Review This
At a speaking engagement a few weeks ago, I suggested that the ultimate test of Larry Summers' leadership style was results, and that so far, the results were lacking. Summers' style seems to have impeded his agenda as much as promoted it, I said.
After the talk, an angry alumnus asked me for specifics. I pointed to the curricular review, which I said was in a state of freefall, a fiasco. He responded that that wasn't so. "You should read Dean Kirby's 8,000-word letter to the faculty," he said. I answered that I had, that this was perhaps not the most objective source, and that he could easily find other viewpoints by reading, say, the Crimson. He walked away in something of a huff.
Now there's more evidence that I was not, in fact, smoking crack. The Undergraduate Council has released a report "strongly criticizing the progress of the Committee on General Education," which is the review's most important component. According to the Crimson, the Council "encouraged the Committee on General Education to state a cohesive philosophy on what a Harvard education should be before making any recommendations for change."
Here we are, two years into Larry Summers' highly-touted curricular review, and undergraduates are rightly pointing out that the review lacks any guiding philosophy other than the mantra to get something done as soon as possible so that it can be flacked to alumni and the press.
A curricular review needs the wholehearted participation of the faculty, which it has never had, since Summers has made a point of discouraging that. One faculty member involved in the review told me how Summers "dominated the proceedings and dismissed the input of committees that had put hundreds of hours of work into it." Meanwhile, the Committee on General Education, for example, is stocked with his inner circle—Steve Pinker, Luke Menand, Robert Kirshner, Michael Sandel, etc.
After the no-confidence vote, serious faculty participation in the review is even less likely.
I hear whispers that the entire effort is essentially crumbling...and that what might happen is the passage of a few small steps—promotion of study abroad, for example—and the abandonment of any attempt at a larger, cohesive overhaul.
