Boston Globe Magazine, June 29, 2003
College Rivalry
Universities will do almost anything these days to land a star professor
who can bring instant prestige, attract large donors, and, oh yes, even do
some teaching.
By Patrick Healy
Professor Niall Ferguson is one of the best young British historians of his
generation, a red-hot talent who weaves Keynesian economics and World War I
politics in such silky language that even students who skipped the homework
can understand him. Ferguson is a bright rising star in academia's
firmament, and Harvard, Oxford, and New York University all want him.
Yet being a star isn't just about great teaching anymore. One evening this
spring, Ferguson hustles into an NYU classroom six minutes late, puts down
his Coke, and promptly announces to his students that he has something to
confess: He hasn't prepared a lecture. All his free time, you see, has gone
into promoting his new book on Britain's colonial past, Empire, a tempered
apologia for the empire's effect on the civilizations it subsumed. There's
the author tour, the speaking engagements, the media interviews, and the
essays for The New York Times that create a buzz around his name. Ferguson
may be a wonderful classroom presence, but he's only teaching on Tuesdays
and Thursdays; his activities the other five days of the week have been
essential to his zoom to the top.
"I'm woefully underprepared," Ferguson tells the 60 business school
students, stretching out each syllable with his Scottish lilt in a way
that's at once chagrined and charming � Hugh Grant as the absent-minded
professor.
"I woke up at 6 a.m. and panicked that I had nothing to say."
Some students begin to twitter.
"I decided to confess this in hopes of winning your sympathy."
He grins a bit � the impish, telegenic face that helped make him a favorite
commentator on British TV news.
"Some of you may feel it's right to leave."
The future MBAs are laughing now. No one gets up to exit. And for the next
hour, Ferguson runs a fast-paced seminar about far-right politics in Europe
that � while a bit light on substance � completely energizes the room.
Students love Ferguson. After only one semester at NYU's Stern School of
Business, he has just been voted Most Popular Professor. And like a Major
League MVP or an Oscar-winning heartthrob, this trophy professor bears a
value in his industry that is hard to overstate.
The celebrification of academia has been underway for some years, as
wealthy universities increasingly strive for prestige, and faculty like
Ferguson are now a commodity to fight over. NYU is rising in the college
rankings � and moving toward its goal of becoming an edgier, downtown
Columbia University, minus the ivy � in large part because it aggressively
woos and wins stars who enhance its reputation.
NYU stole Ferguson from Oxford by raising his salary by tens of thousands
of dollars; making him the Herzog Professor of Financial History, an
endowed chair; providing a cozy Greenwich Village flat; and helping pay for
trans-Atlantic plane tickets so Ferguson can see his wife and three
children back in England. (His wife, Susan Douglas, a publishing executive
with Conde Nast in London, is reluctant to relocate to the States.) And now
Harvard is calling: Ferguson has been approved for a tenure appointment
there, and university officials say they are plotting ways to poach him.
Ferguson is just the sort of star that Harvard president Lawrence H.
Summers craves � an energetic, prolific 39-year-old who just published his
sixth book and whose best work is likely still to come.
"One couldn't imagine all of this happening in Oxford, where there's a kind
of gentleman's agreement that we're all equally brilliant," Ferguson says
in an interview. "It's extremely bad form to suggest that one person is as
vulgar as to be a star. But it's rather sweet and flattering to be told
you're good. And it's positively disorienting to be told you're a star."
(clip)
The first time Harvard tried to poach Edward Said, in the mid-1980s, he was
already an intellectual giant on Columbia's literature faculty and a
politically active ally of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser
Arafat. He also had children in New York City schools and a wife who didn't
see Cambridge as the next stop in her banking career. Harvard officials
made him a generous offer, he says, but they shot themselves in the foot
when they pooh-poohed Columbia's free-tuition policy for children of its
faculty.
"Harvard tried to convince me that a student loan was better than getting
an outright grant," Said recalls.
Harvard struck again in the 1990s with another handsome package. By then
Columbia was determined to make Said happy, offering to move him a
half-block down Riverside Drive from where he was, to an apartment with a
better view of the East River. Said was torn. But a visit made up his mind.
