OXFORD BLOG | 200K Views—Top 10 Most-Read Posts Since 2013

The Oxford blog has reached 200,000 page views. 

Thank you for reading. Comment, please, or contact the blog owner directly at jtmarlin@post.harvard.edu.

Here are the top ten most-read Oxford posts since May 2013.

Entry

WW2: Why Wasn't Oxford Bombed? (21K Views, Feb. 11... Jun 8, 2013, 3 comments

OXFORD IN FICTION: Top Six Fictional Colleges (Upd... Jul 2, 2016

HERALDRY: Oxford Stars (Updated Feb. 24, 2017) Nov 21, 2014, 2 comments

BOAT RACE: Dinners 2015 Mar 1, 2015

HERALDRY: Douglas, Moray, de Vere (Updated Sep. 16... Nov 23, 2014, 2 comments

R.I.P.: Peter V. Darrow (1950-2013) May 20, 2013

BRITISH PMs: Universities Attended (Updated Aug. 1... Jul 14, 2016

THERESA MAY: Time at Oxford (Updated Oct. 29, 2016... Jul 27, 2016

R.I.P.: July 11–Oxonian John Brademas, NYU Preside... Jul 25, 2016

R.I.P.: Oxonian Geoffrey Hill, Poet Jul 2, 2016

SOCIALISM | Who Funded the Brave Magazines in 1910-1922?

Art Young (1866-1943)

January 22, 2017–In today's New York Times a photo takes up nearly half of p. 10, the first page of a section called "The Inauguration". The photo is of Inez Milholland on horseback, about to set off 104 years ago, on March 3, 1913, from Capitol Hill up Pennsylvania Avenue to Lafayette Square, where there was a viewing stand in front of the Treasury Building.

She and her 5,000 or more (the National Park Service estimated 8,000) fellow suffragist marchers attracted the attention of the rest of Washington and a crowd of half a million people gathered around, many of the onlookers deeply hostile. Violence ensued that the D.C. police did little to break up until cavalry arrived from Fort Myer. When President-Elect Woodrow Wilson arrived at the VIP entrance at Union Station, no one was there to greet him except a White House driver and a staff member from the outgoing President (Taft).

The march alone established Inez as a brave woman. But little remembered is the role she played in directing funding to in-your-face socialist publications, especially The Masses. I have just been reading Art Young's long and interesting first (1928) autobiography, My Life and Times, available online (http://bit.ly/2jSuoeO – the download is slow because the file is large), and he has some interesting things to say in this connection.

Inez Milholland was the daughter of a newspaperman who became wealthy by investing in underground tubes for moving mail in big cities. Her socialist views deeply upset him.

These views motivated her to help her friend Max Eastman start The Masses, and after her death in 1916 influenced her widower, Eugen Boissevain, to fund other socialist publications.

Boissevain made a small fortune with two of his five brothers, importing coffee from Java in what was then the Dutch East Indies.

The socialist publications in the 1911-1922 period covered by Art Young coincided with the creation of the traditions and energy that emanated for the rest of the century from Greenwich Village.

These traditions were also wrapped up with the energy of New York University. Inez Milholland attended NYU Law School – and thereby became part of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company strike in 1909 and a witness to the fire in 1911 – because her application to Harvard Law School and other more prestigious school was rejected because of her gender. The Harvard Law School faculty decided she could do the work, but the administration did not admit women for another four decades–not until 1950.

1. The Masses, 1911-17


Art Young shows how The Masses got started with a $2,000 contribution (equal to about $50,000 today says the BLS inflation calculator) from Alva Belmont, whose support was enlisted by Inez. Max Eastman hadn't thought of approaching her, because he knew that Alva wasn't a socialist. But Inez knew that Alva was a supporter of suffragist causes and correctly perceived that she would be open to supporting other issues if properly presented. (See Young, previously cited 1928 Autobiography, p. 297.)

Inez explained to him that Alva was a "militant" – which would be enough for her to want to enable militancy of other kinds.

Alva's gift was quickly matched by $1,000 from popular novelist John Fox and then another $2,000 from civil rights lawyer Amos Pinchot. That was sufficient to get the magazine under way. Belmont made subsequent contributions.

The magazine was ended when Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster General invoked wartime laws against sedition and refused to mail it. The magazine was succeeded by another one led by Max Eastman, The Liberator, and later by The New Masses.

2. Good Morning, 1919-22


Cartoonist Art Young, a mainstay of The Masses, created his own magazine in 1919. He needed $4,500 to get it going, and received $1,000 of it (equal to about $25,000 today according to the BLS) from Inez's widower Eugen Boissevain. Eugen asked Art: "Are you sure this is enough?" (See his previously cited 1928 autobiography, p. 356.)

