The New Republic Weighs In
Jason Zengerle writes a piece of hilariously biased journalism in the February 28th issue of
The New Republic. (Sorry, it's available on the web to subscribers only, which I've always thought is a silly self-curtailment of TNR's influence, but that's another discussion.)
The article is called "Harvard Coup—The faculty attack on Summers," and it's really more a work of propaganda than journalism. It's not that there isn't a perfectly sound argument to make on Summers' behalf. But Zengerle makes it by omitting uncomfortable facts, declining to interview anyone but Summers' strongest supporters, and really unpleasant smears.
1) Let's consider a case of
omission. (Or maybe it's distortion, I'm not sure.)
Zengerle writes unflatteringly of Summers' predecessor, Neil Rudenstine, describing him as wimpy. Rudenstine was afraid of challenging the faculty when developing the Allston campus, Zengerle says. "At one point, he hired avant-garde architect Rem Koolhaas to devise a plan that called for actually moving the Charles river west, thus making Allston part of Cambridge and seemingly solving the faculty's objection to leaving the 02138 zip code."
This is a wildly distorted version of the truth. Rudenstine hired Rem Koolhaus to brainstorm, to consider any and every possibility for Allston's development. Koolhaus came up with the river scheme (which everyone knew was fanciful and would never happen) all by his lonesome. The object was to solve the problem of how people would get back and forth between Cambridge and Allston, when there's really only one relevant bridge connecting the two, and its four lanes of traffic are constantly snarled. (Walking isn't feasible, especially in the winter.)
Incidentally, Summers does not appear to have an answer for this problem. Now people are talking about monorails. That should be interesting.
"Summers didn't bother with such schemes," Zengerle writes determinedly. "Instead, he pressed the faculty on the issue—and came up with a workable plan that...will eventually make Allston home to Harvard's graduate schools of education and public health as well as a state-of-the-art sciences complex."
Well...kinda-sorta. First, Summers never pressed the faculty on the issue. When his handpicked dean of the law school, Elena Kagan, argued against moving the law school to Allston, Summers caved. Instead, he's relocating the ed school and the schools of public health, two of Harvard's smallest, poorest professional schools. (Along with, say, divinity and dentistry.) That's not exactly taking on the faculty.
It is true that Summers is going to run into some opposition from the sciences, who don't like the idea of their campus being split between Cambridge and Allston. So he's excluding them from the planning process. That's why physicist Daniel Fisher is one of Summers' most vocal critics.
2)
Biased sourcing. Zengerle interviews economist Claudia Goldin, pop scientist Steve Pinker, and former dean Henry Rosovsky, all public supporters of Summers. He also interviews Summers' critics.... Oh, no, wait. He doesn't.
3) Nasty
smears. Zengerle implies that Summers' opponent Theda Skocpol is anti-Semitic because she employed Summers' infamous phrase, "in effect, if not intent," against him at the first faculty meeting. In fact, Skocpol was using Summers' own logic to critique him. She never signed the notorious Harvard-should-divest-from-Israel petition, and is not remotely anti-Semitic.
Another example. Zengerle repeatedly uses the words "radical" or "radical left" to describe Summers' faculty critics. He never specifies who this term applies to or what it really means, but we all know what he's talking about: theoretical left-wing nutjobs, the kind Fox News rails against—as if the Harvard faculty consists of a bunch of Ward Churchills.
Let's deconstruct this graf:
"[Summers'] leading faculty critics, like Skocpol and History of Science Professor Everett Mendelsohn, have long records of campus activism and are experts at the art of academic warfare. 'These were the same people who were agitating in the 1970s for various reforms,' says Steve Pinker, who was a Harvard graduate student at the time.... 'They're very familiar with speechmaking and petition-signing and verbal manifestos.'"
I'm fascinated by the neo-retro idea that having a history of campus activism is an inherently bad thing. After all, Everett Mendelsohn's expertise at the "art of academic warfare" began when Joseph McCarthy tried to get the young graduate student ousted from the Harvard ranks and Mendelsohn had to convince dean McGeorge Bundy that he was not a Communist. Does Zengerle consider that an "activist" act?
And consider Pinker's quote. He is criticizing people because they "agitated" for "reforms." (Reforms are a bad thing?) They gave speeches and signed petitions. Pinker, in other words, is saying that these professors can't be trusted because they exercise their First Amendment rights. (Whereas at Larry Summers' Harvard, signing petitions can be a risky act.)
All in all, not Zengerle's finest piece of work. But to give him a break, he probably wrote this story under some pressure.
The New Republic's part-owner, Marty Peretz, is a passionate Summers' supporter. I like Marty very much and interviewed him for
Harvard Rules; it's to his credit that he spoke on the record. But you can feel Marty's guiding hand in every aspect of this piece.
