RENAMING PRINCIPLES | Harvard's Questions

Old Harvard Law School arms,
with Royall badges,
wheat sheaves or garbs.

 July 26, 2021—The "Rhodes Must Fall" initiative has provoked discussion at Oxford. A parallel debate is taking place in other universities.

The Harvard Law School, for example, before 2016 had wheat sheaves or "garbs" in its coat of arms (Azure three garbs or a chief of Gules three open books argent garnished or the word VE-RI-TAS sable) because of its association with Isaac Royall, Jr., who endowed the first Harvard Law School professorship. 

The Royall wealth was based in part on the family's engagement in the slave trade. Worse, Royall's father "treated his slaves with extreme cruelty, including burning 77 people to death," according to a Law School statement. Martha Minow, dean of the Law School, formed a special committee to study the use of the arms to represent the school and make recommendations.

An early history of the issue is on a heraldry blog [http://blog.appletonstudios.com/2015/12/heraldic-controversy-in-cambridge.html] a that references Steve Annear, Boston Globe, December 7, 2015. [http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/12/01/harvard-law-school-forms-committee-examine-use-crest-tied-slave-ownership/1JR7OwiLIsPc3BxRUiH6yH/story.html].

The student initiative at the Harvard Law School, called Royall Must Fall, urged the Law School to change the seal. It arose from decisions in some southern states to remove the Confederate battle flag from certain public venues because of its use by those opposed to equal rights for Blacks in  since the 1960s.

The three wheat sheaves ("garbs") are the arms of Isaac Royall, Jr. as found on a baptismal basin donated by him to St. Michael’s Church in Bristol, Rhode Island; on his bookplate; on a two-handled cup in the possession of the First [Congregational] Church of Medford, Massachusett; and on the tomb of Isaac Royall and his father, William Royall, in Dorchester, Massachusetts (Bolton’s American Armory, Charles Knowles Bolton, The F.W. Faxon Company, Boston, 1927, pp. 142-143). [Bolton’s work, which heraldic scholars have noted has many errors in it, is the only work in which Annear found these arms.] The Royall family owned slaves on a plantation in Antigua and Barbuda as well as their house in Medford. 

After a months-long deliberative process, a Law School committee recommended in March 2016 that Harvard change the seal. Later that month, the Corporation—the University’s highest governing body— accepted the proposal to remove the Royall badges [incorrectly called "crests," which are the adornments above the helmet in a full achievement of a coat of arms] from the Law School’s official seal. At the time, Law School spokesperson Robb London told The Crimson the school would select a new seal by 2017, in time for the school’s bicentennial celebration.

Two years later, a Crimson article by Aidan F. Ryan (aidan.ryan@thecrimson.com. Twitter @AidanRyanNH) reported on the status of the removal. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2018/4/24/hls-continues-no-seal/ 

At the end of that celebration, but the school remained seal-less. In an interview in 2018, Law School Dean John F. Manning ’82 said administrators have focused on the school’s capital campaign and the bicentennial and will adopt a new seal later. “It’s been a very busy year,” Manning said. “We want to think about what is a fair and effective process for identifying a new seal.”

Tthe Law School worked quickly to remove the Royall badges from campus and from Law School websites. The endeavor was mostly successful, but the seal was still visible at some locations on the Law School campus in 2017. The three wheatsheaves of the Royall coat of arms remained in at least one location on campus—the door of a Harvard-owned property at 10 Mt. Auburn St.

“As soon as the Corporation accepted the recommendation to retire the shield, the School undertook an effort to remove all known instances of it from campus locations, print materials, licensed products and web content," said Matthew Gruber, Dean of Administration. 

Amanda M. Lee, former president of the Law School student government, wrote in an email that the absence of an official seal has not generated much concern among the student body, but some students “had concerns that the diploma might have a blank seal.” Manning confirmed diplomas will bear the University’s “Veritas” seal.

The university in 2021 has meanwhile created an alumni focus group to assist The University's Committee to Articulate Principles Involved in Renaming, chaired by Drew Faust. Here are the Committee's questions in July 2021:

- How do buildings, landmarks, and other named entities factor into your personal experience and sense of belonging at Harvard? Please offer examples.

- What factors and University values are most important to consider when deciding whether to rename an entity on campus? How should we take account of and balance both a namesake’s positive contributions and their failures and flaws? How do we understand these in light of the era in which the namesake lived? In light of the era in which a name was bestowed?

- How should we ensure that renaming does not result in erasing past history? What are the relative advantages and disadvantages of removing a name versus contextualizing the history of the namesake? What factors would you consider in determining whether to do one or the other?

OXFORD-CAMBRIDGE DINNER | April 16, 2020

The 87th Oxford-Cambridge 
New York Boat Race Dinner may  be held in September 2020, possibly as a Zoom event.

It was to be held on Thursday, April 16, 2020, but was postponed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The dinner dress is customarily black tie or boat club blazer. If this is a Zoom meeting, dress requirements may be relaxed.

Questions? Contact your blogger, teppermarlin@aol.com. Or check back at this location.

TREATY OF GHENT | 205th Anniversary (Clerihew inside)

A Celebratory Poster of the Treaty, 1814.

Off to Belgium they went,

To work on the Treaty of Ghent.

The Brits wanted uti possidetis

Meaning after-capture status.

The Yanks sought a total recante,

Way back to their status quo ante.

- Clerihew by JT Marlin, 2014

December 24, 2019 – Five years ago, just about the only person who celebrated the 200th Anniversary of the Treaty of Ghent was Oxford University Vice Chancellor Andrew Hamilton, who began his remarks with a reference to it. (Hamilton is now President of New York University.)

The  Treaty of Ghent was formally titled the “Treaty of Peace and Amity between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America.” It was signed on December 24, 1814.

The only American or British newspaper to have acknowledged the anniversary on the date in 2014, as far as I could determine, was the East Hampton Star.

Declaration of War, 1812

The Treaty formally ended a state of war between Britain and the United States. President James Madison initiated a declaration of war on Britain originally because British Orders in Council made it harder for the United States to trade with France.

In addition, the British Navy was seizing (“impressing”) sailors on colonial ships and putting them on Navy ships. The War Hawks in the House of Representatives were calling for war on Britain.

The British Government responded by repealing the Orders in Council, ending the curb on trading. However, impressment remained. If the British had given up the right to impress American sailors, Madison might have called off the war.

Negotiations

Russia's Czar Alexander I in March 1813 offered to host negotiations, but the British were winning and refused. In the fall of 1813, British foreign minister Lord Castlereagh, a Cambridge alum, offered to negotiate directly with the United States. The two countries picked Ghent in eastern Flanders as the venue because it was a neutral city, speaking both Dutch and French. Since the Dutch had settled New York, there were family connections to U.S. officials from that state. The goal of both the British and the United States was to end the fighting, which was far too costly for both countries.

