A Tenured Professor: A Novel

By John Kenneth Galbraith

This biting satire of academia and high finance by the Harvard economist “is ingenious and humorous even as it chills and cuts close to the bone” (The New York Times).

John Kenneth Galbraith served in the Kennedy administration before becoming one of the twentieth century’s foremost economists and public intellectuals. In A Tenured Professor, he spins his wealth of knowledge—and knowledge of wealth—into a delightfully comical morality tale.

Montgomery Martin, a Harvard economics professor, creates a stock forecasting model which makes it possible for him to uncover society's hidden agendas. Seeking proof that human folly has no limit when motivated by greed, Martin sets off a mass hysteria that causes investors to believe—despite the lessons of history and physics—that up is the only direction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 4, 1991
• ISBN: 9780547595610

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was a critically acclaimed author and one of America's foremost economists. His most famous works include The Affluent Society, The Good Society, and The Great Crash. Galbraith was the recipient of the Order of Canada and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, and he was twice awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Book preview

FIRST MARINER BOOKS EDITION 2001

Copyright © 1990 by John Kenneth Galbraith

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Galbraith, John Kenneth, date.

A tenured professor / John Kenneth Galbraith.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-618-15455-8

I. Title.

PS3557.A4113T46 1990

813’.54—dc20 89-39559 CIP

eISBN 978-0-547-59561-0

v2.0321

FOR GEORGE BALL

Why didn’t someone tell me about banking before?

With one exception, none of the persons here celebrated teaches at Harvard or otherwise exists. To Professor McCrimmon I have assigned certain academic tendencies and attitudes which, over the years, I have sought to resist in myself.

The Harvard Faculty Club, recently gentrified, is described as of the time of this history.

As this book goes to press, the President and the Congress of the United States are contemplating reform as regards Political Action Committees, the PACs. Whatever the outcome, the solution here offered is preferred.

1

The Long Table

HARVARD YARD, the ancient center of college and university instruction, is an enclosure of a bit more than twenty acres in extent that is now the site only of libraries, a few classrooms, the handsome administration building, a number of dormitories for the entering class, a church and the stretch of greensward on which the annual commencement ceremonies are held. Students in medicine, public health, dentistry, business administration, and some in the sciences and the law see it rarely, if at all. However, for all Harvard men and women it is thought a place of great symbolic, nostalgic and liturgical importance; there is something slightly solemn in a reference to the Yard. Once, when speaking there, John F. Kennedy told of his pleasure in being back on the Harvard campus. The reaction was severe. It is recognized that busy politicians do not always write their own speeches. But it was considered far from fitting that this should be so starkly confirmed by a Harvard man, along with the obvious fact that he hadn’t read over beforehand what he was going to say.

On one side of the Yard is Quincy Street, a one-way thoroughfare that separates it from the art museum, a center for the study of the visual arts and a dining hall for the freshmen. When women were first admitted to Harvard residence, the designation of freshperson was briefly attempted, but it didn’t succeed.

Also across Quincy Street from a well-traversed gate out of the Yard is the Faculty Club. This is a structure of unconvincingly Georgian aspect; like many Harvard buildings it conveys the impression that both architect and architecture were something of an afterthought. Inside the club on the ground floor are a spacious entry hall and, to the left, beyond a small reception desk and some cloakrooms, a large, rectangular, well-lighted room in which, it was once hoped, faculty members would gather to read and converse after lunch, making it perhaps a center of social concourse for the university. This has not happened.

The room and the furniture are unattractive and give the impression of having been shabby even when new. There are newspapers available, but, by late noon, they have become disassembled and dog-eared, the only exceptions being The Times of London and some other overseas journals, added to accord a cosmopolitan touch, which no one is ever seen to read. There are also magazines, many of which, by the inadvertence of magazine subscription, continue to come free. At some point a coffee urn and cups were placed on one of the tables to encourage after-lunch relaxation and talk. These too have not been a success.

Such social purpose as is served by the club is accomplished in the three dining rooms spread away to the right of the entry hall. Here for two or three hours at midday there is an agreeable sense of activity. Waitresses and an occasional waiter move about, providing food with surprising efficiency. The decor, if undistinguished, is not unpleasant. Few pause to regard the large oil portraits that look down from the walls, gifts long ago to the university museums that were not considered good enough for more reputable display. No one so pictured is now known.

