Yesterday, the Harvard Crimson began its editorial on the resignation of Lawrence Summers as follows:
For once, Yale has it right. Upon hearing the news of University President Lawrence H. Summers’ resignation, Yale President Richard Levin remarked, “I’m sorry for him, and I’m sorry for Harvard.” As are we.
Whatever satisfaction was today enjoyed by the elements of unrest in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), it is unrepresentative of the sobering sense of emptiness that now pervades
’s streets. Harvard’s loss is real. Cambridge For all the controversy, all the brusqueness, all the je ne sais quoi that made Summers offensive, for all the faults that Summers brought with him to Mass. Hall, Summers also brought a vision. . . . And we agree with that vision.
The Crimson noted that “Summer’s commitment to undergraduate education extended beyond the committee room and into the classroom, where he taught two freshman seminars and a lecture course on globalization.”
Yesterday, when Summers stepped out of his Mass. Hall office to personally address the public for the first time regarding his resignation, he was greeted by a crowd of undergraduates. A reluctant Summers — not knowing whether he was about to be lauded or lambasted — gingerly approached one student and shook his hand, then a second; soon dozens joined the fray of admiration. Students believe in Summers’ vision.
Alan Dershowitz wrote that what happened was “an academic coup d’etat” against “the majority of students, faculty and alumni,” who “generally supported Summers for his many accomplishments.”
Summers committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military.
The original no-confidence motion contained an explanatory note that explicitly referenced ”Mr. Summers’ apparently ongoing convictions about the capacities and rights not only of women but also of African-Americans, third-world nations, gay people, and colonized peoples." The note also condemned Summers for his 2002 speech in which he said calls from professors and students for divestment from Israel were ”anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent."
Although the explanatory note was eventually removed from the motion, it was the 400-pound gorilla in the room.
Alex Slack, a Harvard senior who writes a regular column in the Crimson, wrote that Summers “knew the dangers of saying, ‘I know best,’ to a collection of the greatest minds in the world.” Indeed, a member of the Harvard FAS faculty emailed Scott Johnson of Power Line yesterday that:
The real problem was that [Summers] was perceived by many across the institution — rightly or wrongly — as being dishonest, conniving and lacking any leadership abilities that didn’t mirror the Danny Devito lines in the film "Matilda," when the Devito character says to Matilda something like "I’m big; you’re little. I’m smart; you’re dumb. I’m right; you’re wrong."
The alternative explanation is that the Harvard faculty was little, dumb and wrong. And as Ruth Wisse notes in today’s Wall Street Journal, “now that these cowering professors have successfully unseated their president, scrutiny will quite rightly be leveled at them. . . . [Their] political victory sets [their] actions and inactions in bolder relief.”
Summers’ tenure will be remembered for a series of courageous stands followed by serial apologies and ultimate capitulations and resignation. Few presidents would have spoken out at
So let us leave this sad episode by recalling how it began and ended, as set forth in Heather MacDonald’s classic article from last June (after Summers pledged $50 million and two new task forces in partial expiation for expressing certain politically incorrect thoughts):
Henceforth, Harvard history will divide into the pre-task-force and post-task-force era. In the post-TFE, Summers’s feeble efforts to enforce academic standards against the diversity machine will seem quaint. . . .
In October 2001, Summers had a private chat with Afro-American studies professor [Cornel] West, a vain intellectual name-dropper who purports to unite Marxism and American pragmatism in a profound explication of race relations. . . . West’s historical wisdom emerges nicely in his observation that “Marxist thought becomes even more relevant after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe than it was before.”
Such fashionable ignorance Lawrence Summers was ready to tolerate, but what reportedly caught his attention in 2001 . . . were West’s predilection for handing out grades of A, his lack of scholarly output and release of a rap album instead, and his absences from campus on such missions as advising Al Sharpton on a presidential run. Summers’s reputed admonitions to West . . . were entirely consistent with his then-campaign to promote “excellence in serious scholarship and in commitment to teaching” . . . . West predictably turned Summers’s requests into a case of racial “disrespect.”
In January 2002, amid a firestorm of criticism, Summers issued an apology and reaffirmed his commitment to “diversity.” (No one realized at the time how prophetic Summers’s collapse would be.) . . . . But Summers’s apology came too late. West huffily decamped to Princeton, calling Summers “the Ariel Sharon of American higher education” . . . .
MacDonald concluded her article by correctly predicting that, in connection his remarks on “diversity” in the sciences, “instead of making even a temporary stand for excellence and then retreating ignominiously, Summers will not bother to take a stand at all.” Eight months later, Summers has resigned, not bothering to contest a new no-confidence motion.
He could have made the February 28 faculty meeting the occasion for a final speech, made directly to the faculty, which would have been all the more impressive for the fact that the outcome may have been foreordained. In the end, Danny Devito would have stood taller.