REVIEW & OUTLOOK
A Harvard Education
Will Larry Summers lead the university back to the real world?
The conflict that erupted at Harvard when a star of the Afro-American Studies Department allegedly was rebuked by the university's new president, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers, has apparently now ended with fence mending on all sides and explanations that it was all an unfortunate misunderstanding.
Before the fog of good feeling thickens and obscures the facts, however, we'd point out that a misunderstanding was exactly what this struggle was not about. The two sides understood each other very well, which is why the dispute now seems to be about bringing Mr. Summers to political heel.
The entrenched powers in the Afro-American Studies Department and other campus fiefdoms had to have grasped very early that Mr. Summers might be different from the reliably passive figureheads normally appointed presidents of major universities nowadays. Mr. Summers in turn understood what was expected of a new president in this politically correct world. He nonetheless proceeded to deliver signals of his own, some at a far remove from the standard-issue rhetoric.
His post-September 11 speeches called for strong support and respect for the military. His inaugural address emphasized the value of skepticism and denigrated slavish followers of orthodoxy. It embraced, with great warmth, the principle of inclusiveness in its description of Harvard as a place where men and women of all faiths, races and classes were welcome. It addressed with passion the importance of equal opportunity. Able students should be welcome to all the university's professional schools, regardless of their financial circumstances.
The speech, indeed, had everything. Everything but a declaration of support for the principle of affirmative action--an omission nowadays unthinkable in an inaugural speech by the president of an Ivy League university. The absence of that declaration--now a kind of loyalty oath--did not go unnoticed.
It was no great surprise, then, that Mr. Summers should find himself in trouble with members of the Afro-American Studies Department. It all began when department colleagues rallied 'round Professor Cornel West. They were outraged by reports that Mr. Summers had subjected Mr. West to insulting criticism during the course of a private meeting last October--a charge Mr. Summers has emphatically denied. Mr. West, who recorded a rap album while on medical leave from the university, nonetheless left the meeting highly affronted--reportedly by the president's suggestion that he undertake a serious scholarly work and by a certain implied criticism about grade inflation in the course he taught.
This was what led, supposedly, to the flurry of threats that Mr. West and other Black Studies scholars might leave Harvard for Princeton. And it brought--like political clockwork--the Reverend Jesse Jackson racing to Cambridge last week to express alarm that the president of Harvard lacked commitment to affirmative action.
Harvard's president had clearly wandered off the reservation, especially with warnings about grade inflation--an undeniable scandal at Harvard, where one out of two grades now given is an A- or an A--and his lack of explicit support for affirmative action. Clearly the time was ripe for big scenes, outrage fests and public threats about leaving Harvard, all intended to instruct the new president that he was not there to do anything so rash as to reaffirm traditional academic standards or think for himself.
Whether any of this will ultimately work is still a question. President Summers has answered his critics with a statement testifying to his support for diversity--a statement, intriguingly enough, that lacks any mention of affirmative action. We'd like to think we're watching a stand-off and not a surrender here.
How this all came about has a lot to do, we suspect, with the choice of a Harvard president who came from the real world. We've long pointed out that it is hard for people living in the normal world to grasp what actually goes on in the modern academic realm. Presidents of prestigious universities usually reach the top jobs only after they have put in their time proving themselves adept at the fundamentals of the modern PC university. Only, that is, after they've proven themselves adept at appeasing the faculty and bowing before every political shibboleth, especially any involving race, gender and class.
Mr. Summers had no such training, former university teacher though he was--one reason, perhaps, that he's not yet with the program. Everyone concerned with the state of the universities will be praying he never gets there. His challenge now is to take control of Harvard and lead it back to the mainstream.
