Good post on the "Summers" article, with some followup
DANIEL DREZNER BLOG
University news
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have stories today on potent influences on the academy. The Times looks ar Harvard's president, Larry Summers. The Post looks at Microsoft.
The New York Times Magazine quotes one of Summers' friends at Harvard saying, "There are a lot of people on other parts of the campus I've met who just despise him. The level of the intensity of their dislike for him is just shocking."
Glenn Reynolds thinks this is because he's to the right of the "ideologically correct" academy. But this is less about ideology than power.
As the article makes clear, Summers is doing two things that scare a significant chunk of the faculty. First, Summers is centralizing power within his office, taking a more personal role in tenure and hiring decisions. In any university this would prompt grumblings, because it means a loss of autonomy for departments and schools.
Second, and much more important, Summers is taking a positivist approach to areas of thought that have historically been thought of as the humanities. The key grafs:
[T]he intellectual revolution that Summers says he hopes to capture in the new curriculum is not limited to science itself. ''More and more areas of thought have become susceptible to progress,'' he said, ''susceptible to the posing of questions, the looking at the world and trying to find answers, the coming to views that represent closer approximations of the truth.'' Tools of measurement have become ubiquitous, as well as extraordinarily refined....
The great universities have traditionally defined themselves as humanistic rather than scientific institutions. Summers's point is not so much that the balance should shift as that the distinctions between these modes of understanding have blurred, though clearly in a way that favors the analytic domains -- the soft has become harder, rather than the other way around.
Most faculty members at Harvard worry much more about this hard-soft spectrum than they do about the left-right one.... It is quite possible that just as Charles W. Eliot came to be seen as the man who brought the range of modern knowledge into the traditional university, so Summers will be seen as the man who decisively moved those universities toward increasingly analytical, data-driven ways of knowing.
Clearly, these preferences are starting to drive the tenured faculty around the bend:
I met professors who so thoroughly loathe the new president that they refuse even to grant his intelligence, perhaps because doing so would confer upon him a virtue treasured at Harvard. Despite the protections of tenure, virtually all of Summers's critics were too afraid of him to be willing to be quoted by name.
Those dumb enough not to recognize Summers' smarts are headed for a great fall. The next few years are going to be fun for those who write about Harvard.
The Post story is about the rise of Microsoft's influence on college campuses, and the inevitable backlash this is causing on campus. An example of the latter:
"[I worry] that in the face of budget shortfalls, universities will sacrifice their research autonomy, offering up curriculum and academic integrity to the highest bidder," said Mark Schaan, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University who was part of a group of students at the University of Waterloo, the Canadian equivalent of MIT, who last year urged administrators to turn down Microsoft's donations.
That's the rhetoric. Here's an example of Microsoft's role in funding campus research:
Among those who say they have benefited from Microsoft's donations is Howard University associate professor Todd E. Shurn. Two years ago, he was struggling with how to best teach a multimedia class that would combine computer science, art and communications skills.
Two of Shurn's former students, who had gone on to work at Microsoft and had come back to Washington on a recruiting visit, had an idea: Why not build the class around Windows Media Player? The class could create a new interface, or "skin," for the program. The professor was intrigued. He fiddled around with the technology for a few days and concluded it was worth testing. Microsoft provided $5,000, software and books and sent one of its technicians to help set up the computers the students would be using. The experiment was a success, Shurn said, so much so that he expanded the project the next year to include a contest open to the entire school. Microsoft, of course, provided the money for the awards.
Boy, that is evil.
I have no doubt some of my fellow academicians are dreading the rise of these kinds of influences. I say, bring them on.
posted by Dan on 08.25.03 at 12:13 AM
Comments:
"Most faculty members at Harvard worry much more about this hard-soft spectrum than they do about the left-right one...."
I do believe this is true. Moreover, the actual dimensions of animosity in academia cut in so many directions because they are primarily battles over ideas (including methodological ideas). That said, there may be a bit of correlation between the hard-soft and the left-right spectrum. The folks that have been pushing "softer and softer" (po-mos) tend to be the most (left) radical on campuses, often alienating even those who are "left of center." Conservatives and liberals often can ally in resistance to this trend. (Reference concern raised by Richard Dawkins or the book "Higher Superstition" - forgot the authors).
Now I do realize that some conservatives prefer a "soft" approach too, but it is not the kind of "po-mo" soft we've been seeing of late.
posted by: John Lemon on 08.25.03 at 02:15 AM [permalink]
To build upon what John said, he's right that far left postmodernist scholars are generally leading the fight against the positivist wave in social science. (This explains the left-wing name choice -- perestroika --for the "movement.") Many fights over empiricism in my political science seminars have revolved around one left-wing student or another rejecting positivism because, according to their worldview, "there's no such thing as absolute truth."
Conservative rejecters of positivism, conversely, tend to assert that there are absolute truths, but they can't be operationalized. (The ding an sich is missing in our dummy variables, so to speak.) Even with these sorts of reservations, I don't think "traditionalist"-conservative scholars are desperate enough to form a permanent alliance with the PoMo Marxist-feminist-postcolonial crowd against positivism.
posted by: Matthew on 08.25.03 at 04:41 AM [permalink]
Summers' anayltical approach of knowledge must be really threatning to the po-mos and other radical fellow travellers. As John L said in his comment, this analytical, knowledge and fact-driven approach is definitely a challenge to the "soft" approach, and Summers approach also does not does not approach academics as some sort of leftist theology. Kinda like folks I know goes on at my Univ. Here, leftist "scholars" first figure out wha they want their research to prove, and then they selectively work with secondary data, using statistical methods learnt at summer ICPRS courses at U-M, to prove that their 'research" proved the answer they wanted.
