<p>harvard<em>and</em>berkeley,</p>
<p>I understand the principled position that Harvard cannot allow recruiting from organizations that discriminate. However, the more principled position is to also refuse to accept federal funds, particularly DARPA funds for research from those same organizations. It seems that the policy is in place where they think it suits them, not as a matter of principle.</p>
<p>For me, ROTC should be back on campus.</p>
<p>With all due respect, I disagree with almost everything you have said. If Summers has the full support of the Corporation, he will eventually be able to change the culture, despite FAS footdragging.</p>
<p>He has been enormously responsive to the needs and desires of the students, and they are surprisingly aware of the degree to which elements within the faculty are largely hostile to those needs and desires.</p>
<p>That is why he enjoys a substantial measure of support among the students dispite his lack of "charm."</p>
<p>The same goes for the alumni, as well.</p>
<hr>
<p>And to Eagle: you make an excellent point about the flexible "principles" of those hostile to ROTC and on-campus recruiting. They don't care what the cost is of abiding by those principles .... as long as somebody ELSE pays it! </p>
<p>I believe a couple of the Justices observed as much during the argument on the Solomon appeal.</p>
<p>Thank you, Byerly. And Eagle79. </p>
<p>And some of you imply that I "have a problem with gays" just because I want to go into the military and I support ROTC. I have no problem with gays, and have many gay friends. Just because I want to serve in the Marines does not make me anti-gay.</p>
<p>Not at all clear that he does have full support of the Corporation. They have been near silent during this latest excitement.</p>
<p>Universities change slowly, many of the tenured professors will still hold their positions long after every member of the Corporation has finished their service. </p>
<p>The traditional autonomy of faculties is not limited to Harvard, or the recent past. The ability to handle most of its affairs internally is an even stronger tradition at Harvard than at most other elite universities. Attempts to change that, particularly when targetted at the oldest and highest profile school, are going to take a very long time, if they suceed at all.</p>
<p>If the Corporation does manage to get the FAS to do its bidding, not at all sure that would be a good thing. However unruly it may be, the FAS is composed of experts in the academic fields, and the Corporation is not. The members of FAS are better qualified to assess the quality of work of individuals, and the direction of their fields, than is the Corporation, or any one individual selected to be president. This is the source of much of the hostility, and pushing on this is not likely to lead to peace with Summers.</p>
<p>Of course, if current reports are true, the the Summers issue is moot. As I said before, Harvard will be Harvard, whether the president is Summers, or someone more charming. It is a fun news story, but not that much at stake.</p>
<p>Today's Wall Street Journal is saying that Summers will resign before the faculty vote that is scheduled one week from today. Here is the link, it requires a paid subscription:</p>
<p>More on this from today's Harvard Crimson. Apparently Summers has support of those in schools beyond FAS. This article references the article from the WSJ:</p>
<p>boston usmc,</p>
<p>I never once thought, said, or accused you of being homophobic.
All I wanted to do was point out how you have made claims that you are being discriminated against (because you would have to go 20 minutes further to MIT for your ROTC classes while still being able to use your ROTC scholarship to help pay for Harvard), and yet you seem to show little regard for why this policy was put into place, to protest the REAL discrimination against gay students who cannot have access to ROTC scholarships, despite the fact that they too may be patriotic and super-qualified for those ROTC scholarships. Again, I think some of us bristled at the weak claims of discrimination when you seem to be oblivious to the REAL discrimination in this situation.</p>
<p>Byerly,
As you know the Solomon Amendment is being challenged through the legal system... the legal questions are complex... I have no idea which way the case will go, though I think it will tip in favor of the Bush administrations interpretation. Be careful what you wish for, because the Solomon Amendment can easily be turned on conservative pet causes... as has already been done.</p>
<p>The truly conservative position on the Solomon Amendment would be to oppose it... to allow private organizations to set their own internal policies, and attach strings to grants only so far as the strings have to do with the effective administration of those grants... do you really want government attaching ideological strings to every pool of money??
Years ago, principled conservatives opposed the Solomon amendment... but hey, we live in the age where real, principled conservatism is dead...</p>
<p>"The members of FAS are better qualified to assess the quality of work of individuals, and the direction of their fields, than is the Corporation, or any one individual selected to be president."</p>
<p>I am very wary of granting faculty such blank checks. Academic departments have been known to do stupid things collectively. Yale used to have a very distinguished Philosophy department, until about three decades ago (yes, I am not young) a couple of hires brought in a fierce factional bloodbath, from which it still has not recovered. Today Yale is just a bit-player in the Philosophy world.</p>
<p>At the other extreme of wrecking themselves with infighting is when faculties lavish each other accolades without any reality check against the outside world. We all know that Summer's most strident critics reside mostly in certain departments and programs. I spoke with a couple of recent Harvard graduates yesterday; their contempt for the scholarship in those departments is palpable. According to them, these departments have become totally irrelevant to most of the students. In many fields, there are objective benchmarks of value. If you a a great economist, you (or people like you) get appointed chairman of the Fed (or Secretary of the Treasury!). If you are a brilliant lawyer, you get appointed to the Supreme Court (you may have to wait for the right administration to come along, but it happens, and maybe not to you, but to someone like you). If you are a brilliant scientist, patents are filed, or procedures are implemented, based on the principles you discover (maybe several decades later, but it happens, and maybe it gets attributed to the wrong person, but we are talking about blunt instruments here). This is not a perfect mechanism, but there is some form of a reality check for the value of the work. In other areas of intellectual pursuit, it is very difficult to tell apart quackery from genuine scholarship. I hope we all remember the Sokal affair, in which a physicist got his totally bogus paper published in Social Text, one of the most respected scholarly journals in American Studies, to prove the point that many scholars in the culture studies field have no idea what they are talking about. (If you wish to be entertained, google "Sokal affair.") In such fields, the belief that "faculty knows best" is simply dangerous.</p>
<p>For both aforementioned reasons, I believe there has to be some external reality check, to prevent senseless faculty bloodbaths, or runaway growth in totally irrelevant directions.</p>
<p>I am not saying that Summers is necessary the right person to provide that check, nor that this problem is unique to Harvard. I am saying the Corporation, as befits the guardian of the premier univeristy in the world, is addressing the right problem, and even if Summers leaves (a cabinet position in the coming Clinton administration?), the next appointment needs to continue to tackle the problem, which requires iron (as well as silken, I guess) hands.</p>
<p>I'd also like to say that this has been a very good thread. There are sometimes irritations that come from misunderstandings, and there are also genuine disagreements, but I think by and large everyone is trying to be constructive, and that's a good thing.</p>
<p>..........
