Harvard Law School's NeoCon Cesspool: Gambling Addiction Teaches Kids Math!
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Harvard Law School's NeoCon Cesspool: Gambling Addiction Teaches Kids Math!
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
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Harvard Law School's NeoCon Cesspool
["I see great advantage in hitting kids as early as sixth grade, when
they're dropping out of math," said Charles R. Nesson, the Harvard Law
School professor who began the society with a group of his
students.--Newspeak Times
What this Newspeak Times article does not point out is that HLS's
Charlie Nesson has a vested economic interest in getting our children
addicted to gambling with his $50,000 poker computer program that he is
trying to market to the gambling/casino industry on a worldwide basis
and then from there to educational institutions. As if we parents did
not have enough problems keeping our children off of drugs and booze,
now Charlie Nesson comes along and tries to addict them to poker as
well. As for Nesson addicting law students, he should be
ashamed of himself. Certainly law students are adults and can make
choices for themselves. But precisely because of our stressful
environments, law schools already have enormous problems with the
binge drinking phenomenon that results in a large numbers of alcoholic
lawyers that plague our profession and our clients and the public in
general. Now HLS's Nesson wants to produce law students addicted to
poker and booze before they become lawyers and can thus plague our
profession and our clients and the public in general. Yet another
example of professional malpractice by the Harvard Law School Faculty
and Deans. Truly a NeoCon Cesspool. -fab]
The New York Times - Dec 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/nyregion/12poker.html
High Stakes for Poker as a Learning Tool
By GARY RIVLIN
Not so long ago, poker was just a game. A few years back it emerged as
a fad. Then, largely because of television, it morphed into a national
phenomenon, if not an industry.
Is it any wonder, then, that some are aiming to turn it into a higher
cause?
A Harvard Law School professor and a group of his students formed an
organization this fall " the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society "
dedicated to demonstrating that poker has educational benefits. They
argue that the game, which is probability-based and requires risk
assessment, situational analysis and a gift for reading people, can be
an effective teaching tool, whether for middle school math or in
business and law classes.
I see great advantage in hitting kids as early as sixth grade, when
theyre dropping out of math, said Charles R. Nesson, the Harvard Law
School professor who began the society with a group of his students.
Im thinking of kids who are into their video games but instead of
Halo-3 and World of Warcraft, we lead them into a game environment that
has real intellectual depth to it, and feeds their curiosity rather
than snuffs it out.
The society has been working to establish chapters at campuses
nationwide. This semester, it has sponsored seminars at Harvard
featuring academics and authors to evangelize the wonders of poker. In
the spring it plans to hold a workshop on using poker to teach math to
children, to be held at the Smith Leadership Academy, a Boston charter
school for at-risk kids in the sixth through eighth grades. We see
great potential for reaching our students in an innovative way, said
Karmala Sherwood, the schools headmaster.
Others see great potential for creating gambling addiction. Chad Hills,
a gambling analyst for Focus on the Family, the conservative Christian
group, described as moronic any policy that encourages more
school-age children to gamble.
Kids are extremely vulnerable to gambling addiction, said Mr. Hills,
who likened poker to a gateway drug that leads to the harder stuff
like craps and slot machines.
Professor Nesson, who also helped to found the law schools Berkman
Center for Internet and Society, said that even before creating the
society he consulted with Howard Shaffer, director of the division on
addictions at the Harvard Medical School, to better understand the
downside of the game. I dont intend to push these problems away, he
said.
Yet for now he is more focused on using poker to produce sharper
lawyers and more skilled negotiators than on its potentially harmful
effects.
I tell my students all the time that if you want to do something
useful with your spare time, you can do a whole lot worse than play
poker, said Professor Nesson, who has adopted many causes in his 40
years at Harvard, including advocating looser attitudes toward
marijuana, which he openly admits to smoking.
Andrew M. Woods, 24, the third-year law student who is the groups
executive director, may be even more of a true believer in poker than
the professor.
I see poker as one tool to develop the kind of cognitive abilities
that a lot of people dont seem to be developing on their own, whether
because those skills arent taught effectively in school or because
theyre not learning it from their parents, Mr. Woods said. So many of
his Harvard Law classmates were or had been serious poker players, he
said, that I had to wonder what role poker played in all of us getting
here.