Art's magazine competed with Max Eastman's new magazine The Liberator. It only lasted three years. The value of these magazines is that they show an alternative point of view to the prevailing mood of capitalist acquisitiveness that lasted until FDR's election in 1932.

3. John Reed's Trip to Russia

Eugen Boissevain is credited by Max Eastman in his book Great Companions with contributing and raising the money that John Reed needed to go to Russia and write the book that became Seven Days that Shook the World.

NYC as a Potential #1 Global Tech Leader

L to R: John Tepper Marlin, Helen Keller, Henry Etzkowitz.

Last month I met with my friend Henry Etzkowitz for breakfast. There he is with the hat in the photo at left. I am taking the picture (a "selfie") with my right hand. Behind us is a portrait of Helen Keller that reminds me of the thought, “None so blind as cannot see,” an idea dating back before Oedipus to Jeremiah 5:21.

On the appropriate policies for encouraging technology, Etzkowitz is my guru. He travels around the country and the world picking up honors for his documentation of policy successes, and I update him on recent developments in NY State and NY City, the most interesting of which is the Cornell-Technion Center on Roosevelt Island.

Over the last two decades we have often shaken our heads together at the failures of NYC policy-making to encourage technology as an engine of local economic development.

Tech Policy, NYC, 1995-1999 

Our shared interest in tech policy goes back to the 1990s when I was serving as chief economist for the second of the three NY City Comptrollers, between 1992 and 2006. The chief economist function was created by new responsibilities conferred by the 1990 NYC Charter Revision on the Office of the NY City Comptroller.

(The Comptroller, an elected official, is currently John Liu. Eliot Spitzer has just thrown his hat in the ring to succeed Liu. Outgoing Borough President Scott Stringer has for months been considered the most likely to be elected.)

The City Comptroller's office has been included in economic-development planning - for example, in a 1995 conference organized by the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Bill McDonough. The NY Fed called together leading institutions in the region to explore New York’s potential for transition to a knowledge economy, imitating the initiative taken before and after World War II by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and leading to the expansion of tech startups along Route 128. The Lower Manhattan Association provided administrative support for the NY Fed’s conference, and a young science-policy graduate, Michael Salvato, worked on the program. Etzkowitz was a key participant, as the then-director of SUNY’s Science Policy Institute.

Magnificent it was, but not sustained. Few participating institutions signed up for the follow-up phase. Contrast this with the New England Council, a decades-long effort from the 1920s that sought to follow the model that led to Silicon Valley, by systematizing the high-tech spinning-off fostered at Harvard and MIT.

The New England Council sustained its effort first in scientific instruments at the turn of the 20th century, then in radio in the 1920s. Their work helped create Small Business Investment Companies and the entire venture capital industry after World War II. When I was at the Small Business Administration in the 1960s, I was able to study at close quarters the successes of the SBIC program. The American Research and Development Corporation was founded in 1946 as a pro bono regional development effort. A decade later it founded the Digital Equipment Projects, which was intended to create better aircraft training simulators but engineered the mini-computer along the way.

Why Did the NYC Regional Effort Fail? 

So why was the effort not sustained in New York City, in contrast to the Bay Area and Route 128?

Maybe

• Silicon Alley was considered to be doing okay by itself and the involvement of government and universities wasn't seen as necessary. 
• NYC software firms that were competing with the Bay Area and Route 128 by supporting Wall Street's highly proprietary electronification projects did not see any value in regional cooperation. 
• Their growth was resisted by traditional parts of the advertising industry, which felt that it was being cannibalized. (The AOL merger with Time Warner did not seem to be good for the traditional information and communication businesses.)
• Some knowledgable tech people felt that NYC was too far behind Stanford and MIT both on the entrepreneurial front and in the sophistication of its programming to begin to compete. 
• Others decided that nothing more was needed than a professional association - first the NY New Media Association, then the NY Software Industry Association (which evolved into an incubator that depended too much on its real estate viability) and the putatively broader-based Tech Council.)

The NYC Software/IT Industry Report, 1999 

In this environment, the NYC Comptroller’s Office published a report, under my direction, on the “NYC Software/IT Industry” in April 1999 (summary and links to pdf files here). The NY Times covered it well, including with its summary of the report a photo of the Comptroller. The Chancellor of CUNY, Professor Harry Markowitz, told the Comptroller he loved the report. The Comptroller was pleased and generously said so. Etzkowitz played a key role in helping us define the history of tech policy and an appropriate path forward for NYC, as reflected in the last few chapters of the report.

The Report showed that New York had most of the elements required for a world-class technology center:

• A public-school system that provides a steady supply of well-trained high school graduates who are ready to grapple with technology issues at the university level.
• Close cooperation among regional universities, private and state-run (and definitely including community colleges), to ensure strong support for entrepreneurs seeking high-quality technical staff.
• Centers of technology excellence among the universities, especially schools of engineering, and supportive faculty at business and law schools.
• Training for technology experts in tech transfer and entrepreneurship.
• University-based incubator labs and university support for policies that reward labs and centers and individuals within them for innovation. 
• Business interest in, and support for, bringing university-based ideas to market in a collaborative environment.
• Government support for technology to encourage university-business cooperation.

The big missing tooth in this dazzling smile was the entrepreneurial skills created by the open communication between universities and business in Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Mass.  NYU and Columbia around that time announced they were going to work more closely together on research and technology initiatives.

The Dot-Com Bust and Mayor Bloomberg’s First Two Terms 

However, in fact technology took a back seat after the sharp drop in dot-com share values in spring and fall 2000. The NY Academy of Sciences won a million-dollar grant from the STARR foundation, but the large universities were not impressed and most of the funds went to support publications drawing attention to the tech assets of the region. A seminar series drew second-tier administrators and junior faculty, with the notable exception of the President of New York Poly in Brooklyn.

One practical result was the creation of a network of area university technology officers who spun off their own support network. After 9/11, and the election of a mayor who had made his fortune by selling technology services in the form of Bloomberg machines, Etzkowitz and I expected the new mayor to lead a major tech initiative that would make the City of New York into a tech center that might eclipse both Silicon Valley and Route 128.

We were disappointed. The new mayor made clear he was a businessman first and techie second, and he did not undertake any major tech initiatives in his first two terms. He made up for that in his third term with the competition that led to the Cornell-Technion project, but if he had stuck to the term limits in City Charter he would not have left much of a tech legacy.

For the ten years after the Comptroller's Software Report, Etzkowitz and did what we could to keep the recommendations of the software report in front of people who might implement them. Etzkowitz organized the NY Inter-University Seminar on Innovation, bringing researchers and practitioners together from across the region. We had monthly meetings with guest speakers who discussed the recommendations for inter-university cooperation for technology development. We deliberately did not meet at universities, but mostly in the Comptroller’s Office and sometimes the conference rooms of law and business offices.

In 2001 I wrote to the Mayor about creating a technology-transfer office comparable to the Mayor’s film and broadcasting office. In 2002 I met with Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff on the subject.  Etzkowitz also tried to get some interest from the new Mayor.

While the NYC Economic Development Corporation did some good things to assist firms involved in the knowledge economy, their focus was largely on matching up available real estate with business needs. They took action when real estate opportunities meshed with tech promotion.

The Cornell-Technion Initiative and NYC’s Potential 

In 2012, as the Cornell-Technion Roosevelt Island initiative took shape, Etzkowitz and I felt that our thesis of the missing link in NYC’s innovation ecosystem — a Stanford-MIT-like institution focusing on commercializing knowledge, tech transfer and incubation, as well as basic research and education - had found a place on NYC’s policy agenda.

In retrospect, it looks as though to get the interest of Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff we should have translated the Software Report recommendations into a real estate-driven project. When I met with Doctoroff I should have come in with a plan not just for policy but for leveraging $100 million in vacant city land and municipal bonding to attract 20 times that in university and business investment.

A lot of cities are trying to emulate the success of the Bay Area and Route 128. The typical competitors are state capitals with a local university like Albany, N.Y. or Austin, Tex. or Raleigh, N.C. On the Cornell-Technion plan, Etzkowitz comments:

Mayor Bloomberg’s Roosevelt Island project is now focusing on master’s-level students. But research groups require a variety of skills and levels of involvement, including Ph.D. students, post-doctoral fellows, teaching faculty, research associates and undergraduates, supported by large-scale research funding, typically from the federal government, with state government and industry support at the margin.

I remember attending a meeting of MIT alumni in NYC, when Mayor Bloomberg had just published his book and was contemplating a run for Mayor to succeed Giuliani. He emphasized how competition keeps everyone on their toes. Afterwards I spoke with an MIT professor who said that NYC would never catch up to Route 128 because it didn't have the entrepreneurial spirit. Etzkowitz thinks this is still a problem: "NYC still needs an MIT-type institution, along with a system of mentoring research groups to generate spinoffs. Entrepreneurship is a group activity."

One of the hopes of Mayor Bloomberg's economic development team is that Technion - which has a strong record of generating spinoffs - will stimulate Cornell and together they will light a fire under NYU, Columbia, CUNY and SUNY. Etzkowitz sees some potential in some "home team" NYC projects:

NYU has a big data analysis center focused on urban issues, building upon its mathematical strengths and industry links. Columbia is breaking its geographical boundaries, expanding its technology projects above 120th street and linking with City College, in a joint biomedical/engineering research center, building on the strengths of these two schools. NYC also has special assets. The SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology spins out boutique fashion firms, continuing the Institute’s role of bringing together industry and labor to helped the garment industry grow into the fashion industry. Similarly, the SUNY at Purchase theater and dance schools operate on an implicit incubator model, graduating theater and dance troupes into NYC’s thriving cultural economy.

A key to the future is how state governments are responding to their revenue challenges. Etzkowitz  thinks that underfunding of schools in California since Proposition 13 and cutbacks in support of the University of California may damage the Bay Area franchise. Massachusetts, meanwhile, is going in the other direction, funding its public schools and universities.

Henry, thank you for our conversations. And for you, the reader who has read this far - there is more to this story, so stay tuned! (Follow tweets on Twitter - @cityeconomist.) (August 14, 2014: See followup post here.)

NYPD | Does It Need an Inspector General?

The new wing of John Jay College, fronting on 11th Avenue, NYC. All photos by JT Marlin.

October 25, 2012 - Does the New York City Police Department need an Inspector-General?

That was the question before a panel at John Jay College this morning. The idea has been championed by the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law.

It is a strong alliance. John Jay College has just gone through a large expansion in its capacity, and the Brennan Center is a fierce fighter for the underdogs of the American public - and more narrowly the NYC public.

I attended the meeting at the suggestion of the NJ Institute for Social Justice, which I serve as Chief Economist. These notes on the meeting are my personal impressions. Any opinions expressed here are my own and are not necessarily those of the NJISJ.

One can't be engaged in policy issues in the NYC area without running into both John Jay and the Brennan Center. When I was investigating the underground economy as Chief Economist for the NYC Comptroller's Office, the Brennan Center invited me to a meeting of their street vendors association. Vendors made a strenuous case to me that they try to stay within the boundaries of the law. However, they said, these boundaries often change in arbitrary ways. Police interpretation of the law changes and the vendors are not always notified.

Elected officials ordinarily support the Police Commissioner and NYPD because police officers put their lives on the line and the public and their representatives can never be too grateful for that. But we have seen too many videotapes of bad-apple officers engaged in provocation or excessive use of force to be complacent about the extent to which every individual NYPD officer observes all the rules. That is the context of the proposal for an IG.

The Proposal

The Brennan Center has put together an attractive, well-documented, 40-page report making this case:
- Counter-terrorism and intelligence operations create new concerns about civil liberties.
- Intelligence oversight has special problems because abuse of power can be hard to prove.
- Existing oversight of the NYPD is inadequate to meet current challenges.
- Court oversight doesn't address reporting and monitoring needs.
- The Inspector General idea has been tried in Washington with success.
- A Police Auditor concept has also been tried with success.
- The NYPD needs an IG or similar body.

Jeremy Travis, President, John Jay College, CUNY 

The meeting was opened by John Jay President Jeremy Travis, who is riding high as the 620,000 sf, 13-story new building is finally open for business, filling in the entire area between 10th and 11th Avenues. Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center Liberty and National Security Program, introduced the meeting along with Donna Lieberman of the NY Civil Liberties Union, and then the panel members spoke in turn.

F. Warren ("Ned") Benton moderated the panel; he directs the MPA-IG track at John Jay, the only MPA program that is expressly devoted to inspection and oversight and the role of the IG. During the Q&A he emphasized the availability of standards from the association of IGs - how to do audits and reports and peer reviews.

L to R: Prof. Patrick O'Hara, Prof. Eugene O'Donnell, Ms. Faiza Patel, Prof.
Warren ("Ned") Benton, Ms. Donna Lieberman. 

Faiza Patel, Co-Director, Brennan Center

A graduate of Harvard College and NYU Law School, Ms. Patel says she is not anti-police - the NYPD is a "great department".

Rather, she is concerned about giving the NYPD a  "blank check". The stop, question and frisk program, aka "Stop and Frisk", has increased the number of random stops 600 percent.

The NYPD keeps emphasizing the importance of trust between the community and the police, but "Stop and Frisk" has frayed the community's trust. What an IG for the NYPD would do is bring in sunlight - transparency and accountability - to departmental systems. She emphasizes, as she did (with Elizabeth Goitein) in a New York Times Op-Ed on January 30, that her interest is not so much individual cases, but systematic inadequacies in procedures for training and operations.

Professor Patrick O'Hara, John Jay

Professor O'Hara led the development of the John Jay IG program. His writing addresses the dysfunctions in a police department that can generate problems and lack of accountability. In his comments he shows how existing NYPD oversight bodies - Internal Affairs and the Commission to Combat Police Corruption and the Civilian Complaint Review Board - had a role to play in processing individual complaints and cases but they did not address systemic NYPD problems. They and the Department of Investigation don't have the "structural positioning" that is needed to deal with systemic problems.

