It is remarkable how little Summers will have accomplished in his five years. Why doesn’t some reporter look more skeptically at the specifics? The list his PR people have produced is long but thin, if you look closely at it. And the few real successes turn out to be more examples of Summers’ taking credit for what other people did. (The media mostly repeats the list produced by Alan Stone’s very effective operation - - Scott Greenberger’s puff piece in the Feb 22 Globe is good example).


Graduate Financial Aid. A program to help grad students in the “poor” schools like Education and Kennedy School was rolled out with lots of publicity, but according to one dean had almost no effect because there was no money behind. The poor schools were supposed to raise money for it, while Summers went on to his next press conference.

Undergraduate Financial Aid. A program to help low-income families send kids to Harvard is a good idea, but not original with Summers or Harvard. The Harvard admission office was already working on this when Summers decided to get involved. Again the financial support he gave to the office was something like 2 million dollars, hardly enough to make a dent.

Freshmen Seminars. The dean who oversaw the expansion of this program - - again something that was well underway before Summers discovered it - - left for another ivyleague school, complaining that if anything Summers was more an obstacle than a help to what needed to be done.

Growth of Teaching Faculty. Yes, the faculty grew, but not with much attention to targeting the growth where the students are. The Government department, with among the highest faculty/student ratios, actually suffered a decline in faculty. Economics, which also has a high student/faculty ration, got more faculty, but the professors still teach less than in comparable departments. Summers never tried to get his own Economics colleagues to do more teaching. Favoritism -- but no favor to students who major in many other departments.

Women Faculty. It was not the speech that Summers made but the actions he failed to take that bothered the people most seriously concerned about appointing more women to the faculty. Until the notorious NBER speech he had done nothing, and the progress made under the previous regime had been reversed. Maybe it is too soon to tell if the scatter shot package of “reforms” Summers accepted to try to save his job will do any good. Some are worth doing, but others just add bureaucracy.

Curricular Reform,
Stopping Grade Inflation.
The University wide Calendar.
Bold statements and tough talk have produced embarrassing fizzles - - all three were high priorities, part of the highly publicized platform that Summers was elected on.

“Bold Vision for Science.” More “vision” than plan. Summers - - and his Provost Hyman - - were never able to get the scientists to come together to formulate a sensible university-wide plan even in the life sciences. The scientists in the Medical School, Public Health and FAS remain rivals more than colleagues. Instead, Summers singled out a couple of high profile scientists - - Doug Melton and Stu Schreiber - - and lavished attention and support on their pet projects (which are worthy but not integrated at all with work of their colleagues). And so far Summers has not been able to persuade any of the major science departments in Cambridge or Longwood to even consider moving to Allston.

Efficient Management. Summers hired several high priced task forces from McKinsey to find ways to streamline the management in the central administration and some of the schools. There were some improvements, but the overall effect was to increase the bureaucracy. Two new vice presidents, a Provost office that quadrupled in size, and dozens of new high paid middle managers. The “tax” on the schools increased dramatically, with little to show for it (at least little to benefit the schools).

Campaign planning. After easing out the longtime highly successful Development VP and replacing him with an inexperienced person from the B School, Summers let the two richest schools continue with their own fundraising. He did not even try, as the previous presidents had, to plan something like a university wide campaign. The big donors are in law and business, and without them the College, and the smaller schools are at a disadvantage. After the bad publicity and the vote of no confidenc last year, the campaign was delayed, and now won’t happen at all until there is a new president. The big donors do not want to give to a president who cannot get the faculty to follow him. Alumni – giving also declined significantly under Summers.

Allston. This was the single most important challenge and could have been his greatest legacy. But again he was more interested in taking credit for the (modest) progress than actually trying to get the faculty to engage with the planning to make it a true academic campus. Bok began the process of buying the land, Rudenstine bought most of it,and made the decision to develop Allston as an academic campus rather than a spill over area for administrative and service facilities. (Actually Zeckhauser is the probably one who made all the deals.) When Summers arrived, he boasted that he would force the law school to move, which Rudenstine had been unable to do. Summers caved in to the law school too, and then decided that maybe some of the FAS science departments should move. When that proved too hard (Knowles stopped that idea in its tracks), he started rounding up individual high profile scientists like Melton to bring their own labs there. So far there is no coherent science plan for this much ballyhooed science campus. The only other original idea for Allston - -the new undergraduate houses - - came out of a faculty committee. Allston will eventually be a real campus, but its development has been delayed more than advanced by Summers.
 

