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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend.... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (10480)	2/22/2006 8:52:22 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

The End of Summers What Larry Summers's resignation means for Harvard and the university system. by Dean Barnett The Weekly Standard 02/22/2006 IT WOULD BE A GRAND UNDERSTATEMENT to call Lawrence H. Summers's stewardship of Harvard tumultuous. In his five year tenure, Summers careened from one controversy to another. Oft-times Summers cut a sympathetic figure as he upended the sacred cows of political correctness that have become fixtures of the modern university. Other times, Summers's troubles resulted from personal skills that even his defenders concede didn't evidence much social dexterity. The Summers reign came to a shockingly abrupt denouement yesterday when he submitted his resignation, effective at the end of the current academic year. When he leaves the president's office, Summers will resume the humble life of a tenured Harvard economics professor who has one of the most accomplished records of anyone in his field. As for what is in store for Harvard, that remains to be seen. SUMMERS'S TROUBLES began shortly after he assumed his office. Acting far more like a modern CEO than a modern university president, Summers tried to run Harvard as a hands-on manager. This is the opposite tack taken by most university presidents, who are content to be their school's fundraiser-in-chief and public figurehead. Instead, Summers declared that the Harvard faculty should be more involved with undergrads. He challenged the scholarship of some of his tenured faculty members, making a particular cause of celebrity professor Cornel West's sometimes untraditional pursuits. These attempts to supervise the faculty were often met with reactions ranging from disdain to hostility. And then there were Summers's political stands. Summers belittled a campaign that urged divestment in Israel. Later, in the wake of 9/11, he urged that the university's denizens be more patriotic. He was edging closer and closer to the unforgivable. SO SUMMERS already had a sizeable group of enemies by the time he stood before an academic conference and mused that a contributing factor to the under-representation of women in the hard sciences might perhaps be due to different intrinsic abilities between the sexes. The furor that followed wasn't really caused by these comments. As even his fiercest critics conceded at the time, it was merely "the straw that broke the camel's back." The net result of that controversy was the faculty narrowly passing a no-confidence referendum on Summers's leadership. That was almost a year ago. Summers waged a contrition campaign which lasted for almost a year. He repeatedly apologized for his comments and avoided any of the blunt utterances that had previously characterized his tenure. His name faded from the newspapers and when it did appear it was because Summers was doing something typical of university presidents, such as announcing a fund-raising coup--as he did when Saudi Prince Alwaleed bestowed $20 million on the university for its Department of Middle Eastern Studies. (Alwaleed had previously earned a measure of infamy shortly after 9/11 when New York mayor Rudy Giuliani rejected his $10 million gift to help rebuild New York because of offensive comments he had made regarding America's foreign policy and Israel.) This campaign to save his job, however, was doomed from the start. Summers's detractors on the faculty were quite clear all along that there was no way their relationship with their president could be mended. But he did succeed in agitating his supporters. Professor Ruth Wisse, perhaps Summers's most vocal champion, expressed dismay that he apologized for comments that were "unexceptional." Like many of Summers's supporters, Wisse had several occasions for disappointment as Summers scrambled to make amends with the faculty. At some point it had to become apparent that having a faculty that loathed its president was untenable for Harvard. In a battle to the death between the faculty and the president, the president never had a chance. WHERE DOES Harvard go from here? Professor Wisse is not sanguine about what Summers's abdication portends for the university. She suggests that the issues in dire need of addressing regard the faculty, not the outgoing president. As she notes, it is indeed a bizarre circumstance that the Harvard faculty, which was so vocal about its president's every putatively offensive utterance has expressed no qualms about accepting Prince Alwaleed's largesse, nor any curiosity regarding how the Saudi prince's gift will be used. And what of the student body? In a development that seems to have surprised virtually all Crimson observers, only 19 percent of Harvard undergrads thought Summers should resign. This poll perhaps signifies the contradiction at the heart of the modern academy. Students think universities should focus on educating their charges. Undergrads know, however, that their famous professors are often far more interested in their scholarship than in teaching. Summers was probably popular amongst the undergraduates because they knew he was their champion. Summers's resignation is a sign that, at least at Harvard, the professoriate will brook no dissent on their view of the university system. Dean Barnett writes about politics and other matters at soxblog.com. He graduated from Harvard University in 1989. weeklystandard.com weeklystandard.com boston.com thecrimson.com soxblog.com

To: Sully- who wrote (10480)	2/22/2006 2:55:49 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

