The Dog Days of Summers

Two graduating seniors were tossing a frisbee on the bank of the Charles River shortly after eight o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, the most beautiful day of the year. Down below, a handful of rowers were gliding along the water as it glimmered in the sun. And on the Weeks Footbridge, a Harvard maintenance worker was busy scrubbing away a graffiti message someone had written there in black ink: “Fuck Summers.”

It has been open season on Harvard’s leader since he wandered outside the lingua franca of gender politics at an economics conference in January. From a thrashing on the “Today” show to the cover of Time Magazine, the onslaught has been relentless and brutal.

The ridicule reached such ubiquity in March that even President Bush felt obliged to take a jab at President Summers. At a dinner in Washington, Bush said he was disappointed Summers could not attend the event, noting his presence had been required “at the Madame Curie awards banquet.”

W. Mitt Romney, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, chimed in with his own musings at the annual St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in Boston. “I know I need to reach out to other constituencies,” Romney said, according to one account, “so I thought about the chances of organizing a Democrats for Romney group—about as good as starting a Female Mathematicians for Larry Summers group.”

The jokes at Summers’ expense, to be honest, could be funnier. But it’s more significant that they’re being made at all. Prior to Summers’ dog days, swipes at the president had generally been as harmless as coy plays on his name. Now he has firmly established himself as prominent fodder for satire. Such is the innate difference between this year and last.

The skewering hands of New Yorker cartoonist Mick Stevens took up Summers’ troubles in the magazine’s Feb. 14 issue, just a month into the controversy. Three female professors were drawn sitting in a campus cafeteria—the caption: “I hear we’re all getting valentines from Lawrence Summers.” Another cartoon, on the cover of the peachy New York Observer on March 28, depicted a baby Summers in a caldron of boiling water above the headline, “Why Summers Simmers.”

Whatever one may think of Summers himself, it’s hard to argue these renderings are anything but damaging; few alumni would wish to see their alma mater so virulently buffooned in the media. “Harvard alumni want to feel proud of their president, and they don’t want to keep defending him or apologizing for him,” says Richard Bradley, author of the recently released “Harvard Rules,” an analysis of Summers’ early tenure as president.

For Summers, not all publicity is good publicity. Through Tuesday, he had garnered mentions in 109 separate stories in The New York Times since the start of the year, a full 99 of which were in direct reference to the controversy over his remarks on women in science. (Summers had been mentioned in just 11 articles by the same time in 2004.) Richard C. Levin, the president of Yale, has found his way into the Times just twice this year, never making it out of the Metro section.

The attention has had, for Summers, an unfortunate consequence of linking his name not just to his own comments but to a broader cult of sexism as well.

Times columnist Maureen Dowd excoriated Summers in four separate columns between January and March, at one point comparing him to steroid-popping slugger Jose Canseco. “The ‘different socialization’ Dr. Summers talks about may be getting worse, thanks to goofballs like him,” Dowd wrote in that column. “How did he get to be head of Harvard anyway?”

And when in May the University of California was faulted for lagging behind other institutions in hiring women, one professor quoted in the Times said, “Given these numbers, we are concerned that the Larry Summers view of the world may still be standard operating procedure at U.C. when it comes to faculty hiring decisions.”

Though he has tried hard to distance himself from the remarks that sparked his current troubles, Summers is unlikely to ever fully shed the phrase “intrinsic aptitude” from his legacy. It’s a reality that can’t sit well with the president. Speaking to students in Lowell House this spring, Summers said, “I can tell you from fairly extensive personal experience, people cannot catch up fully from derogatory, untrue stories merely through their correction.”

On the morning of March 25, five weeks after Summers released a transcript of the controversial speech on his website, the 7,000-word text suddenly disappeared from his website, replaced by a terse statement: “To obtain a copy of the transcript, please contact the President’s Office at 617-495-1502.”

There was no explanation, but the removal appeared an attempt by Summers, or someone in his office, to separate the president from a speech he had always insisted was not intended for general consumption, never meant to frame his public legacy.

By mid-afternoon that same day, after inquiries by a reporter, the transcript was back online. Spokesman Alan J. Stone said “an internal miscommunication” had led to the mix-up.

The graffiti on Weeks Footbridge came off easily with soap and water. But the transcript—and all its baggage—was indelible.

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