Shots In The Dark

I'm headed to Boston next week to do some press for Harvard Rules. Mostly TV and radio, but on Wednesday, March 9, I'll be speaking at the Old South Meeting House in Boston, for the Ford Hall Forum. For more information, call 617-373-5800 or check out the Ford Hall Forum site. Hope to see you there!

Perhaps the most successful move Larry Summers has made at Harvard was to eliminate tuition for students from families with incomes of under $40,000. Such students had previously been expected to make a $1,000 contribution to their tuition, but when you're only making 40k, a thousand dollars is still a lot of money. The move's effect was both practical and symbolic. I knew it was a huge success for Summers and Harvard when someone forward me a mass e-mail headlined, "HARVARD FOR FREE!" You know you've gone mainstream when your financial aid initiative gets turned into spam.

Now Yale is following Harvard's lead, eliminating tuition for families with incomes of less than $45,000.

This is all great news. But isn't it also worth having a discussion about why it costs $40,000 a year to go to college?

I'm skeptical of the argument that what Harvard needs most right now is a bull in a china shop. It sounds convincing only if you don't think about it for very long. But if you follow the logic and try to discern how President Summers' management style has translated into results, the proposition becomes murky indeed. I would argue that his leadership style has hurt his agenda at least as much as it's helped. In fact, I did just argue that, in this editorial in today's Crimson.

Then there's this smart piece from the San Francisco Chronicle.

The more I think about it, the more I think I was naive not to consider that some items are deliberately omitted from Harvard's daily news clips. Controlling the information that gets distributed around the university is a powerful tool. (Busy people tend to read only information that gets put in front of them.)

So occasionally I'm going to link to articles and items that Harvard doesn't. (If you feel that I've missed something that should be linked to, let me know—I'm at richard@richardbradley.net.

I'll start with this smart letter to the Boston Globe.

Here's Summers' second piece of good news: The motion of censure to be discussed at the March 15th faculty meeting has been distributed, and it plays right into the hands of Summers and his right-wing supporters. (You know who you are, Steve Pinker.) I'll post it below, but let me just say a few things first.

The motion has been proposed by J. Lorand (Randy) Matory, a professor of anthropology. I interviewed Matory for Harvard Rules (on the record, obviously, or I wouldn't mention it), and he struck me as an intelligent, honorable and principled man. But without a doubt, he's on the far left of the Harvard faculty; he's the kind of left-wing intellectual that outsiders can portray as "radical" till the cows come home. Matory was a signer of the divest-from-Israel petition, and I think it's fair to say that he's never forgiven Summers for the president's "anti-Semitic in effect if not intent" rebuttal. Matory believes deeply that, given the United States' political and financial support of Israel, we need to treat that nation as we would a 51st state. He sees Israel's treatment of the Palestinians as a fundamental human rights issue.

His motion begins with language that many professors could likely support. Matory says that Summers has "a pattern of aggressive communication and inattention to faculty opinions." True.

But then Matory moves onto ground that will make many professors uncomfortable. He suggests that Summers doubts the "capacities and rights" of "African-Americans, third-world nations, gay people, and colonized peoples." In the next paragraph he refers to "subordinate populations" and rejects "the proposition that the criticism of Israeli military policy toward the Palestinians is inherently anti-Semitic."

Colonized peoples...subordinate populations...Israeli military policy.....

Such language is too divisive and political for the Harvard faculty. (This isn't Berkeley circa 1969 we're talking about.) It sounds a little like the Port Huron Statement of 1962. The faculty won't support it, and the pundits are going to make hay with it. Summers won't have to say a word; his allies will do his work for him. And, in this case, so will one of his opponents.

It's a shame. The fight at Harvard is not just about Summers' personality and leadership style. It's about the direction and character of the world's most influential university. That, and not a political fight about colonized peoples, is the true nature of this debate. Matory is well-meaning, but he's going to do his cause more harm than good.

FACULTY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
Regular Meeting, Tuesday, March 15, 2005, 4 p.m.
Location to be announced in the Final Agenda
Tea from 3:30 to 3:55 p.m.

PRELIMINARY AGENDA

...

VIII. Docket Items

1. Professor J. L. Matory will move:

That the Faculty vote:

(1) to register dissent from a series of pronouncements by
Mr. Summers that minimize the social causes of social inequality
and, at times, appear to censor dissenting views on campus; and

(2) to demand a halt to any expansion of presidential
prerogatives that will facilitate the application of these
pronouncements to the governance of the University.

