Place your bets on next Harvard president
Gambling website has declared odds for picking a new chief
Word around campus is that the search for a new Harvard president is still wide open. But bookmakers in Costa Rica have already declared the odds.
On the Internet gambling website Bodog.com, Elena Kagan, the popular Harvard Law School dean, is the favorite at 3 to 1. She's followed by another Harvard insider, provost Steven E. Hyman, at 7 to 2, and then by Stanford's provost, John Etchemendy, at 4 to 1.
The future of America's most prestigious university has joined the fate of Fidel Castro and the outcome of Project Runway as debate topics in the increasingly popular world of online gambling, whose sites are often based overseas to skirt US laws.
About 600 bets have been placed on the Harvard presidency so far, according to Calvin Ayre, the flamboyant founder of Bodog, who was featured on the cover of Forbes's billionaire issue and named one of People's ``hottest bachelors." The wagers must be between $5 and $50.
Several of the alleged candidates chuckled at the news that people put money on their fates. ``Well, that's a kick," Etchemendy wrote in an e-mail. ``Maybe this is my chance to win some money with insider knowledge. Do you think the NCAA would frown on that?"
The odds on Mark S. Wrighton, a former MIT administrator who is now chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, were 13 to 1. He quipped, ``I only bet on a sure thing."
Wrighton, who has been credited with making Washington University one of the hottest schools in the country since he took the reins in 1995, said that he hadn't been contacted by the Harvard search committee and that he believes he has ``the best job in America."
Tufts University president Lawrence S. Bacow, given odds of 15 to 1, wrote in an e-mail: ``I am very happy at Tufts. I wish Harvard well in their search."
Kagan was traveling and unavailable, a spokesman said. Hyman declined to comment. A Harvard spokesman also declined to comment on the wagering.
Bodog staff said the website first offered a wager on the future president on Feb. 23, two days after Lawrence H. Summers announced his plans to step down. The field of contenders was updated this month.
The names and the odds are determined by the website's Costa Rica-based bookmakers, who do ``a great deal of research," Ayre wrote in an e-mail. He deemed Kagan's resume ``incredibly impressive."
Perhaps not coincidentally, the 17 names currently offered for betting are identical to those mentioned in a June article in the Crimson, Harvard's student newspaper. The Crimson identified the group as representing the types of people Harvard would probably consider. Bodog said the Crimson was one of numerous sources taken into consideration.
The 17 names are all respected academics, and most seem like plausible candidates. But not all.
Nannerl O. Keohane, the former president of Duke and Wellesley, serves on the Harvard board and the search committee. She emphatically told the Globe earlier this year that she would not be a candidate.
Twenty percent of wagers have been placed on favorite Kagan, while a quarter went to Princeton president Shirley M. Tilghman and 12 percent to Keohane. Hyman and Etchemendy only had 2 and 3 percent, respectively. Bodog would not say how much money has been bet.
A surprising element of the current wager is the end date, Dec. 31, when bets will be canceled if Harvard has not picked a president. But many people expect the new president will not be named until early 2007.
The betting may just be sport, but it ``probably does have some predictive value," said Barry Burden, a political scientist who recently left Harvard for the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Burden, who has studied online wagering on political races, found it to be more predictive than polling, because people willing to put up their own money tend to be political junkies or campaign insiders.
``The question is whether people betting in the Harvard pool have some inside information," Burden said. ``Do they know something about the candidates? Did they overhear something at dinner or just have an instinct?"
A few days before Summers announced his plans to step down, the Crimson reported that another gambling website was predicting a 70 percent chance Summers would step down.
Bodog's current list, in addition to those mentioned above, includes: Alison Richard, head of Cambridge University; University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman; Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Brown president Ruth J. Simmons; University of California president Robert C. Dynes; Cornell provost Carolyn Martin, Harvey V. Fineberg, former Harvard provost and current president of the Institute of Medicine' University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann; Columbia president Lee C. Bollinger; and Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com. 