posted by: ronin on 08.25.03 at 09:16 AM [permalink]
When I read these articles, what hit me in the face was a "spectrum" not specifically mentioned in either, the "useful-useless knowledge" spectrum. As an outcast from academia who has struggled to remold herself in Washington (on a much less rarefied plane, similar to what Summers himself experienced)I would argue that this is the only split that really matters in the larger world. Summers (and Gates & Co) are determined to drag an ancient learning system back into the modern world; many academics see this as sullying the purity of their lifework. Too bad. With half of Americans in higher education, and all meant to at least aspire to this course (wrongly, I think) the question is what should they be learning? It strikes me that 20-30 million English (or, closer to home, history) majors is a poor investment in the future UNLESS the structure of the BA/BS system as a whole is revamped. This appears to be what Summers is aiming for and I say bring it on, baby.
posted by: Kelli on 08.25.03 at 09:23 AM [permalink]
ronin: it's ICPSR, not ICPRS. And (putting my ICPSR TA hat on here) there's nothing wrong with the stats courses at ICPSR, although (like any other course) you won't learn anything if you just show up and go through the motions.
Anyway, bad research is bad research, no matter how many fancy methods you throw at it. Unfortunately too many social scientists treat ignorance of quantitative research methods like a badge of honor, and therefore are ill-equipped to challenge bad research dressed up in fancy methodology. (Case in point: that Berkeley B.S., which was little more than an ideologically-motivated data mining exercise.) If Summers can change that culture at Harvard - IMHO a place that needs that culture challenged badly, notwithstanding the great work that King et al. do there - more power to him.
posted by: Chris Lawrence on 08.25.03 at 10:13 AM [permalink]
As for the power centralization issue, it's worth noting that Harvard is an extremely decentralized university and that, moreover, insofar as power is centralized at all, it's not really centralized in the office of the president. Rather, the Harvard Corporation, of which Summers is but one member of seven, holds the central authority. Most of the time this group is pretty much under the president's thumb, but currently five of the seven board members predate Summers' arrival.
Moreover, during the presidential search process, many board members were concerned about Summers' bull-in-a-china-shop reputation -- concerns that were only alleviated by personal assurances from Robert Rubin that Summers had changed his ways during his time as Secretary of the Treasury. As the Times Magazine article makes pretty clear, however, (and as I also know from my personal experience as a reporter on campus) ways have not been changed and Summers is as abrasive as ever. This does not, I think, bode well for his efforts since without strong backing from the corporation he has no real ability to centralize authority.
posted by: Matthew Yglesias on 08.25.03 at 10:46 AM [permalink]
Speaking from someone with a CS background in college, there is a downside to what Microsoft is doing. Such concentration on one company's products as opposed to good techniques in general does not a good education make. Turning college CS programs into nothing but MCSE certification programs is *not* a good idea.
That said, I've got no problem with MS making donations to universities, but it's important for the university not to let that largess cause them to forget that there is in fact non-MS software out there.
posted by: Aelph on 08.25.03 at 11:50 AM [permalink]
There's a GREAT, and I mean GREAT post on Jay Manifold's blog about the hard-soft spectrum, and why Summers is right. After describing a hugely lopsided discussion between a physics professor and a sociology professor following 3-Mile Island (worth the read for that alone), he cuts to the chase:
"The N just stands for 'not M.' People who are not type M are of type N. Type N people have no real mathematical skill."
- "Interesting," she said.
"It's more than that," I said. "It is fundamental. People of type N cannot argue science or technology with people of type M."
- "Why?"
"Because they always lose."
- "Are you sure?"
"Yes," I said. "They lose even when they are right."
See: The Two Cultures
posted by: Joe Katzman on 08.25.03 at 01:40 PM [permalink]
I hope that with all this "hard-soft" talk we are not merely talking about what has happened in Summers's own profession, economics. There much of the research work is simply dressing the banal with fancy math for publication. Instead, I was struck by Summers's desire to revamp the undergraduate curriculum, with particular attention to enabling students to have some familiarity with the most important areas of human culture. Summers's views on this are online at www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2003/commencement03/html
posted by: thucydides on 08.25.03 at 02:18 PM [permalink]
This hard/soft N/M split is also linked to not being able to determine your level of competence. See apa.org (Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments). This has made me recognise what I am and (more importantly) am not qualified to give an opinion on.
posted by: A on 08.25.03 at 02:49 PM [permalink]
Terrific post, Daniel. It is worth noting as well that the NYTimes piece by Taub was exceptionally well written, a riveting piece of journalism.
posted by: Roger L.. Simon on 08.25.03 at 03:22 PM [permalink]
Back in my undergrad days in the mid 70s, I was double majoring in Physics and Sociology. It was easy to do, as a Sociology major had few required courses 8 or so, unlike the 20 in Physics. One of the courses was in computer modeling of social systems, based on the "Limits to Growth" book and software. One of the sociology profs teaching it encouraged me to go on to grad school and offered this pearl of wisdom on being a computation-oriented sociologist (paraphrasing): "It's great - you can BS the mathematicians with soc. jargon and the soc. people with the math." So, adding some rigor to the social sciences is long overdue. Didn't get the sociology degree, though. I had to choose between two required courses my senior year: Thermodynamics and "Personality, Social Structure, and Culture". Thermo won.
posted by: Edmund Hack on 08.25.03 at 03:56 PM [permalink]
Any possibility that the animosity towards Summers is because he is an economist? Most economists are loathed by all of the other social scientists in my own experience...
posted by: EcoDude on 08.25.03 at 04:20 PM [permalink]
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