Wall St. at Harvard and Princeton: "A Communal Obsession"
As we continue to ask ourselves, "how could it all have happened," that is, the financial crisis that nearly plunged the world into a second Great Depression, we should not forget the nature of the salespeople who peddled the faulty investments which almost brought it on. That's conveyed to us in a startling way in Chapter One, which Ho has entitled "Biographies of Hegemony." In an interview (individual names are changed, the institutions' kept) with a "Robert Hopkins, a vice president of mergers and acquisitions at Lehman Brothers," the pitch is: "`We are talking about the smartest people in the world. We are! They are the smartest people in the world. If you (the average investor or the average corporation) don't know anything, why wouldn't you invest with the smartest people in the world? They must know what they are doing.'"(Page 40.) Now where do you find the smartest people in the world? Arguably, but conventionally, the answer would be mostly at Harvard, Princeton and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Why not MIT, and Stanford, and what's the matter with Yale? Well, maybe it isn't quite all about smartness. In fact, it's about cultural projection too: clothes, confidence, aggressiveness contained within good manners, body image...in brief, it's smartness well-packaged, because salesmanship for financial products, deals and mergers, scanning the horizon for new customers, depends on wide business networking and social interaction with corporate America, and beyond...as we will see shortly. So sorry MIT, Ho tells us ("too nerdy"), Yale ("too liberal") and Stanford ("too far" - from Wall Street, that is)...

Two things jolted me about this smartness motif and the recruiting process at Princeton and Harvard. One is the astounding numbers of undergraduates that want to ascend into this celestial orbit; at Princeton, from 37% of the class of 2001 up to 40% of the class of 2005 & 2006 "entered financial services," with similar numbers for Harvard. How could that be done? The answer is not pretty: Wall Street's presence "dominates campus life: recruiters visit the university virtually every week, even on weekends...the recruiting process saturates almost every aspect of campus life from the very first day of the academic year."(Page 45.) Ho presents us with a two page spread of "Goldman Sachs Recruitment Schedule at Harvard University, 2000-2001," and I count 30 or so events, multiples in every month from September through February. It's so Wall Street saturated at these schools that Ho says "a glance at the campus publications...demonstrates what amounts to a communal obsession..." (Page 53.)

It was in the light of Ho's illumination that I read with great interest Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust's September 6, 2009 NY Times Op-Ed, "The University's Crisis of Purpose." It's a retrospective and lamentation at the same time, in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, and what universities had become, unable to "expose the patterns of risk and denial" contained in that "bubble of false prosperity and excessive materialism..." She asks if "universities (became) too captive to the immediate and worldly purposes they serve" and, "has the market model become the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?" Noting the trend, since the 1970's, for business degrees to outnumber by a 2:1 ratio the next most popular major, she reaffirms a mission for higher education to "offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present." This sounds hopeful, but the trends of 30 years of Market Utopianism, and the vast shadow cast by The Market, will not be lifted in an instant, barring a further economic catastrophe on the scale of the Great Depression.