickets for $5 each but then decided we wanted to sit closer to the 50-yard line so we purchased reserved seats at Portal 30 for another $30 each. Walter was delighted to find his seat number matched his birthday. It was our lucky day. We sat right by the 50-yard line.

Since the three of us purchased six tickets, the attendance figure put out by Yale is overstated by at least three, making it 55,134. This number amounts to 90 percent of the 61,446 capacity that the Bowl was left with after alterations in 2006. But the Yale Bowl was never 90 percent filled. Many people, especially on the Harvard side, must have bought tickets and didn’t come. And after the first half I regret to say a large number of Blue supporters threaded their way out well before the end of the game; for this game, the Sitzfleisch award goes to the Harvard fans.

L-R: Walter Carrington H'52, Robert Trentlyon Y'50, John Tepper Marlin H'62
Update January 2013 - Sadly, Bob Trentlyon tells me he was at a memorial
service for Ambassador Carrington - at Tony & Lucille's (see below) in the
second week of January.

We sat on the Harvard side, where the sun shines after the first quarter. Our caps shaded our eyes (see photo). The sun meant we shivered less than the Yalies on the other side of the Bowl. It was windy, especially in the first quarter, and several missed forward passes were probably  blown off course. The lateral passes had a higher completion rate but gained less yardage than a forward pass would have (duh!).

One reason some Harvard fans didn’t show is surely that Harvard was undefeated going into the game and was already the Ivy champion after beating Penn the week before. But the Harvard team reportedly had decided not to accept their Ivy championship rings if they failed to defeat Yale. Based on this fact, and the formidable team statistics at the front of the game program, I ventured to suggest to my senior companions that the score would be Harvard 48 to Yale 18.  Neither would wager.

The game began with a fine Yale touchdown. It was a sight to see the Yale side so excited. After the conversion and a 7-0 lead, the Yalies leaped up and waved blue hats and blue scarves until kingdom come. The idea surfaced… they could win this! In the excitement I confess I temporarily forgot my lopsided forecast. After all, no money was riding on the outcome. Ambassador Carrington thoughtfully also failed to remember what my forecast was. Bob, in contrast, reminded me I was the “baby” (his word) of the group, and for all he could tell, I was drinking Milk of Amnesia.

But Harvard’s Quarterback  Collier Winters quickly tied up the first quarter.  The stadium paused for a moment of silence out of respect for a woman who was killed before the game by a U-Haul carrying beer kegs, with two others injured. (The NY Times reported that the Yale undergraduate driver was sober and that the problem seems to have been a mechanical failure.)

Harvard’s second touchdown was at the beginning of the second quarter, as Winters threw a successful 20-yard pass to Wide Receiver Alex Sarkisian in the end zone. The next two scores featured kicker David Mothander, who faked a field goal and ran over the goal line without a single Blue hand being laid on him and then, before the end of the first half, kicked a real field goal.

From the game program I counted 138 names on the Harvard squad, 128 on the Yale squad. So, on average, 8.3 percent of the two squads are on the field at any one time. I couldn't find a roster of the two bands; my impression is that they have shrunk from the numbers in the 1950s and 1960s. If my impression is correct, I wonder what the reason is. 

By the middle of the second quarter when Harvard was well ahead, I re-remembered my forecast. The Harvard defense held up during the rest of the game, blocking a Yale field goal kick, forcing a fumble and intercepting three times. At the third down 18 times, Yale was able to grind out the yardage for a first down only four times, which is a success rate of just 22.2 percent.

As the shadows lengthened, and Winters hammered away, the
 sons and daughters of Eli streamed out of the stadium. 

The Yale announcer kept up his spirits by noting the achievements of many of the other 35 varsity sports the university competes in, and noting the scores of games in the world beyond New Haven. He also made the point that Yale was ahead over the full 128-game series, with 65 games won to Harvard’s 53 (soon to be 54) and the rest tied.  But Yale has been lagging in recent years. Since 1956, when the Ivy League was formalized, Harvard has won 31 to 24, with only one game tied - the one in 1968 that is formally listed as a 29-29 tie but is correctly described (I was there) in Cambridge as a Harvard win. The 21^st century has seen ten wins for Harvard, one for Yale. At what point does Harvard start to look like a bully?

After a scoreless third quarter, what sped the sons and daughters of Eli on an early exit from the Bowl was the Bang-Bang Winters Silver Hammer coming down on their heads for three touchdowns in a row.  The most exciting moments were a 60-yard pass to Kyle Jusczcyk and a long runback after an interception by Harvard captain Alex Gedeon.

Ivy Champs '99. This was the last time Yale won against
 Harvard at home. Bob hypothesized this was 1899.

Somewhere in the fourth quarter I observed to Bob that Yale hasn’t beaten Harvard at the Yale Bowl since ’99. I pointed to the “Ivy Champs ‘99” banner on the field (see photo). Bob had by this point in the game become… and I hate to say this about a friend… a bitter man. He looked out over the field and said, with his gallows-humor nostrils flaring: “You realize, of course, that the banner refers to eighteen-99.”

According to Harvard Magazine's report of the game, the final score equaled (was identical to!) the best previous Harvard win, in 1982.

Archway entrance to Little Italy,
New Haven.

To be fair, Yale Quarterback Patrick Witt did his best. During the season he has broken many Yale passing records. He completed 24 of 39 attempted passes during the game, an average of slightly less than 10 yards per pass, with one of them ending with a Yale touchdown. The wind may have contributed to three of his passes ending in Harvard hands. There was a kerfuffle over Witt’s choosing to play with his team instead of showing up for a Rhodes Scholarship finalist interview. He did the right thing for his team and can always apply for a Rhodes in 2012.

Tony & Lucille's, where we ate dinner.

After the game, there being no more Mory’s, we went to Little Italy (see photo of archway at entrance to the neighborhood) and had a really fine meal at Tony & Lucille’s (photo at left). We had trouble afterwards getting a taxi to the train station but fortunately got a lift from a Yalie patron of Frank Pepe’s Pizza  across the road. Pepe’s is reputed to be the most ancient pizza vendor in the United States, says Bob, who by this time was greatly cheered up by a large helping of fettucini, more than he could finish, and some Californian pinot grigio.

Tony & Lucille's restaurant has installed
 an ATM machine. The local bank puts
a distance between  itself and Wall Street.

The ATM machine at Tony & Lucille's was installed by Domestic Bank, which self-describes its mission as "We're Main Street - Not Wall Street".  A sign of the times. This led to some stories by Bob of his days as a newspaper publisher, including the time when his biggest advertisers, NYC’s savings banks (institutions that would now be called “community banks”) were clobbered by the Savings and Loan crisis. It was a hard time for neighborhood-based periodicals, which relied heavily on these bank ads. He once offered a savings bank some toasters in return for advertising - in those days, you got a toaster for opening an account. PS: It didn’t work. “I have a basement full of toasters,” said the banker.

That story was as close as we came to talking about the reality of the world of 2011, laid low by excessive risk-taking by American financial institutions and facing the possibility of another whammy from the asset-shrinking impact of U.S.-originated derivatives on European banks. It was a welcome respite. It was, for Walter and me, and maybe even for Bob, a beautiful day.