Competing for the Harvard hot seat
When we last dropped in on Harvard Business School-trained gadfly-entrepreneur Laurence McKinney, he had corralled such Internet addresses as harvardbusiness.com, harvardbusiness
school.com, etc., and was trying to launch a business off of those websites. That was in 1999. The B-School sleepyheads, who found McKinney annoying to say the least, had also failed to register the Internet address hbs.com. But that, as they say, is another story. McKinney is still tugging at the Harvard tail. Now he has commissioned production of the famous "Harvard chair" -- those pretentious captain's chairs you sometimes see in offices or homes that "discreetly" broadcast the owner's affiliation with the World's Greatest University -- in direct competition with Harvard's official purveyor.
The story so far: The venerable chair, which many moons ago was given away to incoming freshmen, has been manufactured for most of the 20th century by Gardner-based furniture makers Nichols & Stone. The chairs were sold through the Harvard Coop, which paid a small fee to the Harvard Alumni Association in return for its semiofficial/iconic status as the Harvard chair.
For the past few years, Harvard's Office for Technology and Trademark Licensing has been cracking down on unlicensed products. But there was no reason to go after the unlicensed chair, which had a mutually satisfactory, grandfathered relationship with the alumni association. Enter McKinney, who last year obtained an OTTL license to sell a Harvard chair clone, made at the Lombard mill in Ashburnham. "The trademark people didn't know anything about what happened at the business school," McKinney says. "That's all been forgotten."
So now, if you open up the Harvard alumni magazine, you see the Coop's display ad for its "exclusive" Harvard chair just a few pages away from McKinney's ad for his "improved," "authorized," and, for all practical purposes, identical chair.
At $400 apiece, both chairs are wildly overpriced. For that kind of money, you could get "I WENT TO HARVARD" tattooed in gold leaf on your forehead. Naturally, both claim to be the real thing. "There are other chairs, and I suppose you can call them anything you want," says Coop president Jerry Murphy. "But we sell the Harvard chair." "It's chair wars," crows McKinney. "We're selling the first upgrade in 130 years."
Do your own comparison shopping. You can see (and buy) McKinney's chair at his website, everythingharvard.com. The Coop sells its chair, and assorted WGU tchotchkes, at www.thecoop.com. Happy sitting!
Speaking of chairs . . .
Boston University's brilliant and abrasive professor of humanities Christopher Ricks has won election to Oxford University's prestigious Professor of Poetry chair, handily beating out four other nominees. The five-year appointment is a signal honor -- previous occupants include W.H. Auden, Robert Graves, and Seamus Heaney -- and not particularly onerous. For a modest stipend of $9,500, Ricks will deliver three lectures each year, and a fourth "oration" every other year. Mr. Poetry also judges a few prize contests and "generally encourag[es] the art of poetry in the University," according to Oxford's announcement. Ricks's first Oxford obligation comes this fall. A spokesman for BU said Ricks will continue to teach in its humanities program as well. The Prickly One was not available for comment.
Ricks's appointment was mildly controversial, insofar as he is a critic and not a poet. After the election, a supporter of one of Ricks's opponents, Oxford emeritus professor John Fuller, told the London Times that "to have another literary critic in this unique chair seems to be such a waste. . . . All but one of the holders since the war have been poets, and it's worked very well. This is a backward step and I'm very sad about it."
Puh-leeze. As the most recent editor of "The Oxford Book of English Verse," Ricks has metric chops galore. Plus he has that whole demotic thing going, as the world's foremost scholar of Bob Dylan. Furthermore, this is an honor that has eluded two of our greatest poets, Robert Lowell and Muhammad Ali.
Bravo, Christopher!
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 