The main issue addressed by the negotiators was how the spoils of war – territories that were captured during the war – would be divided.

The United States wanted all the captured regions back; their negotiating team was led by two Harvard-connected officials. Britain wanted to keep what they had won; their team was led by Oxford and Cambridge men:

• In this corner, for the Stars and Stripes – John Quincy Adams, chief negotiator, a Harvard graduate; Henry Clay, the hawk (the "bad cop"); Albert Gallatin, former Treasury Secretary, who grew up in Geneva, emigrated to the USA and settled south of Pittsburgh, teaching French at Harvard and elsewhere to earn a living before he became Secretary of the Treasury in 1801, remaining in that job until he went to Ghent in 1814; James A. Bayard, moderate anti-war Federalist; and Jonathan Russell, chargé d’affaires for Madison in Paris. It took the Americans six weeks or more to communicate with Washington, D.C. so they were negotiating largely on their own. The U.S. team wanted to restore territory to what it was before the war, the status quo ante bellum. They won.

• In this other corner, for the Union Jack – The central negotiator was a Cambridge graduate. The two senior members were more senior, and Oxonians, but it seems they didn't want to make the trip, thereby prompting the thought the idea that the Oxford men were more talented, but lazier; while Cambridge provided someone with less experience and talent, but more willing to make the effort. (1) The senior team was Lord Castlereagh, Britain's Foreign Secretary and an alumnus of St. John's College, Cambridge, and Henry Lord Bathurst, the Third Earl, Secretary for War and the Colonies and alum of Christ Church, Oxford. However, they stayed in London and did not dignify the talks with their presence. (2) Instead, they sent a less-skilled team: Admiralty lawyer William Adams, impressments expert Admiral Lord Gambier, and the real workhorse of the group, and a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, Henry Goulburn, Undersecretary for War and the Colonies. The British negotiators wanted uti possidetis, that each side could keep what it had won militarily, such as Detroit and Mackinac Island. They lost.

Admiral of the Fleet James Gambier (L, with Treaty) shakes hands
with U.S. Ambassador to Russia and son of the 2nd U.S. President.
John Quincy Adams. British Undersecretary of State for War and
the Colonies Henry Goulburn (R, red folder) and others look on.

The British senior negotiators were far closer to the Treaty signing than the theoretical U.S. decision-makers, but they were not in London. Being closer, in Europe turned out not to have been much of an advantage. The British being close to London meant they felt they needed to send telegrams to get approvals from their superiors.

The Americans in Ghent understood they were too far from Washington to be able to get approval for their strategy. They were thus able to settle on a common goal, and take action on behalf of their country.

The outcome of the Treaty was favorable for the United States, perhaps because the war was going well for the Americans during the month before the Treaty was signed:

• News of two U.S. victories was the last information that negotiators in Ghent received. The Americans seemed to be losing early in the war, with the burning of the U.S. Capitol and other buildings in Washington. But: (1) Lieutenant General Sir George Prévost and a naval squadron under Captain George Downie engaged in Plattsburgh, N.Y., with New York and Vermont militia and U.S. Army regulars, under the command of Brigadier General Alexander Macomb. They were supported by ships commanded by Master Commandant Thomas Macdonough. The British failed to take Lake Champlain and fled north after the battle. (2)  Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Md., withstood a severe attack, inspiring the National Anthem, "The Star Spangled Banner."  
• The Americans therefore refused to let the British keep what they won. The British did not get what they wanted regarding the independence of Native lands in the state of Ohio, and in the Indiana and Michigan Territories. The British wanted this reserved land to be a buffer state to protect Canada from American annexation, but Clay would not give it up. The British did not get any territory in northern Maine, or demilitarization of the Great Lakes or navigation rights on the Mississippi. Lord Castlereagh asked the Duke of Wellington and his advice was for them to take the status quo ante bellum. 

On December 24 the negotiators agreed on the 3,000-word Treaty. After approval by the two governments, hostilities ended and “all territory, places and possessions whatsoever, taken by either party from the other during the war” were restored to what they were before the war.

Although the United States didn't give up any territory, it had been the one that declared war, so presumably it was bent on expansion. That was not to be, and the Canadian border was left in place, which would have been the consolation for the British. Also, the United States never did get the British to promise not to impress American sailors, but as hostilities in Europe ended, this issue ceased to be such a concern.

The Treaty was signed by the British on December 30, but it took a month for word to get to Washington, D.C. Before the combatants got word of the Treaty, the British attacked New Orleans on January 8, 1815 with a large army. It was overwhelmed by a smaller and less experienced American force under General Andrew Jackson (1767-1845) in the greatest U.S. victory in the war. The news of the Treaty and the outcome of the Battle of New Orleans reached a celebratory American public at about the same time. (However, the Second Battle of Fort Bowyer was won by the British. For them, the news was mixed.)

The United States ratified the treaty in mid-February 1815 under President James Madison, who started it all, with a formal exchange of papers.

Comments

1. The United States won back in the Treaty what it had lost. As the Canadian historian and War of 1812 expert Donald E. Graves concludes:  What Americans lost on the battlefield, "they made up for at the negotiating table.”

2. The Treaty of Ghent has held up for 205 years. However, the Treaty does not imply a  "Special Relationship", just a cessation of hostilities. During the American Civil War, Britain (as Amanda Foreman has shown) came in mostly on the losing side, the South. This makes sense historically. The Pilgrims were led by Cambridge alumni fleeing to New England to avoid religious persecution at the hands of the Church of England. South of New York, however, was populated through friendly grants of land from the Crown to mostly Oxford alumni (Pennsylvania to William Penn of Christ Church, Oxford; Maryland to the Calverts of Trinity College, Oxford; see chart here: https://theoxbridgepursuivant.blogspot.com/2013/06/oxford-alumni-who-shaped-american.html).

3. Hitler brought the United States and Britain together. During World War I, many Irish Catholics opposed U.S. entry on the side of Britain. It was not until World War II that the Special Relationship was cemented. The threat of Hitler tied the United States and Britain, first with Lend-Lease in March 1941 and then with the U.S. declaration of war following the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941.

4. Relations have been good since World War II. Brexit will leave Britain more dependent on its relationship with the United States.

OXFORD ALUMNI | Oxford Today Magazine

The last Trinity 2017 Issue

An article on Oxford Today appears in Wikipedia. It deserves a wider distribution. It is a pity that the print magazine has disappeared.

At Harvard the alumni magazine is kept alive. It is somewhat independent of the university because of alumni contributions.

The Oxford Today website is still up. It had four news posts in August 2017, and since then has had about one per month since then. 