There was an interesting thread just before the resignation was announced--"winners and losers." Can it be revived now? No, I am not the author, but I'd like to add some names and continue the fun.
 

Richard: you came off pretty good in the Crimson Mag interview with Teller. Why not try Tierney next?
 

In reverse order...

I'm reluctant to send this to Tierney, because it's a little odd to write a post criticizing a guy and then send it to him, but if someone else wants to....

I'm going to revive Winners and Losers a little later this weekend.

And finally, thanks to the first poster for that lengthy and impressive critique. Are there any pro-Summers people who'd like to respond?

And finally, if anyone out there knows anything about how Summers and his people are now working the press, I think that's important, and will be at least through June, and I'd like to hear more about it.
 

Whoops. Make that just one "finally," please.
 

I found your take on this surprising. While you are up in arms about his blind oversimplications about the faculty, students are furious about his claim that they don't matter.
 

I'm surprised that no one has commented on the students' poor grasp of statistics. Newspapers keep reproducing the notion that the students were 3-1 in favor of Summers, but the figures they adduced in the Crimson did not bear this out.
 

I doubt the Crimson's writers really have such a "poor grasp of statistics." An unfortunate result of Larry Summers' bringing Washington-style politics and press manipulation to Cambridge, and of his hanging out with the Crimson's editors, is that they have learned that headlines and sound-bites, not facts and reason, carry the day in the press.

I can still remember a time when the Crimson could have been held up as an example of earnest and relatively unbiased reporting to the likes of the New York Times. Of course, the reporters were inexperienced and they sometimes made mistakes or advanced misguided opinions in their editorials, but I really think the vast majority of them believed in the mission of journalism and tried to report fairly.

The cynical and downright dishonest headline attached to the Crimson's poll unfortunately vindicates the current editors' assessment that most newspaper journalists do not read critically, or want an excuse not to. Although a couple of journalists have cited the actual results, most have been content with the misleading headline.

I suppose I'm not surprised by the sloth or disingenuity of the press in general. But I feel deeply sad that Larry Summers has corrupted and bebased so much of Harvard itself -- even down to some of its undergraduates. Let us hope for a brighter future...
 

The numbers were 57 percent said he shouldn't resign to 19 said he should. That's 3 to 1....
 

It's rather interesting, if having gone unnoticed to this point, how opinions of The Crimson have changed since Zach Seward departed the newspaper. Individuals who once championed (some might say 'manipulated') the publication's willingness to take Summers to task over the past couple of years, are now renouncing such support when The Crimson dares to express a contrary and/or more balanced perspective.

I guess the Crimson's of little use to any number of parties when Seward is no longer in charge, and I wonder how he might feel about that?
 

The Crimson used to be a student newspaper that was noticeably better than others on campus and at other campuses. Now, it has descended to such depths that its fall from serious consideration as source of news is inevitable. Its leaders lack maturity, a sense of objectivity, and an interest in the facts. They also appear to lack intelligence or just do not apply it.

Once a group or publication goes down this path, it cannot retrieve the situation. Thoughtful, ethical people become uninterested in participating and peel away. There are plenty of other activities at Harvard. Eventually, the Crimson will be left only with those with low qualities its leaders exhibit.

Nearly always, Harvard students are people of whom one can be proud: intelligent, well-intentioned, open-minded, curious, hard-working, and courteous. The current Crimson leadership must be counted among the very small number of exceptions. Unfortunately, they will drive away anyone except those like themselves.

What a pity for Harvard and a shame for the great institution that the Crimson used to be.
 

Kudos to the previous poster: it is already becoming a mark of shame to say you are on the crimson.
 

Attached to the previous blog entry (the photograph of the Crimson folks with LARRY painted on their chests), there are a number of comments evidently written by Crimson staffers who remark that those pictured are not (all?) current editors.

This is irrelevant. The Crimson is a self-perpetuating organization in which one generation chooses another. Therefore, if the people pictured are recent editors, as they obviously are, then they will have helped to pick people who share the same biases.

Impossible to claim objectivity.
 

here is a social scientist writing

you cannot quote statistics and leave out undecided people as though they had not been polled

come on, crimson, be a tiny bit professional

have anyone every seen a presidental poll reported as follows: "3 to 1 in favor of X"

when the underlying numbers are
X 3%
Y 1%
undecided 96%

or for that matter, did any polling organization in the entirety of the 2004 presidental election ever fail to report the undecideds?

crimson staff: you do not have to take a quantitative reasoning class to stick to acceptable poll reporting. all you have to do is do what all other newspapers do.

the crimson is just no good.
 