(Explanatory Note below)

2. Deans Kirby and Gross will report on the progress
and schedule of the Curricular Review.


Explanatory note for Item #1 (provided by Professor Matory) :

While the Faculty gratefully acknowledges Mr. Summers' apologies for
remarks minimizing the innate capacities of women and for lapses of
respect in his communication with faculty members, the Faculty also
wishes to register its dissent from a number of public pronouncements
by the President that would otherwise appear to represent us collectively,
and to urge limits on the proposed expansion of presidential prerogatives.

Over the past three and a half years, faculty members have discerned in
the conduct of President Summers a pattern of aggressive communication
and inattention to faculty opinions, both of which are inconsistent with the
principles of free inquiry and the democratic management of the Faculty
of Arts and Sciences. The Faculty acknowledges Mr. Summers' promise
to improve his communication with us, but we remain concerned about
the substance of Mr. Summers' apparently ongoing convictions about the
capacities and rights not only of women but also of African Americans,
third-world nations, gay people, and colonized peoples. We are concerned
that Mr. Summers' latest remarks minimizing the innate intellectual capacities
of women reflect Mr. Summers' tendency to vocalize his speculations
without due regard for either the standards of scholarship or the effect
of careless pronouncements, particularly from the president of one of
the world's leading universities, on the human beings concerned.

Mr. Summers has demonstrated little concern for his role as the foremost
public representative of the University. Yet he has moved to increase the
powers of his office significantly, through, for example, the creation of
"divisional appointments." For these reasons, and in the spirit of freedom
of expression, the assembled faculty members wish officially to register
dissent from Mr. Summers' stated opinions regarding the innate capacities
of subordinate populations, the wisdom of dumping in third-world nations,
the authorized presence on campus of organizations that infringe upon the
equal rights of gay people, and the proposition that the criticism of Israeli
military policy toward the Palestinians is inherently anti-Semitic.

We, the Faculty, vote to dissent from these positions of Mr. Summers,
to demand that they not be employed in the governance of the University
or in restricting the free speech of professors and departments, and to halt
any further expansion of presidential prerogatives that will facilitate the
propagation of these positions.

Two interesting developments today.

First: Every morning the Harvard News Office distributes an e-mailed compilation of print media stories about Harvard. As you might imagine, during the last few weeks this "Harvard in the News" list has been filled with stories of Summers and controversy. (And the list is far from complete—it omits magazines and a lot of web-only pieces.)

Today, for the first time in a couple months, there is not one story about Summers and women, Summers and the faculty—nothing.

Alright, there is one Art Buchwald column, but that doesn't count.

The absence of bad news is good news for Summers. Then there's the presence of good news, which is more good news. (Got that?) The New York Times reports that Harvard led all universities in fundraising last year, raking in a whopping $540 million. (Now, there's the Harvard we know and love.) Stanford is nipping at Harvard's heels with $524 million...

The really interesting numbers will come out a year from now, when we get a sense of how much the current brouhaha has affected Harvard's money-machine. But all in all, a good day for Larry Summers.

A nice review in this week's New York Observer. Also, the March issue of Boston magazine excerpts Harvard Rules. It's not online, but you can find it at any good newsstand. As an old magazine hack, I'm amused by the title they chose: "Lawrence of Absurdia." Not bad pun-ditry!

Jason Zengerle writes a piece of hilariously biased journalism in the February 28th issue of The New Republic. (Sorry, it's available on the web to subscribers only, which I've always thought is a silly self-curtailment of TNR's influence, but that's another discussion.)

The article is called "Harvard Coup—The faculty attack on Summers," and it's really more a work of propaganda than journalism. It's not that there isn't a perfectly sound argument to make on Summers' behalf. But Zengerle makes it by omitting uncomfortable facts, declining to interview anyone but Summers' strongest supporters, and really unpleasant smears.

1) Let's consider a case of omission. (Or maybe it's distortion, I'm not sure.)

Zengerle writes unflatteringly of Summers' predecessor, Neil Rudenstine, describing him as wimpy. Rudenstine was afraid of challenging the faculty when developing the Allston campus, Zengerle says. "At one point, he hired avant-garde architect Rem Koolhaas to devise a plan that called for actually moving the Charles river west, thus making Allston part of Cambridge and seemingly solving the faculty's objection to leaving the 02138 zip code."