I am reposting here the Wikipedia entry, unedited except for dropping the many footnotes:

Oxford Today: The University Magazine was a magazine for the alumni of Oxford University. Oxford Today was a magazine distributed free to around 160,000 alumni around the world. It appeared three times a year, with the issues coinciding with the three Oxford academic terms of Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity. The editor was Dr Richard Lofthouse, and it was published by Future plc on behalf of the University of Oxford.

Articles covered subjects such as current affairs, history, literature, as well as the University itself. Contributors and interviewees had included many Oxford alumni from different walks of life, such as the politician Michael Heseltine, the author and playwright Alan Bennett and the comedian Terry Jones of Monty Python fame.

The magazine was previously published by Wiley-Blackwell. In April 2010, it was reported that a new publisher would be taking over the magazine, resulting in the job of then-current editor Greg Neale being placed under review; this caused concern among members of the publication's editorial review board, some of whom expressed the view that the Oxford administration was seeking to reduce the magazine's independence.

The magazine was published by FuturePlus, a division of Future Publishing Limited, on behalf of the University of Oxford. After a review of the magazine and its mounting costs, Oxford University took the decision to close the publication with its last issue published in Trinity 2017.

HEAD OF THE CHARLES: Alumni Tent

Oxford-Cambridge alumni are invited to visit the Alumni Tent at the 2016 Head of the Charles event.

It will be in the Reunion Village  on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass.

Be there or be square. Sunday, Oct 23rd, noon-4pm. More details: http://www.hocr.org/the-regatta/spectators/reunion-villag

Other posts about rowing: 2015 Boat Race Dinners .

OXFORD: #1 in "Times" Uni Rankings

Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson.

The (London) Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings rates Oxford in first place this year.

Oxford displaces CalTech, which has dominated the list in the last five years and before but is now is second place. The next three were Stanford, Cambridge and MIT.

THE Rankings are the only audited global inter-university comparisons. Audit of THE Rankings was by PwC. 

The ranking is based on the following factors, with their weights:

• teaching 30% (based on reputation, staff-student ratio etc.),
• research 30%,
• citations 30%,
• international outlook 7.5%,
• industry income 2.5%.

Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson, who has taken over since January 2016 as Oxford's CEO,  welcomed the news and said in a recent speech:

The ranking is even more impressive when one realises that we are far less wealthy than most of our global competitors. The endowment of the entire university–colleges and university together–is less than one-sixth of Harvard’s  [$38 billion in 2015] and a quarter of Stanford’s, Yale’s, and Princeton’s.

The rankings are dominated by U.S. universities, which account for 63 of the top 200. Asian universities improved their rankings, with 19 now in the top 200.

R.I.P.: John Brademas, Oxonian and NYU President

John Brademas, 1927-2016

John Brademas was for many years a Congressman from Indiana and then Prsident of New York University.

He was born on March 2, 1927, in Mishawaka, Ind., the son of Stephen Brademas and Beatrice Goble. His father was a Greek immigrant who ran a restaurant. His mother was an elementary-school teacher, and one grandfather was a college professor.

In 1945, he graduated from Central High School in nearby South Bend, where he was valedictorian and the football team's quarterback. He enrolled at the University of Mississippi, where he joined a Navy ROTC program.

After his freshman year, he won a scholarship and transferred to Harvard. There he became president of the Wesley Foundation, the campus Methodist student group. In successive summers, he worked at an auto plant in South Bend, lived among Indians in Mexico and was an intern at the UN's temporary headquarters in Lake Success, N.Y.

After graduating from Harvard with high honors in 1949, he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and in 1954 earned a social studies doctorate. Back home in northern Indiana, he resolved to run for Congress in a largely Republican district with diverse demographics. After losing races in 1954 and 1956, he gained political experience as an aide to two members of Congress and in Adlai E. Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign. He taught political science at St. Mary’s College for a year and was active in civic affairs.

In 1958, on his third try, he won the seat for Indiana’s Third Congressional District. In 1977 he married Mary Ellen Briggs, a third-year medical student at Georgetown University and mother of four children by a former marriage.

As a Democrat who represented Indiana from 1959 to 1981, Brademas sponsored bills to add funding to education. He opposed the Vietnam War and many defense measures, rebuked President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate scandal and voted for civil rights legislation, environmental protection, day care programs and services for the elderly and people with disabilities.

He became majority whip, the House’s third-ranking official, and was re-elected 10 times in a mostly conservative district, winning up to 79 percent of the vote. He was defeated in the 1980 Republican landslide that elected Ronald Reagan president.

Brademas was president of NYU from from 1981 to 1992. After the couple moved to New York in 1981, his wife became a dermatologist at N.Y.U. Medical Center.

Mr. Brademas was the author of Washington, D.C., to Washington Square (1986) and, with Lynne P. Brown, The Politics of Education: Conflict and Consensus on Capitol Hill (1987). From 1994 to 2001 he was chairman of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and from 2004 to 2007 he was a member of the New York State Board of Regents. In 2005, N.Y.U. established the John Brademas Center for the Study of Congress, a research and teaching facility.

By the end of his tenure — he stepped down in late 1991 and retired as president emeritus in 1992 after a sabbatical — he had raised $800 million for NYU and nearly doubled its endowment to $540 million. He added new fields of study, like the Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies; enlarged the campus; and added 11 residence halls, providing housing for half of the undergraduates. He also had established N.Y.U. study programs in Cyprus, Egypt, France, Israel and Japan.

After 22 years in Congress and more than a decade as president of NYU, John Brademas died on July 11, 2016 in Manhattan at 89. He is survived by his wife, three stepchildren, John Briggs, Katherine Goldberg and Jane Murray; a sister, Eleanor Brazeau; and six step-grandchildren. His stepson Basil Briggs Jr. died in 2003.

HARVARD: House "Masters" Now "Faculty Deans"

How now, fair Juliet? Is't but the name?
Or would this worm dig just as deep,
Its colors tamed? Yet sticks the shame,
Your kin shall hate. For thee–I weep. 

Harvard has stopped calling heads of houses "masters" because of the association of the word with the master-slave relationship.

They will now be called "faculty deans".
The Harvard Crimson on December 2 last year reported that a new name for house masters was in the offing:

Administrators now must choose a title to replace the term “master.” Princeton recently renamed its residential college master position to “head of the college”[...]

The masters of Harvard's Mather House on their website recently asked their students to call them by a different name, "chief executive officers" or CEOs.  The Crimson says:

That descriptor has since been removed from the site, but in an email [the House CEO] affirmed his discomfort with the “master” title. He has dropped the term from his position while waiting to form “a consensus for a new inclusive title,” he said. “I understand the important historical roots of the title ‘Master’ at Oxford and Harvard, but I am sensitive to the context of the Houses today, and the issues of race which for many years have made me uncomfortable with the title,” [he] wrote, adding that the alternative title of CEO “at least describes part of our job” but “is probably incomplete and leaves out the emphasis of creating a safe and supportive community."

