In her newly-published autobiography Antonia Fraser opens with a quote from the autobiography of G.M. Trevelyan:

The poetry of history lies in the miraculous fact that once on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow.

I often think of this when walking through Cambridge, the city where I live and work. If one walks down Free School Lane, for example, one passes the lab where Ernest Rutherford and Peter Kapitza worked and where the father-and-son team of William and Lawrence Bragg did the research which earned them both the 1915 Nobel Prize for physics. Also off Free School Lane is the room where J.J. Thomson discovered the electron, the room where, in 1932, John Cockroft and Ernest Walton first split the atom, and the room where, in 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick assembled the double-helix model of DNA. Turn left onto Bene’t Street and you find the Eagle, the pub to which Crick and Watson repaired to inform patrons that they had “found the secret of life”. If you walk down St Edward’s Passage, you will see (over David’s second-hand bookshop) the apartment in which John Maynard Keynes lived with his wife Lydia when they were in Cambridge. On Trinity Street, next to the Great Gate of Trinity, is the window of Isaac Newton’s room. On the other side of the street is Whewell’s Court, where Ludwig Wittgenstein had his spartan accommodation, complete with camp bed and card table.

When I lived in the centre of the city in the 1970s, one of the dustbins in a neighbouring house on Chesterton Lane (owned by Magdalene College) was labelled “I.A. Richards”. Walk down King’s parade and you pass the college where, in 1969, I attended E.M. Forster’s 90th birthday party (an event hosted by Francis Crick), where Bernard Williams was the Provost and where Alan Turing was both a student and a Fellow.

And so it goes on, seemingly ad infinitum. There’s Christ’s College, the college of John Milton and Charles Darwin (where they have restored Darwin’s room to its original state). And the Master’s Lodge in Peterhouse, where Herbert Butterfield once lived. And…

I once thought of organising a walking tour on the theme of “Cambridge ghosts”. Who knows, maybe I still might, one day.

One of the drivers of inequality — as Thomas Piketty and others have pointed out — is the colossal increase in the remuneration of senior executives in major public companies. Since much of this increase is accounted for by the switch from mere salary to salary-plus-stock-options, it has incentivised executives to prioritise share price at the expense of almost everything else.

But who taught these executives the techniques needed to boost share prices? Answer: the business schools which gave them their MBAs. But in looking at modern business schools, it’s clear that they are very different from their first predecessors like the Sloan School in MIT. And so are their students. The huge fees charged for an MBA course by leading business schools (the cost of a Wharton MBA, for example, is currently over $100,000) are usually borne by the students studying for the degree. It’s a huge personal investment, which means that they are understandably desperate to start paying it back as soon as they can.

So what happened to turn an MBA from a sensible preparation for a professional career as an executive into a sausage machine for shareholder-value-maximisation? It might be worth looking to From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession by Rakesh Khurana for some answers.

Khurana is the new Dean of Harvard College as well as a professor in the Harvard Business School, so he knows his field well.

Here’s the blurb for his book:

Is management a profession? Should it be? Can it be? This major work of social and intellectual history reveals how such questions have driven business education and shaped American management and society for more than a century. The book is also a call for reform. Rakesh Khurana shows that university-based business schools were founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors and lawyers but have effectively retreated from that goal, leaving a gaping moral hole at the center of business education and perhaps in management itself.

Khurana begins in the late nineteenth century, when members of an emerging managerial elite, seeking social status to match the wealth and power they had accrued, began working with major universities to establish graduate business education programs paralleling those for medicine and law. Constituting business as a profession, however, required codifying the knowledge relevant for practitioners and developing enforceable standards of conduct. Khurana, drawing on a rich set of archival material from business schools, foundations, and academic associations, traces how business educators confronted these challenges with varying strategies during the Progressive era and the Depression, the postwar boom years, and recent decades of freewheeling capitalism.

Today, Khurana argues, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals that once animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share profits. According to Khurana, we should not thus be surprised at the rise of corporate malfeasance. The time has come, he concludes, to rejuvenate intellectually and morally the training of our future business leaders.