This is a wildly distorted version of the truth. Rudenstine hired Rem Koolhaus to brainstorm, to consider any and every possibility for Allston's development. Koolhaus came up with the river scheme (which everyone knew was fanciful and would never happen) all by his lonesome. The object was to solve the problem of how people would get back and forth between Cambridge and Allston, when there's really only one relevant bridge connecting the two, and its four lanes of traffic are constantly snarled. (Walking isn't feasible, especially in the winter.)

Incidentally, Summers does not appear to have an answer for this problem. Now people are talking about monorails. That should be interesting.

"Summers didn't bother with such schemes," Zengerle writes determinedly. "Instead, he pressed the faculty on the issue—and came up with a workable plan that...will eventually make Allston home to Harvard's graduate schools of education and public health as well as a state-of-the-art sciences complex."

Well...kinda-sorta. First, Summers never pressed the faculty on the issue. When his handpicked dean of the law school, Elena Kagan, argued against moving the law school to Allston, Summers caved. Instead, he's relocating the ed school and the schools of public health, two of Harvard's smallest, poorest professional schools. (Along with, say, divinity and dentistry.) That's not exactly taking on the faculty.

It is true that Summers is going to run into some opposition from the sciences, who don't like the idea of their campus being split between Cambridge and Allston. So he's excluding them from the planning process. That's why physicist Daniel Fisher is one of Summers' most vocal critics.

2) Biased sourcing. Zengerle interviews economist Claudia Goldin, pop scientist Steve Pinker, and former dean Henry Rosovsky, all public supporters of Summers. He also interviews Summers' critics.... Oh, no, wait. He doesn't.

3) Nasty smears. Zengerle implies that Summers' opponent Theda Skocpol is anti-Semitic because she employed Summers' infamous phrase, "in effect, if not intent," against him at the first faculty meeting. In fact, Skocpol was using Summers' own logic to critique him. She never signed the notorious Harvard-should-divest-from-Israel petition, and is not remotely anti-Semitic.

Another example. Zengerle repeatedly uses the words "radical" or "radical left" to describe Summers' faculty critics. He never specifies who this term applies to or what it really means, but we all know what he's talking about: theoretical left-wing nutjobs, the kind Fox News rails against—as if the Harvard faculty consists of a bunch of Ward Churchills.

Let's deconstruct this graf:

"[Summers'] leading faculty critics, like Skocpol and History of Science Professor Everett Mendelsohn, have long records of campus activism and are experts at the art of academic warfare. 'These were the same people who were agitating in the 1970s for various reforms,' says Steve Pinker, who was a Harvard graduate student at the time.... 'They're very familiar with speechmaking and petition-signing and verbal manifestos.'"

I'm fascinated by the neo-retro idea that having a history of campus activism is an inherently bad thing. After all, Everett Mendelsohn's expertise at the "art of academic warfare" began when Joseph McCarthy tried to get the young graduate student ousted from the Harvard ranks and Mendelsohn had to convince dean McGeorge Bundy that he was not a Communist. Does Zengerle consider that an "activist" act?

And consider Pinker's quote. He is criticizing people because they "agitated" for "reforms." (Reforms are a bad thing?) They gave speeches and signed petitions. Pinker, in other words, is saying that these professors can't be trusted because they exercise their First Amendment rights. (Whereas at Larry Summers' Harvard, signing petitions can be a risky act.)

All in all, not Zengerle's finest piece of work. But to give him a break, he probably wrote this story under some pressure. The New Republic's part-owner, Marty Peretz, is a passionate Summers' supporter. I like Marty very much and interviewed him for Harvard Rules; it's to his credit that he spoke on the record. But you can feel Marty's guiding hand in every aspect of this piece.

Let's give Larry Summers credit for one thing: his remarks on women in science really have set off far-reaching discussions, and much good will come out of them. (One just wishes that this result could have happened without all the concurrent damage.)

The Times has an important piece today that broadens the issue beyond women, Harvard, and science. Karen W. Arenson's article, "Little Advance is Seen in Ivies' Hiring of Minorities and Women," shows just how pervasive and knotty a problem this is. The crucial graf, to my mind, is this:

"The problem in hiring members of minorities, Professor Ehrenberg said, is that the pool of candidates 'just isn't that large.' He said that under-represented minorities earned only 6.5 percent of all Ph.D.'s granted from 1989 to 1993, and that the percentages in the arts and sciences and engineering were even lower. More than 40 percent of the doctorates earned by blacks were in education."