Through a medium I contacted C. P. Snow about renaming his book, The Masters. He begged me to urge his publishers, if they ever do a new edition, not to rename his book. "Tell them," he said to me earnestly, "'Enough is enough'." Then his wispy spirit was sucked back into the mist of eternity.

November 22 - Bulldog, Bulldog, Boo Hoo Hoo H31-Y24

Yale bulldog: "Wait till next year."

If the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race is The Boat Race, in the USA the Harvard-Yale Game is The Game.

Today's game is worth noting:

• It is the eighth straight win for Harvard.

• This is the first time that either team has won eight consecutive Ivy League games since the 1880s.

• It was the first time that ESPN College GameDay came to televise the oldest game in U.S. college football, in the oldest stadium in the USA, Harvard Stadium (1903).

• Late in the third quarter Harvard had a 24-7 lead, but blew it as Yale proceeded to score three times in the beginning of the fourth quarter.

The year Harvard Stadium opened for business, 1903.

• Yale tied up the score 24-24 with but 4 minutes left to play.

• Harvard then crushed Yale's rising hopes with two scores in these last 4 minutes.

• The two final winning scores were engineered by the backup Harvard quarterback, Conner Hempel, who had been sidelined for the previous three games by a shoulder injury.

• Harvard ended the season with a 10-0 record, and 7-0 in the Ivy League.

• It is Harvard's 17th undefeated season in its history of playing football, and the third in the 21 years that Tim Murphy has been coach.

The Harvard Magazine report on The Game is likely to be the definitive one.

Meanwhile, Yalies can put the present behind them by re-reading old copies of The New York Times in happier days. What better year for Yale to pick out of the archives than 1884, when Yale won 52-0 before a huge crowd of more than 2,000 fans and the Times the next day began its coverage of The Game as follows:

THE HARVARDS BADLY BEATEN. 

 THE YALE FOOTBALL TEAM WHIP THEM BY A SCORE OF 52 TO 0. 

NEW-HAVENS, Nov. 22 [1884].—Eleven Yale men and 11 Harvard men rolled each other over in the soft mud at the new athletic grounds this afternoon and called it football. The crimson and blue jerseys and stockings were twirled around to the pleasure of some 2,400 spectators as the two teams shoved the oblong, leather, inflated bag up and down the field…

BILL COSBY: Mark Whitaker's Biography (Postscripts)

Mark Whitaker (L) and John Tepper
Marlin. Photo by Alice Tepper Marlin.

Sept. 24, 2014–Last night, at the North American office of Oxford University, Oxonian Mark Whitaker talked about Bill Cosby's achievements as a popular comedian and comic actor.

He also spoke about Cosby's private lobbying for African American causes. Cosby avoided talking about race in his comic routines, but had a definite point of view that put him in conflict with some other African Americans.

The Cosby Show, 30 Years Ago

Cosby's is best known for his contribution to the creation of Dr. Huxtable and his portrayal of the character in The Cosby Show. It was just over 30 years to the day since the debut of the first airing of this show.

The Show is credited with helping to make possible the election of President Barack Obama, because it showed a middle-class African American family, with the emphasis on the American rather than the African. The Cosby Show helped moderate the fears that middle-class white Americans showed in their abandonment of central cities for suburban areas.

Alice and I had some personal interest in following the show because she had grown up with co-producer Tom Werner on the Jersey Shore. Werner's wife Jill also worked at the organization Alice founded, the Council on Economic Priorities, before the Werners married.

Chapters 20 and 21 of Whitaker's book show the nervous runup to the creation of the show, as Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner staked a mortgage on their homes to bet on a family show starring Bill Cosby, who was then already known as the first black male star in a television drama, I Spy, which  ran from 1965 to 1968 and won Cosby three consecutive Emmys for Best Actor.

The road to the opening of the show was rocky. Cosby wanted the show to feature a limousine driver with a Latin American handy-woman wife. More than one writer was burned out in the script development, partly because Cosby himself liked to embellish on his lines. NBC executives tried to check on the rough cuts–they were told everyone was in a meeting, and then the tape would get lost...

Jay Sandrich was responsible for getting the final cut of the tapes for The Cosby Show. He had three  "rabbits' feet" on which he depended to get the tapes ready on schedule–

• Two versions of the show were taped, in the afternoon and evening, so he could choose the best version of each scene.
• Phylicia Ayers-Allen, playing Mrs. Huxtable the lawyer, could be relied upon to stay in character because of her ample live theater training, so even if neither of the versions was usable, she could often save the day by providing a usable reaction shot.
• Cosby tended to leave after each shooting for some stand-up performance and therefore did not hover over the editing process. P.S. Cosby is is still, at 77 and despite his vision difficulties, performing live.

There was a lot of sandbagging before The Cosby Show's first episode, which was called "Pilot". Television commentators believed it would have trouble beating Magnum, P.I.  in their time slot, but they begged NBC not to "dump" the show if its ratings were weak.

But that week, 30 years ago, The Cosby Show beat not only everyone else in its time slot but every other show on television. It had 21.6 million viewers. When Carsey told Cosby the news, he was incredulous. 

"You mean we beat 60 Minutes?"
"Yes," she said.
"Call [my wife] Camille!" he said.

I remember watching the first episode myself, back then, and it was a revelation. The importance of the show was self-evident.

The Author, Mark Whitaker

Whitaker in his childhood identified greatly with Cosby for many reasons, mostly related to the fact that they both had fathers who left home. Whitaker's mixed-race parents divorced when he was six and his black father left home. They lived in Norton, Mass. (home of Wheaton College).

Unlike Cosby, Whitaker did well in school and went to Harvard and then won a Marshall Scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He worked for Newsweek as a reporter and then as editor and became the first African American to be editor-in-chief of a national newsweekly. He served as Washington bureau chief for NBC News and then managing editor of CNN.

His first book was a memoir, My Long Trip Home.

Cosby's Childhood

Bill Cosby is two years younger than Whitaker's father. He grew up in a housing project in North Philadelphia. After Pearl Harbor, his father Bill Sr. left his wife and two boys to join the Navy. He was home enough to add two more boys to the family, but for the next 15 years he served three tours of sea duty as a mess steward. His wife worked as a maid.

Young Cosby meanwhile did not do well at school, flunking 10th grade twice. He joined the Navy, like his father, and after four years' service he came out ready to go back to school. He had impressed a track coach from Temple University and was admitted to the University despite very low SAT scores.

