Is It Left Versus Right?
James Atlas has written a smart piece in today's "Week in Review" section of the
Times. The battle behind the battle at Harvard is really about whether the university is going to be liberal or conservative, he argues. On issues such as affirmative action, the development of Allston, bringing ROTC back to campus, the salaries of endowment managers, and the curricular review, Larry Summers wants to "tug" Harvard back to the center. (Tug is a pleasant way to put it.)
There's much truth to this argument. As I argue in
Harvard Rules, Summers is instinctively hostile to the 1960s and any sign of its legacy. And in return, those who tend to think more positively of the '60s tend to dislike Summers. It's no coincidence that the drive to reduce the eight-figure salaries at the Harvard Management Corporation was led by members of the class of '69. I'd suggest that the fight at Harvard has a lot to do with how Harvard interprets that legacy—does it advance the progressive spirit of the '60s, or does it reject that decade's legacy because of its excesses and the often tiresome, knee-jerk rhetoric and dogma of the far left?
On a couple of points, Atlas over-reaches. I never spoke to a soul in Cambridge who sees the Allston development as an "imperial land grab." My impression was that, by and large, folks in Allston were pretty happy about the development of their less-than-picturesque community. The fight over Allston is really about the future power and importance of different intellectual constituencies, and the faculty is frustrated because Summers won't give them any meaningful input into that fight. He wants to make those decisions alone.
Nor is the curricular review a political battle, as Atlas says. It probably should be, taking on the big question of whether to prioritize Western civilization, or if not, what to prioritize. But because the curricular review has been a rush job, those big questions, so political in nature, haven't been discussed.
Nevertheless, Atlas is right: what's going on at Harvard isn't just a fight between an imperious president and a whiny faculty, as it's often caricatured in the press. It's a fight over what Harvard is going to stand for in the 21st century—the struggle for the soul of the world's most powerful university.
