By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, March 7, 2010; A01
As Obama administration officials tried in recent weeks to anticipate what could go wrong in Sunday's elections in Iraq, they realized with some relief that they are largely powerless to control what happens.
In twice-daily meetings leading up to the vote and in a final preelection videoconference Thursday with the U.S. ambassador and military commander on the ground, officials contemplated the possibilities. Violence, intimidation or fraud might limit turnout or mar the legitimacy of the vote. Post-election political jockeying could delay the formation of a government for months and leave a dangerous power vacuum. Iran could create mischief, or worse.
But beneath the last-minute activity in Washington, officials have recognized that the electoral contest and its aftermath are in the hands of the Iraqis. Nearly seven years after U.S.-led troops took over Iraq, the administration appears content with its changing role there.
Committed to halving the contingent of nearly 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq by summer's end as he escalates a red-hot war in Afghanistan, President Obama has set a high bar for intervening -- or even acknowledging serious concern about the future.
In a briefing at the White House last week, senior advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity hammered home two messages: "We can't and we will not tell them how to conduct their affairs," an official said of the Iraqis. "That's up to them." In addition, he said, "we see nothing that would divert us from the track we're on . . . to end the combat mission in August," even in the face of sectarian violence.
Iraq's last national elections, in December 2005, took place under U.S. occupation; political discord and a five-month delay in forming a government led to an explosion of sectarian violence and a surge in American troop levels that then-Sens. Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. opposed. Two years later, the George W. Bush administration began negotiations with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on agreements to gradually withdraw all U.S. forces and establish a long-term strategic relationship.
The pullout agreements -- including a July 2009 deadline for turning urban security over to the Iraqi military and the departure of all U.S. military forces by December 2011 -- were signed two months before Obama's inauguration. In one of his first major foreign policy decisions, Obama inserted an interim withdrawal date, pledging to remove all designated U.S. "combat" forces by August this year, with 50,000 troops remaining to carry out training, diplomatic security and select counterinsurgency missions with Iraqi counterparts for 16 months.
Democrats and Republicans alike have a vested interest in declaring today's Iraq a democratic success unprecedented in the region and claiming credit for it. "This could be one of the great achievements of this administration," Vice President Biden, Obama's designated point man in Iraq, said last month. "You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government."
Former vice president Richard B. Cheney took issue with Biden's assertion, calling it "a little strange" because both Biden and Obama had opposed the troop surge. Any credit to Obama, Cheney said, "ought to go with a healthy dose of 'Thank you, George Bush.' "
Biden, who had the last word against Cheney in dueling, mid-February talk-show appearances, accused the Bush administration of leaving a "mess" in Iraq. The U.S. military may have succeeded in "settling things down," he said, but it was the Obama administration that developed a plan to guide the Iraqis toward true democracy.
In four trips there as vice president, Biden said, "I have met with every single solitary one of the players in Iraq -- Sunni, Shiite, Kurd, Christian. And we have been able to be a catalyst for them, moving . . . from the battlefield to the political arena" to settle their differences.
Although some U.S. officials, including Gen. Ray Odierno, the military commander in Iraq, have voiced concern about what they call Iranian dirty tricks and politically motivated violence, the dominant attitude has been laid-back: "That's just Iraq."
"Certainly there is a lot of wrangling over power and influence and who gets to do what," Odierno's predecessor, Gen. David H. Petraeus, told television interviewer Charlie Rose last week. "But again, some of that is Iraqi politics. It's 'Iraqracy,' we say sometimes."
Even if the elections proceed with minimal disruption, however, significant challenges lie ahead. Of the five major political groups participating, none is expected to win a majority, or perhaps even a plurality, of the vote. Getting a government in place will be arduous and time-consuming at best. The Iraqi constitution allows lengthy challenges to the vote count before the new parliament convenes to choose a president. After that, it could take months for a coalition to amass enough seats to form a government, which the parliament must approve.
Regardless of whether Maliki is reelected, his government will remain as caretaker during the transition, a time when the U.S. presence in Iraq will be shifting. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, already the largest in the world, will take over many functions now performed by the military, including training Iraq's police force.
Administration officials insist that the United States will retain significant influence with the new government, no matter who forms it. "Iraqis will continue to want our help in resolving their outstanding problems," including constitutional reform, disputes over internal boundaries and distribution of oil revenue, a senior administration official said in an interview.
"There are also things they want from us," the official noted. Under the Bush-era strategic agreement, the United States is committed to helping Iraq remove remaining U.N. restrictions on its oil revenue, as well as reparations to Kuwait for Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion, and to encouraging U.S. investment, trade and educational exchanges.
Despite the prospects of sectarian violence and Iranian influence, the administration is counting on Iraqis to pull back from potentially destructive detours out of self-interest. "If Iraq were to fall backward into some kind of chaos," the administration official said, "in the first instance it would be bad for the Iraqis."
"Given the huge investment that was made in troops and treasure over the years, I imagine some would say we need to do something to prevent it," he said, adding that there are contingency plans for slowing or reconfiguring the U.S. withdrawal. "But I don't think there'd be any great appetite for going back in."
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 7, 2010; 1:34 PM
MASON CITY, Iowa -- Republican Terry Branstad's lines have a familiar ring as he campaigns to return to the governor's office after 11 years away. He blasts the incumbentDemocrat for "mismanagement," promising an "economic comeback" and the end of "more government than we can afford."
The pitch is working. Early polls show Branstad, who served four terms, with a lead as large as 20 points over Gov. Chet Culver (D), who is battling a poor economy and the frustration fueled by Capitol Hill vitriol that incumbent politicians are not delivering.
The state that launched Barack Obama toward the presidency just two years ago is looking like a tough sell for Democrats in 2010. Culver is in trouble, Rep. Leonard Boswell (D) is threatened and Obama's own popularity has dropped by one-third since he took office.
