IN MANY WAYS a university president is often like an extraordinarily well-credentialed trophy wife. The ideal university president should possess a glittering résumé of accomplishments, be a socially gifted goodwill ambassador for the school, and most importantly should have a deft hand at fundraising. As far as actually running the university of which he is president, that is usually left to the numerous deans and their faculty. A university president’s job description might well read as follows: Raise money and look pretty.
Unfortunately for Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers, looking pretty–or at least acting pretty–has never been one of his specialties. While he has proven adept at fundraising during his stormy three and a half year tenure, he has also managed to offend Harvard’s professoriate in a bewildering variety of ways. As a result, he Faculty of Arts and Sciences gave Summers an unprecedented vote of “no confidence” earlier this week.
OF COURSE SUMMERS is hardly the first prominent university president to fail to win his faculty’s adulation. In 1948, then retired General Dwight D. Eisenhower became the president of Columbia University. In many ways, he found the Columbia faculty to be a more wily and intractable foe than Rommel. By all accounts, the Columbia faculty reciprocated their president’s dislike. According to legend, the professors used to ridicule Ike by admonishing one another to not give their president memos longer than one page. Anything longer, they joked, would cause Eisenhower’s lips to tire.
While the Columbia faculty blithely dismissed Eisenhower as a guileless simpleton, even Summers’ most ardent critics never question his intellect–they question his management style.
It is one of the great ironies of the current dispute that Summers is often derided as behaving like an autocratic CEO; as Harvard economics professor and former university provost Jerry Green astutely points out, “Larry’s only previous executive position was as Secretary of the Treasury, a post he held for less than two years. He is an academic at heart.”
Indeed, from 1975 through 1991 when he went to Washington as the chief economist of the World Bank, Summers spent all but one year immersed in academia as a doctoral student, an associate professor, and ultimately one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard’s recent history. As proof of his academic bona fides, Summers won the prestigious Clark Medal in 1993. Granted every other year to the outstanding American economist under 40, the Clark Medal is widely viewed as a precursor to an eventual Nobel Prize.
But as Harvard’s president, Summers’s activities have often more resembled those of a CEO than those associated with the traditional fund-raising Energizer Bunny-type university president. Since assuming his office in July 2001, Summers has tried to actually run the university. While that may well be what the search committee which hired Summers had in mind, such active stewardship certainly hasn’t been welcomed by a large segment of the faculty.
AMONG HIS MANY CEO-LIKE ACTIONS, Summers has driven Harvard’s traditionally undergrad-averse faculty to become more engaged in undergraduate education. The merits of this movement aside, Harvard faculty, as a rule, does not respond well to being pushed.
Moreover, he controversially decreed that undergraduate education should be more weighted to mathematics and the sciences. As former provost Green points out, “He has a sincere belief that Harvard graduates will need more science and technical background in the next 50 years than they did in the last 50. In the process of discussing this belief, he has hurt the feelings of humanities faculty members and others who feel that their work is not valued by the president.”
Summers has also been progressing on a dramatic expansion of Cambridge-based Harvard into neighboring Allston, a major long-term project that will affect the university for generations. The faculty expects to have a major voice in the Allston expansion and many professors feel Summers has made his plans without receiving adequate quantities of their advice and consent.
And of course, Summers has made a habit of attacking the left-wing politics and the political correctness that have become such a staple of the modern academy.
SUMMERS’ CEO-LIKE BEHAVIOR is at the heart of the controversy. In an interview with Harvard Anthropology Professor and ardent Summers critic J. Lorand Matory, Professor Matory began the conversation by asking that I define the concept of “tenure” for a readership that might associate the term with infinite job security but has never pondered the matter more deeply. Professor Matory states that an individual who has earned tenure, especially tenure from Harvard, “has so thoroughly proven one’s scholarship to the world” that he can basically pursue his scholarship in whatever means he deems appropriate.