Why the people on this blog are so obsessed with attacking the crimson, I can't understand. Just stop reading it, and stop talking about it, if you feel that way. As for the poster about Seward, it's true, Richard has done quite an about face since someone accused him of having a love affair with the crimson and the editorial board wrote backing summers. Funny how that works out.
 

Dear Richard,

Could you please bring the following information to the attention of the principals involved?

Tomorrow's New York Times is going to include a piece by Sara Ivry. I do not know what she has written but I do know that she is being used as part of Summers' latest press strategy. The strategy is to suggest that the Shleifer matter is one massive case of anti-Semitism and that anyone who has been involved in it is an anti-Semite. These people are most obviously McClintick, his sources, and Fred Abernathy.

You had an early warning of this strategy on Friday with Edward Glaeser's comment comparing the Institutional Investor article to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Sara has been fed this same line, and they believe that she has swallowed it.

The idea is to make the Shleifer case impossible to discuss. Anyone who dares to bring it up will fear being tagged as anti-Semitic. Summers' supporters realize that the Shleifer case is the weakest point in Summers' defenses. They are trying to put it off-limits.
 

From David Warsh

From: [email protected]
Date: February 25, 2024 11:37:24 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Those Three Weeks in March

Those Three Weeks in March

So Larry Summers has resigned the Harvard presidency, pretty much (though not exactly) as predicted. But the story of Harvard’s failed Russia project and its lengthy aftermath only gets more curious.

In most newspaper accounts, little was made of the scandal and Summers’ long-time mentoring and presumed protection of the man at its center, Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer. The two men met in 1979, when Shleifer was a sophomore at Harvard College and Summers an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They have been close allies and fast friends ever since.

Yet at Harvard itself, interest in the matter has intensified, ever since an authoritative account of the affair appeared in a magazine last month, prompting a devastating “no-comment” from Summers at a faculty meeting and pair of ambiguous denials from the seven-person board, known as the Harvard Corporation, that governs the university.

In a letter to Institutional Investor (which published investigative reporter David McClintick’s 25,000-word article in January), Harvard general counsel Robert Iuliano asserted (at the Corporation’s request) that Summers had removed himself “from any university deliberations or decisions” concerning the US government lawsuit against Shleifer and the university “from the outset of his presidency at Harvard.”

In a second letter, James F. Houghton, the senior member of the Harvard Corporation, told Prof. Frederick H. Abernathy, a professor in the division of engineering and applied sciences who had raised questions about the matter in a letter and at a faculty meeting, that “President Summers was not present for nor did he participate in any of the Corporation’s many discussions about the [Harvard Institute for International Development] matter, including those resulting in the decision to settle the case.”

The crucial issue, however, was unaddressed. More than three months passed between the Sunday in March 2001 when Summers was elected by the Corporation and July 1, when he officially took office – presumably the “outset” of his presidency.

And it was in the three weeks immediately after he was elected that a behind-the-scenes court-mandated mediation by a federal judge collapsed in Boston. That was Harvard’s last chance to admit its culpability and settle the case, without the additional embarrassment of continuing to maintain its professor’s innocence and its own in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

And there are several reasons why one might wonder if Summers was deeply involved in setting the university’s strategy during those three weeks – involved, that is, in “university deliberations or decisions” about the matter. The person who holds the key to the mystery is Anne Taylor, Harvard general counsel at the time, who is not talking. One year later, she was eased out of her job by Summers.

There’s nothing difficult to understand about the Shleifer matter. The Harvard professor lined his pockets while under contract to the US government to render untainted leadership and advice to the government of Russia, which was then seeking to turn its bureaucratic nightmare into a decentralized market economy. Not a lot, at first – some oil stocks, some government bonds, shares in a private equity fund. But in flagrant violation of the rules.

But when the Russian SEC chief arranged for Shleifer’s deputy, his girlfriend and Shleifer’s wife to receive the first license to start a mutual fund in Russia – a potential goldmine that the trio touted to would-be backers – the Harvard professor’s co-workers blew the whistle to USAID. He was quietly investigated and quickly fired.

It is easy enough to speculate about why Shleifer flouted US law. Raised in Russia, he was incompletely socialized in American norms and little supervised on the job. Whether from simple greed, arrogance, idealism or, most likely, some combination of the three, he routinely broke the rules.

Far harder to understand is why Summers failed to distance himself -- after Shleifer’s misbehavior became known and he was fired by USAID in 1997, after the government filed its suit against Harvard in September 2000, even after the government won its case last year.

