Tense Past Jeopardizes Summers’ Future

University President Lawrence H. Summers’ long history of tension with Faculty members took a new turn Tuesday, when professors brought together formerly disparate concerns about his administration in 90 minutes of searing criticism.

Before this week, professors questioned Summers only in isolated contexts. But at Tuesday’s Faculty meeting—the first since Summers’ controversial remarks on women in science a month ago—what had been cacophonous complaints merged into a single cry against what some speakers called Summers’ reckless leadership.

“The crisis of governance and leadership here goes much deeper,” Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology Theda Skocpol said at the meeting. “We cannot easily have a new social contract, when there are many indications that we never had a genuine social contract in the first place.”

While gender issues might have been what drew professors to the meeting initially, History Department Chair Andrew D. Gordon, who did not attend Tuesday’s meeting, said the most recent Summers controversy simply took the lid off Faculty frustrations that had long been simmering.

“It’s not simply a matter of that one comment or this particular issue,” Gordon said yesterday, in reference to Summers’ Jan. 14 speech. “There’s widespread discontent at multiple levels...catalyzed by this one event.”

During his first three and a half years at the helm of the University, Summers has fielded—and, critics argue, bungled—complaints of various personnel problems and long-term planning concerns.

Faculty members who have been ill at ease on issues ranging from Summers’ management of the University’s expansion into Allston to the president’s role in the noisy departure of former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 are now rallying around a common issue and voicing their complaints collectively.

A HOSTILE HISTORY

Summers’ remarks last month thrust gender concerns into the national spotlight and have earned Summers the ire of many Faculty members, who see his remarks as a setback in their struggle for equality.

Professors’ anger over Summers’ remarks—voiced throughout the month via critical internal letters and op-ed pieces in national newspapers—erupted Tuesday, as Faculty hoped to redress long-standing grievances by honing in on the current situation.

Professor of Anthropology and of African and African-American Studies J. Lorand Matory accused Summers of espousing discredited arguments of “biological determinism.”

Others called for Summers to release a transcript of his remarks so that his arguments could be openly debated.

While the initial remarks at the meeting reflected concerns over his January speech, professors eventually raised older individual grievances, stressing a pattern of reckless leadership.

With tension in the room mounting, professors took the floor one by one in what seemed to be a coalition united in opposition to Summers.

Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 said Summers’ critics have seized on the president’s January speech, delivered at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) conference, to further their own political goals, rather than out of genuine indignation at Summers’ comments.

“They have been lying in wait for him for some time,” Mansfield said. “I am pretty sure the incident at the NBER meeting was planned or at least seized on by people who had it in for the president.”

But another faculty member said the NBER speech presented an opportunity to realize the extent of Faculty discontent with Summers, rather than an excuse to take on the president.

“I think that what’s happening is that lots of people in the University think they’ve been singled out for brutal treatment and are discovering that other people have experienced the same thing. People are putting the pieces together,” the professor said.

One concern professors cite in particular is what they call Summers’ dismissal of Faculty involvement in the physical and financial planning for Harvard’s expansion into Allston, a grievance that has been voiced at several previous Faculty meetings.

At a 2003 meeting, when Professor of German Peter J. Burgard asked Summers whether the Faculty would vote on Allston plans, Summers answered only by saying “No.”

“I would have thought the Faculty meeting would be a forum for discussion before the move is a fait accompli, but with the planning for the move already on the docket, it seems as if it is a fait accompli,” Burgard told The Crimson after the 2003 meeting.

Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn echoed these concerns at Tuesday’s meeting, saying that Faculty were not given enough of a voice in Allston planning.

As with the complaints about Allston, questions about Summers’ attitude toward racial diversity in the Faculty are long-standing.

Several of the professors who spoke at Tuesday’s meeting rehashed the worries about diversity that some faculty members say have not disappeared since Summers’ notorious dispute with West.

In a meeting with West that occurred shortly after Summers took office in October 2001, Summers allegedly questioned West’s academic integrity and criticized him for allowing grade inflation in his class.

West left for Princeton University in the spring of 2002.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Matory referred to Summers’ interactions with West as “censorship.”

Past problems aside, other professors have expressed concern that the national attention Summers’ recent comments have drawn to Harvard will bring further harm to the University if the situation is not properly addressed.

“As long as there is uncertainty about whether President Summers’ comments amounted to citing a hypothesis or expressing a point of view, the impact on the recruitment and retention of good women faculty and graduate students is potentially enormous, and can only be negative,” said Classics Department Chair Richard Thomas.

What unites these varied groups is a concern that Summers’ overbearing style represents a broader lack of respect for faculty opinions and endeavors.

“When people have diverse opinions, it’s mutual respect and civility that makes the whole thing work,” said one senior faculty member who attended Tuesday’s meeting. “When it’s absent, people feel alienated, isolated, and they lose their joy in their work.”

—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu