I can’t be the first to trot out the old saw by William Buckley, when speaking of elite academia: “I’d rather be governed by the first hundred names in the Cambridge phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University,” because that’s just the kind of thing pajama-clad pundits (but wait: you’re in khakis!) are prone to do whenever the oldest and most prestigious academic institution in the country forgets that the little people are watching:
CAMBRIDGE — Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers, facing a faculty revolt and eroding support from the university’s governing board, announced yesterday he will resign, ending the briefest tenure at the Ivy League school’s helm in 144 years.
Derek Bok, the president of the university from 1971 to 1991, will serve as interim president.
Still, it’s reassuring to hear from one of the leading lights of the school’s professional programs, that not everyone in the ivy-dappled halls is drinking his own bathwater. According to Alan Dershowitz,
The graduate faculties, the students, and the alumni generally supported Summers for his many accomplishments. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences includes, in general, some of the most radical, hard-left elements within Harvard’s diverse constituencies. And let there be no mistake about the origin of Summers’s problem with that particular faculty: It started as a hard left-center conflict. Summers committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military.
A former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Summers was hired by the Harvard Corporation’s board to shake the university up, and keep it atop the pinnacle of academia in the presence of upstart threats across the country. In the end however, it was the faculty that showed who was boss – and a small part of the faculty at that – and who insisted that they’d heard quite enough debate, thank you, on issues like not divesting stocks of companies that do business in Israel, returning ROTC to campus, and yes, asking whether or not research ought to be done into whether there were any innate differences between men, taken as a group, and women, taken as a group. Apart of course, from those we could already, you know: See.
Some donors were unhappy:
“How can anyone govern a university where a fraction of faculty members can force a president out?” said Joseph O’Donnell, a Boston business executive who is a former member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers and a prominent donor.
I’ve got an idea for them: Maybe they can set up “an anarco-sydicalist commune…take it in turns to be a sort of executive officer for the week… but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting…by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs… …but by a two thirds majority in the case of… ”
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Can you believe Harvard’s endowment is $22.6 Billion? 22 bil can fund a whole lot of buffoonery.
I wish Bill Gates would buy it and turn it into a computer science school….
B2
This is and important post Lex. If Alan Dershowitz says someone is left of center, they are way left. This whole situation would almost be comical if it were not so serious. It has become almost impossible to get anyone appointed to the Supreme Court unless he or she has a Harvard or Yale degree.
This problem is not limited to the Ivy League. When I questioned my daughter about the behavior and statements of some of her professors a few years ago, she said, “Dad, do you remember the Hippies? Well now they are all professors.”
Lovely Holy Grail Ref, Cap’n….
Here’s my two monetary quanta on the subject, speaking as a woman with a PhD in physics — ever consider that *both* the Harvard faculty and Larry Summers are a few toys short of a Happy Meal? Just because you have two sides doesn’t mean one is right. I wonder if he bothered to ask any, you know, women scientists about the subject. Maybe he also believes in cooties.
(For a more detailed rant, see here.)
Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
Did you see that? Did you see him repressing me?!
BCR-
GULP… Can I weigh in with this quark question Doctor Snark, Maam?
Is your point that Summers may be “the greater of two weEvils”. so therefore, he must go for the illustrious institution to survive?
If I was in his boat I’d force the faculty to vote, identify the nays and pillory ‘em in a book deal (call it-”Inside Harvard PC”). Just for the record of course.
Perhaps they sweetened his severance package to keep him from doing just that.
B2
The Chair recognizes the Honorable Badbob (AI is getting better all the time, but Marketing says nobody wants an intelligent piece of furniture …)
Nope, the most I am saying is I weep no tears for his departure — and if the PC-infected faculty members of Harvard were to be tarred, feathered, and sent off to shovel the Charles River I would be delighted. There’s small choice in rotten apples. (I enjoy Shakespeare even though he is definitely a dead white male, so you see I am one of the Unclean too.)
I am suspecting you have never encountered a Faculty Meeting in the wild. The scenario you describe is far too rational to enter their pointy little heads.
What I don’t get is……why is he going back to Harvard. I agree with BCR, both sides are defective. However, it is fun to watch the Left eat their young!
Bloody peasants!
Now we see the violence inherent in the system!
Dershowitz has made interesting points about this, but I get the sense that a good many of those who’d have voted no confidence in Summers would have done so for reasons having nothing to do with national politics, gender politics, etc.
Take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve heard about Summers from a Harvard prof who more or less shares his politics (semi-conservative Democrat, which of course makes you a right-winger in academia). His take was that Summers had alienated too many people by acting as an autocratic president; by stating what he planned to do, and then ignoring objections. Not now and then, but systematically.
This has its merits, of course (I for one admire a leader willing to stick to an unpopular course of action when appropriate), but it does have a way of making enemies. Especially among professors, who generally have enormous yet very fragile egos, and tend toward the attitude described by Thomas Carlyle: “Give me my own way exactly in everything, and a sunnier, more pleasant creature is not to be found.”
Anyway, while I believe the faculty leading the charge against him were indeed politically motivated, I’d venture that many who went along were just sick of the guy, and willing to go along for whatever reason.
That’s a great input JPS, and one you’re uniquely qualified to speak to. Of course, it’s also human nature (as we see in other discussions) to wrap our biases – or cognitive lenses if you prefer – in the snowy robes of our better angels.
This what I said over on Our Lady of Snark land:
Summers started out to make a CHANGE. Seldom are change agents accepted without an uproar, sometimes great uproar.
It appears that he started a civil war that he lost. Now it will be left for someone else, perhaps a better manager, more diplomatic, which ALWAYS have their own effect. Usually less uproar but almost always much longer to achieve the same results. In my opinion, his failing was to learn the lesson of little steps.
I apologize for the duplicate comment. When I better learn to link, I’ll be a more complete (not necessarily better) Blogger.
Gosh, thanks, Cap’n Lex. You might be granting me more credibility than I actually have (being somewhere between junior and senior in rank, and trying fallibly to make sense of how senior profs operate), but I appreciate it all the same.
I must say the phrase, “wrap…our bias in the snowy robes of our better angels” makes me smile, somewhat ruefully: Yes, sigh.
Hee! “Our Lady of Snark”. I like.
JPS does indeed give valuable insight into the sheltered jungle of academia, and I think the full truth is an amalgam of the points raised here. Summers did try to instigate change, BUT was incompetent to the point of a)really annoying the people he was trying to change and b)saying things anybody who has been in an academic environment for more than five minutes would know were completely toxic — and thus prevented any good points he might have raised from being heard. A little content-free verbiage, good coffee and non-stale cookies at the faculty seminars, and individual visits to assure Professor Whassname that he *really* valued Whassname’s input and only consulted the others to prevent hurt feelings … he would have had them eating out of his hands in three months, tops.