Lawrence H. Summers announced today he will resign as president of
In his “Letter to the Harvard Community,” he attributes the need for new leadership to “rifts between me and segments of the Arts and Sciences faculty.”
An article in The Harvard Crimson indicates it was a portion of one faculty. The Crimson contacted the deans of the
Althsuler, the Design dean, said that Summers “has been an extraordinarily effective president.”
“I think this has played out to date as an internal FAS matter as if Larry were the president of FAS [Faculty of Arts and Sciences].”
Altshuler said that if there existed a University Senate, with representatives from all the schools, Summers’ fate might be different.
The Crimson also conducted an extensive poll of Harvard undergraduates, who supported Summers by a margin of three-to-one. Undergraduates were satisfied, heads of the graduate schools appear to have been satisfied — so what happened? Here are two clues, one relating to the nature of Summers’ opponents, and the other relating to the nature of his defense.
First, in his letter, Summers notes this fact:
At a time when the median age of our tenured professoriate is approaching 60, the renewal of the faculty has to be a central concern.
A professor approaching age 60 would have graduated from college in the late Sixties. An aging professoriate, whose median age approaches 60, is a sign of a faculty that has ossified, with fixed views they are probably not eager to see challenged. Perhaps this issue deserves as much attention as women in science.
Second, although he reportedly thought the charges that led to the no-confidence vote last year were “bullshit,” Summers “failed to stand his ground,” as the New York Sun noted in an editorial today:
Mr. Summers has shown flashes of brilliance since taking over in July 2001 . . . . We were among those who cheered his willingness to confront political anti-Semitism on campus; his speech in Memorial Church, where he said the signers of a petition to get the university to divest from Israel were anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent, is one of the most important ever given by a Harvard president. When Mr. Summers came under attack for remarks on gender differences, we observed — in an editorial called "The Soul of Harvard" — that Mr. Summers’s travail could not be separated from his defense of
. . . . Israel
But Mr. Summers has made it hard for even his defenders. He accepted $20 million from the same Saudi billionaire whose check Mayor Giuliani tore into shreds when it was offered in the wake of September 11. He failed to stand his ground in the contretemps over his remarks on gender, and when some intrepid women rose to his defense, he seemed embarrassed.
Serial apologies too numerous to count, $50 million thrown to his tormentors in an attempt to make the issue go away, multiple committees to implement a politically correct solution to a problem apparently no longer needing any further academic inquiry — none of this worked. It never works. On the contrary, once again the bleat of the lamb excited the tiger, as Stanley Kurtz notes at The Corner.