Professor Nesson said he was compelled to form the group last spring,
when Harvard administrators said local laws prohibited the law school
from running a charity poker tournament to raise money for a pro bono
program.
That got me out of my chair to demonstrate to the powers-that-be that
poker is a positive thing, Professor Nesson said.
He invited several law students to his house for dinner and the society
was born.
We concluded that wed be doing a disservice to the next generation of
students if we didnt help promote this idea of poker as an educational
tool, Mr. Woods said.
Mr. Woods said the society has seven chapters at colleges across the
country, including U.C.L.A. and Stanford Law School, with efforts under
way at another 10, including George Washington, U.S.C. and Tufts. He
added that the group hoped to establish at least two dozen chapters by
June. The only perquisite is that organizers embrace what Mr. Woods
described as the higher-minded element of its mission. This does not
preclude their doubling as poker clubs, which the Harvard group does,
where hobbyists can improve their poker-playing skills so long as they
do not wager money during play.
Arnold I. Barnett, who teaches mathematical modeling at the M.I.T.
Sloan Management School, attended a November symposium sponsored by the
society. He is not much of a poker player, Professor Barnett said, but
he walked away intrigued.
Im not saying poker should replace algebra, he said. But you have
problems to solve in poker, and for students to see how mathematics can
help them in real-life situations seems a whole lot smarter than having
them determine the volume of some strangely shaped object.
He added that he could see the educational value on the graduate level,
too, because the game involves not only figuring out your own hand but
also deducing your opponents cards " skills, he said, of use in law,
business or real estate.
Professor Nesson, along with Mr. Woods, spoke about the poker group
recently to Google employees, an event captured on YouTube. After
decades of classroom lectures, he is a persuasive speaker. But he also
spoke with a bluntness sure to provide fuel to his adversaries. Im a
child of the 60s who smoked too much grass back then " and never
really stopped, he said.
For some, encouraging poker playing is neither a cause worth embracing
nor an example of an egghead policy gone awry. With the Harvard
football team in New Haven to play the Yale squad last month, the
Harvard Law society challenged " and beat " students at Yale Law in a
poker showdown.
But the Yale team has no affiliation with Professor Nessons club, said
Jeremiah Torres, who helped muster the Yale team. He described his
group as just a bunch of law students that like to play poker from
time to time.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
***
Related:
The New York Times - Dec 11, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/education/11harvard.html
Harvard to Aid Students High in Middle Class
By SARA RIMER and ALAN FINDER
BOSTON, Dec. 10 " Harvard University announced on Monday that it would
significantly increase the financial aid it offered to middle-class and
upper-middle-class students, seeking to allay concerns that elite
colleges are becoming too expensive for even relatively well-off
families.
The move, to go into effect in the next school year, appears to make
Harvards aid to students with household incomes from $120,000 to
$180,000 the most generous of any of the countrys prestigious private
universities. Harvard will generally charge such students 10 percent of
their family household income per year, substantially subsidizing the
annual cost of more than $45,600.
Officials said the policy would cut costs by a third to 50 percent for
many students and make the real costs of attending Harvard comparable
to those at major state universities.
They said the initiative would increase financial aid spending by the
university to $120 million annually from $98 million. A little more
than half of Harvard undergraduates get some form of aid, including
many from families earning $120,000 or more.
The new aid policy is part of a broader effort by elite universities to
ease the financial burden of rising tuition and ward off the perception
that they have become unaffordable. Amherst, Williams, the University
of Pennsylvania and Princeton are among those that have increased aid
and substituted grants for loans to some students in recent years.
The move also comes as members of Congress, concerned that tuition has
outpaced inflation, have been discussing whether universities should be
required to spend a minimum amount of what their endowments earn on
student aid. Harvard has a $35 billion endowment, the highest of any
university.
Harvard officials said they had been considering the aid change for
some time.
Weve all been aware of increasing pressures on the middle class,
said Harvards president, Drew Gilpin Faust. We hear about this in a
number of ways " housing costs, both parents working, the difficulty of
amassing any kinds of savings, just the increasing pressures as middle
class lives have become more stressed.
