new president of Harvard board touted diversity in studies some call 'flawed'At McKinsey, dame commander of the british empire Hunt was regularly mistaken for catering staff [b.s.].
 As the next president of the Harvard Board of Overseers, Vivian Hunt will lead one of the two governing boards of a university that has been grappling with highly publicized research-integrity scandals. There was the alleged plagiarism by Harvard's president Claudine Gay, who resigned under pressure in January. There is the scandal around Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino, who is suing Harvard to contest its findings of research misconduct in, among other things, a paper she wrote about dishonesty. And there are dozens of problematic publications associated with a researcher at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, a Harvard-affiliated institution. If and when those issues or similar ones reach the Board of Overseers, Hunt will bring some unusual expertise. As a partner at McKinsey, the consulting company, Hunt was the co-author of four studies claiming financial outperformance by companies with diverse management and directors. Yet two researchers who attempted to reproduce Hunt's results say they were unable to so. Those academics, Jeremiah Green and John R.M. Hand, described McKinsey's interpretation as "flawed" and wrote that the firm's studies "should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms should expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives." "McKinsey would not provide us with their detailed datasets, nor the names of the firms in their datasets," Green and Hand write. Instead, they used the S&P 500 to perform what they call a "quasi-replication." Their results contradicted those reported by McKinsey. Green and Hand also fault the design of the McKinsey surveys. "McKinsey measures firm financial performance over the four or five years leading up to the year in which they measure the race/ethnicity of the firm's executives, making the default direction of causality captured in their correlations that of better firm financial performance causing companies to diversify the racial/ethnic composition of their executives, not the reverse," they wrote in an article in the March 2024 Econ Journal Watch. The article was published before Hunt was named to take over the Harvard board. Neither the Harvard Crimson nor the Harvard Gazette mentioned Hunt's diversity research in their coverage of her appointment. The Gazette article did note that she was recognized "as one of the 10 most influential Black people in Britain." In a television appearance and in McKinsey marketing materials, Hunt discussed her findings. "What the data shows is that companies that have more diverse leadership teams are more successful," she said in a Bloomberg television appearance. "The leading companies in our datasets are pursuing diversity because it is a business imperative and driving real business results…Companies that are more diverse…are 21 percent more likely to be successful than those that aren't." "When companies commit themselves to diverse leadership, they are more successful," Hunt wrote in a 2015 article for McKinsey headlined, "Why diversity matters." Gender and racial diversity were the first two kinds of diversity mentioned in the article. She also said that "This in turn suggests that other kinds of diversity—for example, in age, sexual orientation, and experience (such as a global mind-set and cultural fluency)—are also likely to bring some level of competitive advantage for companies." Some critics of Harvard have faulted the university for, they say, placing too high a priority on race and gender diversity, or a "diversity equity and inclusion" ideology, rather than academic excellence. The article in the Harvard Gazette, the university's central-administration-published organ, quoted Hunt saying she hoped to work "to support excellence, inclusion, and world-class leadership in all that we do." Back-and-forth over research findings, technical issues, and methodology is the normal stuff of scholarship. Only rarely does it rise to the level of misconduct or fraud. No one is accusing Hunt of that. Nor would she be the first or last researcher to oversimplify or overstate her findings in a television appearance. But the battles over the boundaries between mere disagreement, or sloppiness, or worse can sometimes require the judgment of academic leaders, or, as in Gay's case and that of the former president of Stanford, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, such controversies can contribute to toppling them. The Overseers presidency is a one-year term, but Hunt's year may include a search for a new president of the university. Alan Garber is serving as interim president and has named a former law clerk to Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork, John Manning, as interim provost. Typically the Overseers have some representation in the search but the other governing board, the smaller and more powerful Harvard Corporation, takes the lead. Hunt left McKinsey and joined Optum in October 2022. While she was at McKinsey, the firm was subject to a storm of negative press attention and legal pressure related to its work for clients including opioid makers, state-owned enterprises in South Africa, China, and Russia, and even Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Trump administration. Also in October 2022, Doubleday released Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe's book When McKinsey Comes to Town, which included a sharply negative portrayal of McKinsey's lucrative work for Britain's National Health Service. Hunt was McKinsey's managing partner for the United Kingdom and Ireland and in 2018 Queen Elizabeth II named her Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. "I might be the only office manager at McKinsey who regularly gets mistaken for the catering staff," Hunt said in a 2018 commencement address at Concord Academy, a private school in Concord, Massachusetts. In that speech she spoke about, among other things, her grandmother, a house-cleaner who spent her youth as a tenant tobacco farmer in South Carolina, and whose own grandmother was a slave. She also spoke of the school's beginnings with "academic rigor and an unabashedly progressive point of view." In the Concord Academy speech, Hunt said she went to Harvard only because her father wouldn't pay for the Rhode Island School of Design [What?!]. |
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Harvard is incorrigible: its new, affirmative action board president is yet another scholarly fraud
----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Ira Stoll from The Editors <smartertimes@substack.com>
To: "add1dda@aol.com" <add1dda@aol.com>
wednesday, april 17, 2024 at 12:14:11a.m. edt
"new president of Harvard board touted diversity in studies some call 'flawed'"
Note Ira Stoll's namby-pamby language, and b.s., as opposed to my language.
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3 comments:
Another day, another dishonest black.
A clear and persistent pattern exists among the negresses to cheat. And that pattern has always existed I assume. Among the negro men too probably.
"Probably" is an under-assessment.It's rampant.
--GRA
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