At Temple Stadium, Cosby's coach had him run a 320-yard track, to try to increase the speed of a 440-yard runners and the endurance of a 220-yard runners. On his first run, Cosby had difficulty. The coach asked him what was the problem:

"Rigor mortis set in!" Cosby said. ... "Riggie... He's a little man who jumped out of the pit with a plastic hammer and hit me in the knee."

Riggie was a threat to Cosby all his life.

Cosby in Public and Private

Jonathan Winters, mentor.

In public, Cosby is transparent. He is seeking to get at truth. In private, he did not want at first to cooperate with the biography and when he did try to be helpful he tended just to tell stories.

On stage, Cosby avoids discussion of race. Off-stage, he takes on a variety of racial issues. He takes African American leaders to task for relying too much on trying to change the system and not enough on fixing problems by taking responsibility for them.

He gives great credit to white mentors that he has had during his life. He calls them "abolitionists", giving credit to the long history of conscience-stricken whites who have espoused abolition of slavery and enfranchisement of all citizens.

On stage, he is funny. Off-stage he can be funny but also deadly serious.

Bill Cosby and "Hello Friend" tee shirt in
honor of his son. 

Hollywood's comedians tend to know one another. He and the late Robin Williams were not especially close but they shared one idol - Jonathan Winters, who died in 2013.

Winters once warned Cosby that comedians tend to tire of their material sooner than their audiences do. That fact is one reason Cosby is constantly amending his scripts.

Cosby has two daughters. A tragedy of his life is that his son Ennis (1969-1997), who had been diagnosed as dyslexic but had overcome some of his disabilities, was killed while changing a tire on an access road in Los Angeles. Cosby does not talk about Ennis in public but in his performances he wears or has a tee shirt on display that has the message that Ennis used often - "Hello Friend". Whitaker does a good job of describing Cosby's deep feelings about his son.

Postscript (Sept. 24, 2014)

After I wrote the above, I read the review of Whitaker's book by Dwight Garner in the NY Times issue  of Sept. 23, 2014 (pp. C1 and C6).  Based on this review, I would add:

1. The improvisational nature of Cosby's performances fits with his love of jazz, which Whitaker refers to when he describes Cosby's experience in the Navy.
2. Garner lists specific ways in which Cosby helped fellow black actors and black students, such as the $20 million–widely noted at the time–that Cosby gave to Spelman College, a mostly black college.
3. On the negative side, Garner notes allegations of Cosby's womanizing before he was 40, and accusations of sexual abuse. The book's greatest weakness, he says, is in Whitaker's not mentioning any of these claims.

Postscript 2 (Nov. 18, 2014)

Recent reports underscore Garner's point #3. More women are coming forward and they have little financial incentive to do so because with such a time lapse it would allegedly be hard to make a case, and the statute of limitations would have run out.

GIFTS: Chan to Harvard, Record $350 Million

Gerald Chan, Alumnus of Harvard
School of Public Health - Now Named
After His Father

Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust must work hard–either very late on Sunday night or very early on Monday morning because I and probably 250,000 of her very close friends just got an email from her, time-stamped about 1 a.m.

She announced the largest-ever gift to Harvard, $350 million. It is from the Morningside Foundation, established by the family of Mr. T. H. Chan.

 The Foundation has pledged the money to support the Harvard School of Public Health and its campaign to address four global threats: old and new pandemics, harmful physical and social environments, poverty and humanitarian crises, and failing health systems.

In honor of the gift, the School will be renamed the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The formal announcement will be made at 12:30 p.m. and can be watched here.

Comment 

The Chans are a wealthy Hong Kong family, one member of which, Gerald Chan, earned a doctorate in radiation biology from Harvard after studying engineering at UCLA. Recently the Harvard Crimson drew attention to Chan's purchasing of real estate in the Harvard Square area.

The foundation is headed by Ronnie and Gerald Chan, sons of T. H. Chan, who founded their first business, the Hang Lung Group, to develop real estate in Hong Kong. Another business, The Morningside Group, is a private equity and venture capital firm created by the two sons in 1986.

Only six larger donations have been made to an American institution of higher education. One was for $400 million, given by Eli and Edythe Broad to the Broad Institute, which is jointly run by Harvard and MIT. The Chans’ gift is the largest ever to Harvard alone.

YOUNG AMERICA: The American Universities at 1776 (Updated May 16, 2018)

John Harvard, Cambridge man,
dissenting minister.

When Harvard opened for students in 1642 (it was founded six years before), only 50,000 people lived in Britain's American  colonies.

Yet at the time of the American Revolution more than 130 years later, the colonies had a free population of about 2 million and a slave population of about 300,000, plus children of the slaves who were not at the time counted.

So the colonies grew more than 40-fold during these pre-Revolutionary years of Harvard's existence.

By the end of those 130 years of the colonial era, ten institutions of higher education were founded and nine were open for business, the very first plan for a university being still-born.

Using their modern names, and in order of foundation, the nine institutions that were opened by 1776 are:  Harvard (Massachusetts), William and Mary (Virginia), Yale (Connecticut), Princeton (New Jersey), U. Pennsylvania (Pa.), Columbia (New York), Brown (Rhode Island), Rutgers (New Jersey) and Dartmouth (New Hampshire):

• Four of the universities are in New England – Harvard, Yale, Brown and Dartmouth. 
• Two of the other five are in New Jersey, the only colony to have two universities – Princeton and Rutgers. 
• The remaining three are in New York (Columbia), Pennsylvania (U. Penn.) and Virginia (William & Mary).

Two of the universities – Rutgers and William & Mary – are now public research universities, i.e., they are operated by the states of New Jersey and Virginia. The others are the seven private Ivy League universities.

The Colonies vs. The Mother Country

Having nine institutions of higher education in eight of the thirteen colonies by the time of the Revolution was quite impressive, when one considers that as of 1832, more than half a century after the American Revolution, England still had only two universities, Oxford and Cambridge.

Scotland, however, had five universities in four locations–St Andrews (the first university, in Fife), Glasgow, Aberdeen, Marischal (also in Aberdeen) and Edinburgh.

The First American Colonial Universities - Harvard, William & Mary, Yale

Three threads sum up the religious orientation of the early universities in the American colonies:

1. One church, orthodoxy (Roman Catholicism).
2. An alternative orthodoxy (Church of England).
3. Rejection of both (Dissenters).

Harvard was founded by dissenting ministers, especially from Cambridge. William & Mary was created primarily for Anglicans. Yale was for created for dissenters from the new orthodoxy at Harvard.

