Growing Up Goldman
I just came back from an event at Goldman Sachs’ London office, and boy do I feel itchy. The Harvard Club of London, together with Goldman, hosted a talk by Jack Meyer, former caretaker of Harvard’s endowment. While I was intrigued by his perspective on risk management, which took up the first 20 minutes of the talk, Meyer spent the rest of the time trying to sell a really bad idea.
Briefly, Meyer’s involved with the Asian University for Women, and tonight’s talk was really an AUW fund-raiser. I’m fine with that — I’ve been to Tupperware parties before — but I was disappointed by the lack of foresight on this project. Specifically, Meyer is talking about setting up a world-class university in Bangladesh to serve the needs of women (presumably) from disadvantaged Asian communities. Here are the problems:
1. Why a university? If you have to go through the trouble of recruiting applicants throughout Asia, why not just institute a scholarship program that utilizes existing resources? Just develop a course curriculum at an American university and send your selected scholars there.
2. AUW states that the minimum criteria for acceptance, for their undergraduate program, are:
- Age: 17-26 years
- Education: 10+2, a total of 12 years’ education
- 65% or above marks in Secondary School Certificate (SSC)/10th Grade/equivalent and Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC)/12th Grade/equivalent result
- 70% marks in English of HSC/Year 12/equivalent (If your medium of instruction was NOT English)
- Experience and aspiration to lead and contribute for own country and society
The problem with these criteria is that they select for females who have access to 12 years of education — something extraordinarily difficult to come by and NOT A FUNCTION OF MERIT. Being able to access education in developing countries is largely a function of money: you have money, you go to school; you don’t have money, you go to work. Worse still is that (presumably) you’re asked to get first-class marks in English IN COUNTRIES WHERE ENGLISH IS POORLY TAUGHT.
3. Why put the university in Chittagong, Bangladesh?
I understand the desire to locate the institution in a hotspot, but doing so unfairly disadvantages the students. Being in Chitta-middle-of-nowhere means that you make it unnecessarily difficult to retain talented faculty, unreasonably cumbersome to maintain world-class facilities, and, hell, do you even have consistent electricity in Bangladesh?
I think it’s another irrational idea being sold by otherwise rational people. (Jesus! Why is it so difficult to find financing for good ideas? Like building a waste-management infrastructure that generates almost no waste and employs hundreds of disadvantaged people? Ahem.)
As an aside, I wasn’t surprised by how many douche-bags showed up at the event. I think the guy from one of the earlier (season 2?) Apprentice shows was there too. What really gets me is how some of these people never learned social-savvy. For instance, one of the women there approached me at the elevator and tried to start a conversation by asking if I thought the room was too hot. I replied with the obvious: “oh, that’s just me. I have that effect on people.” Which subsequently paralyzed her with nervous giddiness — the same feeling you get when a crush calls you out for dropping a pen to look up her dress. And that’s when it hit me: these may be the Masters of the Universe, but, in a way, they’re still just kids.
UPDATE (April 24th): O.K. I concede. It’s frame control, actually.