Fool or Hero?
Phil Kennicott has
this profile of Larry Summers in the Washington Post. ("Fool or Hero," it's blurbed on the Post website, which is a classic example of how newspaper websites can have lower standards than the physical papers; the actual article is titled, "The Man in the Ivory Tower.")
First things first: Summers "declined to speak on the record for this story," almost certainly meaning that he spoke to the reporter but wouldn't allow himself to be quoted or have any information attributed to him. (By most standard journalism rules, anyway.) But unless I'm reading this wrong, Summers did talk to the reporter; he just didn't want it publicly known that he spoke to the guy. Make of that what you will. I remain of the opinion that this is appropriate behavior for a politician, but not a university president.
Kennicott's article is pretty subjective; it's in the "Style" section of the paper. Here's his thesis: "Two...subtle schools of thought prevail to explain the events of Summers's tenure. One is the personality theory: Summers is brilliant, brash and simply likes to stir things up. The other might be called the "dark thread" hypothesis: All of these episodes are connected and that Summers is out to remake Harvard, and perhaps the world, in ways that should be deeply troubling to traditional academics, and perhaps the larger, liberal-left establishment as well. "
Worth pondering. But I'm not sure that the two theses are incompatible. Larry Summers is a complex man. And then, of course, there's always the possibility that he himself doesn't know exactly what he's up to—that there is, in fact, no grand master plan.