Because Harvard was first in line, it tended to influence the universities that followed. Stephen Trachtenberg, former president of The George Washington University and a former Churchill Traveling Scholar at Nuffield College, Oxford, argues that John Dunster's having come to Harvard from Cambridge at a time when they had a four-year undergraduate program meant that Harvard and then other universities required four years for the B.A. degree.

Oxford and Cambridge later reduced the time for the B.A. to three years for most subjects (Greats is still a four-year program), but American universities were by then wedded to the four-year degree.

By and large, Oxford men were Roman Catholics or orthodox Anglicans.  Cambridge men were dissenters, including dissenters from the original dissenters. Among the exceptions was Alexander Whitaker, a Cambridge alumnus who was an Anglican and who paved the way for the first effort to create a university. Unfortunately, it failed.

Henricus College would have created the first university in the colonies. It was planned in Henrico (named after James I's son Henry) for Varina, Virginia, in 1618, 18 years before Harvard was created. Cambridge-born alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge (and son of much-admired William Whitaker, Protestant scholar and Master of St. John's College, Cambridge) Alexander Whitaker (1585–1616) paved the way for this plan through his active work in the Virginia Colony in 1611-1616. Coming from Anglican parishes in the north of England, he established two churches near Virginia's Jamestown colony. He baptized Pocahontas, creating the illusion that it would be easy to bring the native Americans into the church. James I was initially enthusiastic about the plan for a university at Henrico, Va. with the idea of providing a place to teach both Anglican and Puritan seminarians and to convert the local Indians to Christianity. An area of 10,000 acres on the side of a river was picked out for the campus. However, the idea was still-born. Before it had any students, the Indians targeted for conversion decided to fight back. They laid waste Henrico with a deadly attack in 1622. The king lost his enthusiasm. The colony of Virginia lost its charter. The university idea was ended in 1624.

Harvard was the first durable university, founded by a Cambridge alumnus (Emmanuel College), John Harvard, who donated his library and some money to create the first colonial college that still survives. John Harvard was born to a butcher (married to a woman from Stratford-upon-Avon) in Southwark, a borough of London. Many of John Harvard's family were wiped out by the plague. He emigrated to Boston and served as a dissenting minister. Harvard College was formed in 1636 and was at first called "New College". In 1638, John Harvard was on his deathbed with tuberculosis, he bequeathed his 320-volume library and half his estate to the college. The college was then gratefully renamed after him. It was envisioned as a place dedicated to educating dissenting (Puritan and other) ministers. It opened for teaching and degree-granting in 1642.

Rev. Dr. James Blair 

William & Mary was the second enduring university. It was named after the two co-regents, William III of Orange and his wife, James II's eldest daughter Mary II, who were brought in by Parliament in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to replace Catholic James II of England (last of the Stuart monarchs), and put an end to any plans for another Catholic resurgence in the monarchy. A new university in Virginia was again promoted, this time by Dr. James Blair, a Church of Scotland and subsequently a Church of England adherent, educated at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh. He founded the university at  Middle Plantation, later named Williamsburg in honor of the king. It was founded as planned in 1693 and Dr. Blair served as its president from 1693 to 1743, a 50-year term of office for a college president that one source says has been matched by only one other person in the history of the United States. William & Mary is now a public research university, operating under the oversight of the State of Virginia.

Yale was founded, like Cambridge University, as a refuge for teachers and students troubled by trends in the university they left. The initial step by the Colony of Connecticut to create an institution to train ministers, future politicians and others was passed in 1701, probably because Connecticut was subject to different laws and customs. The initial Yale Fellows, led by James Pierpoint, were all alumni of Harvard - ten Congregationalist ministers who jointly contributed books to create the first Yale library. The first diploma was granted in 1702. The major impetus for the endowment of Yale came from Harvard's sixth (and largely absentee) president Increase Mather, a staunch Puritan who alienated some by being involved in the Salem witch trials and others by then urging restraint. Mather was concerned that the clergy on the Harvard faculty were relaxing their Puritan standards and hoped that Yale would maintain Calvinist religious orthodoxy. In 1718, Increase's son Cotton Mather contacted a Welshman, Elihu Yale to ask him for financial help. Eli Yale had made a fortune while trading in India for the East India Company and gave the university 417 books, nine bales of goods sold for £560, and a portrait of King George I.  The university in return took Yale's name in the hope of further gifts that, alas in the end, did not ensue, in perhaps the first recorded Major Disappointment in a university's Major Gifts campaign.

The Next Three Universities, Founded in the 1740s

Princeton was the first university founded in New Jersey, originally as "the College of New Jersey", in 1746 (it was renamed in 1896). It started teaching a year later and gave its first degree a year after that. It was sponsored by Presbyterians but educated students for ministries in many religions. Its impetus was the Great Awakening, which can be said to have originated from the Oxford "Holy Club" of Charles Wesley and then John Wesley. George Whitefield arrived at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1732, a provincial youth with a West Country accent (for example, it is recorded that he pronounced “Christ” as “Chroist”). He described himself as coming from the tap-room of the family inn. Whitefield had heard of the “Holy Club” before he arrived, and open-hearted Charles Wesley included him. Charles became Whitefield's chief Oxford mentor. In 1736, steely John Wesley entrusted the newly ordained Whitefield with the oversight of the Oxford methodists, while he went with Charles to Georgia. (In 1739, Whitefield returned the favor.) Whitefield soon became as famed as the Wesleys and is given equal billing as the leading inspiration of the worldwide evangelical Great Awakening. This spirit took shape in Pennsylvania in Log College in Bucks County, founded by Presbyterian Minister William Tennent in 1726. The seven founders of the College of New Jersey were Log College participants, all Yale Presbyterians except for one who attended Harvard. They asked Governor Lewis Morris for a charter and he, being Anglican and a Loyalist, refused it.  When Governor Morris died, John Hamilton became Acting Governor, and he, being somewhat more liberal, provided the charter. Aaron Burr, Sr. turned the evangelical ideals of the College's founders into a reality during his presidency, from 1748 to 1757.

The University of Pennsylvania was founded as an Anglican institution in a state founded by an Oxford-educated Quaker, William Penn. It was originally called the "College of Philadelphia".

Columbia University, originally called "King's College" because it claims a royal charter, was founded in 1754. It was intended for Anglican ministers but was charged with a policy of religious liberty. The impetus for the creation of Columbia was in part that evangelicals across the river had formed the college that was later called Princeton. In 1746 an act was passed by the general assembly of New York to raise funds for the this purpose. In 1751, the assembly appointed ten New York residents, seven of whom were members of the Church of England, to direct state lottery proceeds towards the foundation of a college. Classes were initially held in July 1754 and were presided over by the college's first president, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who was the only instructor of eight students.