Since the beginning of 2009, unemployment has risen by half, to about 6.5 percent -- high for Iowa, although lower than the national average. Tax revenues are down and social service needs are rising. The legislative news from Des Moines, where both chambers are controlled by Democrats, is often gloomy.
As for Obama, Ron Cline, a founder of the North Iowa Tea Party, put it this way: "He said he was going to change things. He did. They're worse."
A tea party billboard on the southern end of Mason City's downtown reads, "Socialism. Change We can't afford!"
Yet Culver and Obama are suffering from different problems in a state where the pull of party is limited and 47 percent of Iowans called themselves "independents" in a recent poll. Evidence suggests that confidence in Obama could return if the economy continues to improve and he engineers a few legislative successes.
"I don't think people think he's a lost cause," said J. Ann Selzer, who has been polling Iowans for years. "What he doesn't have is a Congress that works very well, and he was hands-off. If he's able to make things happen and explain things differently, people's support will come back."
None of that is certain, of course. A fierce battle is underway over Obama's health-care policy, the economy is still sputtering and the administration is struggling to solve conundrums from terrorism trials to financial regulation.
Republican strategist Craig Robinson sees "a dissatisfaction with everything Washington" , but he noted a divergence in attitudes toward Culver and Obama, who worked Iowa hard as a candidate.
"Both times we have done polls -- July 2009 and January 2010 -- Obama's numbers were above 50 percent and Culver's were in the dumps," Robinson said. "I don't think Iowans necessarily approve of his agenda, but they're fond of him. They like him personally."
Emily Bowers, an unemployed northern Iowa factory worker, is one of those who is still holding out hope for Obama. "He's trying. You've got to give him time," she said. "Especially with the big hole he came into." She is so generous to Culver -- she expects to vote for Branstad if he wins the GOP primary in June. She remembers him positively from his previous 16 years in the state capitol, which ended in 1999.
Branstad, 63, recognizes that time has elapsed. Reminiscing about a colleague while meeting members of the Mason City Chamber of Commerce, he said, "It kind of dates you when a lot of people you served with are dead."
"We're calling this the comeback campaign," Branstad said, referring to his political career and the state's economy. He criticized Culver for what he called poor personnel choices and "huge deficits."
Culver, he said in an interview, is "not up to the job." He sees portents in recent Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey, two states that backed Obama in 2008. He also points to Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R), reelected by a wide margin the same day Obama carried the state.
Branstad, who has sought Daniels' advice, is facing state Rep. Rod Roberts from Carroll and Bob Vander Plaats, a businessman and social conservative supported by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
Culver, 44, insists that he is "not distracted by any polls." A former high school history teacher, son of a former U.S. senator, and three-sport athlete at Bethesda-Chevy Chase Senior High, he sees the anti-incumbent feeling and considers it largely beyond his control.
"I understand these cycles. That's just how it is," Culver said in a statehouse interview. "The key is to just get up every single day and work as hard as I possibly can to help Iowa families."
Culver said he intends to remind voters of Branstad's record, inviting a comparison on tax policy and the size of Iowa's government. His own tax record, Culver said, deserves support from the anti-government, anti-tax followers of Iowa's tea parties. "I hope they're really paying attention to the governor's race," Culver said.
Branstad, too, has an eye on frustrated tea party adherents, saying he welcomes "their interest and involvement."
Selzer thinks Culver's troubles stretch beyond the economy and she is skeptical about his chances. His approval rating is 36 percent, matching the worst readings for any governor in 40 years.
"He's losing the Democrats. That's really shocking, if you're the party in power and the party's defecting," said Selzer. In a February poll for The Des Moines Register, she found that Culver's approval rating with Democrats was just 57 percent.
Obama was at 83 percent among Democrats. Overall, Obama was at 46 percent, down from 49 percent in November and 68 percent on the eve of his inauguration. His current numbers are similar to President Bill Clinton's popularity at their ebb, halfway through 1994, his second year in office.
Republican disaffection with Obama is vast, with only 15 percent of GOP respondents in the poll approving of the way the president is doing his job. His approval among independents who were critical to his election fell to 38 percent, a drop of 10 points in three months.
The biggest issues were the budget deficit, health care and the economy, with 90 percent of Republicans and tea party supporters saying the federal government is spending too much. Selzer said, "It's the sense that government's out of control."
"I'm seeing people who have never e-mailed me in four years getting involved in issues. A question I get is, 'Pat, can you believe what's going on?'" said state Rep. Pat Grassley (R), 26-year-old grandson of Sen. Chuck Grassley. "There's frustration out there."
Robin Anderson, a former banker who is executive director of the Mason City chamber, caucused for Obama in January 2008 before voting for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in November. She sees a deeper dissatisfaction with Washington.
"People look at both parties and they can't identify with them. Where are the centrists?" Anderson asked as she collected namecards after Branstad's visit. Congress should "focus on the really important things that need to get done."
Insurance agent Casey Callanan, 29, who advised Branstad to get the word of his successes to young voters who came of age after he left office, said later that voters are just as anxious for "change" as they were when Obama won 54 percent of the vote.
"Right now, it's anti-incumbent. Nobody's happy with what's going on," Callanan said. "Everybody's starting to consider themselves independent. They want progress and things to move forward, and stop the bickering."
Legend has it that when Cortes landed in Mexico in the 1500s, he ordered his men to burn the ships that had brought them there to remove the possibility of doing anything other than going forward into the unknown. Marc Andreessen has the same advice for old media companies: “Burn the boats.”
Yesterday, Andreessen was in New York City and we met up. We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. In particular, he was talking about print media such as newspapers and magazines, and his longstanding recommendation that they should shut down their print editions and embrace the Web wholeheartedly. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.
Andreessen once famously put the New York Times on deathwatch for its stubborn insistence on trying to save and prolong its legacy print business. With all the recent excitement in media quarters recently over Apple’s upcoming iPad and other tablet computers, and their potential to create a market for paid digital versions and subscriptions of newspapers and magazines, I wondered if Andreessen still felt the same way. Does he think the iPad will change anything?
Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he’s an investor in the Business Insider) are either. “”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”
But people pay for apps. Wouldn’t he pay for a beautiful touchscreen version of a magazine? Maybe, if it were something genuinely new that blew him away. It would have to be more than an article with video and graphics though. (I agree, otherwise it’s no better than a CD-ROM).
Oh, and he points out, that the iPad will have a “fantastic browser.” No matter how many iPads the Apple sells, the Web will always be the bigger market. “There are 2 billion people on the Web,” he says. “The iPad will be a huge success if it sells 5 million units.”
Despite trying time and again, Andreessen’s observation is that media companies have no aptitude for technology, nor do they really understand what technology companies do. The one thing technology companies do really well is deal with constant disruption. “Microsoft is going through this right now,” he points out, “Ballmer is not complaining about it.” He’s tackling it head on. So did Intel when Andy Grove gutted it to shift from memory chips to microprocessors. So does every technology company CEO. It is ingrained in the industry Andreessen comes from, so it is just obvious to him: “You are cruising along, and then technology changes. You have to adapt.” Media companies need to learn that lesson fast. To the extent that their products are now delivered and consumed as digital bits, they too are becoming technology companies.
Beyond the iPad, he believes that all the talk once again from big media companies about erecting paywalls or somehow charging for news, articles and video online is shortsighted at best. He comes back to the simple fact that the open Web is where the users are. Talking about paywalls and paid apps is like saying, “We know where the market is and we are not going to go there.” Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.” You’d have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.
You wake up each morning with a fever; you feel like a shadow of yourself. But no time for sickness today—the Adams House intramural crew has one of its thrice-weekly practices at 6 A.M., and you…will…row. Some mornings, you watch the sunrise from Lamont Library after hitting your study groove there around 11 the night before and bushwhacking through assignments during the quiet time between 3 A.M. and 5. The rower and late-night scholar is Becky Cooper ’10. “Lamont is beautiful at 5 A.M.—my favorite time,” she says. “Sunlight streams in.” There’s plenty to do—Cooper is taking five courses, concentrating in literature but still pre-med: “I can’t close doors.”
She writes out her daily schedule to the minute: “Shower, 7:15-7:20.” Lunch might be at the Signet Society, the private, arts-oriented, undergraduate club where she is vice-president. She also belongs to the Isis, a female social club, and has held the post of Dionysus at the Harvard Advocate, planning social events like the literary quarterly’s spring dinner (which she revived) for 70 attendees. Cooper has an omnivorous appetite for learning and experience: new fascinations constantly beckon, and she dives in wholeheartedly. Yet the ceaseless activity leaves little space or time for reflection on who she is or what she wants. “I’m more terrified of being bored than busy,” she explains. “Though I’m scared I’ll work myself into a pile of dust if I don’t learn when to stop.”
Cooper has always been super-active. Even in elementary and middle school, she “adopted an intense work ethic” and participated in track, basketball, chorus, a pottery class, and gymnastics. At the “pressure cooker” Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, she put the shot and racewalked for the track squad, and added cheerleading. After track meets and practices on Saturdays, she had a Sunday job as a docent in a science museum. And from seventh grade on, she attended summer camps for gifted students at upstate college campuses.
At Harvard, she has hosted a two-hour weekly jazz show on WHRB, and as a freshman acted in Ivory Tower, the long-running Harvard TV soap opera viewable on YouTube. (Last summer, she also acted in an independent film shot by a friend in Miami, learning American Sign Language for the part.) In the summer of 2007, Cooper tasted some ravishing ravioli di zucca (pumpkin)—“I was in heaven”—and determined to learn Italian and cook in Italy. As a sophomore, she got a job with Harvard University Dining Services, working with their consultant, cookbook author Mollie Katzen, and the next summer, after two months in Paris with the International Herald Tribune, was baking in Italy as a pastry chef and speaking only Italian.
As a Crimson staffer, Cooper wrote a food column every other week for the arts section. Frequently, her classes and meetings ran from 8 A.M. until 11 P.M., when she went over her column, line by line, with another Crimson editor. She returned to college this spring after taking the fall term off to continue a summer job assisting New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik. “It’s exhausting—here now, where next?—continually hopping from one thing to another,” she says. “You never let yourself rest. Harvard kids don’t want to do 5,000 things at 97 percent; they’d rather do 3,000 things at 150 percent.”
There’s no irony intended: “That’s the standard operating procedure,” Cooper explains. “College here is like daring yourself to swim the length of a swimming pool without breathing. A lap is a semester. I want to do everything I possibly can.” She works on a 28-hour day, she says: some days sleeping 10 hours, others, two. She can describe different levels of exhaustion. One level, she explains, is a “goofy feeling, like feeling drunk all the time; you’re not quite sure what’s going on. Then there’s this extra level of exhaustion, where you feel dead behind your eyes. The last four weeks, that’s where I’ve been. I get sick a lot.”
Keeping Up with the Einsteins
Amazingly enough, Cooper is not unusual at Harvard College. Students today routinely sprint through jam-packed daily schedules, tackling big servings of academic work plus giant helpings of extracurricular activity in a frenetic tizzy of commitments. They gaze at their Blackberries (nicknamed “Crackberries” for their addictive pull) throughout the day to field the digital traffic: e-mail and text messages, phone calls, Web access, and their calendars. Going or gone are late-night bull sessions with roommates and leisurely two-hour lunches—phone calls and texting punctuate meals, anyway.
“They are unbelievably achieving,” says Judith H. Kidd, formerly associate dean for student life and activities, who retired from Harvard last year. “They are always on. They prefer to be busy all the time, and multitask in ways I could not imagine. Students will sign up for three or four activities and take one of them up to practically NGO level. They were organizing international conferences.”