Caspar Bowden, one of the most remarkable people I’ve been lucky to know, has died. His Wikipedia entry summarises his remarkable, highly-principled life and his accomplishments. I first met him in 1999 when campaigning against the Regulation of Investigatory Powers bill which was then on its way through a clueless UK parliament.

He was an extraordinarily serious man in whose company, I always felt slightly frivolous by comparison. But his seriousness derived from a deeply perceptive and informed concern about the scale of the surveillance nightmare into which we were sleepwalking — a concern that was amply corroborated by the Snowden revelations.

Caspar and I were both speakers at the conference in Copenhagen University held in December 2013 to mark the centenary of the Bohr model of the atom. I was lecturing on “Neils Bohr as a public intellectual” and in the course of my talk I slipped in a small but heartfelt tribute to Caspar:

On the face of it, it might seem that we have plenty of scientifically- and technologically literate public intellectuals: television and other mass media are awash with media superstars like Brian Cox, the rock-musician-turned-physicist who has been wowing British TV audiences for what seems like an eternity. Other cultures doubtless have their own equivalents.

The problem is that scientists like Cox are not really public intellectuals, because what they are doing is just explaining their disciplines to a general audience rather than engaging with the thorny public issues that science and technology now poses. What they do is important and often delightful in its way, but it’s not the heavy lifting that needs to be done.

A very good example of this heavy lifting is the work done by Caspar Bowden in unravelling the real nature and implications of NSA surveillance. This is difficult and often unrewarded labour but it’s what democracies need. And it’s only when one sees what’s involved that one really appreciates why people might settle for the comfortable option of media stardom rather than getting down and dirty in the public marketplace of ideas.

Caspar had seemed very depressed during the conference, so one reason for mentioning him was to cheer him up and let him know that some people really valued his work.

Later, he emailed me:

I missed your talk because I had promised my wife 1st proper holiday in 2 yrs and only way to make flights work affordably.

I haven’t justified my inlcusion – yet, but I take it as a spur to fulfil some rather late developing potential. I have consciously tried to re-read Arendt, Russell, Orwell, Lippmann and Chomsky over last few years. Almost more fun reading between the lines of what even they seemed to regard as unsayable about the power systems of their time, and why.

Failing my Maths Tripos 30 years ago has been both a curse (much time wasted in rather pointless jobs and many jobs inaccessible still) and a blessing (it saved me from specialisation and I can read as eclectically as I like).

With Caspar’s passing we have lost someone brave and significant. May he rest in peace.

Ross Anderson has written a lovely obituary in the Guardian.

Later Thanks to James Miller for spotting the incorrect link to Caspar’s Wikipedia entry. Now fixed.

Just noticed the name of the manufacturer of the lifts in St Antony’s, where I’m staying.

One of the best things about the The Economist is the imaginativeness of its cover art. This week’s is a good example.

… was the timeless tabloid headline devised by Vinnie Musetto, a former editor at the New York Post, who recently passed away and was accorded respectful obituaries in various newspapers. It ranks with “Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead”, which Claud Cockburn claims once won a competition at the London Times for the most boring headline.

Writing in the New Yorker, John Cassidy sees a new role for the late Mr Musetto as “the Godfather of Clickbait”. He’s right.

We’ve been having conversations on my Press Fellowship programme about what journalism should be like in a digital era. In thinking about different models, I remembered some of the astonishing stuff done by John Oliver in his TV show — for example his terrific exposé of the NCAA — and this programme about Edward Snowden and surveillance.

Most print journalists would probably not regard Oliver as a journalist, for a variety of reasons but mainly because he appears to mix fact and opinion so readily and powerfully. Well, he does mix them, but on the other hand he really makes people think. Witness the impact that his programme about Net Neutrality had. We don’t know how many of the four million public submissions received by the FCC were directly attributable to Oliver’s show, but I’m willing to bet that a lot of them were. And in the end the FCC bowed to that public pressure.