<p>A little bit of history</p>
<p>Catching up on this thread I noticed a quote from the Economist. While PC may have been part of the issue they go on to suggest it had more to do with challenging faculty perks, and getting them to take teaching more seriously. I don't know how accurate it is, but I found that to be an interesting perspective. </p>
<p>"In the end, though, character was less important than power. There was a set of much more basic tensions between Mr Summers and his critics. These tensions might be dressed up as ideological, but they were really about the privileges and perks of academic life.</p>
<p>The most obvious was undergraduate teaching. Undergraduates get a raw deal for their $40,000 a year. The core curriculum is an antiquated mess. Star professors palm their pupils off on graduate students and then give them top grades to keep them happy (one survey found that 91% of Harvard graduates get honours compared with just 51% at Yale). Mr Summers tried to use the bully pulpit to force professors to teach more seriously..."</p>
<p>It's an interesting question, in a corporation or in a tax-exempt organization, where the real power should lie. Should the Board of Directors (here the Corporation) do much more than approve the big-picture budget and occasionally hire and fire a CEO (and, in an exempt. org., contribute money)? Should the President be a leader in the sense of establishing consensus or at least bringing the minions along or in the sense of having a vision and seeing that it is implemented? Should a string of vice-presidents (deans of schools?) really run various subsidiaries and faculties? Who controls hiring and the budget? Should the actual worker bees (faculty?) be in charge of things arguably in their areas of expertise, or are they blinkered turf protectors to an unacceptable degree?</p>
<p>Harvard does not seem to have good answers to many of these question.</p>
<p>At Harvard (and many other institutions), the profs who are likely to teach fewer undergrads are those favored by Summers: scientists and economists. The former because they have outside funding to do research and the latter because they do a lot of outside consulting which enables them to "buy" out teaching time. Humanities faculty are much more likely to teach a full load of courses and shoulder more than their share of administrative burdens.</p>
<p>Economists have outside funding (research grant support) from NSF and other funding agencies, which does allow them to buy out their teaching time in top-tier research universities, just as scientists do. </p>
<p>However, it is not always their choice to do this--in many research universities, economists are told that they are expected to bring research grants that will pay for at least half their salaries (as well as salaries of researchers working under them plus a significant chunk of money that goes toward university overhead, etc.) An economist who does not bring in that kind of research grant money is considered not to be pulling his weight by department administrators.</p>
<p>I know economists who have left top research universities because of the relentless pressure to bring in grant money.</p>
<p>Physical and biological scientists also are under relentless pressure to bring in grant money at top research universities. </p>
<p>Consulting, on the other hand, is a different matter entirely. The normal practice is that faculty (economists, scientists, or anyone) are not allowed to buy out teaching time with consulting. Instead, there is a standard practice of allowing all faculty who wish to do so to do some outside consulting as part of their work life, with the expectation that they will take consulting work that contributes to their professional development, allows them to connect their research to the real world, and to develop connections in the outside world that may open doors to jobs for students after graduation, etc. but the work is not supposed to interfere with teaching responsibilities and it is not supposed to take more than one day per week of the professor's time. Faculty who choose to do outside consulting do not buy out their time that way.</p>
<p>It is also possible for faculty (whether they are physical scientists or economists) to be very much involved in undergraduate education while working on research grants that buy out half of their official "teaching time." Some faculty bring undergraduate students into their research groups, either for pay or for academic credit. </p>
<p>As Dick Light argued in his book, Making the Most of College, in many cases undergraduate research assistant opportunities may be the most valuable educational experience a student can have. (I suspect molliebatmit would agree.)</p>
<p>Economists and scientists do have many administrative responsibilities that may not always be visible to humanities faculty. There is a good deal of administration involved in running sponsored research projects. Running labs, dealing with human subjects issues and other ethics issues involved in research, dealing with personnel issues in supervising undergraduate and graduate research assistants as well as lab support staff, dealing with government funding agencies, writing grant proposals and research reports to funding agencies, ordering equipment, that is all administration too.</p>
<p>So it's not at all obvious to me that scientists and economists do less than their fair share of administrative duties, when ALL administrative duties are considered.</p>
<p>It may be that professors who buy out half their time with research grants do indeed teach fewer undergrads than those who do not buy out their time, but to the extent that their research projects involve undergraduates they may indeed be providing incredibly valuable educational experiences for them. I know that many economists in their 40s and 50s trace their careers back to formative experiences working as one of the small army of undergrad research assistants under Harvard's Martin Feldstein decades ago. </p>
<p>It seems to me that there are more opportunities than ever for undergraduates to work as part of faculty research projects in economics and in the sciences. </p>
<p>MIT and Caltech even offer some undergraduate research opportunities in the humanities--I remember reading about a Caltech physics major with literary interests who got to spend a summer in England working as a research assistant on a summer project with a Caltech English professor.</p>
<p>All you say is true; but, whether scientists do not teach a full load of courses by choice or under pressure, the fact remains that in comparison with faculty in the humanities and social sciences, they do less classroom teaching; and <em>that</em> has been the focus of discussions
As for economists, I was told that some at Harvard taught as few as 1 course per year. In bringing this up, I am responding to the charge that the hostility of elements of the FAS faculty has to do with Summers pressuring profs to do more teaching. That charge has no basis whatsoever.