There’s a wide consensus that today’s undergraduates make up the most talented, accomplished group of polymaths ever assembled in Harvard Yard: there’s nothing surprising about meeting a first-chair cellist in the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra who is also a formidable racer for the cycling club, or a student doing original research on interstellar dark matter who organized a relief effort in sub-Saharan Africa. “You could say it’s a high-end problem,” says dean of admissions Bill Fitzsimmons ’67, Ed.D. ’71, “but one of the dilemmas for the kind of multitalented people who come to places like Harvard is that they could do almost anything. And especially if that’s true, you need to think hard about what it is you really value, which direction is right for you.”
The paradox is that students now live in such a blur of activity that idle moments for such introspection are vanishing. The French film director Jean Renoir once declared, “The foundation of all civilization is loitering,” saluting those unstructured chunks of time that give rise to creative ideas. If Renoir is right, and if Harvard students are among the leaders of the future, then civilization is on the precipice: loitering is fast becoming a lost art. And if the tornado of achievement that whirls through Cambridge has its obvious rewards, there are, as with most tornadoes, downsides.
Sleep deprivation, for example: varsity athletes, representing about 20 percent of undergraduates, seem to be the only sizable student category to sleep and rise at roughly conventional hours, according to Harry Lewis ’68, Ph.D. ’74, McKay professor of computer science and former dean of Harvard College. At Becky Cooper’s high school, the standing joke was: “Friends, grades, sleep: you only get two.” Sleep was nearly always the odd one out. Cooper attributes her own frequent low-level infections and colds to exhaustion. Undergraduates tend to push themselves relentlessly and to disbelieve physical limits. “Harvard kids,” Cooper says, “think of themselves as superheroes.”
New technologies vastly enlarge the game of keeping up with the Einsteins. “If you aren’t on Facebook, you feel guilty, you feel like you’re being a bad citizen, or worse, that you are out of it,” says Hobbs professor of cognition and education Howard Gardner ’65, Ph.D. ’71, who studies excellence in the realm of work. “One thing we discovered in our research is that kids look up people whom they don’t know on Facebook, because they want to see how much they’re achieving. If you’re on the Crimson, but someone else is on the Crimsonand the swimming team, well, then….”
The explosion of busyness has occurred not in academics (most students still take four courses a semester), but largely in extracurricular activities. “Extracurriculars are now as important as coursework,” says Gardner. “I wouldn’t have said that 40 years ago.” The number of student organizations grew almost sevenfold from 1960 to 2007-08, skyrocketing from 60 groups to 416, although undergraduate enrollment grew only about 10 percent, from about 6,000 to 6,655. In recent years, the College has added an average of 40 to 50 new student groups annually (though about half don’t endure), says David Friedrich, M.T.S. ’04, assistant dean of Harvard College for student life. In singing, for example, there are now 19 small a cappella groups at the College; before the Radcliffe Pitches were founded in 1975, the Harvard Krokodiloes were the sole such group on campus.
In Excellence Without a Soul, his 2006 book on the future of liberal education, Harry Lewis relates a conversation with three of his former students who had launched a highly successful Internet start-up. What in their computer-science educations had contributed to their success, Lewis wanted to know. There was an awkward silence, then one spoke up. “I really loved my computer-science education,” he said, “but I could have read books and learned a lot of that on my own. The thing that was really valuable was running the Quincy House Grill.” Lewis explains: “He’d had to get people to show up on time, and make sure there was enough hamburger ordered the day before—but not too much, or he’d have to waste it, and that would cut into his profit margin. He took all this stuff and combined it with his technical skills to become a very successful entrepreneur. The way social progress gets made is by learning to work together, and the real place where people can learn to cooperate is in extracurriculars.”
“There are so many opportunities here, I don’t want to sleep,” declares the preternaturally busy Will Guzick ’11. “I want to soak it all in and make the most of my four years.” Last year he pulled plenty of all-nighters, but this year is “shooting for seven hours a night,” usually rising at 9 A.M. for a day of classes, going to meetings for activities in the evening, and studying in the Quincy House library (open all night) or the dining hall until 2 or 3 A.M. “The man who cleans the dining hall knows me well,” he says, grinning.
Guzick rooms in a centrifugal Quincy House suite with four other driven young men who found themselves together (and awake) only twice during the fall term: once on Guzick’s birthday, and one night when they fortuitously encountered each other in the dining hall “and decided to take a picture to commemorate the occasion.”
Guzick juggles an astonishing array of commitments in addition to five courses for his economics concentration with a secondary field of statistics. He played varsity tennis his first two years, but dropped that 20-to-25-hours-per-week commitment to clear time for other activities. These include the Leadership Institute at Harvard College, which aims to promote leadership on campus; work as a research assistant to a Business School professor, a grader for an Extension School finance course, and as a campus representative for a GMAT tutoring business; the Harvard Undergraduate Economics Association; running (he runs 10 to 15 five-kilometer races per year); working at the Banco Credito del Peru in Lima for four weeks this January; and serving as a peer adviser for nine freshmen and as a drug-and-alcohol peer adviser (he is trying to launch a Friday-night movie series at the Science Center as an alternative to intoxicants). Guzick is also working to organize a series of conferences on French, Italian, and Spanish at Harvard and other colleges because “We don’t have a system of language learning outside the classrooms.”
The pace of that preparation, though, can be frantic. “People are going nonstop,” says Olivia Goldhill ’11, a philosophy concentrator from England, “and there are a lot of negative implications. You don’t have time to dedicate to your friends or to yourself—or to thoughts that you haven’t been taught to think.” Goldhill, educated at London’s venerable Westminster School, where discussion and debate are the warp and weft of the school day, marvels that, at Harvard, “there are so few intellectual discussions outside of classes. I try to take at least an hour for lunch with friends. There are days, though, that even when you want to go and hang out, everyone else is in their nonstop mode.”
“Students are very conscious of what it will take to get into graduate school or to get a job,” says dean of freshmen Tom Dingman ’67, Ed.M. ’73. “I regularly have conversations with freshmen who say things like, ‘This summer, I have a chance to go back to the yacht club where my family has been involved, and I would run the sailing program. But I don’t think I should do that. I should be doing an internship in an office somewhere so that next summer I can build on that, and maybe ultimately get an internship with Goldman Sachs.’ But they’re not paying attention to the things they really enjoy, and not seeing the opportunity to develop themselves holistically—it’s more strategizing about how best to build a launch pad.”
