Harvard's Decline? Two Nobelists Leave for UChicago in Two Years
This week came the stunning news that the University of Chicago poached a second Nobel Prize-Winner from Harvard. In Two Years. This is completely unprecedented. Never in the past 120 years has Harvard lost two Nobelists in two consecutive years--especially to the same institution. Last year, UChicago attracted Harvard's newly-minted Nobelist Michael Kremer, an economist. This year it's biochemist Jack Szostak, who won the Nobel in Medicine in 2009. It's a sign of the new clout coming from Hyde Park, Chicago. While UChicago has been one of the nation's leading universities since its founding 130 years ago, it sometimes lost faculty members to the Ivies or West Coast universities. But now the trend has been reversed in a big way. It's not just that UChicago stole two Harvard faculty members in two years. That would be nothing new since UChicago has stolen a fair number of high-profile Harvard faculty in recent years. But to poach two Nobel Prize-Winners from an East