Curtains Rise, Tempers Flare

A drama in three acts, and on three separate stages, played out on campus this semester, as professors seized the spotlight at heated Faculty meetings to air their frustrations with University President Lawrence H. Summers.

In the course of 28 days in February and March, the normally quiet and sober meetings were transformed into what some called a “show trial” and others deemed an inevitable confrontation with Summers, who had sparked the controversy with his Jan. 14 remarks on women in science.

Speaking at the Feb. 15 Faculty meeting, Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies Diana Eck articulated the grievances, concerns that extended far beyond the offense of Summers’ comments: “How will you respond to what is clearly a widening crisis of confidence in your fitness to lead our University?”

The fallout from Summers’ remarks—culminating in a stunning vote of no confidence in the president on March 15—brought the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) to a near-standstill, delaying the full Faculty’s discussion of the Harvard College Curricular Review and pushing any votes on the review to the next academic year.

The meetings were replete with indignant rhetoric, dramatic maneuvering, and a climax worthy of Shakespeare.

“Do you, in fact, prefer fear to reason?” Sociology Department Chair Mary C. Waters asked Summers on Feb. 15, as more than 250 of her colleagues packed into the high-ceilinged Faculty Room in University Hall erupted in applause.

It was Act One of the showdown between Summers and the Faculty.

But as quickly as the crisis burst onto the public stage in February, the drama retreated backstage soon after the vote of no confidence in March, and by the time the ice began to thaw in Cambridge, things seemed to have returned to business as usual.

A CRISIS ERUPTS

Even though Summers’ January speech at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) conference was widely condemned by members of FAS and the national media, few anticipated the firestorm that awaited the president at the Faculty meeting one month later.

At the meeting, the simmering controversy over Summers’ remarks boiled over into a wider crisis that quickly engulfed the entire University.

Punctuated by nervous silences and bursts of boisterous applause, the 90-minute meeting saw some of the University’s most prominent professors hurl a stream of intense and unrelenting criticism at the president.

On the docket that day were a discussion of Kirby’s annual letter to the Faculty and a briefing on the progress of the ongoing curricular review—but the meeting never made it beyond the questions period.

It quickly became clear that the women in science comments were the fuse that ignited a powder keg of discontent Summers had been filling for the past four years.

Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology Theda Skocpol spoke early in the meeting of a “broader crisis of trust, governance, and leadership of which this episode and its manipulative handling so far are but one instance.” Skocpol enumerated several broad grievances against Summers’ leadership style, saying that he had used “fear and manipulation” against Harvard staff and that his handling of professors violated “elementary norms of academic freedom.”

Anthropology Department Chair Arthur Kleinman followed Skocpol, expanding upon her statement in no uncertain terms: “We are not cowards, we are not spineless, we are not with you.”

“Your presidency has created in me, for the very first time, the dismayed and undermining feeling of misplaced loyalty,” Kleinman said.

The only professor to speak in support of Summers at the meeting was Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature Ruth R. Wisse, who said, to subdued applause, “This is a show trial to beat all show trials.” Wisse denounced the faculty movement as a battle to stifle academic freedom in the name of political correctness.

“There is clearly an enormous amount of air to clear,” Summers said just before the meeting was adjourned, after a vote had passed to continue the meeting in a special session one week later.

The eight professors who spoke out harshly against the president had set in motion a rocky battle for influence in the University, to be fought in the following Faculty meetings, on the pages of newspapers, and behind closed doors.

ANTICIPATION BUILDS

Held in the lofty University Hall Faculty Room­, with the afternoon sun pouring through large windows onto walls covered with oil paintings, Faculty meetings rarely attract more than a sixth of FAS’ 802 voting members.

Summers typically sits on a high wooden chair in the front of the room, at the head of a round table with Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 and Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby to his left and right. At Gross’ left sits outgoing Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Peter T. Ellison.

Sometimes, while listening to speakers during the meeting, Summers swings his feet under the table, and absentmindedly twirls his index finger in a circle around his mouth.

In the tension-fraught week following the outburst at the Feb. 15 Faculty meeting, speculation circulated that the Faculty would attempt to put confidence in Summers’ leadership to a vote.

On Thursday, Feb. 17, Summers bowed to Faculty pressure and released the transcript of the NBER talk.

But the release of the transcript only sharpened the lines of debate on campus, as a group of professors circulated a petition supporting Summers’ leadership and pledging to affirm confidence in him if it should come to a vote in the following meeting.

On Feb. 22, camera crews and news vans flocked to Lowell Lecture Hall, where the special Faculty meeting had been moved to accommodate the expected high turnout. There, the press gathered along with several dozen demonstrators behind a police barricade on Kirkland Street.

The president, accompanied by University Provost Steven E. Hyman and a plainclothes police officer, walked briskly through the cold gray afternoon toward the reporters on the sidewalk across from the Science Center. But Summers, clearly agitated, made a wrong turn, making a right toward the Mallinckrodt biology labs rather than a left toward the doors of Lowell Lecture Hall.

“Over here, Larry,” Hyman called out.

THE SECOND ACT

As faculty members poured into the lecture hall, overflowing the room’s 350 seats, Summers met with members of his staff and the docket committee in the basement and took a moment by himself in an empty classroom.

At the start of the meeting, Summers found his seat next to Kirby at a round table set up in the lecture hall.