The IG, he says, would not be "overkill". What no existing body can do, and what the NYPD needs, he says, is what an IG would make possible - a reporting relationship of the NYPD to a body that will "let the chips fall where they may" ("fiat justitia, ruat caelum").

The Governor of Indiana has described the IG in Indiana as a "profit center" because it improves the state's efficiency and effectiveness. The IG has the "'structural logic" to get the job done, whether the individuals who staff the IG are brilliant or inept. It is the best way to assess the NYPD's concept of "policing by the numbers".

He did not think it should be viewed as a narrowly defined entity concerned only with civil liberties abuses. The IG concept has worked in NYC in corrections, education, fire, sanitation. The pedigree has been proven at the Federal level. It is an idea whose time may have come.

Donna Lieberman, Executive Director, NYCLU

NYC Councilwoman Brewer, standing in back..

Donna Lieberman heads up the NYCLU, having previously worked as a criminal defense attorney for the Legal Aid Society in the South Bronx office. She is easy to hear over the noise of the HVAC, which was noted afterwards by several older listeners who complained about the audio system or how it was utilized.  She believes that the NYPD can't do its job without an IG, whether its new anti-terrorism job or its traditional law-and-order job.

"It is asking too much of the City Council to do the NYPD oversight, although this is not to let them off the hook." (Councilwoman Gale Brewer, Chair of the Technology Committee of the City Council, attended part of the meeting.) The NYPD is made "a laughingstock" on television news or drama programs for its lack of oversight. She mentions the 17-year-old who caught an officer on tape calling him a "mutt".

She claims there is a "racist animus" in the NYPD and wonders who is going to "connect the dots". The Mayor delegates - the Rand Report recommendations were inadequate.

She singled out the school safety program as having no policy oversight. The result of the deficiencies is a huge cost in litigation, lost credibility and a loss of rights among the citizenry. Kids lose their faith in school.

Merrick Bobb, Special Counsel,  LA County Board of Supervisors

Merrick Bobb, Special Counsel, LA Co. Board
of Supervisors

Bobb's role is similar to that of an IG. He says that an IG needs unfettered access to the police and other agencies, and its needs adequate facilities and staff. A starved IG is not going to be effective. The NYPD is a big department and a shoestring budget won't get the IG job done.

He favors the idea behind the funding of the Independent Budget Office in New York City, which has a budget linked to 10 percent of the OMB budget.

The IG's office needs to be "insulated from the politics of the moment". It needs lawyers, yes, but also a strong quantitative capability, people who are sophisticated at statistical analysis and can make judgments based on seeing reports by precincts and longitudinal studies of statistics over time.

Question Period

Q1. The first questioner, a woman in a headscarf, asks whether the IG's office would be legal under state law. If not, this is all a waste of time.
A. Lieberman says that the IG is needed for transparency and the issue of legality is not so clear.

Bruce Rosen ("Citizen"), far right, asks question.

Q2. A man who identifies himself as "a citizen" and whom I recognize as Bruce Rosen, notes that during the Occupy Wall Street activities the police officers were pulling people away from the Wall Street bull. Why were they doing that? In what way was that considered worthy of special protection by the police?
A. Yes, the Mayor and prosecutors got a "free pass" on a lot of what went on.

Q3. The City Council tried to set up an IG type monitor but it doesn't have the power to do this.
A. Mayor Bloomberg doesn't think the NYPD needs this. The greatest expansion of oversight was under Mayor Dinkins. What the Mayor and the public need to consider, says Patel, is the costs of the existing system with the NYPD having no IG, i.e., the settlements that have to be negotiated and the lawyers that need to be hired.

Q4. Yonkers set up an IG type monitor but the office has found it hard to pursue its investigations in the face of police department resistance.
A. The NYC Campaign Finance Board is a good model. By appointing strong leadership it has been able to get the job done.

HARVARD | Glomming onto Stanford-MIT Model–Splendor in the Glass

Professor Kit Parker and Dean Youngme Moon
Engage NYC Alumni on Innovation

In New York City last week to celebrate Harvard's 375th year and reconnect with alumni was Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s 28th President and its first woman president.

Alumni came to the Allen Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center, on the 5th and 6th floors of the Time-Warner building at Columbus Circle.

The huge room is surreal, with the backdrop of New York City arrayed through two full floors of walls of glass squares–an exterior flat wall and an interior curved one.  As the evening rolled on like a play in a Greek amphitheater, the lighting darkened and added to the entertainment value of the event.

Walter Isaacson was President Faust’s interviewer. He served up a few appropriate puffball questions and then fielded sharper questions from alumni, who wrote on 4x6 cards at each seat with a little golf pencil. A flock of serious people patrolled the stepped aisles of the room and carried the questions to Mr. Isaacson. The same people later carried radio microphones up and down the steps for the second part of the program, on innovation, which was the meat of the evening.

