End-of-Year Awards Feature Summers

It’s year-end awards season, and University President Lawrence H. Summers is racking up prizes. But don’t expect any of them to show up on his mantle in Massachusetts Hall.

Summers’ musings on the innate abilities of female scientists, which earned him a mouthful from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last semester, have now landed him on several best-of and worst-of lists for 2005.

The Boston Globe Magazine, in a story entitled “The Provocateur,” named Summers as one of seven runners-up yesterday for “Bostonian of the Year,” awarded to the Hub’s most influential personalities.

“Harvard hired Summers in 2001 to shake things up,” Globe reporter Neil Swidey wrote. “And shake he did, picking fights and collecting enemies as freely as a pocket collects lint.”

Edward Ginsburg ’55, the former Massachusetts Turnpike Authority employee who publicized the leaks in the Big Dig’s tunnels, was named the “Bostonian of the Year.” Ginsburg is a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Last semester’s brouhaha over Harvard’s president also won him the fifth slot on a list of the worst public-relations gaffes of 2005, compiled by Fineman PR, a firm in San Francisco.

Among those who topped Summers on the list of blunders were Tom Cruise, who jumped off the deep end—and onto Oprah Winfrey’s couch—while publicizing his new movie, and Pat Robertson, who had to apologize after calling for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

The year-in-review press coverage of his Jan. 14 speech on women in science can’t sit well with Summers, who has spent the entire calendar year atoning for his remarks and has sought to refocus faculty and alumni on his priorities in the new semester.

But if the president was hoping to leave “Innate-gate” behind him for good, he’s had no such luck. The Global Language Monitor, a group that tracks vernacular trends, last month enshrined “intrinsic aptitude” as number two on a list of the 10 “most egregious examples of politically correct language” in 2005.

—Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu.