Good night and good luck

I just returned from a study trip to the United States, which I helped organizing for the MBA Programme of the Hong Kong University Business School. We studied the success factors of tech clusters in and around the Boston/Cambridge area, explored the startup environment in New England, debated the current US-China trade relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and also got quite some insight into the current struggles between the US federal government and Harvard University. Also the tone at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was quite subtle, watching what is happening to their neighbor down the road. We also took the chance to explore arts and culture, made a day trip to Nantucket and made a dive into American history. It is not a long, but an intense one. Perhaps this is what explains the intensity of today’s debates on some levels. What surprised me, personally, was the caution with which friends and colleagues were expressing their opinions. I guess, this is a time, where you can get easily labeled. And while new labels are made up every day, the old ones undergo an inflation. It’s a time in history where the Overtone window is pulled wide open. And that in itself has quite some danger.

There have been times similar in the United States. Even if these comparisons always fail to be exact, still history rhymes. Obviously, I am thinking of the anti-communist crusade of the US Senator Joseph McCarthy. And I borrowed as a title for this post, the signature sign-off used by the CBS-Journalist Edward Murrow, ending his broadcasts with “Good Night and Good Luck”, and it became a powerful reminder to keep up journalistic standards in these turbulent times, and holding public figures accountable.

When you watch the news on the US now, it appears to be quite a circus. And I guess, that’s the intention. Just look at the cast and their costumes. With Harvard being in the crosshairs now, what could happen though, is that the intellectual elite will come under scrutiny. I also have my criticism on how academia works. But it is easy to to throw out the baby with the bathwater here, especially in this irrational and heated debate, which is meant to fire up people and achieve submission. During my time in China, I heard countless accounts of professors being humiliated, injured or even killed by the mob during the Cultural Revolution. We also had the chance to speak to Jewish students at Harvard, and yes, they confirmed experiencing frightening antisemitic aggression on their campus. But they also do not want to be the pawn for a potentially much bigger power struggle in the US. There is no easy solution to any of this. America, good night and good luck!

Boston revisited

The Charles River (Quinobequin) separates Boston from Cambridge Massachusetts and, given the number and quality of Universities on its banks, is dubbed “the most educated river”. There are Harvard, MIT, Boston University and many more. I have been to Boston before to visit the office of my former employer, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). But they have now moved to a very modern and spacious location at the southern bank of the redeveloped harbor, just across Logan International Airport. Boston as a major trading port, became the center of the American Revolution, and subsequently the independence war. This was triggered by the English heavily taxing many goods imported to their colonies without offering political representation. The “Tea Party” were not just crazy people throwing tea into the port.

Today Boston is a very friendly, walkable and clean city. Unlike in other US and Canadian cities you rarely see drug addicts in the streets. The Boston mayor, Michelle Wu (吳弭), recently added policies to make it easier for law enforcement to remove tents and at the same time expanded the number of shelters in critical areas. She also pushed the Boston Green New Deal, proposed free public transport (there is not much public transport though) and other progressive policies. There seem to be no big public budget worries, or perhaps since the “great dig”, a major move to put infrastructure under ground from 1991 to 2007 (!), which overshot the budget by factor 10, the Bostonians maybe used to it. In any case, Boston is a very livable city today and among other initiatives this is also a result of the “great dig”.

There are great museums, libraries and galleries, which in itself justify to return to Boston soon. What I really enjoyed was a musical performance in the Boston Citizen Opera. An amazing building, which was originally a movie theatre and converted under Sarah Caldwell to an opera house and acquired by the Opera Company of Boston. However, it did not achieve financial viability. It was renovated and reopened in 2004 under new leadership with the Broadway production of The Lion King, and it is kept busy with concerts and pop concerts. We saw the musical “Come from Away”, which was great. It is based on the story of Gander, a small city in Newfoundland, which gave shelter to 7000 stranded passengers in the days after September 11 in 2001 when US airspace was closed in response to the terrorist attacks. It is a very American story, and nobody can help remembering these terrible days. But the musical does not leave its audience dwell on that for too long and quickly switches to individual stories and of course to the great people of Gander coming together to help. The theatre was cracking full, standing ovations, and people had a great evening. I can well imagine though, what the German purists would say to musical in an opera house. But Germany is a social angina pectoris anyways. And it’s why German theatres are more of a highly subsidized mortuary, instead of reaching all generations.

We had the very kind opportunity to stay as a guest in the The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. It was founded as the Philadelphia Cricket Club in 1854 as the first country club for any sports. Today it is mostly about golf, and even I don’t play that, it is a marvelous place. Honestly, in a world where it becomes more and more acceptable to have loose manners, such a club feels like a beacon of civilisation. But I can actually expand this to the whole of the Boston area. Sure, some say, this is a bubble with Harvard, MIT and all the rest of it. It does not represent the USA. That’s right. But people are luckily free these days to choose the environment they want to live in, and contribute to improve it. And Boston I find a great place to exactly do that.