At one end of the largest of the dining rooms and close by the doorways leading on to the other two is the long table. This, by common consent, is the major communications center of the university. A professor of classics once suggested it be called the college epicentrum, another effort that didn’t take.

At the smaller tables in the three rooms younger scholars gather for purposeful discussion or to entertain the numerous visitors to the university who, faithful to an established academic tradition that makes movement a substitute for thought, travel to Cambridge in pursuit of some scientific or literary enterprise which, too often, has only a ritualistic aspect. Older professors, quite a few retired members of the faculty and those with no particular luncheon companion for the day go to the long table. All hope that in the course of the meal they will pick up some interesting or even useful information; in this they are frequently disappointed. The daily exchange runs generally to personal history and anecdotes, these being at Harvard, as elsewhere, a major teaching resource. In past times when Harvard professors returned from service in Washington—with the State Department, the Pentagon, the OSS or less reputably with the CIA or the Labor Department—the recapture of their public achievements in face of extreme bureaucratic or legislative error often served as primary lecture material for a term. Students were thought to be impressed.

Sometimes, however, the conversation at the long table takes a more useful turn—to some crisis in the management of university affairs; some portent of disaster in international relations on which a scholar with presumed knowledge will be questioned in a reflective way; some aberration by a statesman, like Ronald Reagan, of whom grave disapproval is assumed; or to the current preoccupation of the faculty or the Faculty Council, where for some time legislation on sexual harassment has been an urgent topic. Referred to by the Faculty Council as amorous relationships in the instructional context, this was, at first, the problem, admittedly exceptional, of unduly ardent professors, assistant professors and teaching assistants who offered better grades or threatened worse ones as an inducement to what was called sexual preferment. Later, however, attention shifted to some notably enterprising young women who, it was alleged, threatened their teachers with a charge of such sexual aggression unless they were given the marks they felt they deserved.

Very often a professor comes to the long table with some topic in mind and engages others in his concerns with little regard for their interest or attention.

…

So it happened on the day when this history begins. Two professors of middle years—one tall, with sparse red hair, thin, elongated features, deep-set eyes and a generally distinguished bearing; the other shorter, slightly fleshed around the jowls and with, in contrast to his companion, an air of extreme good nature—arrived briskly at the long table just after one o’clock. It is a time when the early diners, including retired professors who are brought promptly to their meal by reluctantly admitted idleness, are beginning to leave. The newcomers nodded briefly to their neighbors; the latter nodded back.

How are you, Ted? The question was to the tall, red-haired man.

You are looking well, Professor Grierson, said another. It was evident that Grierson was a man of standing, a presence of some prestige at the long table. He, after a brief response, continued with the conversation he was having with his companion on the way to the club.

It could, he said, be a major breakthrough.

I agree, if it holds up. A quantum step.

I’m not too sure of all the details, but it’s a new concept and he seems to be giving it a pretty solid trial.

Why doesn’t he go ahead and publish?

He wants to keep it to himself for a while. It’s his way of doing things. Also his wife’s. She has a strong voice in these matters. Pretty active in politics as well.

"Well, politics and personal life are one’s own business. Or should be."

Yes, they should be, said Grierson. It’s his economics that counts, in any case. That’s what we got him back here from Berkeley for. We really got something, I think.

…

What have your economists come up with now, Grierson?

The interruption came from a solidly built man wearing a heavy green Harris tweed jacket with a sweater and bow tie. His clean-shaven face was round and pink; his nearly white hair was brushed with obvious attention on two sides of the well-marked, also very pink, line of the part. At first glance he seemed a man of genial aspect; only on a closer look did one see that his eyes, small, alert and unblinking, were unequivocally mean. The question could, perhaps, have been expected.

Angus Maxwell McCrimmon, professor of advanced psychometrics, now in his late fifties, would, in earlier times, have been approaching retirement. He was in his accustomed place near the end of the long table, his back to the clutter and conversation of the dining room. Neither there nor elsewhere was McCrimmon a figure of affection. Recalling the noted Scottish saying on the Clan McCrimmon, a professor of Celtic once observed that at Harvard things were different: "Where the McCrimmon sits is the foot of the table." Angus McCrimmon’s character was not one that emerged gradually as he became known. In this history he is, as he was at Harvard, an evident earth-fault in an otherwise stable terrain.