In fact, the opposition to the way the curricular review is shaping up is strongest among scientists, though not because of the stress on teaching. It has to do with the proposal to delay declaring a concentration until the sophomore year and reducing concentration requirements.
As for research opportunities in the humanities, humanities and social sciences profs do hire undergrads to do research, often under the work-study program: the equivalent of the Caltech English professor can be found in most universities, I would suspect.
On the administrative issue, Harvard is known for giving its faculty (at least in FAS) a lot of committee and other administrative work ranging from search and promotion committees, graduate admissions, fellowship selection, directorships of various centers, etc...</p>
<p>Seed magazine says Summers was always pro-science: <a href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/02/summers_fall.php%5B/url%5D">http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/02/summers_fall.php</a></p>
<p>(Article written by a Yalie.)</p>
<p>"Some of my best friends are professors. Many of my relatives, too. I'd probably be one myself, had I done better in graduate school. But, this week at least, I'm glad I chose another line of work, because the most prestigious professoriate in the world, Harvard's, has just made an ass of itself. </p>
<p>It has done so by toppling President Lawrence Summers, who resigned rather than face a second faculty no-confidence vote, which he seemed set to lose. In explaining the coup, conservatives will cite political correctness. They'll say that, by challenging African American Studies Professor Cornel West and musing about the relationship between gender and scientific aptitude, Summers ran afoul of the left-wing dogmatism that dominates campus life. But that gives the faculty too much credit. It lets them pretend they were defending some abstract ideal, some principle larger than their own self-interest. The truth is far shabbier: The Harvard faculty deposed Lawrence Summers because he wanted them to care about something beyond themselves.</p>
<p>First, Summers wanted tenured professors to teach. And not just that; he wanted them to teach large undergraduate survey courses. Summers noticed what people have been noticing for a long time: Students at Harvard--and at other prestigious universities--often graduate without the kind of core knowledge that you'd expect from a good high school student................"</p>
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<p>So who's out of touch? The students, or FAS?</p>
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<p>Why must one of them be "out of touch"? Both are in touch; both are responding to how Summers treated THEM. The undergrads love Summers because he was great at making allies of them -- he spent a lot of time dancing with them, listening to them, teaching them. FAS was angry at Summers because he was very poor at making allies of them -- he criticized them, offended them, and undercut them.</p>
<p>In other words, the demonization and beatification of Summers we're hearing from different factions are equally out of place. Summers is a human being, and like most of us, he was much better at some parts of his job than others.</p>
<p>"Summers drummed out for being "too Jewish"? This had never crossed my mind. If this is true, I would like more documentation. If not I would prefer to see that statement withdrawn."</p>
<p>Sorry, but I stand by my statement. And I hope you note the quotation marks, which I think I've explained as best I can. It wasn't a matter of his being Jewish (as I remember, so was Rudenstine, and no one would have ever suggested putting quotations marks around his religious affiliation), but his being "Jewish".</p>