Waiting for Superman attempts to do too much, by telling too many stories. There are 5 stories of children attempting to be admitted to successful charter schools. One of the heroes of the charter school movement, Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, is featured. Finally, educational reformer Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the Washington D.C. public schools is also profiled. Since one of the issues Rhee takes on is tenure for incompetent teachers, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is presented as what the New York Times calls “a demonic opponent of change.”

The movie ends on several rather sad notes. As any economist would predict, there is excess demand for successful charter schools, and the law requires that excess demand be dealt with by publicly-held admissions lotteries. Of the five students presented, one is successful in the lottery, a second makes it on the wait list, and three are unsuccessful. Michelle Rhee proposes a contract that pays substantial bonuses to the most effective teachers, but the proposal fails in collective bargaining. Rhee begins the movie looking young and dynamic but by the end appears to have aged two decades. Indeed, following the defeat of Mayor Adrian Fenty, she decided to resign.

The movie was produced by Jeffrey Skoll’s activist Participant Media and, consistent with Skoll’s approach, ends by interspersing with the credits text urging the viewer to take action. The actions suggested include parents writing their school boards to demand great teachers, volunteering their time, or donating money. All of this strikes me as well-meaning, but it is not clear that it would have much impact.

To go back to the movie, my criticism is that, by attempting to tell so many stories, it doesn’t tell any one of them in sufficient depth. First, there are many successful charter schools, but also many that, by any standard, aren’t doing any better than the public schools they seek to challenge. So what differentiates the successful charter schools from the unsuccessful ones?

Second, was Michelle Rhee a successful reformer or did she crash and burn? Were her tactics – in particular the closing of schools and firing of teachers – warranted, or an unproductive shock and awe campaign?

Third, was Randi Weingarten being demonized because the plot line demanded an adversary? The New York Times, at least, suggests that Weingarten is more flexible than the film suggests. Any one of these stories could have been investigated – and presented – with more depth and nuance.

Much should be done to improve public education in the US. It is not clear to me that breaking teachers’ unions is the best way to do that. Reducing class size, coping with the effects of poverty, and making better use of technology are all part of the answer. All these, of course, require additional resources. The resources made available by foundations and by the Race to the Top initiative are part of the solution, but a real initiative would require support on a much greater scale. And it is not at all clear to me that the US is ready or able to make such a commitment.

I feel considerable sympathy for and sadness about Peretz. The honor was for his responsible leadership of the program during a difficult time. (For example, Prof. Michael Walzer revealed that, in the aftermath of the Harvard strike of 1969, Peretz worked hard to convince the university not to expel the students who had occupied University Hall.) The honor was undermined by what Peretz, in his posted confession on Yom Kippur eve called his “sin of wild and wounding language.” A responsible and judicious leader and mentor can at the same time be an extreme partisan in print in the culture wars, a tendency aided and abetted by the ease of instant online publication. As a general precaution, I think blog publication software should have an automatic internal “diplomacy checker” that cautions against overly provocative prose and prevents a post from going up until the writer looks at it the next morning. My guess is that wouldn’t be sufficient in this case: Marty is who he is.

Aside from the sadness of l’affaire Peretz, there was much at the seminar that was thought-provoking, which I’ll discuss under the themes of inter-disciplinarity, connecting, and remembering.

In its essence, Social Studies is an interdisciplinary social sciences program. Interdisciplinarity is great for undergraduates, but is feasible for a practicing academic? Most academics are specialized, not interdisciplinary. Tenure decisions and publication decisions are usually controlled by people rooted in their intellectual niches.

One of the speakers, sociologist Rogers Brubaker, observed that sociology’s absence of a dominant paradigm and perpetually fracturing and realigning subdisciplines facilitates interdisciplinarity. University of Pennsylvania President Amy Guttman, in contrast, observed that economics is controlled by a dominant rational actor paradigm, making it difficult for economists to engage in inter-disciplinary research. That said, it seems to me that she passed over the growth of behavioral economics, which is a hybrid of psychology and economics, attempting to supplant the rational actor with more realistic psychological assumptions.

One difficulty of being interdisciplinary is the challenge of learning a new discipline in mid-career. You must go beyond undergraduate dilettantism; if your knowledge of the new discipline is superficial, reviewers for academic journals will catch you out. Perhaps a better way to do interdisciplinary research is to put together a team of scholars from different disciplines. While each will not be expected to master the other discipline(s), each will have to become conversant enough with the other disciplines that the collaboration produces synergies. Social studies encouraged us to be interdisciplinary and provided models of effective interdisciplinary scholarship, but emulating the models is always a challenge.

Second, connecting. Because there were faculty and former and current students from a 50 year period present, likely everyone knew only a handful of the several hundred in attendance, a situation that is painful for introverts and delightful for extroverts. I went with the latter tendency, and ended up talking with many of the lecturers, recent graduates, and current students. To a person, I found them engaging and engaged, with lots of ambitions and plans for future learning, whether through formal research or life experience. The caliber of its participants speaks highly of the strength of the program’s design and its appeal to the best students and young faculty members.

