A Thought on Excellence
Having finally had the time to read Harry Lewis' essay, I want in particular to highlight one paragraph that strikes me as both utterly right and very well-said:
The lack of confidence of the Harvard faculty in its president was widely caricatured as stemming from a complacent faculty’s resistance to his controversial and innovative ideas, a backlash resulting from his abrasiveness, or more simply an attack by feminist harpies allied with leftist crazies. The reality is that the ideas Summers offered did not meet the Harvard standard. He expressed his “controversial” ideas as one-liners in brief talks, not in essays in which ideas struggled against contrary ideas. There was in his presidency a striking absence of the balanced, thoughtful, and informed analysis that characterizes the academy at its best. Where earlier Harvard presidents, including Summers’s immediate predecessors Derek Bok and Neil Rudenstine, wrote eloquent essays about matters they thought worthy of broad attention, Summers avoided using the written word to provide deep analysis of complex issues.
In researching and writing
Harvard Rules, I spent an enormous amount of time trying to understand Larry Summers' vision for the future of the university. It was a deeply frustrating effort for much the same reasons that Lewis describes. Since Summers would not talk to me, I read and re-read all of his speeches and other statements on education, and they simply were not particularly thoughtful or nuanced. "One-liners" is an appropriate description.
This is not to say that Larry Summers did not have a thoughtful and nuanced vision of Harvard's future—just that he never put it into public words. One got the sense that Summers did not want to be pinned down; that he was in such a hurry to implement change—the change
he felt Harvard needed—he wanted to skip the phases of debating that change and building consensus. So he said as little as possible—because once the words were out there, the Harvard community would have something to discuss.
Why? I would hazard a couple of reasons. Impatience is one. Arrogance is another; with a handful of exceptions, I don't think Summers felt there were many at Harvard from whom he could learn, or from whom he needed to learn.
But there's another, more subtle reason: Larry Summers avoided his weaknesses. In tennis terms, he ran around his backhand.
Summers is not a good communicator, and he has certainly never been a skilled diplomat or consensus-builder. (Just ask the finance ministers of various Asian and South American countries.) He likes vigorous questioning, led by him, and he likes to deliver monologues; but he does not like conversations, dialogues, give-and-take, or being aggressively questioned himself. Moreover, he does not like to write. University presidents often publish collections of their essays and speeches. Such a book published by Summers would be short and, given his reputation as a provocateur, surprisingly dull. (Only in response to questions does Summers truly become vivid.) And, frankly,
much of it would be ghostwritten.
Summers' leadership style—his secrecy, his disinclination to reveal this thoughts and intentions, the paucity of his writings—flows directly from his avoidance of these intellectual dislikes.