HARVARD POLITICS Stanley Kurtz The Corner The New York Times notes that Summers knew he had to go when colleagues from the Clinton administration told him so. The Times adds that Summers is thinking of advising a Democratic presidential campaign. There you have the explanation for Summers' appeasement. Summers is from the sane side of the Democratic Party (yes, there is one). These moderate Democrats want to bring the academy closer to the center of the country. But when push came to shove, the leftist faculty wouldn't play along. That left Summers and his moderate Democrat backers on the board to choose between appeasement and a serious public battle. Ultimately, Summers and his allies backed down because they are part of the same national political coalition as the leftist faculty (which contributes heavily to the Democratic Party). Moderate Dems would be happy to reform the academy, but they don't have the stomach to treat leftist professors as open opponents. Only Republicans can do that. So in a way, we are seeing another iteration of the paralyzing split between DLC types and the fire-breathing base. The Democratic left is just too big, too powerful, and too essential to victory to be purged, as Peter Beinart wanted to do. That brings us to all those surveys of party registration in the academy. Party registration is a rough proxy for point of view in those surveys. But the Summers case suggests that it might be something more as well. The minuscule number of Republicans professors on campus shows that even moderate Democrats are unable to put the academy's house in order without Republican help. So long as actual conservatives are effectively banned from the faculty (and make no mistake, they are now effectively banned), nothing will change. Not only will an entire set of ideas be missed, but even moderate Democrats will be cowed into submission. They can't make war on the folks they work with in their larger political battles. And right now the academy needs war, not love. Alan Dershowitz, in "Coup against Summers a dubious victory for the politically correct" describes the center-left split at the heart of this conflict. boston.com summers_a_dubious_victory_for_the_politically_correct/ And here is Amity Shlaes on how the moderate mind-set of Clinton's economic team tried but failed to reign in the radical 1970's era sensibility still dominant on Harvard's faculty. quote.bloomberg.com corner.nationalreview.com nytimes.com

To: Sully- who wrote (10480)	2/23/2006 12:06:58 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 35834

Another academic casualty by Thomas Sowell townhall.com Feb 23, 2006 The resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University tells us a lot about what is wrong with academia today. When he took office in 2001, Summers seemed like an ideal president of Harvard. He had had a distinguished career in and out of the academic world, including having been a professor at Harvard, so there was no obvious reason why he would not fit in. His fatal flaws were honesty and a desire to do the right thing. That has ruined more than one academic career. Dr. Summers' problems started early on. He called in Cornel West for a private discussion of West's scholarly activities -- or rather, Professor West's lack of scholarly activities. It was not that Cornel West was inactive. He was active as a great showman on television, he was active in politics, he was active on the lucrative lecture circuit, and he was even active in entertainment, writing and performing rap music. He was also popular with students, as any professor who gives out lots of A's is likely to be. The kind of activity that Lawrence Summers wanted to see from West was the kind of activity expected from full professors at a leading university -- scholarly research and writing. Cornel West wrote lots of things in lots of places but even an editor of the liberal New Republic characterized West's books as "almost completely worthless." Although the discussion between Summers and West was private, Cornel West himself made it a public issue -- and a public scandal. West and his supporters made this a racial issue. That made facts and logic irrelevant. Summers apologized. That should tell us all we need to know about Harvard and about academia in general. Neither truth nor standards matter when it comes to one of the ideological raw nerves like race. Lawrence Summers touched another ideological raw nerve last year, when discussing why there were not more tenured women professors in science. Since he was addressing a scholarly symposium, Summers cited hypotheses and data that might explain the under-representation of women at the top in science. Summers advanced what he called "the high-powered job hypothesis." Mothers have a hard time reaching the top in jobs where people work long hours and put everything else aside when the job requires it. He cited another well-known and unchallenged fact. Although women and men have similar average IQs, men are over-represented at both the lowest and the highest IQ levels. Men outnumber women among both idiots and geniuses. Since top scientists are drawn disproportionately from people at the highest levels, that is another possible factor in differences between women and men in high-end science. Summers also cited other factors, including socialization and discrimination but this did not prevent another ideological firestorm from erupting. Summers was simply demonized and the faculty turned against him. The only politically correct explanation is discrimination. Summer apologized -- again. But, in the end, these hasty retreats did not save his job. Despite incessant repetition of the word "diversity" in academe, the tragic fact is that the academic world is one of the most intolerant places in America when it comes to diversity of ideas. Even the president of Harvard dare not step out of line. Parents pay the kind of money on which whole families could live, in order to have their children "educated" at elite academic institutions, hearing only one side of a whole range of issues -- race and sex being just two. Even if every conclusion with which students are indoctrinated were true, unless those students develop their own ability to weigh opposing arguments, these conclusions will become obsolete as new issues arise in the years ahead. These "educated" people will have developed no ability to analyze opposing sides of issues. Students are getting half an education at inflated prices and learning only how to label, dismiss and demonize ideas that differ from what they have been led to believe. Their "educated" ignorance is a danger to the future of this country. Thomas Sowell is the prolific author of books such as Black Rednecks and White Liberals and Applied Economics. townhall.com