Politics, Economics and other Stuff

Silly University Ranking

This has to be one of the more silly university rankings of all time.  The Guardian reports: Oxford slips in international university ranking as Asian rivals 'snap at heels.'

Oxford fell from fourth to joint fifth place with Imperial College London in the QS/Times Higher Education rankings, published today, widening the gap with Cambridge which was rated second in the world. University College London (UCL) leapfrogged Oxford coming fourth after Yale, Cambridge and Harvard.

Overall the UK still punches above its weight, second only to the US. It has four out of the top 10 slots and 18 in the top 100. But there has been a significant fall in the number of North American universities in the top 100, from 42 in 2008 to 36 in 2009. The number of Asian universities in the top 100 increased from 14 to 16. The University of Tokyo, at 22, is the highest ranked Asian university, ahead of the University of Hong Kong at 24. ..

Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group of Universities, said: "The broad message of these tables is clear – the leading UK research universities are held in high esteem internationally but countries like China and Korea, which are investing massively in their best institutions, are snapping at our heels.

"The precise accuracy of league tables like this can be debated but there is no mistaking the alarm bell warning that our success is at risk if we as a nation don't take action to fight off such fierce competition."

She added that the UK was less well-funded than its competitors and if public spending cuts hit budgets they would be under increasing pressure. Universities are currently arguing for improved funding in a forthcoming review of the student finance system, to be launched by the government within weeks. They are increasingly calling for fees to be increased to safeguard the quality of their teaching.

The top three US universities according to this ranking: Harvard, Yale, U Chicago.  Ironic, to say the least. 

Harvard Fundraising

TaxProf blog writes:

In today's Harvard Crimson, Caspersen Taxes May Be Suspect:

Harvard Law School’s biggest donor, who died last week in an apparent suicide, may have owed up to $100 million in back taxes and fines, the New York Times reported this week.

Finn M.W. Caspersen, who gave over $30 million to the Law School and tens of millions more to other philanthropic enterprises, may have been implicated in a sweeping federal investigation of offshore bank accounts, said the Times’ anonymous source. ...

According to the Times’ source, federal authorities have placed liens on the personal trusts of Caspersen’s four sons, all of whom also attended the Law School.

The TaxProf Email Discussion Group today debated whether the IRS could clawback any of the $30 million gift to Harvard Law School under the transferee liability rules of § 6901.  Mary O'Keeffe (Union College) noted that much of the $30 million may be in the form of a pledge, and Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.) directed the group to a 1993 article, Pledges to Nonprofit Organizations: Are They Enforceable and Must They Be Enforced?, which concludes:

When it comes to enforcing pledges, charities have demonstrated a timidity not characteristic of their solicitation practices. Charities seem to fear the loss of subscribers if it became practice to sue to enforce the subscriptions. Indeed, a review of the reported cases shows that the great majority of such actions were brought only after the death of the subscriber, when the charity was willing to dispute with the heirs over the assets.

News from Yale

Well, news from Yale sounds less than idyllic right now.  Media noise.  Not my employer any more...

1) Disgruntled former employees: The gunman is suspected to have been targeting the Yale Human Resources office, located at 221 Whitney Ave.

2) A missing female MD-Ph.D. student in the national news with more than 100 police personnel looking for her.

3) More looming budget cuts:

The University’s budget deficit will grow to $150 million each year from 2010-’11 through 2013-’14, University President Richard Levin said in a letter to the Yale community Thursday. As a result, the administration wants to squeeze another 5 percent of reductions out of the current year’s non-personnel spending, in addition to cuts that will be made in future years.  ...
For the current year, all departments have already had to reduce their staff and non-salary spending by 7.5 percent, with the expectation that they would cut another 5 percent in non-salary expenditures next year. On Thursday, Levin asked them to start cutting that 5 percent now — targeting travel, entertainment, equipment, and supplies — with the understanding that even more cuts will follow.

Not clear to me how one does this...I'd guess not all departments have the same sort of margins to cut.  Across the board cuts, if actually done and not just announced, are usually a bad idea.  Cuts should be program eliminations for programs that should be cut anyway, with the budget just providing cover. 

