Academic Stars Clash in Course

The stage of Sanders Theater morphed into an ideological wrestling ring yesterday afternoon as University President Lawrence H. Summers, Bass Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel, and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman sparred in round one of their much-anticipated core class on globalization.

Though the new course is officially titled “Social Analysis 78: Globalization and Its Critics,” onlookers could have been forgiven if they thought that they were watching the latest installment of CNN’s “Crossfire.”

Sandel launched the intellectual brawl with a series of not-so-subtle allusions to the public relations fiasco sparked last month by Summers’ remarks about “innate differences” between the sexes.

Before agreeing to co-teach the course, Sandel said he approached Summers and warned, “Larry, this won’t work if you give us the bland, platitudinous talk that is characteristic of University presidents.”

“Larry, you have to be uninhibited…Larry, you have to be provocative,” Sandel said.

Not missing a beat, he continued, “I never imagined he’d spend the whole month before practicing.”

Sandel starred as globalization’s critic, while Friedman, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, championed global capitalism. Even as they expressed drastically different views, Sandel and Friedman interacted with the good-natured ease of ex-college buddies. Both men graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University in 1975.

With the caveat that “as a reporter I would never put this in the paper,” Friedman jokingly suggested that Sandel had been one of the costumed protesters who hurled objects into store windows during the 1999 anti-globalization protests in Seattle. Addressing Sandel as “Mr. Dress-up-like-a-turtle-and-throw-a-stone-through-a-McDonald’s-window,” Friedman said that “by the end of this course you will concede that the problem is not that we have too much globalization, but that we have too little.”

After Friedman’s paean to globalization, Sandel quipped, “I never thought that it would be possible to make President Summers look like a warm and fuzzy liberal.”

After delivering a trenchant rebuttal of Friedman, Sandel set his sights on Summers, who was a prominent advocate for global integration as chief economist at the World Bank and later as Secretary of the Treasury. Sandel mercilessly mocked Summers’ now-famous aphorism: “In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car.” Friedman has cited Summers’ quotation in four separate Times columns over the last two years.

“You don’t want to be remembered for that saying above all others,” Sandel told Summers. Then he turned to the audience and added, “Well, given the alternatives now, maybe he does.”

After noting that at least one person—a retired Georgetown University sociologist named Norman Birnbaum—has indeed washed a rental car, Sandel argued that Summers’ adage is a “normative claim thinly disguised.” Summers mistakenly assumes that all people act only in their own self-interest, Sandel said.

In response, Summers said the maxim’s true meaning is that property rights propel third-world development. He argued that peasants who have their own plot of land will use sustainable farming methods and not deplete the soil.

As he made this argument, Summers grew increasingly animated, at one point waving a writing utensil in an emphatic gesture.

“Michael thinks that property rights are some sort of right-wing plot,” Summers said.

Not to be outdone, Sandel turned to Summers and said, “I’m not against private property. Now may I have my pen back?”

By the end of the two-hour session, some students were fed up with the instructors’ antics. Jonathan M. Husson ’07, an earth and planetary sciences concentrator in Adams House, said that the class was “a bit too catty.”

“It was too much about them taking personal jabs at each other and trying to one-up each other, rather than actually trying to work through the debate surrounding globalization,” Husson said.

But Emily Z. Yan, a senior at MIT who is hoping to cross-register in the course, said the first session lived up to her expectations.

Yan and other students will learn if they can enroll in the class this morning, when results of the lottery for limited spots will be posted on the course website.

Students packed the orchestra level and the first nine tiers of pews in Sanders. But the balcony was almost empty—perhaps because students were intimidated by the Herculean reading load outlined in the course syllabus.

The assigned readings range from “The Wealth of Nations,” by Adam Smith, to “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders,” by Osama bin Laden and associates.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.