The strategizing starts early; today’s parents groom their children for high achievement in ways that set in motion the culture of scheduled lives and nonstop activity. “This is the play-date generation,” says Kidd. “There was a time when children came home from school and just played randomly with their friends. Or hung around and got bored, and eventually that would lead you on to something. Kids don’t get to do that now. Busy parents book them into things constantly—violin lessons, ballet lessons, swimming teams. The kids get the idea that someone will always be structuring their time for them.” Dingman notes that, “Starting at an earlier age, students feel that their free time should be taken up with purposeful activities. There is less stumbling on things you love and that give you fire in your belly, and more being steered toward pursuits—some of which may, in fact, become passions.”
For her part, Olivia Goldhill recognizes that “filling time with activities can be almost a distraction, so you don’t have to investigate other aspects of life. The reaction to J-term was a good example of people being scared of what they would do if they weren’t given some structure by the University” (see “January Reading,” January-February, page 52).
Home life has changed in ways that would seem to undercut children’s development of autonomy. There was a time when children did their own homework. Now parents routinely “help” them with assignments, making teachers wonder whose work they are really grading. Youngsters formerly played sports and games with other children on a sandlot or pickup basis, not in leagues organized, coached, and officiated by adults; kids had to learn to settle disputes over rules and calls among themselves, not by referring them to grownup zebras. Once, college applicants typically wrote their own applications, including the essays; today, an army of high-paid consultants, coaches, and editors is available to orchestrate and massage the admissions effort.
Adults have taken charge even of recreation, as in play dates. “When birthdays come along, kids have been entertained by magicians,” says Dingman. “Or taken out to Chuck E. Cheese. They are the ‘Chuck E. Cheese generation.’” Having had their parents organize play and social activities, many young people now arrive at college expecting the institution to operate similarly, in loco parentis. “It’s very upsetting to read on [year-end freshman] surveys that people have been spending Friday and Saturday nights doing problem sets, finding it hard to escape from what they characterize as the ‘intense pressure’ of this place,” Dingman adds. “When they identify what they think is lacking, they say, ‘You haven’t organized other things for us’—things like ‘trips to bowling alleys.’ When I was in college, it never occurred to me that it was Harvard’s responsibility to entertain me.” Kidd, too, recalls “complaints from parents that we weren’t providing enough social activity.”
Indeed, parental engagement even in the lives of college-age children has expanded in ways that would have seemed bizarre in the recent past. (Some colleges have actually created a “dean of parents” position—whether identified as such or not—to deal with them.) The “helicopter parents” who hover over nearly every choice or action of their offspring have given way to “snowplow parents” who determinedly clear a path for their child and shove aside any obstacle they perceive in the way.
Some of the impetus for this is probably “overcompensation,” explains Dingman. “With more and more families having both parents working, there’s some guilt, and there’s a sense that ‘When I can be available to you, I’m going to make all things happen for you.’ There’s no recognition that by stepping up to clear the path, they’re really handicapping their sons and daughters, making them unaware that they actually have the capacities to do things themselves.” Parental involvement can reach astonishing extremes. One Chicago father received a call from his Harvard-freshman daughter who had taken the subway into Boston and wanted to know whether to go right or left at a downtown intersection. (He supplied the answer.)
Dingman’s office writes to families of incoming freshmen, asking how Harvard can welcome and support their progeny, and “Oftentimes, we get from parents a very definitive chart of where that student is going,” Dingman says. “We’ll hear, ‘So-and-so has always wanted to be a doctor and will be a pre-med at Harvard, use the summers to work in labs, go to med school, and begin a career in pediatric medicine.’ The parents’ letters are expressed with such certitude—it’s quite remarkable. This doesn’t suggest that the student has much room to explore, or that there’s much support for someone falling in love with a different field of study.”
Today’s college students, partly due to cell phones, texting, and e-mail, “are in remarkably close communication with their parents,” Dingman continues, citing frequent conversations with undergraduates who tell him things like, “‘My mother’s going to kill me because I didn’t get to the [Institute of Politics] Forum last night—Newt Gingrich was speaking, and she said I had to get a ticket.’ My parents never would have known what was happening on campus; nor would they have thought it was their role to push me toward it.” A survey carried out, in collaboration with Cornell and several other colleges, by associate professor of psychiatry Paul Barreira, director of behavioral health and academic counseling for the University Health Services, showed that one-third of undergraduates are in contact with their parents daily.
The parental tendrils can extend even into academic work. In the early 1990s, some undergraduates faxed drafts of term papers home to their parents and received edited, marked-up faxes back; today, e-mail streamlines the process. Barreira cites a study indicating that students who were in frequent contact with parents did better academically; perhaps parents are still “helping” with homework, boosting grades, or perhaps close parent-child ties enhance performance in more indirect, diffuse ways. Barreira doesn’t see reason for alarm. “You hear about parents dictating exactly what is going on with their kids, what courses they are going to take,” he says. “I actually think that’s a minority of students—it may be overplayed.”
Fitzsimmons adds, “Sure, there are more helicopter parents, and they come in all different forms—rich and poor, from all kinds of backgrounds. But for the most part, the helicoptering has worked, and is perceived as a positive thing by students.” He cites a study by the College Board indicating that more than 60 percent of students felt their parents had the “right” level of involvement in the admissions process, and that only 5 to 6 percent felt their parents were overly involved.