Three years ago, under Lawrence H. Summers, the president at the time,
Harvard decided that families whose income was less than $40,000 would
no longer have to pay for undergraduate education, although students
would still have to make some contribution though programs like
work-study. It then raised the income level eligible for the waiver to
$60,000.
Harvards dean of admissions and financial aid, William R. Fitzsimmons,
said those changes had increased the number of low-income students by
33 percent in three years. But Harvard officials said they had become
increasingly concerned about higher-income families.
Many Harvard officials, Dr. Faust said, feared that cost was driving
the choices students made about graduate school and careers and that it
had created what amounted to a two-class system among Harvard
undergraduates. Mr. Fitzsimmons referred to it as the upstairs
downstairs syndrome.
The officials said, for example, that often only the wealthy students
can afford to pursue highly valuable but unpaid research opportunities
with professors, take unpaid summer internships, study abroad or even
spend time with their friends.
Under the new financial aid rules, the university said, a family making
$120,000 would have to pay about $12,000 for a child to attend Harvard
College, compared with more than $19,000 under current policies. A
family making $180,000 would pay $18,000, down from $30,000.
The university also plans to substitute grants for loans in all
financial-aid packages and will no longer consider home equity in
calculating aid. The change in home equity considerations alone will
mean, on average, a reduction of $4,000 a year in cost for those
families whose home equity would previously have been a part of the
financial aid calculation.
Harvard officials say they do not want families borrowing against their
homes " or selling their homes " in order to send their children to the
university. If you had an oil well in the backyard, you could sell the
oil, Mr. Fitzsimmons said. But you need to live somewhere.
Currently, 763 students whose family incomes are between $120,000 and
$180,000 receive some financial aid from Harvard, which has a total of
6,600 undergraduates. The new policy will apply to them next year,
officials said.
Only a handful of universities have anything even remotely close to
Harvards financial resources, and it was not clear how many could
afford to follow. Yale tersely said in response only that it was
planning an announcement next month on expanded financial aid.
Still, some university officials said they thought Harvard would have
followers.
They are the first; theyre not going to be the last, said Robert J.
Massa, vice president for enrollment at Dickinson College. My concern
is that we are squeezing middle- and upper-income students out of the
picture.
While Yale, Princeton and Stanford all give aid to students from
middle- to upper-middle-class families, Harvards initiative goes much
further.
Richard Kahlenberg, who is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a
nonprofit public policy group and has written extensively about income
inequality and higher education, called Harvards new initiative a
very positive step.
The bottom line is that you want the best and the brightest from all
economic backgrounds to apply to a place like Harvard, Mr. Kahlenberg
said. And to the extent that Harvard can send a message that ~we will
make it work for you, thats important as a political matter. Its
important to take care of the middle class because you dont want a
backlash against programs for low-income students.
While tuition and other college costs have soared over the last decade,
many highly selective private universities have been taking actions to
help students from low-income and working-class families.
Princeton was among the first universities to alter its financial aid
formulas to help low-income and middle-income students. In 2001,
Princeton made the shift to grants from loans for all students
receiving financial aid. It also removed a familys home equity from
the calculations, said Robin Moscato, Princetons director of financial
aid.
We share Harvards concern about the pressures on middle-income
families, she said.
Just last Saturday, Duke University announced several changes intended
to make the college more affordable. It said it would eliminate
parental contributions for families making less than $60,000 and give
students from families making less than $40,000 grants so they could
graduate without loans to repay.
Yale, Pennsylvania, Columbia and other Ivy League universities have
also increased the overall amount of aid they dispense and expanded
eligibility. Beginning this semester, Columbia is substituting grants
for loans for students from households with incomes below $50,000.
Both Williams and Amherst announced recently that they would substitute
grants for loans as part of their financial-aid packages to reduce
debt. And Stanford added $5 million in financial aid this school year
for students with family incomes between $60,000 and $135,000.
Dr. Faust said Harvards decision to go further was meant to ensure
that all income groups had access to higher education. Education is
the engine that makes American democracy work, she said. And it has
to work, and that means people have to have access.
She added, At the heart of this is a commitment to redefining the
terms of access.
[Sara Rimer reported from Boston, and Alan Finder from New York.]
*
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