[quote]
University President Lawrence H. Summers is expected to resign in advance of next Tuesday's full Faculty meeting, the Wall Street Journal reported on page A3 this morning, citing two anonymous sources "familiar with the situation."
[/quote]
</p>
<p>...hello Derek Bok.</p>
<p><a href="http://thecrimson.com/%5B/url%5D">http://thecrimson.com/</a></p>
<p>I'm interested to see how this will affect the curricular reform; after all, much of what they're reforming was instituted by Bok in the first place.</p>
<p>reform??? I guess if one sees Summer's departure as reform.</p>
<p>hazmat--</p>
<p>Was that in reference to my comment? I'm talking about the curricular review--maybe I should have used that word instead, but I think "reform" is a pretty good word as the review committee has already made its recommendations and now they just have to be instituted--the review's already happened; the reform's yet to ensue.</p>
<p>that was my point. Reform as the implementation and reform as to the future of changes.........a lot will be rethought. Perhaps it is not the thought that folks object to but rather the spoken words of Summers.</p>
<p>Anecdotal data point. My father, an alum of Harvard for both grad and undergrad, and a retired high level university professor and administrator, who has also written on the history of the American University, has been saying for two years that Summers is not qualified to lead Harvard. He just isn't a good manager and he is especially not a good leader. Harvard will survive and do much better once they find a leader worthy of the insititution, and once they have recovered from these events. Should take about two years in total.</p>
<p>"there has to be some external reality check" </p>
<p>I agree. But these already exist. Harvard both solicits outside evaluations for each tenure decision, but appoints outsiders to each ad hoc evaluation committee. the question is not whether the decision should be left only to people currently in the department, that is not the case now, but whether people with no qualifications in the field should play an active role.</p>
<p>If there was a perception that some departments are hopelessly compromised by political considerations, and that the quality of scholarship has suffered, all I can say is that surveys of experts in the field usually end up with Harvard near the top in the non quantitative disciplines, almost across the board. </p>
<p>If more independent evaluation of potential tenure appointments is needed, then this could be accomplished by having more involvement by other experts outside of Harvard, rather than assigning the decision to people who are not experts. The latter are not capable of deciding on the basis of scholarly quality, so they have to apply other criteria- what else could they do?</p>
<p>If you are advised to get surgery, you may want a second opinion. But you should try to get it from another surgeon, or at least a physician. You probably would not want to ask your friend the physicist, no matter how good she may be at physics. She cannot give you a useful opinion about the surgery. Similarly, with the exception of those members of the Corporation who have academic backgrounds, who could offer useful opinions on those appointments in their fields, involvement of the president and Corporation cannot have these wonderful effects because they are not qualified.</p>
<p>If this is a Corporation agenda, then Summer's departure will be a minor skirmish in a much longer war. No distinguished faculty will sit still for it.</p>
<p>WBUR in Boston is reporting that Larry Summers has resigned.</p>
<p>Also the Harvard web-site is reporting this:</p>
<p>How about that dean of Engineering from Stanford ...</p>
<p>Funny that the other guy they had in mind when they chose Summers was Lee Bollinger, who is having his own troubles at Columbia with 10th-year "graduate students" going on strike, and "community leaders" who want to shake down Columbia over its expansion beyond its tiny 35-acre campus...</p>
<p>It is easy to exaggerate the importance of the curriculum reform. Right now the curriculum is well within the range common at elite colleges and universities. The proposed changes neither impose an "everyone takes the same courses" core (Reed or Columbia), nor an open curriculum (Amherst and Brown). So after all the reforming, Harvard students will again take courses according to a distribution requirement, well within the range of other colleges. To the extent that one needs to improve the specific courses, this is more a matter of directing resources and faculty time on creating them, than on whether the overall curriculum changes. </p>
<p>The revisions, if adopted, will have little long term effect on the education of Harvard students. They will still do traditional majors, they will still have requirements across a range of intellectual fields. Many will take these courses only grudginly, many will complain of poor advising, and most will worry much more about their GPA's and LSAT, MCAT, GRE scores than about whatever courses outside their majors they had to take first and second year.</p>
<p>4th floor,</p>
<p>I think being the president of a major research university has got to be one of the most difficult jobs out there... </p>
<p>Interesting factoid: every single Harvard president up to, but not invluding Bok, had their undergrad degrees from Harvard itself. Bok was the first to not have a Harvard BA... he graduated from Stanford, and then got a Harvard Law degree... Rudenstine came next (Princeton BA, Harvard PhD), and then Summers (MIT BS, Harvard PhD). I wonder if the Corporation will continue teh tradition of choosing a president who has at least one Harvard degree, undergrad or grad.</p>
<p>The Gazette article says that Summers will stay at the university as a "University Professor". I wonder how long he will stay in that position.</p>