As the putative boss of such a population, one would want to realize that these are individuals unlikely to be enthusiastic about being bossed. In order to herd the professoriate in the directions he desired, Summers would have had to perform some remarkable feats of political dexterity.
A situation that promised to be difficult under any circumstances was exacerbated by several controversies that Summers had no small part in creating. Shortly after coming to office, Summers initiated a widely publicized tussle with well-known tenured Professor Cornel West, which resulted in West leaving Harvard for Princeton. Summers questioned whether West’s pursuit of his scholarship, which included forays into politics and rap music, were worthy of Harvard. Given the way tenure is defined, many faculty members felt that the mere act of raising the issue was out of bounds.
Later, Summers accurately condemned a divest-in-Israel movement as redolent of anti-Semitism. Perhaps most controversially, Summers urged academia, in general and Harvard specifically, to be more patriotic in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Neither stance was popular with Harvard’s faculty.
And then there are the issues regarding Summers’s social comportment. The complaints from faculty members aggrieved by Summers’s serial faux pas are legion. While it seems that Summers’ brusqueness has been embellished into an ongoing urban legend, there can be little doubt that he has bruised a lot of faculty feelings.
So when Summers speculated in an off-the-record academic conference that a contributing factor to the under-representation of women in the hard sciences might perhaps be due to different intrinsic abilities between the sexes, it was, in the words of Summers critic Matory, “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Doubtlessly many of Matory’s colleagues shared that sentiment. In spite of nearly two months of contrition since those remarks, the faculty nevertheless voted “no confidence” in Summers on Wednesday.
WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE Summers and the university? In many ways, the “no confidence” vote changes little. Prior to Wednesday’s faculty meeting, it was hardly a secret on campus that a significant portion of Harvard’s faculty disliked Summers rather intensely. Wednesday’s vote merely codified something that had long been known.
Assuming he wants to, Summers will retain his job. He still has the solid backing of the Harvard Corporation, which is the university’s ultimate ruling authority. It’s also instructive to take a close look at the numbers involved in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’s no confidence vote: The FAS has 802 voting members, only 421 of whom took part in the vote. Of those 421, a thin majority of 218 supported the “no confidence” vote. And as professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth Wisse pointed out in an interview, many members of the Harvard community are quite fond of President Summers, including large swaths of the undergraduate population and several graduate schools such as the Divinity School, the School of Education, and the Law School.
Wisse has emerged as one of Summers’s most eloquent defenders; Matory might be his fiercest detractor. Nonetheless, they both agree that the ruptures between Summers and certain pockets of the faculty are irreparable. Matory could imagine no way that relations with Summers could be mended, while Wisse feels that since the differences are so politically charged and deal with basic matters of principle, it is unlikely that peace will break out any time soon.
WITH SUMMERS UNLIKELY TO DEPART, and the bulk of his tenured foes equally unlikely to move, it appears that the parties will have to agree to dislike each other and move on as best as possible (assuming Summers reciprocates any of his antagonists’ hostility–he certainly hasn’t offered any rancor for public consumption during the last few months).
But the differences between Summers and his critics are deep. During our interview, Matory railed against Summers’s call for heightened patriotism at Harvard. It wasn’t that Matory was faulting patriotism or condemning patriotism–he just didn’t feel it was part of a scholar’s job description. He said that, as a scholar, he should follow where his scholarship leads–if that leads him to conclusions regarding America’s past or present that don’t reflect well on the nation, he views it as his responsibility, as a scholar, to teach them, not ignore them.
This is not an unsympathetic position, but it also called to mind an anecdote from Stephen Ambrose’s biography of Eisenhower: During one particularly testy exchange between Ike and Columbia’s scholars, Eisenhower was informed that Columbia had some of America’s most exceptional physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and engineers. Eisenhower was unimpressed; he asked if they were also “exceptional Americans.” The faculty could not have been more indifferent to his concern.
Dean Barnett writes about politics and other matters at soxblog.com under his on-line pseudonym James Frederick Dwight. He graduated from Harvard University in 1989.
