Our Lack of Confidence

In a vast waste of energy and general disregard for its own repute, the Graduate Student Council (GSC) decided early this week to ask its constituents the same questions posed at last week’s Faculty meeting, at which the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted a lack of confidence in University President Lawrence H. Summers. What the GSC didn’t ask was whether any of these questions even applied to grad students.

To be sure, the students of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) are a vital part of the Harvard community, and their voice in the controversy surrounding Summers is an important one to include. If done right, public opinion polls conducted occasionally could be effective as part of a multi-faceted approach to gauging student sentiment. But a poll of graduate students mimicking the measures voted on at a FAS meeting one week earlier—which itself was flawed at best— demonstrates a disconcerting thoughtlessness on the part of the GSC.

Setting aside the objections this page raised last week regarding the phrasing and compatibility of the two measures put before the Faculty, the GSC’s decision to replicate those measures in its poll ignores the very different nature of graduate students’ relationship with Summers. After experiencing life under Summers’ leadership for four years, the Faculty publicly aired many of its concerns about his leadership style and the future of the University. Graduate students have had no such experience. Hearsay and anecdotal evidence from professors were the only data informing their votes. We’re not really sure what if any qualms graduate students have with Allston planning, the curricular review, or the tenuring of female faculty, or if their concerns are wholly different. But we’re sure that professors, not graduate students, are far more qualified to comment on all of those issues. If the GSC was set on conducting a poll, it should have taken steps to tweak the questions in order to yield more relevant results. From the outset, the conclusions of this poll were fated to insignificance because they were not grounded in any clearly stated graduate student concerns.

While the results of the vote were announced without much fanfare—the first resolution proclaiming a lack of confidence in Summers failed by a narrow margin, while the second, more conciliatory measure passed convincingly—we cannot help but question the GSC’s motivations for organizing this poll. Framing the questions after the Faculty measures, as it did, would have made for very convenient headlines of “Graduate Students Echo Faculty’s Lack of Confidence” had the first measure passed. The goal of assessing graduate student sentiment should not be to land a spot in tomorrow’s New York Times, but to aid the reassessment and rehabilitation process of a University in crisis. Instead, one of the stated goals of Zoe F. Trodd, president of the GSC, was for the poll to help publicize grad student sentiment to the media. We are glad many graduate students stayed away from this flawed poll—substantially less than half of all GSAS students voted—siphoning away any legitimacy that may have carried a skewed outcome to national news pages.