Summers agonistes

[Carl Remick <carlremick@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Larry Summers' travails are described with considerable -- some might say
excessive -- sympathy in today's NY Times.  NB Rachel Donadio's sneering
references to "the values and pieties of the 60's" and "the guise of leftist
open-mindedness" together her genuflecting to "today's political and
economic realities":]

March 17, 2005
The Tempest in the Ivory Tower
By RACHEL DONADIO

...  In some ways, it [i.e., the Summers controversy] recalls the campus
turmoil of the 1960's. Only this time around, the protesters aren't the
undergraduates; they're the faculty, who to some extent remain immersed in
the values and pieties of the 60's and are clashing with a president intent
on bringing Harvard in line with today's political and economic realities.
What's happening at Harvard goes far beyond Summers's personality; instead,
it's about larger social and political transformations to which the academy
- essentially a conservative institution made up of thousands of progressive
minds - is deeply resistant.

Much of this is mapped out in Richard Bradley's ''Harvard Rules''
(HarperCollins, $25.95), a timely new book that sets out to catalog the
flaws of Larry Summers. Well-paced and juicy, it nevertheless relies heavily
on innuendo and on other people's reporting, since Summers wouldn't grant an
interview to Bradley, a former editor at George magazine. Even so, ''Harvard
Rules'' manages to shed much light on the current situation. In Bradley's
view, Summers's mission has been ''to purge Harvard of the bonds that kept
it from realizing its enormous potential and seeing itself in a new way -
his new way. And that meant eradicating the influence of the 1960's.''

In some respects, Summers was a canny choice for the presidency. In his
teaching days, he was the youngest professor ever given tenure at Harvard,
at age 28, and was widely considered Nobel Prize material. He is a liberal,
but of a particular kind. A former chief economist of the World Bank,
Summers succeeded Robert Rubin as treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and
was a leading proponent of globalization when many other liberals were
lamenting its discontents. Summers also hews to a kind of bottom-line
market-driven thinking, which can seem deeply at odds with the humanistic
values of the academy. And he is unapologetic about American power on a
campus steeped in post-Vietnam ambivalence about such things....

Against this background, the resentment over Summers's comments about women
becomes clearer. His remarks may have been misguided, but what is the point
of a university if not to provide a forum for airing controversial ideas?
Summers's comments seemed to mark a return to an earlier era in the gender
debate - and so did the intensity of the response. In fact, today, the
definition of feminism is open to interpretation. Now, a woman with an
advanced degree can leave the workplace to become a stay-at-home mom and
still be a feminist; she might even watch ''Desperate Housewives.'' In the
broader culture, if not on campuses, the era of political correctness is
decidedly over.

But if P.C. is over, what comes next? There's no easy tag line for ''the
oughts,'' because there's no immediately recognizable constellation of
values. At moments like this, fraught with ironies and ambivalences, it's a
relief to find villains. Yet the animosity is not just toward Summers
himself, but also toward his stated intent to steer Harvard closer to the
mainstream.

His presidency, which began in October 2001, has overlapped with one of the
most unsettling times this nation has faced, and he has viewed that as an
opportunity to redress what he has called the ''post-Vietnam cleavage
between coastal elites and certain mainstream values.'' He vocally supported
bringing R.O.T.C. back to Harvard from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where it had been exiled after Vietnam-era campus protests and
where it remained because of later protests over the military's
discrimination against homosexuals. And he supported Harvard's honoring the
Solomon Amendment, which ties federal funding to universities' allowing
military recruitment on campus, something students and faculty had
protested. In this way, as Bradley writes, ''Summers explicitly linked the
future of the United States in its fight against terrorism with the success
of Harvard.''

In another effort to address the global situation, Summers delivered a
speech on campus in September 2002 in which he criticized a campaign calling
on Harvard and other universities to divest from Israel. ''Serious and
thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in
their effect if not their intent,'' he said. As his detractors saw it,
''Summers had crafted his talk not to promote debate, but to silence it,''
Bradley writes. In any case, Summers had sent a clear message, one other
university presidents have been notably loath to communicate even as ugly
anti-Israel sentiment in the guise of leftist open-mindedness has rippled
across their campuses....

(Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the NYT Book Review)

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/books/books-harvard.html?8hpib>

Carl