All just from today's front page of the Yale Daily News. 

Update #1: one day later we've moved on to 'University: Professor is not a suspect in disappearance' and 'No suspects in disappearance, police say'.  I'm still disgruntled about how Yale handled the last case of a student murder, with the hounding of her thesis adviser, a lecturer, as a 'person of interest' by the university administration for reasons that seemed not to go beyond 'lets puts some pressure on him' (based on 2nd hand accounts of what the university counsel told someone I know).    

A student murder is the sort of bad public relations which feeds into existing perceptions and which scares off prospective students.  Bad for Yale and New Haven. Not clear what can be done ex post though.  If this is a murder and not some form of cold feet/stress related disappearance, a non-New Haven acquaintance murder would be the next best thing, compared to a stranger or non-Yale New Haven acquaintance murder.  

Journal Citation Counts

via Organizations and Markets, Howard J. Wall, Don't Get Skewed Over by Journal Rankings:

Nearly all journal rankings in economics use some weighted average of citations to calculate a journal's impact. These rankings are often used, formally or informally, to help assess the publication success of individual economists or institutions. Although ranking methods and opinions are legion, scant attention has been paid to the usefulness of any ranking as representative of the many articles published in a journal. First, because the distributions of citations across articles within a journal are seriously skewed, and the skewness differs across journals, the appropriate measure of central tendency is the median rather than the mean. Second, large shares of articles in the highest-ranked journals are cited less frequently than typical articles in much-lower-ranked journals.

Interesting if true.  I'm worried about the 'typical' above -- do median citations actually dominate for lower ranked journals?  Any other lower part of the distribution dominate?

Salary Reductions at UC Berkeley?

Supposedly UC Berkeley is going to try to cut faculty salaries by 8%.  Not clear what the time horizon is.  This is a 2nd round cut for some senior faculty salaries.  Bonus elimination has occurred as well (for non-faculty?).  

Martha Minow is Dean of Harvard Law School

The Harvard University Gazette has the news.  I read Minow's 1990 book Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law shortly after it came out -- yes, the crazy things I did in graduate school -- and did wonder at the time where she would go in life.  Well, she was already tenured at Harvard and did have some family exposure to the law. 

Minow is the daughter of Newton Minow, famed for his 'vast wasteland' remark about TV and former FCC Chair under JFK. The Minows also have an Obama connection, as Vanity Fair pointed out last year:

One of the clearest-eyed grandees of the Chicago establishment, Newton Minow has long seen something special in Obama. Minow played key roles in the two presidential campaigns of Adlai E. Stevenson, then went on to become John F. Kennedy’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, famously pronouncing television programming “a vast wasteland” in 1961, a few months before Obama was born. At 81, sitting in his law office at Sidley Austin, in the Loop, above a stretch of street christened Honorary Newton N. Minow Way, Minow is talking about the young man his daughter Martha, a professor at Harvard Law School, recommended for a summer associate’s job two decades ago. At Minow’s firm Obama fell in love with a young lawyer, Michelle Robinson, who would become his wife. Minow acknowledges that he initially opposed two of Obama’s earlier runs for office—his unsuccessful congressional-primary race against the Democratic incumbent, Bobby Rush, in 2000 (the only election for office Obama has lost so far), and his campaign for the Senate, in 2004—and says he asked Obama both times, “Are you nuts?”

Minow opposed Obama’s decision to run for the presidency too, until he caught the senator on C-span during a book-promotion tour in Iowa in late 2006. The formal program was over, but the cameras lingered, capturing Obama’s interaction with the crowd.

“I adored Jack Kennedy,” Minow explains, “and I saw the 21st-century version of Jack Kennedy in my mind. He is astonishing. I think the fundamental point is the country wants a different kind of politics.” He adds, “I also believe the race issue and the gender issue are yesterday, particularly with young people.”

Just my usual remark that one should not hold family background against people, especially if they use it wisely.