The Final Three Universities, Founded in the 1760s

Brown University was founded by Baptists in 1764, but its trustees were required to come from a balanced portfolio of religions, including Anglicans. The Governor of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, was a Cambridge graduate. Rhode Island was a haven for dissenting ministers who were expelled by the Puritan leadership of Massachusetts for straying from Puritan dogma. In 1763, The Reverend James Manning, a Baptist minister, an alumnus of Princeton (as it would be called), was sent to Rhode Island by the Philadelphia Association of Baptist Churches to found the college. At the same time, local Congregationalists were working toward a similar end. Former colonial governors of Rhode Island Stephen Hopkins and Samuel Ward were involved. The college's charter was granted in the form of an Act passed by Rhode Island's General Assembly. The college was called Brown after a a gift from Nicholas Brown, Jr. The charter required that the makeup of the board of 36 trustees include, 22 Baptists, five Friends, four Congregationalists, and five Church of England members.

Rutgers was created in 1766. Originally chartered as Queen's College, Rutgers was renamed in appreciation of Col. Henry Rutgers, a New York City landowner, whose gift allowed the college to reopen after financial insolvency. Rutgers was originally a private male-only liberal arts college affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church.  It was named as the state's sole land-grant college in 1864 under the Morrill Act.  It evolved into a coeducational public research university after being designated "The State University of New Jersey" by the New Jersey Legislature in 1945 and 1956. It is one of only two colonial colleges that later became public universities, the other being William & Mary.

Dartmouth College was created as a Puritan (Congregational) college in 1769 by Eleasar Wheelock, a Congregational minister. New Hampshire itself was founded in part by Cambridge alumnus John Wheelwright, whose dissenting religious views forced him to leave Massachusetts.  Dartmouth went through a long period of difficulties and found its feet in the early 20th century.

OBIT: Jerry Goodman ("Adam Smith") Memorial

George J. W. ("Jerry") Goodman, aka
"Adam Smith", Rhodes Scholar 1952

Yesterday's vivid memorial service in New York City for George Jerome Waldo ("Jerry") Goodman will stick with me as a reminder of how such events should be conducted. Goodman died on January 3 this year at the University of Miami Hospital, after a long effort to fend off the bone-marrow disorder myelofibrosis.

Goodman was elected a Rhodes Scholar from Missouri in 1952, but resigned from residence at Oxford University because of plumbing and padlocks at Brasenose College.

His moniker "Adam Smith" was reportedly given to him by Clay Felker when he was editing New York Magazine, to preserve Goodman's anonymity as he tried to stay in the business while pillorying it. Goodman said others have also claimed credit. Later, Goodman used the nom-de-plume for his wildly popular books about Wall Street and then as a trademark for a widely praised show on economics for the general public.

Goodman was born in St. Louis on August 10 (same date as my wife Alice's birthday), 1930. He was the son of Alexander Mark Goodman, an attorney, and Viona Cremer Goodman. Jerry Goodman's officemate and friend, Craig Drill, has written a testimony to the public-spiritedness of Alexander Goodman in the attached comments at the memorial service.

Jerry Goodman attended Harvard College, graduating magna cum laude in 1952, and was an editor of The Harvard Crimson. Goodman won a Rhodes Scholarship to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he studied political economy. However, he quit the college before the end of the first year of his scholarship. As his son Mark put it to me yesterday:

He liked the people at Oxford, but he did not like the facilities. He said: "I never want to take another cold shower ever again." He also didn't like the fact that the college gates were locked every night and he had to climb over to walls to get back in.

Instead of a thesis at Oxford, he spent his time writing a novel, The Bubble Makers, published in 1955, about a Harvard student in conflict with his grandfather. He wrote several other novels and a book for children.

In 1954, he joined the US Army First Special Forces (later called the "Green Berets") in the Intelligence Group known as Psywar (psychological warfare).

In 1961, Goodman married an actress from Phoenix, Sally Cullen Brophy, who had a full Broadway and television acting career in the 1950s and 1960s. When she retired from acting, they moved to Princeton. She taught theater arts at local universities. She died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2007. Their two children, Susannah and Mark, both spoke at the memorial service, with warm words for Goodman's participation in their childhood activities, and an emphasis on the music that they shared a love for.

Goodman pioneered a style of financial writing that made the language and concepts of Wall Street more understandable and accessible to the typical investor. He was founding editor of Institutional Investor in the second half of the 1960s, and in the process transformed financial writing. Michael Lewis at his best is channeling Goodman. The first non-fiction book that Goodman wrote, The Money Game, was published in 1968 when he was at Institutional Investor and was soon Number 1 on the bestseller list. A colleague who was at the Harvard Business School at the time told me after the memorial service yesterday:

It is hard to imagine the impact that Adam Smith and the book had on B School students at the time. When the first piece about "Red-Dogged Motorola" came out in New York Magazine, we rushed out to get on the phone. We got early copies of The Money Game and we couldn't get enough of Scarsdale Fats and the other characters.

In the book he memorably introduced the joke that ends with an economist on a desert island proposing to two fellow storm survivors faced with cans they can't open: "Assume a can opener". His point was to make fun of economists who make unwarranted assumptions.

His love of music, and especially opera, led him to interview Placido Domingo, during a period when he was singing in Wagner's Ring Cycle at the Met. Jerry showed him why so many Americans know the Ride of the Valkyries theme - Elmer Fudd, bedecked in a Teutonic helmet and plunging a shovel in the ground as he goes, sings it as he chases Bugs Bunny from hole to hole: "Kill Da Waabbit, Kill Da WAAAbbit, Kill Da WAAABit... etc." After they watch the clip, Jerry sings the theme again, and Placido Domingo lustily joins in. A cartoonist celebrated Jerry's 70th birthday with a picture of Lincoln Center lights advertising the duet - "Placido Domingo/Adam Smith sing KILL DA WABBIT".

I met Jerry through my fellow Trinity College, Oxford alumnus Ham Richardson, the late Louisiana-born top-ranked tennis great who moved to New York City after his tennis career was over to participate in venture capital and other Wall Street deals. We got talking about the British Empire, Rudyard Kipling, The Just-So Stories that we both loved (done up by Disney as The Jungle Book) and then the "great grey-green greasy banks of the Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees." Jerry said the Limpopo River was in the Congo, and I said that didn't make sense, Kipling was writing about South Africa, and I said the my recollection was that the Limpopo ran through the top of the eastern end of South Africa. He was interested, and bet me $10 that I was wrong. So we Googled it on our iPhones (actually, no - it took a while for us to get an Atlas in Ham's library, and find the river), and when he saw I was right he immediately handed over a $10 bill with no hesitation. Not as exciting a betting amount as the one that starts Liar's Poker, but Jerry got something he seemed always willing to pay something for - good information. I saw him many time after that and we always updated each other in a bantering tone.