President Faust announced an "80 percent yield" for the entering freshman class of the fall of 2012, i.e., the number of applicants who accepted a place at Harvard College divided by the number invited to attend. This 80 percent figure is the highest Harvard figure since 1971, and my recollection is that Harvard's yield is the highest of any university. Huzzah!

President Faust explained Harvard's high yield rate by giving examples of the current emphasis on teaching at Harvard. The University is attempting to reward good teachers with the same kinds of recognition that accompany significant research.  Good idea!

Isaacson then read out the first alumni question, asking about the status of the Science Center at Allston, and the cognoscenti leaned forward to hear her response. President Faust answered by referring to the impact of the global financial meltdown on the size of the University's endowment.

My Comment: The scaling back of the Science Center is a reflection of the decline of the Harvard Endowment by 30 percent or $11 billion in fiscal 2009, as predicted earlier in Vanity Fair.  In the prior 18 years, the Endowment grew more than sevenfold. Jack Meyer, former First Deputy Comptroller and investment manager for the New York City Comptroller, quintupled the Endowment during his tenure. Key Harvard officials were apparently unhappy in 2004 that Meyer and key staff earned eight-figure compensation for their good performance. President Larry Summers, with support from Robert Rubin on the Harvard Corporation, argued that Meyer was unnecessarily aggressive. Meyer and some key staff quit in early 2005 and set up a private hedge fund that did extremely well during the next five years, outperforming its benchmarks by 8 percentage points a year. President Summers did less well, resigning in mid-2006 following a well-publicized dispute with women faculty; the next president of Harvard was its first woman. To maintain its budget in light of the Endowment's 30 percent slide in 2009, the University took on $6 billion new debt, with a reported annual service cost of more than $500 million. Some ambitious plans, notably for the Allston Science Center, were shelved.  The endowment recovered 21.2 percent of its value in the last two years, but is still $5 billion below where it was in 2008.

A new plan for the Center is being refined, reports President Faust. It will encourage both a greater concentration of scientific talent in the science center and will establish designated locations for nearby private businesses to create spaces for commercializing new ideas–more like Stanford and MIT.

To underscore the message, the rest of the formal program was devoted to a discussion of innovation. The Dean of the Harvard Business School in charge of the MBA program, Youngme Moon, began the discussion. She is a short and slender (see photo at top) graduate of Yale (a few gasps were heard) and Stanford, and previously taught at MIT. She was counter-balanced physically by a beefy engineering professor with a background in the U.S. Army, Kit Parker. They engaged aggressively with the audience on where good ideas come from and the culture of competition. Having contrasted innovative companies like Apple and Nike with not-very-innovative enterprises like the US Postal Service, the two took pains to establish that Harvard was in the former category.

Their underlying thesis is that a university has the job of being a fountainhead of innovation. Individuals put out ideas and then through debate they see how their ideas compete with others in a marketplace of ideas. The discussion then circled back to what kind of students Harvard wants to admit and develop. Answer: It wants students ready to try new things, and it wants to encourage them to do so, which means making it okay to fail. No more looking the other way as students stay in their comfort zone to be sure of keeping all their grades at the A level. Harvard wants students to graduate having tried new things. Harvard wants to be a place where one can "put out ideas and let them compete and it is okay to have ideas fail and start over, letting the bad ideas go."

My Comment: The idea of a marketplace for ideas is ancient, at least as old as the Socratic Method. It was explicitly promoted by John Milton, John Stuart Mill and Thomas Jefferson, whose writings are resurrected when universities want to defend academic freedom and tenure. But Harvard is saying more than that professors should be  free to speak their minds–it wants students and faculty to develop ideas that will be marketable. The marketplace is not just a testing of ideas for soundness, but for actual dollarization of thinking. So Harvard becomes a kind of factory for new ideas, with venture capitalists lurking nearby to pump money into the best ideas. The venture-capital industry happens to have been pioneered by a government agency, the Small Business Administration, through its Small Business Investment Company program. It also works in the nonprofit field as the heart of social entrepreneurship initiatives. But rewards for risk-taking depend on timing and universities are not always the best place to commercialize ideas. Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg continued to hang around Harvard after they decided they had a good idea they could build into a fortune.

After all that we repaired to a post-discussion cocktail party with a parade of servers with small hors-d'oeuvres artistically arranged on elegant glass plates. The biggest risks seem to have been taken by the servers, who had to walk up and down stairs and then face hungry Harvard alumni competing to nab and wolf down the small delicacies. A good innovation for the Allen Room would be a dumb-waiter.

