Why Did Larry Summers Get Dropped, Really?

If you want to see student opinion, check it Summersvile an open forum for Harvard students to debate Summers. My overall takeaway was that most students felt this was simply a faculty power play in part about PC and in part simply personality - this is a faculty that didn't like being challenged.

Theodore Bestor, the chair of Harvard's Social Anthropology department, was asked

the same question this afternoon in an undergraduate lecture class. His response was that in

fact, the difference between the faculty meeting this year and last

year was that it was not about a few professors clamoring for

political correctness, but widespread dissatisfaction with Summers'

leadership. That criticisms came from people who had never spoken

before in departments as diverse as mechanical engineering, biology,

history, etc.





His personal gripe with Summers was the "increased bureaucratization"

of the University. That apparently, even to be able to access the Dean of FAS (William Kirby)

required 3 or 4 meetings with various underlings who then evaluated

whether the issue merited addressing directly by the Dean. This was

not the case before Summers and Kirby. Further he considered this

bureacratization and bad management to be the cause of prolongation of a

curricular review that after three years still has yet to offer any

concrete changes.





In other words, the issues with Summers, at least as presented by

Bestor, and as the rest of FAS seem to say, have less to do with any

of his substantive statements, and far more to do with his procedure:

strong-manning resignations and being in general a bad manager.

I'm a graduate student at Harvard and an alumna of the college. Larry has won over a large number of undergraduates by signing dollars bills for them. In a time when so many college students approach education purely as consumers (i.e. I paid my $35,000, where's my education, never mind that I never do any of the reading because I'm too busy reinventing the greek system), there's very little that a professor can offer them comparable to this without being accused of pandering. Remember, also, that the mandate to rein in grade inflation means there are fewer undergraduates satisfied with their grades. Larry doesn't give grades or homework; he hands out souvenirs. In that light it's not at all surprising that the students take his side.

This is a conservative campus where all manner of political incorrectness gets tolerated at the faculty/administrative level. Bostonist is right on target--Larry's insensitive and ignorant comments about women, African Americans, and Native Americans were not enough to get us to this point. The likes of Dershowitz and Harvey Mansfield would have us believe this is all about political correctness. Consider the source--these men live to be media whores, not scholars. For the faculty who pushed the no confidence measures, media attention was a last, desperate resort. Most are far more interested in pursuing their scholarship.

The thing is, as short as his presidency was, a great deal of damage has already been done. What upset me the most was the wholesale demolition of Hilles Library, a beautiful library built for Radcliffe students during the 60s (when they were not permitted to use the Harvard libraries). Any small liberal arts college would be lucky to have such a library, which had a terrific collection of serials and wonderfully dedicated librarians. And of course the main book collections took more than a century to build. Larry's administration decided it was "wasted space" and has donated the collections to a university in China.

No student can pretend to be aware of the larger administrative issues that were at stake in this controversy. My only point of reference is the anger and dismay of faculty members I've come to know and respect over time, people who most emphatically are not troublemakers. When you can unite a faculty like Harvard's against you, you're definitely doing something wrong.

I'm currently an undergrad at Harvard, one of many who feel Larry was horribly mistreated. That said, I'm glad he's gone in some sense, as he definitely did not have the managerial ability for the job, even if I did appreciate his vision and his engagement with undergrads (at least more than anyone else at this place).

The problem is, I don't believe that most people were motivated by reactionary political correctness (outside of the true loonies like Matory) -- but that did not stop the faculty from hiding behind it to force out a man they didn't like. That's what angers me and that's what saddens me the most -- not that people wanted him out, but the level of disingenuity that the faculty used to do it. There's a reason students are planning a sit-in at the faculty club next week.

I think I can speak for most undergrads at Harvard when I say that more than anything, we just want this all to stop already. When the whole "women and science" thing happened last year, everybody on campus got sick of it within 3 days.

Finally, the most ironic bit of the whole thing is that Larry had almost certainly done more for science in general (and for women in science) than almost anyone before him. Last year, newspapers had a hard time finding women in science to criticize him not because of a lack of women in science but because most thought he had done a lot of good for them.