As a senior official in the Treasury Department – by 1999 he had become Secretary – Summers had oversight of US economic policy towards Russia throughout those years. He stayed at the Shleifers house in Newton while interviewing for the Harvard job.

Harder still to know is why Harvard defended Shleifer from the moment the scandal broke, on ever more narrow legalistic grounds. He wasn’t covered by the conflict-of-interest provisions of the government contract that prohibited investments of any kind in the country he was advising, the university’s lawyers argued, because he was a consultant to the advice-giving team that he headed (instead of an employee), or because he didn’t actually live in Russia.

Hardest of all to fathom is the stance that Harvard adopted in March 2001, once Judge A. David Mazzone led the parties informally and in private through the arguments of the government’s case. US District Court Judge Douglas Woodlock had referred the suit to his senior colleague for mediation less than a week after it was filed, presumably reflecting his sense that the matter could be settled relatively easily.

In late September 2000, when the government has filed its treble damages suit, much had been up in the air: George Bush vs. Al Gore in the presidential election, Harvard beginning its search for a successor to president Neil Rudenstine. If Gore had won the November election, Summers in all likelihood would have continued as Treasury Secretary.

Instead, the presidential election was a tie, various recounts failed to settle the matter, and the Supreme Court finally decided the result. Summers was out of a job. Two months later, on March 11, he was named president of Harvard, his appointment to take effect on July 1.

We know very little with any certainty about what happened during those next three weeks as concerns the suit against Shleifer and Harvard, except that at the end of them, the negotiated settlement fell through. On Friday, March 30 2001, the docket notes, “Case no longer referred to ADR (Alternative Dispute Resolution).”

A year later, when Summers was deposed under oath, the government’s attorney asked about his conversations with Shleifer about the affair. He replied, “There were various points prior to my removing myself from the case, not long after I took up the position at Harvard, conversations in which he vented a certain amount with respect to his feeling vis-a-vis the way this was being handled.”

And, at another point, when exactly did the recusal take place? “Not long after becoming president of Harvard. Just when, I don’t recall.”

So the three weeks in March remain an enigma. Many lawyers were involved in those settlement negotiations; sources report a deep division of opinion at the time. Harvard is said to have wanted to settle, Shleifer to have refused, unless Harvard promised to pay his legal bills andf to indemnify him against a finding of damages. Clearly there was friction between him and general counsel Ann Taylor. (At one point, Shleifer complained to Summers that she was among the Harvard officials who were “bad-mouthing” him in the press, according to the president’s deposition.)

If it wasn’t the newly appointed (but not yet inaugurated) Summers who made the argument, directly or indirectly, to defend Shleifer and try the case instead of settling, culminating in the collapse of Judge Mazzone’s mediation, then who was it?

Harvard has acknowledged that former president (and former law school dean) Derek Bok entered the case at some point as an adviser to the Corporation. When did he begin? (Bok has been named interim president once Summers leaves, in June.)

The Wall Street Journal reported last October that Summers had recused himself “at the Corporation’s insistence.” When exactly did the formal action take place?

And if Summers was really recused in the matter, what cautionary measures did he take to clarify his judgment when he dismissed Taylor 2002 as the university’s top lawyer and promoted Iuliano into the job a year later? Granted, superintending the Shleifer case was hardly the general counsel’s only assignment, but it was probably the most important, with potential exposure to the university of well over $100 million, though the loss turned out to be “only” $26.5 million (plus another $15 million or so in lawyers’ fees) in the end.

Harvard’s Institute for International Development is dissolved, and soon Summers will be gone from the president’s office. But Harvard has not made peace with its disastrous Russia project. Giving Summers a university professorship, Harvard’s top academic rank, is one thing. Absolving him from complicity in the decision taken during those three crucial weeks in March 2001, when he had begun involving himself in management but not yet formerly taken office, is something else again. The failed mediation, and the timing of Summers’ recusal, are matters that First Fellow Houghton really should explain.

xxxxx

Why did Larry Summers’ Harvard presidency fail?

“It would be presumptuous to try to aggregate the opinions of thousands of individual faculty members, or to guess at the private thought processes of Corporation members,” and it is far too soon to attempt a history.”

So wrote John Rosenberg last week, just before he reminded readers of his own courageous earlier analysis as editor of Harvard’s alumni magazine. (…[D]istinguished faculty members from a variety of disciplines spoke about their sense that the president, while pursuing change, had claimed ‘sole agency’ to do so, soliciting and then ignoring informed counsel, and resorting to ‘bullying and personal aspersions,’ humiliating faculty members and even silencing their opinions.”

Two other pieces that appeared last week struck me as especially enlightening.

James Traub, who three years ago profiled Summers in The New York Times Magazine, wrote in Slate, …[H]e wasn’t forced out of Harvard because he stood up to political correctness. If anything, Summers was forced out of Harvard because he behaved so boorishly that he provided a bottomless supply of ammunition to his enemies, both the ideologues and the doctrine-free.”

Richard Bradley, author of Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University (and of a blog that keeps track of subsequent developments as well), wrote in The Los Angeles Times, “Summers was ousted not because of a clash of conservative versus liberal ideologies…. The real problem was that Harvard’s faculty rejected the encroachment of Washington politics….Summers spent too much time positioning Harvard to suit prevailing political winds rather than advocating for the university’s traditional separation from the corrupting worlds of politics and commerce.”

Naturally, I think my own earlier analysis also stands up pretty well – that, having gone to college down the street at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Summers was attempting to address a caricature of Harvard that had developed at MIT over the years, and that he possessed no real understanding of the institution of which he had become president, having served only four years as a full professor.

(A number of links may be found when the weekly is posted at www.economicprincipals.com )
 

Now that the earlier anoymous poster mentions it, Mr. Bradley's opinion of The Crimson does seem to have changed since Seward left the paper. I wonder if he was using Seward much like people are claiming the Harvard communications flaks are using current media types to promote "Summers' latest press strategy?"
 

Last poster:

Anonymous #16 is privy to what the Harvard press office is doing. It is not a supposition. It is an announcement.

from Anonymous #16
 

Couple of things.

First, there's some subtext going on here about Zach Seward that I don't understand. I think Zach is a good reporter with strong investigative skills, it's true. But my opinion of the Crimson has nothing to do with his presence on it, or lack thereof. Was I using Zach in some way? That's just inane. Not to mention insulting to him. (Though I'm sure he can stick up for himself.)

Here's what I do think: In general, I think the Crimson reporting has been relatively solid, although the paper has a habit of burying the lede in its stories. (Such as the Protocols of Zion comment.)

I also disagreed with its editorial in support of Summers, thought that its student poll was very poorly done, and thought that the behavior of former Crimson editors who painted Summers' name on their chests was an embarrassment to the paper.

Having said that, I don't have the antipathy to the Crimson that some people posting do.

I do think, however, that the Crimson editors need to be very careful, because all of their mistakes seem to incline in defense of Summers, and after a while, one starts to see a pattern. If I were a professor, after the past week or so, I would be more cautious about talking to the Crimson than, say, a month ago.
 

Did the Sara Ivry piece (mentioned by an anonymous poster above) get published? I didn't see it.
 

Richard, Do you or anyone else reading here know if Summers recused himself from the decision to elevate Shleifer to a named chair in teh economics faculty in 2002? (That normally would be a decision made by the university president, so I wondered if Summers and the Corporation were telling it straight in the letter to the Harvard community released in the Crimson)?
 

To the poster who warned that The New York Times would cling to the claims of anti-Semitism surrounding the Institutional Investor piece, it should be noted that Sara Ivry did absolutely nothing of the sort in a balanced, and damning, account . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/business/media/27mclintick.html

Perhaps that is a sign that the paranoia about the media among the commenters here is, indeed, inane.
 

Sara Ivry's article is available in today's NYT Business section. It seems pretty even-handed--giving credit to this blog for focusing on the Russian scandal, for example. Two interesting points: She apparently found someone to confirm that Shleifer was never disciplined by Harvard (previously, we only heard that there was no "public knowledge" of any discipline), and she gets another hilariously off-base quote from Dershowitz, who pretends to believe that "only twenty or thirty" people at Harvard read McClintick's article.
 

Apropos some of the above, there is an interesting article by Alex Beam in today's Globe

http://www.boston.com/ae/media/articles/2006/02/27/summers_harvard_and_israel/
 

Or, actually, I think the article is a sign not only that the paranoia about the media is inane but that we should be much more skeptical of the predictions (and descriptions of unconfirmed past history) by anonymous people claiming to have internal knowledge of the situation (as the poster on the Ivry article did).
 

I don't quite see that, previous poster. The person did not claim to have seen the Ivry article, just to have heard a line that people were attempting to sell to Ivry. In this case, the reporter may have used her judgement and decided that the anti-semitism line did not make sense. Alex Beam seems to have have come to such a judgement, and we don't really know what line he was fed that made him write his article