Here are our picks from the latest Harvard-related opinion, news, and features:
A front-page article in the November 3 Boston Globe examined the reception that Gottlieb professor of law Elizabeth Warren is getting, in Washington and nationally. Warren chairs the Congressional Oversight Panel that was created to oversee the U.S. banking bailout and is now crafting the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (an idea she suggested in the May-June 2008 issue of Harvard Magazine, in “Making Credit Safer”). She is getting some flak as an ivory-tower elitist, but says her work is inspired by growing up in a “cheap little crackerbox on the end of town” in Norman, Oklahoma, writes Michael Kranish of the Globe’s Washington bureau. For more of Warren’s own writing, see “The Middle Class on the Precipice,” from our January-February 2006 issue.
In this week’s Economist, the business columnist known as “Schumpeter” praises a new book by Josh Lerner, Schiff professor of investment banking at Harvard Business School. In Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed—and What to Do About It, Lerner examines failed economic-development efforts in countries including Malaysia, Norway, Canada, France, and Japan. To learn more about Lerner’s work, read about his analysis of corporate buyouts in the Harvard Magazine archives.
On the heels of last weekend’s New York Times article on ROTC policies at elite universities comes a related Wall Street Journal opinion piece. Main Street columnist William McGurn writes that 10 alumni of Harvard—more than any other school other than the military-service academies—have received the Medal of Honor (surprising, McGurn writes, given that the ROTC program was “chucked off campus at the height of the Vietnam War and remains officially unrecognized today.”) Harvard’s 10 recipients of the nation’s highest military honor will be recognized next week, on Veterans’ Day, at the Memorial Church (see “Above and Beyond,” in our current issue) in a ceremony cosponsored by the Harvard Veterans Alumni Organization; Advocates for Harvard ROTC, a group that supports allowing the program’s return to campus, and the Business, Kennedy, and Law Schools’ armed forces clubs.
A November 2 Globe article described the reasons behind the eerie sight of tens of thousands of dead oak trees on Martha’s Vineyard, and quotes Harvard Forest director David Foster, who says the die-off may be a consequence of climate change and a predictor of more widespread tree death to come. Read more about Foster and the Harvard Forest in “Dr. Foster’s Forest,” from our March-April 1998 issue, and an excerpt from Foster’s book, Thoreau’s Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape.
Another article in the same issue of the Globe, by Bina Venkataraman, M.P.A. ’08, explored the phenomenon of offering large sums of money as prizes for innovation; Calestous Juma, professor of the practice of international development at the Harvard Kennedy School, was quoted.
