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Summers postmortem continues
Commentary on Harvard president Lawrence Summers' decision to resign is everywhere right now, as mainstream media coverage merges with opinion pieces in the papers and on blogs, and as factual reports merge with analysis, speculation, and even gossip about what really went wrong at Harvard, about what Summers' failure there means for the institution, and about what the entire fracas says about higher education in America. Here are some excerpts from the better writing that has appeared on the subject over the past few days.
Writing for The Boston Globe, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz deplores the bullying means by which a doctrinaire segment of the Harvard faculty crippled Summers' ability to work effectively and eventually hounded him out of office:
A plurality of one faculty has brought about an academic coup d'etat against not only Harvard University president Lawrence Summers but also against the majority of students, faculty, and alumni. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which forced Summers's resignation by voting a lack of confidence in him last March and threatening to do so again on Feb. 28, is only one component of Harvard University and is hardly representative of widespread attitudes on the campus toward Summers. 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.
At Cliopatria, Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson agrees that politics played a huge role in Summers' troubles, while James Traub, George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan, and and Swarthmore historian Tim Burke argue that politics was not everything here, that Summers' managerial style had a great deal to do with alienating the Harvard faculty.
Burke's analysis is particularly good, not least because it is followed by an exceptionally sharp and penetrating exchange with a reader who feels Burke unfairly downplays the ideological aspect of the Summers affair. Burke argues:
The unsuccessful tenure of Larry Summers at Harvard is first and foremost a story about the details of leadership and management. Some people can't transfer their formidable skills between different kinds of environment, and Summers appears to be one of them. That's too bad, and I hope he has a chance some day to return to the kinds of institutional and political worlds where his undeniable intellect and energy are best expressed. That's a more boring and particular story than the narrative that the culture warriors might prefer, but I think that's the main issue in this case.
And a commenter responds:
Here, as elsewhere, you have a tendency to imply (say outright?) that the existence of complications, details, local rivalries, personal tensions, somehow diminishes the importance of the grand ideological analysis. The point of ideology is that it does indeed unify a host of particulars toward a common goal, aligning all the local details within a common narrative. Ideology is so important, and so influential, precisely because it does operate through human clay, and is so remarkably effective despite the intractable material. And when you attack the culture warriors, the ideologues, for not having a sufficient grasp of the local, you are attacking a straw man: all intelligent analysts of ideology (which I assume exist on all partisan points on the spectrum) know that the local and the general interpenetrate. Yes, Summers is a local case, but the local case still follows the pattern of the larger ideological war.
The entire exchange is unusually interesting, well-written, and civil. Well worth a look.
Also worth thought: the college presidents who spoke with InsideHigherEd.com's Scott Jaschik, but did not want their names to be publicized:
Several college presidents whose politics are not notably conservative agreed that Summers was punished for his views--and said that they worried about the message that sent to other presidents. "Summers as an individual may have been too strong-minded, too clear, and too disrespectful of the Harvard elite to survive," said one president. "One thing is sure, and that is that the academic elite do not tolerate dissent that deviates from well known and narrowly defined boundaries, and the academic elite in particular does not tolerate dissent that carries with it the threat of implementation."Another president--who like all the presidents interviewed for this article wanted their names kept out of it--said that the downfall of Summers struck her as "political correctness to the nth degree." She said that she "wasn't offended" by the questions Summers raised--even those about women and science--even when she didn't agree with his conclusions. "It's too bad presidents have to be so circumspect these days," she said. "Everyone laments that presidents can't use the bully pulpit, but here's one that did."
The president of a leading research university, however, said that while he did not believe for a minute that Summers is a sexist, he thought the lesson of Summers wasn't to avoid speaking out, but to avoid being "too direct and abrasive." Presidents may prefer to think that they don't have to be pay attention to different campus groups, this president said, but they do.
"These are jobs in which you have to be a politician and a diplomat, and work with your various constituencies and be careful about what you say--that's a price of the job in my view," he said. "You have to accept that. These are very difficult management jobs, with many constituencies, each of which thinks they run the place."
The president added that it's important to understand that faculty members expect to be treated with respect and to have their independence upheld. At the same time, he said, "there's obviously a huge tension for all of us in these roles of how you get things done."
These anonymous quotes from people whose job it is to be leaders in higher education speak volumes about the climate of contemporary academe, as well as for the instantaneously chilling effect Summers' resignation appears to have had on the willingness of other higher education officials to speak up about issues central to their field. The views expressed above ought to have names attached to them. But college presidents appear to be running scared these days, and with good reason.
Posted by acta online at February 23, 2006 07:26 AM
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