In every university a decent harmony is maintained only as a steady flow of minor faculty misjudgments, misadventures and misdemeanors is overlooked, ignored, forgiven. Mild descents into plagiarism, an otherwise too obvious misappropriation of the ideas of others, a too transparent tendency to intellectual mystification, an unduly evident surrender to dubious outside sponsorship of research, a book depicted by the scholar as of unparalleled power and interest that, regrettably, remains always one year in the future, are all accepted as inevitable. They are passed over except in the most intimate conversation and ignored to the extent possible by the university administration. The alternative is acrimony and recrimination, and these are hostile to the community spirit that allows men and women of varying character and achievement to live peacefully together.

To McCrimmon, however, tolerance and discretion were unknown. By nothing had he felt so rewarded over the years as by the aberrations of his colleagues and the mistakes and miscalculations of presidents, deans and governing boards. When a consensus had been reached at a faculty meeting, it was McCrimmon who spoke ardently to its flaws. When he found himself in the majority, he went eloquently into the opposition.

Only with students was McCrimmon exempt from the hostility he was known greatly to enjoy. That was because, with the exception of some flagrant eccentrics, he had no students. Partly this derived from general undergraduate ignorance, shared by much of the faculty, as to what psychometrics was. McCrimmon, however, had a different view.

Years ago Kirsopp Lake made his reputation at Harvard by giving its easiest course and thereby equipping thousands of students with a wholly unnecessary knowledge of the Bible. I give the hardest course, and thus I maintain standards, don’t spoil the undergraduates with easily acquired information and leave myself with time for more important personal matters.

Not for many years had the Confi-Guide, a student publication which annually reports on the diligence and competence of Harvard professors and the content of their courses, had a paragraph on McCrimmon. No one ever came forward with a judgment, for few with a minimal sense of purpose had ever finished a term in his course.

McCrimmon, having gotten Grierson’s attention, continued: A breakthrough, you say? If it’s in economics, at least it can’t be dangerous. Nothing like gene engineering, laser beams, sex hormones or international relations. That’s where we don’t want any breakthroughs.

Nothing dangerous, Mac, said Professor Grierson with a slight edge to his voice, but very interesting for us. A good predictive model by our Professor Marvin. You should know about him—one of our bright young people. Even you might be impressed.

He came down firmly on the words even you. As usual, it didn’t work.

You’ll have to explain. I’ve seen references to economic models in the papers before. What’s new about this one?

Professor Grierson looked at his luncheon companion, who was appreciatively eating a Reuben sandwich. This was now a lunchtime staple at the long table in succession to horse steak, a favorite in the difficult days during and after World War II and for many years a tradition on the menu. His fellow economist didn’t respond. Grierson drew a slight breath.

A good model replicates the American or world economy or some part of it, gives you a working view of its operation, tells you what it will do in the future.

You mean recessions, depressions, unemployment, inflation and the other misfortunes you arrange for us? Profits in various industries? What will happen to the stock market?

Professor Grierson decided to shorten his answers. A good model has predictive value. That about sums it up.

This, too, didn’t work. By now others at the long table were suspending their conversation to listen. Only at the extreme end was there still talk on a mooted change in undergraduate course requirements—a liberalization in the required or core curriculum that was thought by the more sensitive teachers to pose grave educational risks. As McCrimmon had long ago discovered, the truly offensive aspects of his personality were a reliable source of attention.

Don’t you already have these models? What about the one in Lexington, also invented, as I remember, by a Harvard professor? Data Resources or some such. That excellent man Eckstein. Doesn’t that work?

Yes, of course it does, said Grierson. And there are Wharton Econometrics and others.

Aren’t they reliable? Why do we need another?

They do sometimes miss the boat. That’s how economic prediction is; it sometimes gets blown off course.

Your maritime metaphors impress me. If predictions aren’t reliable, of what value are they?

Grierson was near the end of his patience. People generally accepted his word, and he had come to expect it. But he knew that one didn’t show anger or even impatience at the long

Reviews for A Tenured Professor

[ecw0647 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This quote about sums it up: "Tenure was originally invented to protect radical professors, those who challenged the accepted order. But we don't have such people anymore at the universities, and the reason is tenure. When time comes to grant it nowadays, the radicals get screened out. That's its principal function. It's a very good system, really -- keeps academic life at a decent level of tranquillity."