Cambridge, Massachusetts
HARVARD PRESIDENT Lawrence Summers makes an odd Archie Bunker. But not to the few dozen students who gathered last Tuesday in front of Harvard’s Science Center to demand his scalp. Some of their chants were aimed at Summers himself: “Racist, sexist, anti-gay–Larry Summers you must pay!” Others focused on the causes Summers has allegedly quashed: “What do we want?” “A living wage!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”
Two things about the rally stood out. First, it was tiny. The number of vocal anti-Summers demonstrators peaked around 50–out of an undergraduate pool of more than 6,400. Second, the anti-Summers crowd gave short shrift to his faux pas about women in science and engineering. Instead, they aimed their rally at other issues. Speakers banged on huffily about low-paid workers, mistreated black scholars, greedy oil companies, and all-male social clubs. You got the sense they could’ve staged this protest even absent Summers’s comment about women’s “intrinsic aptitude.” Each speaker delivered a brief harangue, then cast a symbolic “no confidence” vote. After 45 minutes or so, the “Vote no!” gaggle trekked to nearby Lowell Lecture Hall, where the members of the Harvard faculty were streaming in to discuss their president’s future. (They adjourned more than two hours later having resolved nothing.)
When the anti-Summers flock arrived at Lowell, it turned out a small band of pro-Summers students had beaten them to the spot. The latter handed out packets containing a pro-Summers op-ed written by three female undergrads in the Harvard Crimson and a list of students, alumni, and parents who had endorsed it on the website www.studentsforlarry.org. They dispensed at least 300 packets in all. As of last Friday, “Harvard Students for Larry” had collected more than 500 online signatures from members of the Harvard community. (Meanwhile, Harvard alumni are circulating their own pro-Summers petition, at www.alumniforharvard.com. It has garnered over 350 names.)
This latest outbreak of controversy to roil Summers’s tenure at Harvard began in mid-January, when Summers spoke off the cuff at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference. Seeking to explain gender disparities in math-related fields, Summers tossed out the following statement (“to provoke you,” he said): “In the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude”–that is, men might possess an innate advantage. When the remark became public, a torrent of outrage burst forth. Summers issued one mea culpa after another, to no avail. Leading professors called for his head, and Cambridge buzzed with talk of his resignation.
Harvard undergrads, however, were unmoved. They generally give the impression of being far more supportive of their president than is the faculty. A recent poll of Harvard professors conducted by the campus daily showed that while 55 percent believe Summers should not resign, 32 percent think he should. Moreover, majorities of the faculty told the Crimson they disapprove of Summers’s leadership (52 percent) and/or feel he has diminished Harvard’s image (56 percent). Such sentiment is hard to find among the undergrads, while support for Summers is common across ideological and party lines. One of the three women whose byline graced the pro-Summers Crimson article was sophomore Kate Penner, a Democrat. The others, Lauren Truesdell and Paloma Zepeda, are Republicans. Zepeda says she spearheaded the effort “to advocate respect for discourse.” She and Truesdell both report receiving lots of positive feedback from their peers over email.
Among undergrads, even many staunch liberals oppose giving Summers the boot. One of them is Truesdell’s roommate, Rachel Murray, a self-identified liberal Californian (who doesn’t care for Ah-nuld). Murray thinks the push to oust Summers is so much claptrap. She found his remark on human genetics to be engaging rather than enraging. “He said it to challenge people,” Murray stresses. The portion of female undergrads that want to ditch Summers, she adds, is not “anywhere near” the one-third of professors who want him out. Another student who normally favors liberal activism–and hails from true-blue Massachusetts–also considers the anti-Summers furor just plain silly.
It’s not that Harvard undergrads are overwhelmingly pro-Summers. But most are, at the very least, anti-anti-Summers, which in this case means the same thing: They don’t believe Summers should be forced to resign. Many don’t give a fig about the whole ordeal. “I haven’t met anybody who’s pissed off about it,” one young woman told me. Last Tuesday–Summers’s ostensible day of reckoning–occasioned no student uproar on campus. The very cold, very gray day went off like any other, with Harvard Yard noticeably quiet for most of the afternoon. And the much-hyped anti-Summers rally was meager by Harvard standards, aside from the small phalanx of reporters. It’s the professors who are driving the anti-Summers caravan, not the students.
What explains this gap? For one thing, today’s Harvard undergrads are less ideological than those of, say, 25 years ago. They’re surely less knee-jerk-liberal, on balance, than their professors. While catching the latest wave of political correctness is a virtual necessity for untenured (and even some tenured) faculty, among students it’s the anti-PC position that has cachet. This is true not only in the matter of differences between men and women but also in other areas where Summers has antagonized the faculty. His pro-Israel and pro-ROTC positions, for example, mirror those of a solid majority of students.
Another explanation: While undergrads widely see Summers as student-friendly, many professors dislike him personally, whether for his top-down managerial style, his often brusque demeanor, or his shakeup of Harvard’s academic culture. Many are already steamed over Harvard’s pending expansion into neighboring Allston, across the Charles River from Cambridge. They broadly oppose the move and feel Summers has shut them out of the process. Now they have a pretext for their anger.
For these reasons and more, the only students conspicuously urging Summers’s resignation last Tuesday were the usual suspects: those who take every chance to zing the “Harvard Corporation” and demand social justice. To most students, this perpetually roused rabble looks parodic, like the “Cause-Heads” in the movie PCU. For that matter, so, too, do the anti-Summers faculty.
Duncan Currie, Harvard ’04, is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