I don't know enough to explain this paucity, and although I have some opinions, I don't want to be provocative just for the sake of being provocative. But I can say from my time spent reporting Harvard Rules that this is a real problem. It's fascinating to attend a Harvard commencement and see a remarkably diverse audience of graduates and families; it feels like an academic Epcot Center. But look up on the official stage, and you see a horde of old white men. (A situation which has gotten worse under Summers, who doesn't have a single black or Latino or Asian at a high-level post in his administration.)

The obviousness of the disparity is so great, Summers can't help but see it. Why hasn't he done anything about it? One explanation holds that Summers cares about meritocracy, not diversity. Is there really a contradiction between the two?

Slate has a review of Harvard Rules posted today, by a writer named Stephen Metcalf. It's a curious piece of work. Metcalf likes a lot about the book, and he repeatedly draws on the substance of it to discuss something already on his mind, "the culture of flattery" that now pervades academia. By this Metcalf means, if I'm getting him right, a prevailing campus atmosphere in which academics are so reluctant to offend that they wind up flattering each other—and themselves—non-stop. He criticizes me for being blind to this culture of flattery and idealizing the critics of Larry Summers.

Fair enough. I don't agree with the point—what Metcalf considers flattery seems to me the civility necessary to function in a small academic community—but it's a legitimate argument to make. Metcalf engages deeply with Harvard Rules, and any author is grateful for a review that seriously addresses the issues raised by his or her book.

But there is one cheap shot in this review that merits rebuttal. Early on, Metcalf describes Harvard Rules as "little better than a hatchet job, built on scuttlebutt and Nexis searches." That's a nasty allegation, and it's wrong on every count.

Harvard Rules isn't a hatchet job. It's tough on Larry Summers, but it's fair, and it accurately recounts his years in at Harvard. The events of recent weeks have only made its accuracy manifest.

Scuttlebutt and Nexis searches? Nah. I spent 18 months living up at Harvard, about two blocks from campus, researching and reporting this book. During that time, I averaged about two formal interviews a day, plus any number of phone conversations and lots of e-mail exchanges. What Metcalf calls "scuttlebutt," I call reporting. That's what journalists do to make sure that they don't levy an unfounded accusation against someone. Stephen Metcalf ought to try it.

While this blog is mostly about matters-Harvard for the foreseeable future, I do want to delve into other areas of culture and politics. Like, for example, the death of "gonzo" journalist Hunter S. Thompson.

Along with every other aspiring journalist growing up in the '70s, I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and ...on the Campaign Trail. To me, the books were the dark, subversive flip side of All the President's Men. Both were attacks on the established political order, of course. But whereas Woodward and Bernstein were conventional newspaper reporters—two sources for everything!—Thompson was the outsider, the rebel, the iconoclast, the freak. He pushed the boundaries of acceptable political discourse, and over time he came to embody the '60s-ish ideal that you could fuse your lifestyle and your work. Thompson wrote stoned (et cetera). In some way, the rest of us could also rebel against the idea that you had to check your personality at the office door and become the man in the gray suit.

But over time, I've come to have doubts about Thompson's legacy. Anyone looking at his work seriously has to concede that he hasn't published much of worth for the past 30 years. In fact, he hasn't published much at all. One can only wonder what role his drug and alcohol use played in that diminished output. I can't imagine it wasn't a factor.

And as a former magazine editor, I've seen his influence in lots of ways, most of them bad. Thompson seems to have convinced a generation of young journalists that attitude is everything; that it's more important to be rebellious than to be serious; and that the coolest thing to do in journalism is try to convince someone to pay you to write stream-of-consciousness nonsense while underwriting your drug habit. Thompson was one of a kind, but his legions of young imitators missed that reality. Part of Thompson's sadness, I think, was that he seemed to wallow in that cult of personality, and perhaps even chose to live his life in a way that would promote it. Perhaps he even chose to end his life in a way that would promote it.

The Hunter Thompson of 1972 would have eviscerated these Hunter Thompson-wannabes, urging them to find their own distinctiveness, their own originality. In his later life, he seems to have needed them.

There is another sadness about Thompson's death, and that is that the world of modern magazine journalism really had no place for him. Imagine Thompson in Rolling Stone now—amid the mindless and substance-free profiles of Britney and Beyonce, his writing would have seemed wildly out of place. Hunter Thompson's suicide isn't literal proof of the death of narrative magazine journalism. But it sure is a sign of an art form on the brink of extinction.