Summers opened the meeting, asking Kirby to moderate and saying, “My desire is simply to listen.”

In the two hours that ensued, several Summers supporters—primarily fellow economics professors—emerged from the woodwork to rally to the side of the president.

While professors still leveled heavy criticism at Summers, his detractors took a more conciliatory tone than a week before.

But a key confrontation near the meeting’s end drew attention back to differences between the broader Faculty and its leadership, when former Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles proposed a three-person committee to mediate between the president and the Faculty.

In response to the proposal, Reid Professor of English and American Literature Philip J. Fisher took the microphone and called the idea undemocratic.

“I find myself in a meeting that has the slight feeling of an arranged outcome to it,” Fisher said to thunderous applause.

Knowles’ face betrayed shock, and Summers’ showed visible disappointment.

And although a vote of confidence had not been proposed—the rules stipulate that 80 percent of professors must approve calling a vote not placed on the agenda beforehand—Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies J. Lorand Matory ’82 said after the meeting that he would put such a vote on the docket for the next meeting of the full Faculty in March.

THE FINAL ACT

By mid-March, news of Summers’ “crisis of confidence” had moved off the nation’s front pages and, to the casual observer, it seemed that Summers had weathered the storm.

But in the meantime, Matory had placed his motion on the docket, calling for an explicit up-or-down vote on Summers’ leadership. Most professors at the time believed it would not pass.

On Tuesday, March 15, the national spotlight turned to Harvard once again. The meeting had been moved to an even larger venue, the Loeb Drama Center, and by the time Summers arrived, the intersection of Brattle Street and Appian Way was teeming with journalists, protesters, and curious onlookers.

Inside, the room was packed. Ellison, Gross, Summers, and Kirby sat at a round table on the stage.

All were silent when Matory, the first professor to speak, walked up to the microphone to introduce his motion: “Twenty years. Twenty years. That is the average length of a Harvard president’s tenure. And that is why our vote today matters.” Matory spoke slowly, deliberately, and confidently.

He finished by restating his motion: “I hereby move that the Faculty vote, by secret ballot, on the following resolution: ‘The Faculty lacks confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers.’”

A proposal by East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department Chair Philip A. Kuhn to postpone the vote failed, and at 5:12 p.m. professors began filling out the pre-distributed yellow ballots and dropping them into black boxes circulating around the room.

Phillips Professor of Early American History Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a member of the docket committee, announced the results of the vote about half an hour later. Defying everyone’s—including Matory’s—expectations, the no confidence motion passed, 218 to 185 with 18 abstentions.

Gasps and murmurs of shock resonated throughout the theater. At the front of the room, Summers and Kirby betrayed visible disbelief. When Ulrich had finished her statement—announcing that Skocpol’s more mild motion to censure the president had also passed—Summers covered his mouth with his hand.

Following the vote, faculty members filed out of the building, met by a swarm of journalists. “There is no noble alternative for him but resignation,” Matory proclaimed in an impromptu news conference.

A rowdy group of about 40 protesters, who marched from the Science Center to the Loeb, met Matory as he made his statement. When Summers left the building, their chants of “Na na na na, hey Larry, good bye” drowned out the president’s statement to the press.

The “crisis of confidence” that began exactly four weeks before had reached its climax.

THE DENOUEMENT

The crisis ended almost as abruptly as it began.

The next Faculty meeting, on April 12, became the first since January where discussion was not dominated by the controversy over Summers’ leadership. In fact, after Matory delivered a speech against Summers and called upon the Harvard Corporation to “rescue us from this crisis,” the harsh rhetoric of February and March began to fade further and further into the past.

Of the 200 professors in attendance, only one applauded, offering two brief claps after Matory’s speech. The faculty went on to discuss the curricular review, which they had been scheduled to take up two months earlier.

At the next meeting, on May 3, even Matory appeared to have tempered his rhetoric. He asked Summers how he planned to increase the number of non-white administrators and professors, and how he would try to bring former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 back to Harvard—but did not directly attack Summers’ leadership. And two weeks later, at the last Faculty meeting of the year, the 150 or so professors in attendance heard further presentations of the curricular review. There was no mention of the crisis that had defined the Faculty for the better part of a semester.

“What we had in the course of this was a very full discussion and a really full dialogue, a full airing of views in the Faculty with the president,” Kirby says of this year’s Faculty meetings.

This “airing of views” contributed to some of the most dramatic and contentious Faculty meetings in recent memory.

But since March, faculty discussions of their discontent with Summers have moved out of the Faculty meetings and into more private venues.

The Faculty meetings, says Acting Chair of the Folklore and Mythology Department Jan Ziolkowski, “have been very boxed, structured events.”

“There’s a very staged atmosphere,” he says.

Yet the long-term consequences of this turbulent semester remain to be seen. Summers has already announced he will no longer participate in the curricular review—possibly a reaction to accusations from professors that the president was exerting undue influence in Faculty affairs.

A group of department chairs, which first gathered in February in response to the initial outcry against Summers, has announced that it will continue to meet next year to address the Summers-FAS relationship.

In May, the Faculty Council announced that the full Faculty would convene for five extra sessions in the next academic year, to make room for debate on the curricular review.

But for now, the curtain has closed on the public drama, and calm has returned to the Faculty Room.

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.