In the end, it wasn’t enough:
Five public apologies, repeated statements he would do better, numerous assurances he had learned a lot, public acknowledgment he hadn’t known what he was talking about, appointment of two (two!) committees to increase the representation of women on the faculty (and pronto), two "searing" public grievance sessions with the faculty, multiple private meetings with small groups of faculty members to hear their complaints privately, and more.
Result: the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) passed a motion of "no confidence" in President Lawrence Summers by a vote of 218-185 (with 18 abstentions).
The Harvard faculty has now completed the process that history professor Philip A. Kuhn warned his fellow faculty members about in the February 22 meeting of the FAS faculty:
I suggest we pause for a moment to imagine how these proceedings will be judged by our successors a generation hence, in hopes that we can learn from the mistakes we have already made and perhaps avoid worse ones.
If there are any China historians still around, they might recognize, in our session of last Tuesday [February 15], an old-fashioned Chinese struggle-session.
In the 1960s, the designated target (let’s call him Mr. Liu) would be set upon by his colleagues (soon to be his former colleagues), his back already against the wall because of an injudicious remark or a deviation of policy, or simply because he was on the wrong side of a factional divide.
Mr. Liu would then be assailed retrospectively for every flaw of omission or of commission, every quirk of personality or unsatisfactory class standpoint. Everyone felt compelled either to join in the assault or to remain silent, to avoid being next on the list of targets.
Mr. Liu would then be expelled from his job, or much worse. Those were ugly spectacles.
Chinese had — and still have — no channel to confront their leaders through legitimate procedures. But we have question periods at every FAS meeting. This question period (which I gather we’re still in) is one of the very few to have provoked anything but deafening silence. Has nobody felt the urgency to question the policies of the administration and their appointed committees? Is there no gripping issue begging for discussion? . . . .
And where is this so-called "fear and intimidation" coming from? Can anyone on earth have less to fear than a tenured Harvard professor? Shouldn’t tenure impose an obligation to speak out plainly and often? Our successors will hold us in contempt — unless, heaven forbid, they’re just like us.
We won’t have to wait for the successors.
Like the Chinese and Soviet proceedings, the Harvard faculty’s action will be remembered more for what it demonstrated about the judges than about the judged. It may also be remembered for some of the eloquent statements by faculty members in the minority (including professors Ruth Wisse, Philip Kuhn, Douglas Melton and Lawrence Katz, recorded here and here). And it is encouraging that the Harvard students (with certain exceptions) seem to have kept their senses.
But it is the action by the majority of the faculty that demonstrates the scope of the problem in American universities:
Ward Churchill is a single professor at a state university saying transparently stupid things. What do you do when the faculty at the nation’s oldest and most prestigious college stages a show trial?
UPDATE: Add the name of Lubos Motl, assistant professor of physics at Harvard, to the honor list. He posted "A Sad Day for Harvard" last night on his blog. Worth reading. Harvard Magazine, which has provided exemplary coverage of this sad affair, has published a lengthy summary of the remarks of each speaker at the "remarkable meeting held on the Ides of March:"
[P]rofessor of history Stephan Thernstrom . . . said the issue before the faculty was a paramount principle of academic freedom. . . .
Controversial ideas and free debate, he said, were the essence of universities, and of the institution of tenure. In the 1950s, "the enemy was out there. It is deeply depressing to me that today the enemy is within." . . .
[P]rofessor of psychology Steven Pinker . . . [said] Summers had given a talk on women in the sciences, and his content dealt with a controversial, empirical issue — not a matter subject to a vote on its correctness. . . .
Voting in favor of the resolution could only be seen, then, as declaring that the University wanted its president to hew to dogma, in line with majority sentiment.
Professor Thernstrom also criticized "the president’s ‘abject’ apologies for what he had said, when he would better have defended his remarks." As would have Mr. Liu.