During a stint in Hollywood, he wrote screenplays, including an adaption from one of his novels,  The Wheeler Dealers (still a good flick), starring James Garner and Lee Remick.

He was a member of the Editorial Board of The New York Times, an editor of Esquire Magazine, a writer for Fortune, and a founding member of New York magazine.  In 1984, PBS television launched him as the anchor and editor-in-chief of Adam Smith's Money World, which won eight Emmy nominations and five of its Awards. The program was aired in more than 40 countries and the Soviet Union ran a Russian-language-dubbed edition, doubtless watched by a young Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, who was born the year that Goodman was elected a Rhodes Scholar.  Goodman interviewed, among others, Warren Buffett and (in Moscow) Mikhail Gorbachev.

The family suggests donations in memory of Jerry Goodman be sent to two research programs for the cure of Myeloproliferative Disorders: (1) Robert Rosen, Chairman, MPN Research Foundation, 180 N. Michigan Avenue, #1870, Chicago, IL 60601 (or online mpnresearchfoundation.org), or (2) The Tisch Cancer Research Institute, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, One Gustave L. Levy Place, Box 1079, New York, NY 10029.

Here are links to some memorable obituaries of Jerry Goodman:
Jason Zweig, in the Wall Street Journal, who provides some of the original comments that Goodman was most famous for.
Douglas Martin, New York Times.
Martin Sosnoff, Forbes
Other good ones? Tell me at teppermarlin@aol.com.

REMARKS BY CRAIG A. DRILL AT MEMORIAL SERVICE FOR JERRY GOODMAN

April 30, 2014

Jerry and I were friends for almost forty years. Over the last two decades, we were officemates, sharing soup and sandwiches regularly.    

Jerry was raised in St. Louis at the end of the Great Depression. He told me that his father, Alexander Goodman, a lawyer, never made much money because he chose instead to take on cases and causes that he believed in.

Alexander once represented a farmer whose dog had been killed by a train. The attorney for the railroad asserted: “The dog was on our tracks, and, anyway, what is the value of a dog?”  

Well, Alexander’s answer was one of eloquence: “What is the value of a dog?  What is the value of a dog? Who wakes with the farmer before the break of day? Who toils daily beside his master in winter’s cold and summer’s heat? And who, when the farmer has gone to his final resting place, by the grave site, sits, refusing to leave, his muzzle between his paws?”

The farmer won his case. And Jerry’s father’s words were published in the holiday card sent around by the St. Louis Bar Association.  Now we know from whence came Jerry’s story-telling ability! 

Jerry entered his early teens during World War II and always had a special interest in military history.  He rarely spoke about his time as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, but told many stories about his time in the US Army First Special Forces Group.  His favorite World War II hero was Ernest Evans, a mixed-blood Cherokee, who, as Captain of a destroyer in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, repeatedly attacked, against all odds, the Imperial Japanese Fleet.  

Of his time at Harvard, Jerry talked mostly about writing for The Crimson. Moreover, he was thrilled to have been accepted into a small seminar on modern poetry led by Pulitzer Prize winner Archibald MacLeish. 

He enjoyed singing in the Glee Club and had a solo in one Christmas concert, which he later sang out to our office with gusto.  But he truly “sang his song” as a writer.  

Through the prism of humor, he helped us to better understand ourselves (sort of), as well as this sport -- and addiction -- called the modern stock market.  He had an uncanny ability to tell the real from the phony, even though the phony for many of us has glittering attractions.  

Jerry was proud to have coined some memorable words and phrases.  “Gunslingers,” a term for aggressive money managers from his classic, The Money Game, was one of his favorites. Some of his unforgettable phrases have found a permanent place in Wall Street vernacular, among these: “The stock doesn’t know you own it” and “If you don’t know who you are, the stock market is an expensive place to find out.”  

And he was proud of some of the images he created, among them the partygoers at the Masque of the Red Death ball -- money managers in the frothy “go-go” years -- asking, “What time is it?  What time is it?  But the clocks had no hands.”  

And he was gratified that his pioneering “Adam Smith’s Money World” -- which ran for 13 years on PBS -- won five coveted Emmy Awards and that his popular Goodman Lectures at Princeton on Media and Global Affairs had to be moved to larger auditoriums.  At the tail end of the dot-com bubble, Jerry, Mark, and I started adamsmithtv.net, which was a tremendous success in terms of fun and for father and son to work together.

Jerry was a polymath, a Renaissance man. He would take our lunch discussions from the Coptic-language Gospel of Thomas to his meeting with Günter Schabowski, the portly spokesman for the East German Politburo whose comments on TV -- inadvertently -- helped to bring down the Berlin Wall. 

Invariably, at our lunches, Jerry could not refrain from talking about investing and stocks. “Why is John Hancock so cheap?” “Is Continental Airlines going bankrupt again?” Jerry did his homework, and to better understand the biotech stocks, he actually went back to Princeton and audited two courses.

Despite many financial successes and fame, he never changed homes. He certainly never behaved ostentatiously or arrogantly. Jerry was destined to become a carrier of our culture, not just a passive observer, articulating with grace and wit the voice within us that knows what is right…as his father had done.

Jerry often bragged about Susannah and Mark, and it was evident how much he loved them. Beaming with pride, he showed me photographs of his granddaughters, Sophie, Lily, and Leah, who brought him great joy. Buying a condo in Coconut Grove was a big step for him, and he enjoyed going down to the warmth and the sea, along with Lynda, his loving partner, and his family.  

Jerry and I fell into the habit of reciting evocative poetry. Just a few months before his own death, as he was saddened by the loss of two close friends, Jerry read aloud Stanley Kunitz’s “The Layers.” As he read it, I could see the young man in Archibald MacLeish’s poetry class and, now, the older man with the courage of Captain Ernest Evans.  He felt this poem was a spiritual testament to what it is to be human.

THE LAYERS - Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,

some of them my own,

and I am not who I was,

though some principle of being

abides, from which I struggle

not to stray.

When I look behind,

as I am compelled to look

before I can gather strength

to proceed on my journey,

I see the milestones dwindling

toward the horizon

and the slow fires trailing

from the abandoned camp-sites,

over which scavenger angels

wheel on heavy wings.

Oh, I have made myself a tribe

out of my true affections,

and my tribe is scattered!

How shall the heart be reconciled

to its feast of losses?

In a rising wind

the manic dust of my friends,

those who fell along the way,

bitterly stings my face.

Yet I turn, I turn,

exulting somewhat,

with my will intact to go

wherever I need to go,

and every stone on the road

precious to me.

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

Live in the layers,

not on the litter.

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written. 

I am not done with my changes.