Harvard Turns to Turkish Government to Replace U.S. Funds
Plus, New York Times columnist says New York Times news story is garbage
“Private equity firm will finance Harvard research lab,” was the headline that Stat put over its June 16 report, one that set the tone for future coverage of that news.
Better, more skeptical coverage, like an otherwise excellent and groundbreaking piece in Retraction Watch, “Harvard researcher’s work faces scrutiny after private equity deal,” also bought into the “private equity” framing. The Retraction Watch piece pointed to two published corrections and additional “issues with statistical analyses” in the scientific work of Gökhan Hotamışlıgil, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health whose lab got the funding.
(The dean for communications and strategic initiatives at Harvard Chan School, Stephanie Simon, who wrote about the deal for the school of public health’s website and is listed as a contact on the press release about the deal, is a former editor at Stat. She didn’t respond to two emails from me seeking comment.)
But precisely how “private,” really, is the “private” equity deal, which was announced as “nearly $39 million over 10 years” for work related to “obesity and age-related diseases”?
Harvard says the money is coming from “İş Private Equity, a subsidiary of Türkiye İşbank Group.”
The "private" equity company has a board of directors that includes a representative of something called the Technology Development Foundation of Turkey, which bills itself as “in partnership with the public and private sectors.” The “private” equity company is part-owned by that Foundation, whose board includes someone from the Turkish finance ministry, someone from the presidency of the Republic of Turkey, and someone from the Turkish trade ministry.
And the Türkiye İşbank Group is itself 28 percent owned by a Turkish political party (not President Erdogan’s, but a foreign political party nonetheless).
I understand Turkey is a NATO ally of America, but it’s also, unfortunately, become the functional headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, to the point that when Qatar was pressed to evict the Hamas leadership, the Hamasniks reportedly fled to Turkey. The hatred of Israel is so strong and the propaganda so pervasive that even the non-Islamist Turks absorb it, almost as if by osmosis.
Anyway, maybe Harvard will be able to attract, for its research funding that the federal government has frozen, citing antisemitism, inefficiency, and ideological and racial bias, some private equity money that is genuinely private. This is not that.
Even the story that Harvard’s public health Dean Simon is telling about it doesn’t really add up. “The sponsored research agreement with İş Private Equity came about through a chance meeting,” Dean Simon writes. “Last fall, Hotamışlıgil was invited to give a scientific presentation in Istanbul at a symposium that Türkiye İşbank Group had organized to celebrate the bank’s centennial. …The CEO of İşbank, Hakan Aran, was in the audience. At a dinner later that evening, the two sat next to each other.” What sort of “chance meeting” is it when a Harvard professor is invited to Istanbul to speak at an event celebrating the 100th anniversary of a bank? That isn’t a “chance meeting,” that’s a Harvard professor getting invited to a corporate event of a Turkish-political-party-owned bank and accepting the invitation. Harvard doesn’t disclose who paid for the travel.
Turkish media reported a $24 million donation to Harvard in 2014 to support Hotamışlıgil’s lab from Yıldız Holding. At about the same time, Harvard Business School opened a research center in Istanbul, Yildiz started hosting Harvard Business School MBA students, and Harvard Business School publishing started churning out case studies about Yildiz’s corporate strategy. Then-Harvard President Bacow visited the Harvard Club of Turkey and held an event from 6 pm to 8 pm on Friday March 17, 2023 at the Four Seasons Bosphorus in Istanbul.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of action on the Harvard-Trump administration front. At yesterday’s cabinet meeting, President Trump asked Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, “How are you doing with Columbia and Harvard?” McMahon responded, “We’re negotiating hard,” and said, “we’re getting there.”
Today, McMahon and the secretary of health and human services, Robert Kennedy, notified the New England Commission of Higher Education that its member institution, Harvard University, is in violation of federal antidiscrimination laws and therefore may fail to meet the standards for accreditation set by the Commission.
“By allowing anti-Semitic harassment and discrimination to persist unchecked on its campus, Harvard University has failed in its obligation to students, educators, and American taxpayers,” McMahon said. “The Department of Education expects the New England Commission of Higher Education to enforce its policies and practices, and to keep the Department fully informed of its efforts to ensure that Harvard is in compliance with federal law and accreditor standards.”
A third Trump cabinet secretary, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, also acted against Harvard today with a subpoena for information about foreign students. “If Harvard won’t defend the interests of its students, then we will. We tried to do things the easy way with Harvard. Now, through their refusal to cooperate, we have to do things the hard way. Harvard, like other universities, has allowed foreign students to abuse their visa privileges and advocate for violence and terrorism on campus,” Noem said.
Harvard says it gets about $686 million a year in U.S. government research funding, while the Trump administration’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism has announced termination of $2.65 billion in grants to Harvard. The Turkish economy is in rough shape, so whatever comes from Turkey is unlikely to go far toward bridging Harvard’s new budget gaps.
Times Versus Times: In a front-page Sunday news article by Michael Shear, The New York Times claimed that war had “deepened” Israel’s “isolation.”
“For Israel, the ripple effects have been felt in the Persian Gulf, where before Oct. 7, countries like Saudi Arabia appeared willing to establish diplomatic and economic ties with Israel. Now, most analysts believe that hopes for normal relations have been drastically set back as the war in Gaza has dragged on, in part because the Gulf nations have tied the idea of diplomatic ties to a resolution of the Palestinian issue — a resolution that seems more distant than ever,” the Shear “news analysis” claimed.
Now Times columnist Bret Stephens comes in with his own piece that doesn’t directly mention the Shear front-page analysis but reads like a rebuttal. “It’s only because of Israel’s victory that there’s a realistic prospect of a peace agreement between Jerusalem and Beirut as part of an expanded Abraham Accords. There’s a similarly hopeful story in Syria.”
Stephens writes that Israel “advertised its capabilities to Saudi Arabia, which may now be more amenable to joining the Abraham Accords — not out of a softhearted desire for peace but out of a hardheaded interest in cementing military, economic and technological ties with the Jewish state.”
This is one of those zero sum situations in which it is impossible for both Shear and Stephens to be correct. Stephens suggests Israel is close to deals with Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. Shear says that Israel is more isolated than ever and that “hopes for normal relations have been drastically set back.”
I think Stephens is much more close to the truth of the situation than Shear is. It’s interesting to look at it in terms of what price, if any, either of them would pay for being wrong. If Stephens is correct, will Shear suffer any reputational or career consequences for being wrong? Or if Shear is correct, will Stephens suffer any reputational or career consequences for being wrong? Part of the answer may be that no one expects these journalists to be accurate, they just expect them to be entertaining or interesting or well-argued. They are colleagues so there is an expectation that they be civil, which may be why Stephens doesn’t come straight out and say this is a column about why the front-page news analysis in this past Sunday’s New York Times was totally bogus.
If I were A.G. Sulzberger (a big “if”) and both those guys worked for me, I’d invite them to do a video debate where they try to justify their claims and predictions and test them against each other face-to-face in real time. Or I’d file the two articles away and assign a third reporter, or better yet, an editor, to circle back independently in six months or a year and assess which of the two views came closer to being trustworthy.
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Retrospectives on previous articles are indeed interesting.
The WSJ does some of this in its "Notable & Quotable" feature on the editorial pages.
Another way to get this experience is to get very behind in reading a publication, and experience the articles from the perspective of several months later.