The Ecology of Overachievement
In the latter part of the twentieth century, the composition of Harvard College changed dramatically. The funnel of access became tighter numerically (20 percent of applicants were admitted in the mid 1960s, versus 7 percent today), yet broadened for greater diversity in race, sex, ethnicity, geographical origin, and social class. “Twenty-five percent of my class [1967] was on some kind of need-based financial aid,” says Fitzsimmons. “It’s a little over 60 percent for the current freshman class. True, we have a better financial-aid program now, so the comparison isn’t exact, but there’s no question that this place has many more people from the bottom quarter and bottom half of the American income distribution. Now, about a quarter of the class comes from families earning less than $80,000 per year.” New financial-aid initiatives have accelerated change in the last five or six years; consequently, for many students now, “This is their big chance,” Fitzsimmons says. “They have no safety net, no family money—or ‘social capital’—to fall back on.”
Harry Lewis explains: “People who come, on average, from more comfortable backgrounds are less worried about getting a job after college than those who are very strongly motivated to do better than their parents did. The second group are their parents’ best hope for moving the family up in the world. So there’s more upward mobility, which makes people more energized and ambitious, and sometimes driven—and I don’t consider ‘driven’ itself to be a negative term. That helps create the energy.”
Another shift is that Harvard has become a far more international university than it was a few decades ago. “Harvard may or may not be the greatest university in America,” says Howard Gardner, “but it is clearly the greatest one in the world” in that it’s known from Malaysia to Chile to Sri Lanka, whereas references to Yale, Stanford, and Princeton draw only blank stares even in western Europe. “To get in, you’re competing with people all over the world,” he continues, “which makes it an incredibly selective process.”
Hard-working, enterprising international students may well be raising the benchmark on achievement for everyone, as well as enlarging students’ reference group to global scale. “The average American kid does very little homework,” explains Fitzsimmons. “You can find statistics that show high-school seniors averaging 45 minutes to an hour of homework per night. In many other countries, the norm is four, five, or six hours of homework each day.”
Perhaps the pendulum has swung to an extreme, and a reaction will set in, with a new balance asserting itself. But right now, many College students seem to suffer from a horror vacui, a fear of empty spaces, whether those be the J-term, a leisurely summer near the water, or simply an unplanned hour.
“Like one of those puzzles in which you try to rearrange little tiles—to get the number 1 in the upper left corner, and so on—it’s the empty space that makes the other squares maneuverable,” says Dingman. “Without it, the pattern can be fixed and not open to new permutations. I tell students that’s a good way to think about their lives: if they don’t have any empty space, there’s not likely to be any movement. It’s really in those moments where they have created windows of free time that they may learn the most about themselves and end up with the kind of movement they’re looking for.”
One undergraduate who seems to have a feel for empty spaces is Olivia Goldhill, who makes sure there is time in her day for friends, unhurried meals, and cultivating her inner garden. Although she had to take a required quantitative reasoning course to graduate, “I wasn’t willing to put in vast hours of work just to get an A,” she declares. “I think a lot of other students would.” She also feels less pressure because, given her career interests (journalism) and the likelihood of returning to England, “My GPA won’t matter.” Her family, too, has a relaxed, low-pressure attitude about grades. “My mom said she doesn’t want me to get As,” Goldhill says, smiling. “Because that would mean I was missing the college experience.”
Craig A. Lambert ’69, Ph.D. ’78, is deputy editor of this magazine.
During the holidays last year, Aydin Senkut and Elad Gil gathered 50 of their friends at a health-food restaurant in Palo Alto. Over turkey burgers and tofu wraps, they talked about tech trends and how to get rich. Or, more precisely, how to get richer.
Senkut, Gil, and their dining circle are alumni of Google (GOOG), one of the greatest engines of wealth creation the U.S. has ever known. Since going public six years ago, Google has generated more than $170 billion for its employees and investors. Many of the millionaires the company has produced are young, wired into the latest developments in tech, and at ease with risk. Which explains why so many Google alums—including many of those at Senkut and Gil's gatherings—are active angel investors, attempting to add another zero to their bank accounts and another innovative company to their list of accomplishments. "I feel like we have such a strong network, it's almost like we've recreated Google outside of the Google walls," says Andrea Zurek, a 39-year-old backer of 26 startups.
More than 40 ex-Googlers have invested in about 200 fledgling companies since 2005, according to the research firm YouNoodle and reporting by Bloomberg BusinessWeek. At least a half dozen current Google executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are also financing young companies. Numerous angel-watchers say the Google group has more in common than just pedigree. Unlike many venture capitalists, the Googlers like to swap investment ideas and back startups together. They're also willing to take big chances. "[They're getting into] very risky deals that can be extremely rewarding," says Jeff Clavier, a veteran venture capitalist who founded Palo Alto-based SoftTech VC in 2004. "They have been very active as a group over the past two to three years."
MORE THAN MONEY
The results have been impressive. Companies backed by Googlers include Twitter, Tesla Motors, and gamemaker Tapulous. "As Google matures, its alums are continuing to have a huge impact on Silicon Valley and the tech industry," says Ron Conway, one of the Valley's most active angel investors, who has backed 190 companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
One reason for their success is that Google's angels have more to offer struggling entrepreneurs than just money. Bart Decrem, a Stanford University law grad, turned to the Google network when he was starting Tapulous in 2008. The company's Tap Tap Revenge game requires players to tap on-screen balls to the beat of a song—not exactly a sure thing of an idea. But Decrem thought the game might become a substantial business by selling it on Apple's (AAPL) iPhone. He raised $500,000 from a dozen angels, including Senkut and Zurek, who advised on strategy, connected the company with new partners in Asia, and helped it explore platforms for mobile phones that use Google's Android software. Today, Tap Tap games have been downloaded more than 25 million times and Tapulous is solidly profitable, with $1 million in revenues a month.
Google's Angels dabble in a wide variety of businesses. Zurek has money in a premium vodka maker and a South Korean frozen yogurt emporium. Yet the angels tend to concentrate their cash in what they know—search technology, mobile computing, and the consumer Internet. Already, Twitter, backed by former Google executive Chris Sacca, is the hottest startup in Silicon Valley, pioneering a new field of real-time communications. The online personal finance service Mint.com, with money from Senkut, proved so popular that market leader Intuit (INTU) bought it for $170 million last year and made founder Aaron Patzer one of its top execs. Search provider Powerset, backed by Senkut, was acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) in 2008, and its technology became a key part of the Bing search engine.
