"Summers end marks the start of a long winter in American universities

Colleges & Universities A-Z Harvard University
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<p>(Editorial comment: The Times of London)</p>

<p>February 24, 2006</p>

<p>Summers' end marks the start of a long winter in American universities</p>

<p>Harvard’s President challenged all the academic pillars of political correctness
TWENTY YEARS AGO the American philosopher, Allan Bloom, published a book called The Closing of the American Mind, a devastating indictment of the nation’s universities and, more broadly, of its cultural elites.</p>

<p>Its premise was that the spirit of openness, a willingness to consider ideas freely, the great virtue of American life and the guiding ethos of a university had been perverted into a cultural relativism. From the 1960s liberal philosophy had taken hold, defiantly asserting that truth was in the eye of the beholder, and that notions of absolute ideals or virtues were anachronistic. In this new world, liberal democracy was no better than totalitarian theocracy, Plato’s philosophy was no more valid than Marianne Faithfull’s and Mozart should be considered on the same terms as the Monkees.</p>

<p>*
The resignation of Larry Summers as President of Harvard University this week indicates that the closing of the American mind is a continuing process, remorselessly squeezing the light out of its academic enlightenment.</p>

<p>Mr Summers, elected to the top job at America’s richest and most famous university five years ago, never fitted the mould of a modern academic chief. He is fiendishly clever, for a start, a brilliant economist. If he hadn’t jumped into policymaking in his 30s, first at the World Bank, then as a senior official in the Clinton Administration, finally becoming Treasury Secretary in 1999, he would almost certainly have won a Nobel prize by now, as two of his uncles did.</p>

<p>These days the values more often prized in university heads have less to do with intellectual candlepower, and more to do with smoothness, access to influence, and above all, a capacity to generate hundreds of millions of dollars. Smooth, Mr Summers was not. In his often awkward personal habits, overweening intellectual self-confidence and execrable management style, he variously appalled and terrified. Never properly socialised, this impatient young man behaved in the rarefied surroundings of government departments, diplomatic salons and academic common rooms like a semi-housetrained wildebeest.</p>

<p>He was famously unco-ordinated, and before he shed 50lbs recently, the possessor of a voracious appetite. At a diplomatic reception in Beijing a few years ago, he dropped a spicy chicken wing into the cuff of his trousers and, to the alarm of aides, walked around for the rest of the evening with the half-eaten deposit stuck there. Unkind observers wondered whether he was saving it for a midnight snack.</p>

<p>Stories of his unbounded self-belief and lack of diplomatic skills are legion. Robert Rubin, his boss when he was at the Treasury, was Mr Summers’s complement — laconic, rail-thin, smart, urbane. But he valued Mr Summers’s intellectual brilliance, and sought his guidance on the most important matters. Every week, Mr Rubin would breakfast with Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Mr Summers was usually invited. On one occasion he arrived very late, and joined the world’s two most powerful economic figures a full half-hour into breakfast. Breathlessly apologising, he explained that he had been detained by a fascinating chat with a visiting foreign official. Smiling, Mr Rubin turned to the Fed Chairman and said, “Alan, it looks like you and I will have to improve the quality of our conversation if we want Larry to come on time in future.”</p>

<p>But it was not his arrogance, or his table manners, or even his envy-inducing genius that did for him at Harvard. It was his determined and ultimately futile effort to open the closed minds of America’s proudest academic elite.</p>

<p>Though a liberal Democrat, Summers had a traditional view of what a university should be doing, pursuing truth and excellence wherever it led.As he surveyed the vast ranks of well-paid academic celebrities at Harvard, puffing out their ideologies on women’s studies and black history, he wondered what it was all about. His first run-in was with Cornel West, the black professor, who had produced more rap music in recent years than he had books or papers. After a very public row, West left for the more forgiving pastures of Princeton.</p>

<p>Mr Summers quickly challenged the other pillars of political correctness on which most American universities sit. He opposed an effort to block university investment in Israel and condemned attempts to ban the US Armed Forces from recruiting on campus. Note that these were not assertive steps designed to enforce a particular world view, but the opposite — attempts to keep minds open to the possibility that their accumulated prejudices might need to be re-examined.</p>

<p>But his campaign was a challenge to the view that the approved answers of America’s academic elite to the great issues of our time and history were the whole truth, never to be reopened or re-examined.</p>

<p>Most famously, a year ago, he questioned whether that there were so few women professors at the top of their fields in mathematics and engineering might reflect not only sexual discrimination, but also gender-specific aptitudes in different disciplines.</p>