Third, remembering. I asked Director of Studies Anya Bernstein whether the program had been recorded and her answer was that, as is often the case now at Harvard, there wasn’t money in the budget. As someone concerned with narratives and institutions, I deeply regret that. The Social Studies program, while a relatively young institution by Harvard standards, has a wonderful story to tell. Telling an institution’s story is a great way of recruiting – not that Social Studies seems to have any problem there – and of building identification with the institution on the part of its participants. It would be great for Anya and other lecturers to say to their students that, if they wanted to know more about the history and philosophy of the Social Studies program, they could look up the proceedings of the 50th anniversary celebration on the program’s website.

Without the benefit of transcripts, I hope Anya can round up the speaker’s notes and texts which, together with the filmed interview of Prof. Stanley Hoffmann, one of the program’s founding fathers, would constitute something approaching a record of the event, and post it on the program’s website. I think the students, current and future, would learn a lot from it. I found it so thought-provoking that I’d also like to read it and think again about all that was said.

The Social Studies celebration has now become the controversy du jour because a recent blog post by Martin Peretz, the long-time director of the program, has caught the attention of those who feel it is islamophobic. They are demanding that Harvard withdraw the honor it is about to bestow on him – the establishment of a student scholarship fund in his name. The controversy has gone beyond the US; for instance, one of Peretz’s critics is Globe and Mail columnist Sheema Khan.

I was looking forward to the event – a mixture of intelligent dialogue and meeting old and new friends – with great anticipation. I now wonder whether the agenda will be hijacked by the Martin Peretz affair, to the extent that attendees will have to pass through a gauntlet of placard-carrying protesters and, inside the room, it monopolizes the discussion.

But does Peretz deserve to be honored by Harvard?. Some honors are given for a specific achievement or achievements in a specific area, for example Nobel prizes, and other honors are given to the whole person for achievements of a lifetime (at least to that point), for example the Order of Canada. For the former, everything other than the specific achievement or achievements is generally assumed irrelevant. But can everything else really be considered irrelevant to the prize? Would a Nobel committee give its prize to a brilliant scientist who has made a discovery of the utmost scientific significance and practical importance, but who has recently been convicted of vehicular homicide?

Universities honor people by giving them honorary degrees or attaching their names to buildings, programs, or scholarships. They are often not explicit, even in their own thinking, about whether the rationale for the honor is a specific achievement or the qualities of the whole person. Even for honors for specific achievements, this can become problematic if the honoree has been deeply engaged in a controversial issue as a partisan – here I like the French term parti pris – on one side. And this appears to be the essence of the issue regarding Martin Peretz. The honor is for the significant role he played in managing the Social Studies program for a long time and in a challenging era. The following analogy comes to mind. The late Edward Said was a controversial advocate of the Palestinian position and critic of Israel. He was also an accomplished literary scholar. While I didn’t support his views on the Middle East, I would support any one of the 20 universities that gave him honorary degrees, assuming it was for his literary scholarship.

In the case of Martin Peretz, his detractors feel that his commentary about the Middle East is tantamount to hate speech about Muslims. In terms of the driving analogy, they would consider it the equivalent of vehicular homicide, so that these aspects of the whole person are so objectionable that he should not be honored for his contributions to the Social Studies program. My inclination – albeit without detailed study – is to say that Peretz’s commentary, while pointed and controversial, hasn’t crossed the line into hate speech.

Whatever else happens, I hope the Social Studies celebration remains a celebration, because the program is worth celebrating. More on that next week.

First, many fields within management have adopted a natural sciences research model that emphasizes publishing academic journal articles rather than books.

Second, the research component of the influential Financial Times global ranking of business schools is based on articles published in a list of 40 top-tier academic journals. Administrators attempting to improve a school’s rankings will therefore, as they say, incent faculty members to publish articles in those academic journals rather than books.

Third, business schools have been growing, which means hiring entry level faculty members. To get tenure, assistant professors need to publish quickly, and books take too long, so a business school with a young faculty – as most are – will concentrate on publishing academic journal articles.

Despite these reasons, there are a few management professors who continue to write books. I’ll suggest two important reasons why.

First, there are still some management professors, especially tenured full professors, who undertake big and ambitious research projects, and a book is the vehicle par excellance for publishing the results. A book is the place to publish a new theory, work out is implications and applications, and analyze the supporting evidence. A book is the place to synthesize a field or subfield. A book is the place to create a new field or subfield.

Here are a few examples at the Rotman School. Richard Florida wrote a book to explain and elaborate on his theory of the creative class. Andy Stark in a recent book addressed the complicated question of the shifting margin between public and private sector responsibilities in the US. In my own case, I found that a book was the best format for a comprehensive look at innovation in government, both in general and in a variety of different policy areas.

Books have the related advantage that they consolidate research in one place, rather than spread it around a number of different academic journals. A book is the place to go for the first word, last word, and the whole story in between.

The second reason for publishing a book is to reach a different and possibly larger audience. Journal articles are necessarily aimed exclusively at academic colleagues, who are the only people who read the journals. A book might also be read beyond one’s academic colleagues, possibly by practitioners and even the general public. Many academics aspire to write something that reaches out beyond his or her academic colleagues to a broader public, and a book is still the vehicle for doing that.

A three-part injunction for living a full life, attributed to the nineteenth century Cuban independence leader and writer Jose Marti, is to plant a tree, have a child, and write a book. I hope that more management professors, particularly those with the security of tenure, will embrace the third part.