SERIOUS SCHMOOZING
The most active Google angel thus far is Senkut, a 40-year-old native of Turkey who has invested between $25,000 and $150,000 in more than 60 startups. Senkut joined Google in 1999 as its 63rd employee. He left in 2005 and promptly took his mother to Paris for her 60th birthday, purchased two multimillion-dollar homes in the Bay Area, and treated himself to a Lamborghini.
If Senkut is the established star among the Google angels, Chris Sacca is the up-and-comer. The 34-year-old Georgetown University law grad joined Google in 2003 and left in 2007. Of the 31 startups he's backed, his biggest hit is Twitter, in which he invested $50,000 just as it was getting started in 2007.
Working out of a 3,000-square-foot home in Truckee, Calif., a small ski town near Lake Tahoe, Sacca hikes and snowshoes most mornings before breakfast and commutes to San Francisco for three days every two weeks. It's an unconventional way to supervise investments, but Sacca has an unconventional approach to investing, period.
One Friday night in December 2008, he posted a message on Twitter asking if any startups were working late. "We tweeted back, 'we're FanBridge and we work hard every Friday night,'" says Spencer Richardson, its 25-year-old co-founder. FanBridge makes software that helps musicians manage marketing and relationships with their fans. A few weeks later, Sacca flew to New York and met with the company's founders. "They had day jobs and built this site that had 20 million users, adding 100,000 users a day," says Sacca. "It was a no-brainer."
Over the next few months, Sacca invested $50,000 and pulled in several hundred thousand dollars from other angels. Last year, FanBridge's founders considered offering their products to authors, comedians, and other artists; Sacca advised them to stay focused on the music industry. Today, FanBridge is profitable and used by 55 million music fans. "The feedback from him was, 'start by being the best at something, then branch out,'" says Richardson.
The Google Angels may have several more breakout companies developing in their portfolios. Sacca has invested in Lookout, a promising developer of security software for mobile phones. Several ex-Googlers and current Vice-President Marissa Mayer are behind Square, which aims to displace credit-card swiping machines with a cheaper payment system that works through smartphones. And current Google exec Joshua Schachter helped finance Foursquare, a mobile phone service that lets friends share tips on local hotspots and is being used more than a million times a week. "What drives us is the innovation, the excitement of working with people we like," says Zurek.
Paul Graham, who co-founded the startup incubator Y Combinator, believes the tech industry has just begun to appreciate that Google's wealthy ex-employees may have not just a single innovative second act, but potentially hundreds of them. "When people write the history of Silicon Valley 20 years from now," says Graham, "the true impact of Google could come more from all the things that Google people go on to do after they leave Google."
Two of Senate Majority LeaderHarry Reid’s Republican challengers have again crossed the 50% threshold and now hold double-digit leads in Nevada’s U.S. Senate race. One big hurdle for the incumbent is that most Nevada voters are strongly opposed to the health care legislation championed by Reid and President Barack Obama.
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of likely voters in the state finds Sue Lowden, ex-chairman of the Nevada Republican Party, with a 51% to 38% lead on Reid. Seven percent (7%) prefer some other candidate, but just three percent (3%) are undecided.
Businessman Danny Tarkanian posts a similar 50% to 37% lead over the embattled Democratic leader. Nine percent (9%) opt for another candidate, and four percent (4%) are undecided.
Last month, Reid earned 39% of the vote against both Republicans, while Lowden picked up 45% and Tarkanian 47% in their respective match-ups with him.
Last fall Reid’s support was in the 40s. Since then, it’s been trending down into the 30s, suggesting that the Senate race continues to be a referendum on Reid rather than a show of support for his GOP opponents.
Former Assemblywoman Sharron Angle, continues to run weakest of the three top Republican hopefuls, but this month she leads Reid 46% to 38%. In January, she had a 44% to 40% lead.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it's in the news, it's in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.
Forty-five percent (45%) have a favorable view of the so-called Tea Party movement. Thirty percent (30%) view it unfavorably, and 25% are not sure what they think.
Only 23% of the state’s voters consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement.
Any incumbent who is earning less than 50% at this stage of a campaign is considered potentially vulnerable. Reid, who is seeking a fifth term in the Senate, received 61% of the vote in 2004.
Forty-one percent (41%) of Nevada voters support the health care plan championed by Reid and now working its way through Congress. Fifty-six percent (56%) oppose it, which is slightly higher than opposition nationally.
More significantly for Reid, those figures include just 24% who Strongly Favor the plan and 51% who are strongly opposed. Those who strongly favor the plan overwhelmingly support Reid, while those who strongly oppose it overwhelmingly support the Republicans.
Sixty-five percent (65%) of Nevada voters also think it would be better for the country if most incumbents were not reelected to Congress this November. Only 32% say their local congressional representative deserves reelection.
Twenty percent (20%) of voters in the state have a very favorable opinion of Reid, while 48% view him very unfavorably.
For Lowden, very favorables are 18%, and very unfavorables total 12%.
Tarkanian is viewed very favorably by 15% and very unfavorably by eight percent (8%).
Nine percent (9%) have a very unfavorable view of Angle, and the same number (9%) see her very unfavorably.
At this point in a campaign, Rasmussen Reports considers the number of people with a strong opinion more significant than the total favorable/unfavorable numbers.
While Barack Obama carried Nevada with 55% of the vote in 2008, just 44% of voters in the state now approve of the job he is doing as president, marking little change from last month. Fifty-seven percent (57%) disapprove of the president’s performance. These findings include 27% who strongly approve and 47% who strongly disapprove. This is comparable to Obama's approval ratings in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.
Thirty-six percent (36%) say the president has done a good or excellent job handling the health care issue, but 54% rate his performance in this area as poor.