If you're interested in the historical role of Harvard presidents, you might want to take a look at my op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times. Called "Harvard Presidents Used to be Players," it's a short overview of the public roles played by some Harvard presidents over the 20th century, and why it's more difficult for a university president to play that kind of national role. My thanks to the folks at the Times, who were a pleasure to work with.

James Atlas has written a smart piece in today's "Week in Review" section of the Times. The battle behind the battle at Harvard is really about whether the university is going to be liberal or conservative, he argues. On issues such as affirmative action, the development of Allston, bringing ROTC back to campus, the salaries of endowment managers, and the curricular review, Larry Summers wants to "tug" Harvard back to the center. (Tug is a pleasant way to put it.)

There's much truth to this argument. As I argue in Harvard Rules, Summers is instinctively hostile to the 1960s and any sign of its legacy. And in return, those who tend to think more positively of the '60s tend to dislike Summers. It's no coincidence that the drive to reduce the eight-figure salaries at the Harvard Management Corporation was led by members of the class of '69. I'd suggest that the fight at Harvard has a lot to do with how Harvard interprets that legacy—does it advance the progressive spirit of the '60s, or does it reject that decade's legacy because of its excesses and the often tiresome, knee-jerk rhetoric and dogma of the far left?

On a couple of points, Atlas over-reaches. I never spoke to a soul in Cambridge who sees the Allston development as an "imperial land grab." My impression was that, by and large, folks in Allston were pretty happy about the development of their less-than-picturesque community. The fight over Allston is really about the future power and importance of different intellectual constituencies, and the faculty is frustrated because Summers won't give them any meaningful input into that fight. He wants to make those decisions alone.

Nor is the curricular review a political battle, as Atlas says. It probably should be, taking on the big question of whether to prioritize Western civilization, or if not, what to prioritize. But because the curricular review has been a rush job, those big questions, so political in nature, haven't been discussed.

Nevertheless, Atlas is right: what's going on at Harvard isn't just a fight between an imperious president and a whiny faculty, as it's often caricatured in the press. It's a fight over what Harvard is going to stand for in the 21st century—the struggle for the soul of the world's most powerful university.

One of the biggest political questions implicit in Larry Summers' presidency is that of the university's relationship to the federal government. Without question, Summers has weakened Harvard's identity as an institution apart from, and often in opposition to, the government. For many students and faculty members, this drive to closer ally Harvard with Washington is worrisome, and represents a subversion of the university's role as an enlightening force in society. Summers, they charge, is interested only in power—primarily his own—and thus he's willing to compromise the university's independence to make himself more politically palatable to Republicans who might appoint him to, say, the job of Federal Reserve chairman. Probably a pipe dream now, but it wasn't always.

Let me give a quick example of how Summers' desire to bond Harvard closer to the government has created tensions on campus.


The president gets a lot of credit from conservatives for wanting to bring ROTC back on campus; conservative pundits bash faculty and students who oppose that as being un-patriotic and hostile to the military. (In fact, Summers himself has said pretty much the same.)

These conservative arguments rest upon a caricature of the Harvard community, which is not nearly as leftist as portrayed. The student body in particular is hardly a bunch of riotous left-wingers. I never got any sense of real dislike of the military on campus. Everyone supports our troops.

What they don't support is the military's ban on gays. That bigotry offends a humane and open-minded intellectual community, as it should. Consequently, people are troubled by the idea of restoring a military presence to the Harvard campus.

The bottom line: If the military lifted its ban on gays, the Harvard faculty would vote to bring ROTC back to campus the next week.

This tension also manifested itself in the debate over the Solomon Amendment, a federal law mandating that universities which accept federal money must also accept military recruiting. After 9/11, the Pentagon began to enforce the amendment, threatening the loss of Harvard's hundreds of millions in federal aid, and Harvard collapsed like a bad souffle.

With both ROTC and the Solomon Amendment, Summers refused to speak out on behalf of gays, essentially saying that other goals of the university were more important than this issue of fundamental human rights.

I say "essentially" because Summers has never publicly articulated his position on this matter. It's a shame; I'd like to hear Summers address how the university should balance the imperative of its moral independence with the reality of its dependence upon the federal government. Particularly as Republicans in Congress are cracking down on the autonomy of private universities, that is an urgent question. If Larry Summers really wants to ignite important public and political discussions, this is a much better place to start than whether women are dumber than men in science and math.