Deb Shore, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District in the Chicagoland region, just completed Harvard's Kennedy School of Government Senior Executives in State and Local Government Program in Cambridge last month.  She talks about her experience there in the video (length: 8:54).

What do you think of Harry Potter?  I ask this of you, class of '08, not because I care, but because I want to prepare you for your next job interview. . . and the one after that. . . and the one after that.  In fact, you have entered yourselves into the annals of history as one of the dumbest aggregates to come out of any institution of higher education, ever.

Today, NPR's Morning Edition reported the outcry made by members of the Harvard Class of '08 over their commencement speaker, one J.K. Rowling. In the report, the students themselves used phrases like "she is unworthy" of performing such a hallowed task as commencement speaker. That she has been invited to such a thing is a black mark upon our class.  If you read further, I will show you the black mark on your class and exactly who put it there.

From SaveTheInternet.com:
... It is rare for all five members of the Federal Communications Commission to leave Washington, D.C., and they want to hear from you. There will be a public comment period* - come speak up to save the Internet!

WHAT: Public Hearing on the Future of the Internet
WHEN: Thursday, April 17th
TIME: 12:00pm to 7:00pm
WHERE: Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University
             (471 Lagunita Drive, Palo Alto, CA)

*The press about this meeting says no onsite public comments, not sure which is which here... but you can submit comments prior to the meeting to be considered--instructions below.

Elizabeth told bloggers on a conference call shortly after the Edwards campaign suspended, that she’ll "be around."  

She’s keeping her word.

Today, Elizabeth was a guest on NPR, where she discussed how McCain’s healthcare plan,  "falls short in every conceivable way."

PODCAST: LISTEN  to Elizabeth on NPR- April 8, 2008

If you've ever seen CSI:NY, or if you've seen Will.I.Am's "Yes We Can" video, then you've seen Hill Harper's face. What you may not know is that besides being a fine actor, Harper was also a law-school classmate of Barack Obama's at Harvard -- and now he's made a fabulous 30-second spot endorsing him, which has just been put up on the Dipdive.com site.

Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute is promoting his new book, Plan B 3.0, a set of policy prescriptions to help heal the ecological systems that support the biosphere and human life.  On February 22, 2008, he was in Cambridge to speak at Harvard's Center for the Environment and address the Cambridge Forum.  I attended the afternoon session at Harvard.

Brown was introduced by Daniel Schrag, the head of the Center, and spoke for about twenty minutes.  This was followed by a response from Michael McElroy, the first head of the Center, comments by Schrag, and then a question and answer session.

The primary insight I took away from the event was Brown's statement, "The price of grain is directly tied to the price of oil."  This coupling of oil to food is closer than ever as the effects of shifting grain to a fuel feedstock rather than human and livestock uses is already coming home in the rise in the cost of pasta in Italy and flour in the United States as producers plant corn for ethanol rather than wheat for food.

Check this out: "Barackula is a short political horror rock musical about young Barack Obama having to stave off a secret society of vampires at Harvard when he was inducted into presidency at the Harvard Law Review in 1990. Obama (Justin Sherman) finds that he must convince the vampire society that opposing political philosophies can coexist or else the society may transform Obama to the dark side." Here's the link.

Recent announcements by Harvard and Yale universities to expand financial aid are good news for the small number of students helped, but do little to dispel the impression of an ivory tower still removed from regular people.

I've got to admit that most of my college football energy is spent rooting for the Oklahoma Sooners.  But once a year, my thoughts turn to my alma mater, Harvard.  

One of the many few great things about Harvard football is that it's a successful season if we beat Yale...so there's really no reason to pay attention to any of the rest of it.  As it turns out, this season Harvard and Yale were both undefeated in the Ivy League going into today's game at the Yale Bowl, so this was for all the marbles (if one considers an Ivy League football championship to be "all the marbles"). Though Yale, playing at home and with a better record, was pretty heavily favored, Harvard kicked their behinds, 37-6.  

Last night, Maureen Dowd gave the TH White lecture at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.  I asked her a question about what seems to be the increasingly dire timeframe for climate change and peak oil.  She responded by saying that it was amazing to her but George W. Bush seems to have turned America green, a reaction to his determinedly black or brown policies according to what I take to be her reasoning.  She didn't respond at all to my main point, the increasingly likely possibility that climate change has already reached the tipping point, that world oil production figures indicate that peak oil may have already happened, and that any mitigating actions should have been in place yesterday if not the day before.

At a panel this morning, again at Harvard, I asked Dana Priest about the same question and whether anybody in the national security establishment was looking at these possibilities.  She responded by telling me to contact the Washington Post's environmental reporter if I thought they were missing the story.

