Stanford engineered collaboration. Harvard engineered competition. Both worked.
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
The clearest natural experiment in Jonathan Hare's own education, and the reason it belongs in this record rather than in a memoir: two elite institutions took the same intake and produced different behavior, purely by changing what was measured and disclosed.
Stanford. Grades were H, P+, P, P− and a fail. Students were not permitted to report them. Recruiters were not permitted to ask — a recruiter who asked in an on-campus interview was barred from on-campus recruiting. First-year honors were not published, and grades were not released at all until after graduation. The stated purpose was cooperation rather than competition, and the class T-shirt carried a mock dictionary entry defining the school as a two-year vacation. The signal was: you clawed your way in, this is the end of the academic train, now learn to collaborate.
Harvard. First-year honors published, and roughly ten percent of the class removed after the first year. Hare's assessment: you might as well have been working at an investment bank.
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The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
Firms spent considerable effort trying to infer what they were not allowed to ask — McKinsey and others working out who the Arjay Miller Scholars were, since that was the one signal that leaked.
The interesting part is that the mechanism worked in both directions. Remove the ranking and people cooperate; publish it and cut the bottom decile and they compete. Neither outcome was about the students, who were drawn from the same pool. It was about what the institution chose to count and to show.
It is the same claim the Governance Premiums make. Behavior under pressure is a property of what a system measures and rewards, not of the character of the people inside it. Change the measurement and the same population behaves differently — which is either an indictment or an opportunity, depending on who is doing the designing.
It appeared during intro week, when the class was still getting to know each other. Hare's recollection is that it likely came from Sheila Benini, whose father was an associate dean of students — recorded as his suspicion rather than as fact.
The function was explicit: a non-aggression pact, distributed as clothing. Chill out, do not work too hard, do not compete with each other. Coming from Berkeley engineering — two electives in four years, and a forced curve — Hare found the contrast considerable.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
1990–92 — the faculty, the classmates, and the prize he gave up
Open →who experienced bothHarvard then Stanford, Tesseract, Benchmark — and a game of chicken with a city bus
Open →the same argument, with more at stakeBass's model fixes the Spence problem. Then it creates a second one.
Open →whose signaling result this is a live instance ofVice Chairman of Consilient, and the introduction into Cisco
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
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