While the president pushes to get his health care plan back on track, 60% of Nevada voters say the better strategy would be to pass smaller bills that address problems individually rather than a comprehensive bill like the one now before Congress. Just 29% see a comprehensive bill as a better move.
When it comes to health care decisions, 51% fear the federal government more than private insurance companies. Forty-four percent (44%) fear private insurers more. Those figures are similar to the national average.
Thirty-three percent (33%) in Nevada expect the economy to be stronger in a year’s time, but 41% think it will be weaker. Again, the views of Nevada voters are similar to the views of Americans nationally. Just 23% say it’s possible for anyone who really wants to work to find a job these days. Fifty-six percent (56%) disagree.
Forty-five percent (45%) have a favorable view of the so-called Tea Party movement. Thirty percent (30%) view it unfavorably, and 25% are not sure what they think.
Only 23% of the state’s voters consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement.
On the Republican side, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison was hurt by the national political mood in her unsuccessful bid to defeat incumbent Governor Rick Perry for the GOP gubernatorial nomination in Texas. Even Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson, who has no serious Democratic opposition to date, falls just under 50% which means he is potentially vulnerable in November.
A COMMON reason given by those who have yet to try Twitter: “I have nothing to say.”
The truth is, you don’t have to post a message to get the most out of Twitter.
At its best, the social medium is a perpetual, personalized news service about topics of your choosing — whether health care reform, tech news or the latest episode of “Gossip Girl” — filtered and served to you by people who care a lot about what you care a lot about.
Even the most prolific users say Twitter has become more useful as a way to tap in to the discussions of the day than to broadcast their own thoughts. And once you get pulled in, you might just find you have something to say after all.
Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, suggests that naysayers simply log on to Twitter’s home page and search for a topic they are interested in, whether it’s their favorite sports team, the name of their company or a topic in the news.
Within a minute, they understand the appeal, he said.
Twitter users write 50 million messages a day. For the holdouts, here are a few ways to make Twitter work for you.
A CUSTOM NEWS FEED By the time Bridget Baker, who works in public relations in Seattle, checks GoogleReader while eating lunch at her desk, she has already read most of the articles in her feed because she saw them on Twitter.
In the year since she joined, she has written only 17 posts. “I tend to be a pretty private person. and I don’t feel I have anything that needs to be said,” she said. Yet she opens Twitter first thing each morning and follows friends, bloggers and thought leaders who post about politics, religion, fashion and food.
People with shared interests become your editor and Twitter becomes an alternative RSS feed. Find those people by searching Twitter directories, like WeFollow or Just Tweet It, and by following people whom others repeat or mention.
One-fifth of posts and 57 percent of repeat messages contain a link, proving that this is an increasingly popular way to spread news, said Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist who works at a software company called HubSpot. A quick scan reveals the news of the moment as the most important stories of the day bubble up and are reposted.
For instance, when Audi showed an ad for a green car during the Super Bowl, Chip Giller, the founder of Grist, an environmental news site, immediately noticed a debate about the car’s environmental merits on Twitter. Sure enough, the next day it was a big story.
CHECK YOUR LISTS Twitter is such a fast-moving stream that you may not want to follow everyone who posts about your interests. That’s one reason Twitter invented Lists, which anyone can create. Someone could separate celebrity users, owners of food carts in New York or tech pundits, for example, so they get an unadulterated stream of news on only the topic they want at that moment.
If you don’t know who the best users are on a favorite topic, look for Lists on sites like Listorious or by checking profiles.
Janessa Goldbeck works in Washington for a rights organization, the Genocide Intervention Network. Each morning, she checks a few Twitter Lists of people who work in human rights. “I don’t want to follow all those people, but I can get a snapshot of the landscape each day by looking at the Lists,” she said. “It’s the quickest, most personalized news filter you could imagine.”
ATTEND A CONFERENCE, VIRTUALLY Most conferences these days have a Twitter hashtag. At the exclusive TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., in February, for example, attendees added #TED to the end of their posts.
By searching #TED on Twitter, people could read the latest updates (and skip the $6,000 attendance fee). People wrote quotes from the speakers, like this one: “ ‘If I only had only one wish for the next 50 years, it’d be to invent the thing that halves the cost of CO2’ — Bill Gates #TED.”
Others told us what we were lucky to be missing: “last talk on evolution #TED was obvious, boring and put audience to sleep.”
WHAT’S AROUND YOU RIGHT NOW Twitter is working on ways to deliver news nearby, like alerts about an earthquake or the closing of a bridge, Mr. Stone said.
Twitter’s list of trending topics can now be searched by city. On Wednesday, “TAKS” was a trending topic in San Antonio because schools were giving the annual achievement test of that name, while “Dennis Seidenberg” was trending in Boston because the Boston Bruins had acquired the hockey player from Florida.
Some Twitter apps, like Tweetie and TwitterLocal, let you search posts near you. Check the Web site Happn.in to see the most discussed topics in your area.
People are coming up with makeshift ways to do something similar. During the recent snowstorm in Washington, people added #snowpocalypse to the end of their posts. By searching that term, Ms. Goldbeck said she read news about closings of government offices and Metro stops before she heard it elsewhere.
ASK QUESTIONS Once your Twitter writer’s block lifts, you can use Twitter to ask questions when you don’t know whom to ask.
Ask where to eat dinner in a new city, for example, or how to extend your iPhone’s battery life, and you are sure to get answers.
Some people are even using Twitter for more urgent questions. Bertalan Meskó, a medical student at the University of Debrecen in Hungary, wrote a post about a patient with mysterious symptoms: “Strange case today in internal medicine rotation. 16 years old boy with acute pancreatitis (for the 6th! time). Any ideas?”
Within hours, specialists worldwide had responded, suggesting gallstones, lupus or growths on the pancreas. One of the suggestions helped the doctors with a diagnosis.
“It would have been impossible to find that specialist through e-mail, because we had no idea who to contact,” Mr. Meskó said.
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