<p>In the Index of Sins against modern academic political correctness, this is about as grave as it gets. Even to suggest the possibility that there might be innate differences between the sexes or races that could lead to different outcomes is to invite condemnation from the academic Church of the Closed Mind. Despite abject apologies for his errors (which he now regrets), the closed-mind crowd wanted his blood. And this week, after the threat of yet another vote of no-confidence from his faculty members, they got it.</p>

<p>Ironically, in the 20 years since Bloom’s book American universities have risen to even greater global pre-eminence. Floating ever-higher on a sea of cash from wealthy alumni, they are able to attract the brightest minds from around the world. In science and technology especially, this has yielded great strides in research. But in too many cases these great inflows of cash have done nothing to alleviate the poverty of philosophy that characterises intellectual life at so many universities.</p>

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<p>The media is really doing a horrendous job on explaining why Summers was pushed to resign... contrary to this editorial as well as others in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, etc... he was NOT pushed out because he was un-PC. It makes a nice sound-bite, but it just isn't reality...</p>

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<p>He was pushed out because the turf-protectors in the FAS were prepared to destroy the reputation of the College if they had to in order advance their selfish agenda, and so advised the Corporation. And THAT ... is reality.</p>

<p>To this effect, see the "Economist" account - "A Defenstration at Harvard."</p>

<p><a href="http://www.economist.com/World/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5557442%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.economist.com/World/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5557442&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

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<p>"It's Harvard's loss</p>

<p>Lawrence Summers made it clear when he became president of Harvard five years ago that he wanted to give the famous university a good shake. Many professors didn't like the motion one bit, and they began campaigning to get rid of him. This week they finally succeeded, executing an academic coup d'</p>

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<p>How can you not love a guy like that? A man of varied appetites,... Just to replace him with a pretty face? Personally, I don't think Bo Derek, although certainly slimmer, is as well qualified to lead Harvard into the century we're in,..</p>

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<p>'Parochial Interests'</p>

<p>Observers at Harvard, however, say it is no coincidence that some of those who complained the loudest about the president were in departments that he valued least. The fights were partly about professors' protecting their own interests, says Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics there. "There is turf protection, and part of that is status-quo protection," she says. Unlike his predecessor, Neil L. Rudenstine, Mr. Summers didn't have "at his command ... 250 words he could use to make people feel that what they were doing was the most important thing in the world," she says.</p>

<p>Lawrence F. Katz, another professor of economics, agrees. "I do worry that if every little group is allowed to push for their own interests," Harvard could pay a high price, he says.</p>

<p>In a letter to the Harvard community that Mr. Summers released on Tuesday, he referred to that problem. "We cannot maintain pre-eminence in intellectual fields if we remain constrained by artificial boundaries of departments and schools," he wrote, arguing that professors need to "transcend parochial interests in support of broader university goals."</p>

<p>Mr. Mansfield, the professor of government (who has long railed against grade inflation at Harvard), describes faculty members who clashed with Mr. Summers as "the feminist left, plus other sympathizers who didn't like Larry's academic conservatism, his putting the brakes on affirmative action and diversity, on grade inflation, his intent to balance the faculty's political partisanship a little more, and what he was doing to relieve Harvard's hostility to the military and ROTC."</p>

<p>In his teleconference with reporters, Mr. Summers acknowledged that his prodding had rubbed professors the wrong way. "I sought to challenge and to always ask whether there were better ways," he said. "The only bad reason for doing something was that we had always done it that way before ... But I think ... that was threatening." In retrospect, he said, "it may well have been that I could more successfully have advanced the university's interests by showing more reverence for its traditions."</p>

<p>Despite his apparent contrition over his clashes with the faculty, some wonder what Mr. Summers's downfall says about higher education's appetite for a president who makes hard judgments and says what he thinks. "When he began to look at his faculty and investigate their achievements -- were they doing the job well? -- this was thought to be an outrage in and of itself," says Donald Kagan, a professor of classics and history at Yale University who, as dean of Yale College from 1989 to 1992, frequently clashed with professors there.</p>

<p>Mr. Kagan says the events at Harvard show that "the faculty has come to think that nobody has the right to tell it anything or express opinions of which they do not approve, and they need to be let alone to do what they like." Academic freedom, he says, "is for them and nobody else."</p>

<p>Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, says the Harvard Corporation will have to work hard to change the perception that what has happened at the university means there is no room for a president who wants to make significant reforms. The governing board must make clear that it "will seek out and stand firmly behind leaders who ask hard questions about how well faculty are doing their jobs, who challenge faculty complacency and intellectual rigidity," she says.</p>

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<p>Victim of a 21st century inquisition.</p>