Harvard finally has a female president. She is Drew Gilpin Faust and replaces Lawrence Summers who had a short tenure in large part because he raised critical questions about the academic output of some of the university’s most esteemed African-American faculty members (Cornell West to be specific, who among other things put out a Rap record)) and, perhaps more transgressively, speculated about the genetic differences between males and females when it comes to scientific achievement. With that one, it was only a matter of days before the Harvard board would need to find a sinecure for him. Which they did.

As a college student, one of the things that bugs me is the textbook racket. Most students are scraping by working jobs & taking out loans to pay for tuition, board & transportation, only to be screwed over at the University bookstore.

Depending on the class, students sometimes are required to get $100+ textbooks. Get enough classes & you're looking at the equivalent of a month's rent to purchase a semester's worth of textbooks. And when the semester is over & you go to the campus bookstore to sell the books back, the school will gladly give you back a fraction of what you paid, if they'll even buy the books back at all. Elementary calculus hasn't changed much in the last century, but the University will screw over its students by forcing a new edition on them.

It would be a more honest situation if the cashiers at the campus bookstore had ski-masks and guns.

Well, Harvard has taken matters to another level. In order to stop students from comparing the prices between the bookstore & online alternatives, Harvard is claiming that if a student writes down ISBN numbers & prices, it's a copyright violation.

(Courtesy of CN'ya News)

   As per our breaking stories the last two days on President Bush's full pardon for leading dead Nazis and for various accused traitors or criminals, the President has now pardoned Al Gore III for any prospective drug convictions.
   
    "Hell, we both went to Harvard! And like to have a little fun! And it's the 4th of July! Freedom!!! like my friend Mel Giblet says when he's wearin' that Scottie skirt!!" said the President, "bonging" a large of quantity of "near beer" while in a hot tub with new friend Angie Merkel.

    Mr. Bush, seemingly tipsy, then blamed global warming on the 9/11 explosions, called Al Gore "Al Qaida", and said, "Al! Why the hell can't you be a real American like me or your son there?" before he sank beneath the suds, soap suds or otherwise.

We've heard that some of Alberto Gonzales' Harvard Law classmates think he's done a pretty lousy job as Attorney General.

Now, what exactly does George W. Bush’s alma mater think of the first MBA President?   They think that BushCo is a case study in "failed leadership", and the President and his friends in the mass media threaten national security.   Fire Bush and his management team before The Decider and Fox News destroy what’s left of the country.

That’s the judgment of Harvard Business School professor D. Quinn Mills and coauthor Steven Rosefielde in their new book, Masters of Illusion: American Leadership in the Media Age (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

D. Quinn Mills is the Alfred J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

MORE below . . .

Well, today I'd like to run through the bunch of headlines and trends that have caught my eye this morning, with news from Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, to our very own tower of academic achievement, Harvard University. Why Harvard, do you ask? Well, it's where the renowned war-criminal Dan Halutz is hanging out, haven't you heard?

If you want to skip right to the action items, look toward the bottom of the diary.

We'd like to think that the world in which we live is safe. In many ways, it is safe for a lot of us, but certainly not for everyone. As an academic, I want to believe that I am immune to the violence of the world when I am on campus. I think to myself that a university is a center for learning, where people learn to accept a lot of different ideas and how to deal with problems in a civilized manner.

And yet, I know better than most people that centers of learning are not always so safe. I was shot at more than once in my high school, and stabbed three times. I have known dozens of other survivors of such extreme scholastic violence, and I have studied the phenomenon. Like many of you, I watched in horror as the events of the Virginia Tech massacre unfolded just a few short weeks ago. I know all too well the importance of a strong, qualified, competent, satisfied security force on campus. And now this morning, there was another incident involving a Fresno State student (though it was off campus).

Two years ago Larry Summers, then-president of Harvard University, attended conference at which he said that differences in "intrinsic aptitude" may explain why there are so few female scientists at top universities.

As I'm sure we all remember, this caused a firestorm and was one of the factors that led to the resignation of an already beleaguered Summers.

The controversy played out in the press as a fight between political correctness and free speech. Which, of course, it wasn't. Summers' supporters portrayed him as a maverick intellectual whose only interest was in pursuing the truth, fighting against the forces of PC thuggery.

Well, they're back.

I live halfway between Harvard and MIT and have the leisure to go to many of their public events, stealing as much intellectual property as possible.  Tuesday, March 6, 2007 I went to both institutions and heard Chris Isham, chief of investigative projects at ABC News, at Harvard at noon and John Hockenberry, former NBC News and NPR correspondent, at MIT at four.  Both were educational, in different ways.

Warning:  One expletive undeleted and at least one other rude phrase.