Postscript: After I wrote this I belatedly picked up my April 30, 2012 issue of The New Yorker and read the story by Ken Auletta on Stanford's close ties to business - "Get Rich U." The subtitle is: "There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be?" Auletta looks at the other side of the Stanford coin. Stanford faculty not in engineering or computer science told him they felt the humanities are neglected. They wonder about the harnessing of Stanford to student and faculty greed. What happened to the contemplative tradition? When the proposal to open up a New York City campus of Stanford came along, the dissidents questioned excessive focus on applied science. Auletta's story does not note a key fact in the competition among Stanford, Cornell and NYU. Along the way a Cornell alumnus pledged a $250 million gift to the Roosevelt Island campus if Cornell won the bidding. That must have skewed the decision-making, since the campus will be hugely expensive and New York City's contribution is limited to the land and some infrastructure. One person who has seen all three proposals believes that NYU's was the best of all. Once Stanford had withdrawn, the Mayor provided NYU with a substantial consolation prize in the form of space and resources in Brooklyn to help NYU realize its proposal in conjunction with NYU Poly (formerly known as Brooklyn Poly). Although Auletta criticizes the Mayor for giving Stanford a hard time in the final weeks of the competition, the Cornell gift was a game-changer. The Mayor's support of both the Cornell and NYU proposals may turn out to be brilliant. Business Week just came out with a riposte to Auletta, arguing that in the face of competition from China and India, we need more Stanfords. But what is properly a top economic priority for New York City and a valid focus for Cornell and NYU may not necessarily be totally compelling for Harvard. The trade of birthright for soup was a good deal for Isaac's father Jacob, but a bad one for Esau. It's at least worth a little more discussion, which is what alumni reunions are good for besides increasing alumni giving.

BLOOMBERG | Cloning Himself

Nearly 30 years ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg left Salomon Brothers (it was the recession of 1981-82), and he transformed his $10 million severance check and his Salomon shares into a giant company with more than 9,000 employees concentrated in the New York City area.

He had a hunch he could compete with the Reuters terminals and he was right.

Now he wants to clone himself so that in 30 years other people can look back and say: "My giant company got started in New York during the Decession (Repression?) of 2008-2010."

His new idea is one I hoped the Mayor would come round to. I said so last October in an Op Ed in City Hall News:

Today, the city has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to harness the energy of Wall Street entrepreneurs bursting with ideas as grand as Bloomberg's was in 1981, but who need partners to make their ideas a reality. Layoffs from the downsizing of Wall Street create a unique opportunity for talented displaced workers to start or partner in new businesses or social ventures. The displacement could help advance the Mayor's PlaNYC 2030 agenda by encouraging green entrepreneurs--profit-oriented or nonprofit, like Solar One and GreenEdge NYC--to make the Big Apple into the Green Apple.

When I wrote this less than five months ago, the latest estimate from Albany of the likely loss of New York's financial services jobs was 40,000. The estimate now is 65,000.

Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t pretend his plan will restore all 65,000 jobs. But his “guess” is that the small businesses could create 25,000 jobs. Last week a NY Times story by Patrick McGeehan describes the Mayor’s new plan, which is to

invest $45 million in government money to retrain investment bankers, traders and others who have lost jobs on Wall Street, as well as provide seed capital and office space for new businesses those laid-off bankers might create. The plan is intended to stem a potential exodus of banking professionals from the city during the restructuring of the financial services industry, which has been the city’s economic engine for decades, and to speed the industry’s recovery, which will take at least several years, officials said. Mr. Bloomberg recounted how he created his company in a rented 10-foot-by-10-foot room. He received no help from the city, but he said that was no reason not to help other entrepreneurs now.

The most tangible aspect of the plan is the creation of new incubators, one of them at 160 Varick Street, where he announced his new plan. The Varick Street building

will house an incubator for start-up companies that might employ laid-off professionals. Trinity Real Estate donated the space for three years and the Polytechnic Institute of New York University will select the entrepreneurs who will occupy the space, beginning in April. A second business incubator is scheduled to open in Lower Manhattan later in the year, said Seth W. Pinsky, the president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation. The agency plans to put $3 million into funds to make small investments in start-up companies, Mr. Pinsky said. He said that he hoped to attract twice as much money from private investors and that $9 million would be enough to help start hundreds of new businesses.

I spent the first half year after retiring from the Comptroller's Office in a business incubator in Manhattan and I have recently written about another one, Green Spaces in Brooklyn, as “Green Edge 14”. A report I worked on for the NYC Comptroller on the software industry in 1999 concluded that NYC needed more well-conceived incubators.

Successful incubators such as those that spawned the successes of Route 128 and Silicon Valley require energy from several sources. The MIT-Stanford model is based on a three-way fusion of energy from business entrepreneurs, government money and leadership, and university knowledge. Incubators in New York City that have petered out have usually lacked strong enough government support or university involvement.

