Poll: By 3-to-1 Margin Undergraduates Say They Don't Want Summers To Resign

By a three-to-one margin, undergraduates do not think that Lawrence H. Summers should resign his post as University president, according to a poll conducted by The Crimson this past weekend.

Just 19 percent of undergraduates in the survey said that Summers should resign, while about 57 percent said he should not. The online survey polled 424 students and carried a margin of error of approximately 4.6 percent.

But the number of students who approve of how Summers is handling his job as president is only slightly higher than the number who disapprove: 39 percent said they “strongly approve” or “approve” of Summers’ job performance, while 30 percent said they “strongly disapprove” or “disapprove.” The remaining 31 percent said they were neutral or had no opinion.

“I think he’s doing a fine job,” said Derek J. Horton ’08. “I know the faculty hates him, but I think he’s kind of running Harvard like a business—and I respect that,” Horton said Sunday in an interview in Currier House dining hall.

BY THE NUMBERS

The Crimson sent e-mail messages to 840 randomly-selected Harvard undergraduates early Friday asking each of them to respond to three questions about Summers. The online polling tool iCommons ensured that all responses were anonymous, that only students who received the e-mail message could tap into the poll, and that each respondent could only vote once.

Of the 840 students, 50.5 percent responded. More males than females chose to take the poll, and about 32 percent of the respondents were freshmen.

The poll asked students three Summers-related questions. The first question was: “Do you approve or disapprove of the way that Lawrence H. Summers is handling his job as Harvard president?”

The second question was: “Do you lack confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers?” Just 27 percent said they lacked confidence in Summers’ leadership, and 55 percent said they did not.

When a similar question was posed to Faculty of Arts and Sciences members at a meeting last March, 218 professors voted for the no-confidence motion, and 185 voted against it.

Summers will face another no-confidence vote at the Feb. 28 Faculty meeting—assuming that he is still president at that point.

And the third question was: “Should Lawrence H. Summers resign his post as Harvard’s president?”

The resignation of Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby in late January sparked the latest round of uproar over Summers’ leadership among professors—and it appears to have left some students disaffected with the president as well.

Physics concentrator Elizabeth B. Wood ’06, interviewed in Cabot House dining hall Sunday, said: “I think that the dismissal or resignation of Dean Kirby dealt a serious blow to the curricular review, and I think it was certainly poor planning.” Four individuals close to the University’s central administration told The Crimson last month that Summers forced Kirby to step down.

But elsewhere in Cabot dining hall, Daniel T. Kettler ’07 said that despite the fact that Summers “can be a little rough around the edges,” the junior engineering concentrator doesn’t want Summers to resign.

“He was hired to get things done,” Kettler said.

Male undergraduates in the survey tended to give Summers higher marks than their female counterparts did.

Sixty-six percent of male respondents said that the embattled president should not vacate his post, while only 45 percent of the women said that they wanted Summers to stay in Mass. Hall.

Among the students who were asked to take the poll, 238 men and 186 women responded during the weekend.

Associate Professor of Government Barry C. Burden said yesterday that variations in response rates between men and women are “pretty standard practice” in many polls.

“It’s always true when we do surveys in a non-campus setting that men and women respond at different rates,” he said.

Former Statistics Department chair Donald B. Rubin said that the poll’s response rate—at just over half the pool of undergraduates asked to participate—is “not bad by current standards, but it’s not up to the standards of what would be regarded as a good federal survey,” which would aim to top 80 percent.

“It is above the standards of what would be accepted in business and marketing,” he added.

In choosing students for the poll, The Crimson ran a program through Microsoft Excel that randomly selected names in a directory of the undergraduate student body.

The Crimson consulted Burden, Kennedy School political scientist Thomas Patterson, and Rubin in formulating the poll.

—Ying Wang contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Javier C. Hernandez can be reached at jhernand@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Daniel J. T. Schuker can be reached at dschuker@fas.harvard.edu.

POLL RESULTS

1. What is your expected year of graduation? (424 responses.)

A. 2006: 24.1%.

B. 2007: 21.2%.

C. 2008: 22.4%.

D. 2009: 32.3%.

2. What is your gender? (424 responses.)

A. Male: 56.1%.

B. Female: 43.9%.

3. Do you approve or disapprove of the way that Lawrence H. Summers is handling his job as Harvard president? (424 responses.)

A. Strongly Approve: 11.8%.

B. Approve: 27.1%.

C. Neutral/Don’t Know: 31.4%.

D. Disapprove: 23.8%.

E. Strongly Disapprove: 5.9%.

4. Do you lack confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers? (423 responses.)

A. Yes: 26.7%.

B. No: 54.8%.

C. Not Sure/Don’t Know: 18.4%.

5. Should Lawrence H. Summers resign his post as Harvard's president? (424 responses.)

A. Yes: 18.6%.

B. No: 57.1%.

C. Not Sure/Don’t Know: 24.3%.