(HARVARD) PRESIDENT'S DAY
David Frum's Diary
The Wall Street Journal news section has a front-pager this morning on Larry Summers, president of Harvard. The story focuses on Summers' "management style." (Although if you read the story with a media archaeologist's eye, you can detect tell-tale signs that it originated as a hit-piece on Summers for his defiance of ideological taboos and was rearranged by an editor into a supposedly more neutal critique of Summers for being brusque and overbearing.)
Time was when university presidents were leading figures in American public life. Robert Maynard Hutchins of Chicago, Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, Nathan Pusey of Harvard - each in their way, each with their flaws and limits - were once people whose views commanded attention and respect.
Those days are long gone, undone by the degeneration of the moral and intellectual integrity of the universities that presidents lead - and maybe even more, by the ever more squalid cowardice exhibited by the presidents those universities have more recently selected for themselves. My friend Andrew Peyton Thomas has just published a withering account of the hasty retreat of the once-promising dean of Harvard Law School, Robert Clark, in the face of the ideological zealots who have done so much damage to his once vital institution of learning.
Larry Summers, a former Clinton Treasury Secretary, is no less liberal than his fellow university presidents. But unlike most of them, he believes that scholarship ought to hold a higher place on a university campus than political conformity. He forced out the embarrassingly preening Cornel West. He has challenged Harvard's easy grading standards. He even - in what may be his finest moment - chided Harvard for its lack of respect for the military. Speaking in November 2001 at the Kennedy School's annual Public Service Awards dinner, Summers addressed K-School dean Joe Nye directly:
"Joe, I hope that when you have this award next year, among those who will be recognized will be those who have served our country in uniform. Because I think we need to remember that of all the kinds of public service, there is a special nobility, a special grace to those who are prepared to sacrifice their lives for our country. And if these terrible events and the struggle that we are now engaged in once again reignite our sense of patriotism--reignite our respect for those who wear uniforms and bring us together as a country in that way--it will be no small thing." (Alas this hope went unfulfilled.)
The best verdict on Summers comes from the great Harvey Mansfield, who is quoted in today's Journal story: "He is being attacked for his strengths and not for his defects."
Let me add one more reflection: The corruption of the universities is a terrible shame upon the United States and a cause of profound sadness among American conservatives. When we complain about the abuses on campus, it is not out of glee at scoring a point against an ideological opponent, but out of terrible regret that some of the most essential institutions of this great country - the institutions at which learning and inquiry ought to be honored and served - have so often perverted their best natures to serve bad causes.
America suffers from a dangerous separation of its mind and soul. Its elite intellectual institutions are too often hostile to the country's culture and founding values. As the Journal reporters mention, Harvard continues to ban ROTC from campus for fear of offending the university's militant gay lobby; as Samuel Huntington details in his important book, Who We Are, elite institutions like Harvard regard themselves as multinational, multicultural enterprises independent of the nation and the people that created, sustain, and defend them.
This separation serves nobody. It makes places like Harvard effete and irrelevant. I had lunch a little while ago with a representative of another prestigious school. "We see it as our mission," he told me, "to train leaders." But how can you do that, I asked, when you are instilling your leaders with an ideology that is despised and mistrusted by their potential followers?
At the same time, it badly disserves America to lose the services of places like Harvard. Despite the health and strength of its soul and sinew, a country cannot thrive in a dangerous world with a diseased mind.
So all power to Larry Summers. With a half-dozen more university presidents like him, the day may come when America's great universities will again be great in something more than endowments and pretensions.
08:52 Am
nationalreview.com
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