All Posts Tagged With: "Harvard University"

A Nicki Minaj t-shirt at Harvard, football & bike-sharing

Harvard State

1. As the deadly Israel-Gaza conflict continues, CNN has footage of Anderson Cooper ducking from rocket strikes on repeat while Maclean’s Michael Petrou explains what to watch for next and Nick Taylor-Vaisey analyzes the headlines.

2. Proving that Harvard is still a refuge for the world’s foremost intellectuals, the student-run clothing store Harvard State is selling t-shirts with singer Nicki Minaj’s likeness and the words “Yale You a Stupid Ho.” The photos have offended some (at Yale I assume), but they need not worry. Unlike the shirts that proclaim “Veri Drunk Since 1636,” these ones aren’t yet sold out online.

3. McMaster University’s Marauders football team beat the Calgary Dinos on Saturday at the Mitchell Bowl held at Ron Joyce Stadium in Hamilton in front of nearly 6,000 fans. That means the 48th Vanier Cup on Nov. 23 in Toronto will be a rematch of the 2011 final when McMaster barely beat Laval’s Rouge et Or. Read more in The Silhouette.

Continue reading What students are talking about today (November 19th edition)

Despite attempts to save money, university cites “extraordinary financial challenges”

The Boston Herald is reporting that, in the wake of a 30 per cent drop in its endowment, Harvard University will be laying off 275 employees over the next week.

“Difficult circumstances have called for difficult decisions,” wrote Harvard president Drew Faust in an e-mail, citing the school’s “extraordinary financial challenges.”

Since January, the school’s administration has tried to save money by cancelling travel spending, reducing discretionary spending, and freezing the salaries of 9,000 employees. Buyouts were offered to 1,600 workers; 500  accepted the offer.

According to an e-mail from the school’s vice president for human resources, the layoffs will be split between administrative and professional positions as well as clerical and technical workers. Forty other employees will see their hours cut.

“These steps have helped to keep the number of involuntary reductions as small as possible,” reads the HR e-mail.  “Unfortunately, further cuts are needed in order for Harvard to adjust to the institution’s new economic reality.”

In full gear, professor reviewed student applications in the middle of a war zone

Last year, Kit Parker was a Harvard professor. Today, he is a U.S. army major in Afghanistan.

Parker has spent his whole career juggling two unlikely professions: Teaching and fighting. He returned in December to Afghanistan, where he has been involved in numerous firefights and attacks on his convoys with roadside bombs.

His unusual career path has put the 43-year-old in what he calls “the two extremes of human condition.”

“You have Afghanistan, where you have … 90 per cent illiteracy, people living in mud huts, roughly the 12th century,” says Parker, a towering man with a shaved head, darting blue eyes, a southern drawl and an apparently strong command of just about any subject he talks about. “And then you got people at Harvard, where supposedly we are all literate and have all kinds of education available to us. How more different can these two environments be?”

And yet, he says, one thing is the same – the relentless pace of the work. Nothing prepared him better for Harvard than his first deployment.

“I was used to every day, 24/7-work to survive,” says Parker, who is with the 3rd Brigade of the New York-based 10th Mountain Division. “And you step into the tenure track at Harvard and it is the same thing.”

Parker first heard about Afghanistan as an undergraduate at Boston University in the 1980s. The university was running a training program for Afghan reporters who then wrote articles about the war between the mujahedeen and the Soviet Union’s troops for the university newspaper.

“Little did I know when I was reading these news articles in the student paper that almost 20 years later I would be in this hell hole,” says Parker of Birmingham, Ala. “Joke’s on me.”

He got his bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering in Boston before moving to Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University, where he earned a master’s in chemical engineering and a PhD in applied physics. He was also an army reservist.

Just before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Parker was considering getting out of the army.

“It was getting more and more difficult to maintain two careers at a high speed,” he says.

But when the attacks happened, “I was in for the whole shebang.”

A simple way to time the market: follow the money — and do the opposite

If you’d been listening to Ray Soifer for the past several years, your investment portfolio would probably make you the envy of most so-called market experts. Since the early ’80s, Soifer has been using a system for timing long-term stock markets that’s rarely wrong. For several years now, his system has been suggesting to take your money out of the market. Last year it was screaming that a bust was coming.

Soifer’s method is simple, and more than a bit curious: he tracks the number of Harvard MBA graduates who take jobs on Wall Street or with investment banks, hedge funds and venture capital firms. If more than 30 per cent of Harvard’s graduating class takes one of those jobs, it’s a long-term ’sell’ signal (40 per cent of the class of 2007 went to Wall Street). If less than 10 per cent take the plunge into finance, it’s a ‘buy.’ In other words, the more Harvard alums on Wall Street, the worse things are likely to get.

The indicator isn’t really a knock on the quality or character of the Harvard biz school grad. Soifer is one of them (he graduated in the class of ‘65). “It’s not so much that the Harvard MBAs are any greedier than anybody else—certainly no greedier than law school or medical school graduates,” he says. “But it’s really more the behaviour of the Wall Street firms themselves.” When things are good on Wall Street, money starts flowing and competition and recruitment heats up, luring graduates from the prestigious school. Those hiring sprees are a pretty good sign that a boom is peaking and a bust is coming.

Next year’s number should be interesting, notes Soifer. Almost certainly, they will be down. Although, there is a lag between the hiring decisions and the state of the things on Wall Street. Next year’s numbers will include many who made career decisions in the fall of 2008, when the market was declining, but still before the meltdown. The indicator may not be in ‘buy’ territory just yet. “It takes two to three years for a market move to fully reflect itself,” he says.

Soifer acknowledges that while fairly accurate over the long term, his system is a better ‘sell’ warning than a ‘buy’ one. The last time his indicator hit the ‘buy’ level was in the early ’80s (the all-time low was in 1937).

And what does Harvard make of his indicator? “They’ve gotten used to it,” he says. But there was a period when they were not entirely pleased, he adds. “What miffed them was not that I was doing it. What miffed them was the idea that, ‘our graduates are going to that den of iniquity called Wall Street? We think better of them.’ ”