My friend Professor Henry Etzkowitz calls the fusion of energy from the three sources in a well-functioning incubator the "Triple Helix" of innovation. If we are looking to clone financial entrepreneurs, it’s hard to think of a better DNA to work with than the Mayor’s.

NYC | Software Incubator–R.I.P.

The NY Software Industry Association (NYSIA) incubator at 55 Broad Street was an asset to the software community. It was beautiful space in an important building in the heart of the Wall Street area. NYSIA’s President, Bruce Bernstein, put his heart and soul into making it work. It opened on May 1, 2005, when the first “incubated” company moved in. It is now closed.

My Own Experience
The purpose of a business incubator is to nurture companies. Success can be measured qualitatively by the experience of companies in the incubator and it can also be measured quantitatively by what happens to the companies that move in.

I moved to the NYSIA incubator immediately after retiring from the NYC Comptroller’s Office, following 13.3 years as Chief Economist and Senior Policy Adviser. In February 2006 I created CityEconomist.com as a website initiatives to support my teaching, writing and consulting.

My experience at the NYSIA incubator was good. I had an instant office in the heart of the Wall Street area, fully wired and at a low cost. I jointly organized some meetings on job trends in NYC. Other meetings occurred frequently in the NYSIA common space, allowing me to meet many interesting entrepreneurs with whom I have continuing relationships I was able to place some students from my classes at NYU Stern School and Pace University with incubated companies.

One student I placed was described by his employer as the best worker he ever had. I reluctantly gave up my space in the incubator partly to pay more attention to my mother and uncle, who were both sick and died within a week of each other in November 2006. It took more than a year to empty and sell their two houses and I expect to be working on their papers for the rest of my life.

Objective Evidence: 81 Jobs CreatedThe NYSIA incubator in 2007 housed 11 companies, seven of them startups. One was the New York headquarters of an overseas high-tech firm. Two were companies developing new products or services. The remaining company has 40-50 people in another country where it was formerly headquartered and moved to the incubator to spin out a new company.

Seven companies and organizations were at one time incubator residents. Besides the successful graduating companies cited above, four companies were small consulting firms and an overseas university had a local in the incubator. All together, the companies in residence in September 2007 created 63 jobs.

These were the 11 incubatees in September 2007:
1. Startup: Healthcare IT, joined incubator 3/07, created 3 jobs.
2. US hq of overseas startup: Wi-fi networking hardware, 9/05, 7 jobs.
3. Startup: Government IT, 5/06, 4 job.
4. Startup: Online video sharing and editing, 10/05, 28 jobs.
5. New product development: Healthcare IT, 10/05, 5 jobs.
6. Startup: Data mining, 2/06, 2 jobs.
7. Startup: Software development tools, 7/05, 2 jobs.
8. Startup: Management consulting, 5/05 , 1 job.
9. New product development: Software for data center management, 5/05, 6 jobs.
10. Spinoff from overseas co., specialized community sites and social software, 5/07, 2 jobs.
11. Spinoff from state university, educational software, 8/05, 3 jobs.
Total: 63 jobs.

Two companies graduated from the incubator and continue to function and grow elsewhere in NYC. They created 18 jobs.
1. Startup: Healthcare IT, 6/05 – 2/07, 3 jobs.
2. Startup: Financial Services IT, 5/05 –10/06, 15 jobs.
Total: 18 jobs.

Five companies in the incubator raised $21 million.
1. Angel funds (pre-VC), $0.5 mil., working on 2nd round.
2. Angel funds, $1.5 million.
3. Venture capital, $13 million, 3 rounds.
4. Federal ATP R&D, $2 million, closed.
5. Venture, $3-$5 million, funded in residence.
Total: $21 million

Assessment, LessonsNYSIA’s incubator provided a real service. It was unusual in being connected with a trade association. NYSIA provided marketing services to its members and informal links with NYSIA members were important.

Its demise is therefore sad, in a category with the demise of NYU’s old engineering school. NYU’s merger with Brooklyn Poly gives hope that history can be remedied if not rerun.

What lessons can we learn?
1. An incubator requires a commitment for several years. Multi-year funding is crucial.
2. State and city funding that must be appropriated every year is unreliable. The demands on political leaders are multiple and resources are limited.
3. NYSIA suffered from the lack of a university connection, which would have provided student and professorial help without special budget lines and would have ensured more staying power.

It’s a pity that NYSIA and Pace University could not have found a way to work together since Pace was committed to the incubator concept and might have found the software industry trade association connection helpful. NYSIA would certainly have benefited from a closer connection with a university. In the end, perhaps the benefit of being in the Wall Street area wasn't worth the loss of a supportive university environment.