"Everyone was on lots of academic committees at Harvard," he says. "They
had meetings at 8 o'clock in the morning. I had never been on a committee
in my life, and I didn't want to start then."
Said is one kind of star � a senior statesman in his field who would
instantly glamorize a university's humanities program and attract attention
from the wider public. (Said was once accused of throwing a stone near an
Israeli watchtower in Lebanon, a minor international incident that led some
to call for his firing.) And while his concerns are the same as those of
many stars � family needs and academic freedoms can often outweigh the
highest bids � his value to a university helps illuminate differences among
the stars. They can be categorized in a few ways:
Rock stars � the personalities or celebrities; known for controversy as
much as for their work. Said is one; Carol Gilligan, the gender
psychologist who is often misunderstood as favoring girls over boys, is
another. (NYU poached her from Harvard in 2001.) Deirdre McCloskey, the
Iowa economist whose sex change in the mid-1990s made her the talk of the
field, was poached by the University of Illinois at Chicago with a 35
percent salary increase. BU chancellor John Silber has recruited Nobel
laureates with offers of prestigious titles or light teaching loads,
including author Saul Bellow (with one class per year), activist Elie
Wiesel (two classes a year), poet and playwright Derek Walcott, and
physicist Sheldon Glashow.
Stature stars � the builders. They start or shore up programs that will
define a campus and impress alumni and donors. In the last two years,
Columbia recruited Sachs and Nobel economist Joseph E. Stiglitz to boost
its development group. NYU has also wooed two other star scholars to
economics, Stanford's Tom Sargent and Harvard Business School game theorist
Adam Brandenburger. Asked why he left Harvard, Brandenburger told a student
newspaper recently, "The way I put it is that being at Stern is being on
the up escalator."
Department stars � the leaders. They are important players in their fields
and often fill a crucial niche on campus. Harvard sought Greenblatt in the
mid-1990s to strengthen its bench in Shakespeare and New Historicist
literary theory. Dartmouth's business school mourned the loss of Rohit
Deshpande, their marketing program star, to Harvard Business School. James
O. Freedman, a former Dartmouth president, says, "The dean and I [told
Deshpande] we'd make time for work, a sabbatical, anything."
Sunset stars, or extinct volcanoes � the legends. Most are in their 50s and
60s, wooed by universities that want a short-time return on the big names
before they retire. Famed philosopher Richard Rorty was hired by Stanford
at age 66 and given a flexible teaching load. NYU recruited two-time
Pulitzer Prize winner David Levering Lewis this winter, at age 67,
improving upon his $160,000 salary from Rutgers and offering an easier
commute from his home on the Upper West Side.
Superstars � they do it all. And they have crossed over from academia to
become celebrities that average Americans have heard of. Henry Louis "Skip"
Gates Jr. is a black-studies star who became a popular essayist for The New
Yorker and is now involved in film and television. Philosophy star Cornel
West, who jumped from Princeton to Harvard and back to Princeton last year,
is another, crossing over into hip-hop music and political commentary.
Niall Ferguson was a superstar in Britain; his time in America bears watching.
Among the newest superstars is Steven Pinker, the MIT language and mind
specialist and a best-selling author who is now heading to the psychology
department that William James and B. F. Skinner built at Harvard. As a sign
of his crossover status, Pinker was actually first courted for a job in
Harvard's English department by two of its stars, Skip Gates and Elaine
Scarry. Over jambalaya and beers at the Green Street Grill in Cambridge,
Pinker told them about his latest book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial
of Human Nature, which carefully suggests that genetics � not society,
family, or God � is the main force behind human behavior. It's hot stuff,
the kind of incendiary material that has burned other scholars trying to
link genetics, IQ, and race. Pinker avoids dwelling on such links and
instead tracks the way that genes can influence our actions. "Skip and
Elaine understood where my work was going. Skip loves the concept of the
marketplace of ideas. He said to me, 'You're going to get fried. I think
it's great,' " Pinker recalls. "But the conversation set things in motion."
full: http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2003/0629/coverstory.htm
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