The New Republic Weighs In on Harvard
Marty Peretz shows this week why his magazine, The New Republic, is still such a player in Harvard's intellectual and public life.
First off, Steven Pinker writes about University of Utah researchers who conducted a study of Jewish intelligence and found it a) genetically-based and b) high. (The links are probably subscriber only--sorry.) The relationship between genetics and intelligence is, of course, a subject on which Pinker has written and thought about a great deal; it was largely from his work,
The Blank Slate, that Larry Summers drew the material for his remarks about women and science.
The controversy over those remarks is the unspoken subtext of this article.
As Pinker writes,
In recent decades, the standard response to claims of genetic differences has been to deny the existence of intelligence, to deny the existence of races and other genetic groupings, and to subject proponents to vilification, censorship, and at times physical intimidation. Aside from its effects on liberal discourse, the response is problematic. Reality is what refuses to go away when you do not believe in it, and progress in neuroscience and genomics has made these politically comforting shibboleths (such as the non-existence of intelligence and the non-existence of race) untenable.
Physical intimidation? In any case, you can be sure that the controversy over Summers' NBER speech is on Pinker's mind throughout this article.
Following Pinker's essay, Martha Nussbaum, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, reviews Harvey Mansfield's Manliness and finds it impotent. It's such a devastating review, actually, that one almost wants to look away to spare the author embarrassment.
Writes Nussbaum: When we compare Mansfield to our decent-if-not-very-flashy [hypothetical philosopher], it seems appalling that Mansfield has spent decades teaching great philosophical texts to undergraduates who cannot easily tell a careful reading from a careless one, or low standards from high ones--especially when the teacher keeps portraying himself as the bold defender of standards. Undergraduates typically take a while to learn to analyze the arguments in Plato logically and to care about things like validity, ambiguity, and contradiction. Many of them, then, will not notice how riddled with logical error and verbal ambiguity their teacher's pronouncements are. That is the sort of thing that they are in class to learn. But surely other, older people know. How did someone whose every paragraph is a stake in Socrates's heart come to be an exemplar of philosophical seriousness?
Ouch.
And finally, TNR owner Marty Peretz uses the magazine's Diarist column to defend Larry Summers and attack Summers' critics. The column is called "High Ground," though online it's blurbed as "Lawrence Summers and His Enemies."
Peretz doesn't soften his blows. He dubs Jeremy Knowles, the interim FAS dean, an "oleaginous retread"; calls Corporation senior fellow Jamie Houghton "the nonexecutive chairman of Corning Inc.," which may be technically true but is written to suggest something else (Peretz calls Corning "the company founded by [Houghton's] ancestors more than a century and a half ago," and we know just what he means by that); and says that Nan Keohane is the most overrated figure in academia. "The book to which she owes her reputation—I think it was her Ph.D. dissertation...."
I repeat: Ouch.
I know and like Marty Peretz, who hired me long ago to be an intern at the New Republic, for which I will always be grateful. And I respect Marty; he's absolutely fearless, even if sometimes his words are...injudicious. (So, for that matter, are mine, sometimes.)
Rhetorically, Peretz is Summers' most efficacious defender. He ignores entirely the intellectually defunct curricular review, the Shleifer scandal, the budget deficit, and—perhaps most important—the absence of an articulated and serious vision of the meaning of the university and its future.
Peretz is, however, devastating on the subject of faculty critics of Summers. The ranks of these Summers detractors included those who simply sup off Harvard, while his supporters largely consisted of scholars who add luster to it....
Let us remember that one of the most vigorous of those supporters was Harvey Mansfield, who was just gutted and left for bled by Peretz's own magazine. Not much luster there.
Peretz also throws in a reminder that he has money, quite a lot of it, and knows other people who do—and apparently would have given large sums of it to Harvard were it not for the ouster of Summers.
My own impression of wealthy alumni who were once my students is that Summers made them more generous; and, as for the future, they will wait and see. I know of at least three gifts in the $100 million range that were very likely to materialize and now are dicey.
Well, maybe. Gifts of $100 million that were "very likely to materialize" could have materialized before now, but didn't. (In fact, one prematurely publicized gift, Larry Ellison's $20 million, has simply vanished.) If these supporters believed in Summers so much, why didn't they give the gift as an expression of their support?
It is easy to say that one was on the verge of giving a huge donation until.....
And then, of course, one can assume the existence of donors who sat on the sideline because of Summers' presence.
We will probably never know the true story of alumni giving at Larry Summers' Harvard. But if contributions were truly setting the records that are claimed, Summers would still, in all likelihood, be president—faculty opposition be damned.
Peretz's argument has other flaws. He points to undergraduate support of Summers and writes that "the most astute constituency at Harvard, it turns out, is the cohort of undergraduates."
Never mind that two paragraphs before, Peretz criticized these very same students for their ignorance, writing, Remember C.P. Snow's lecture about "The Two Cultures"? Well, in 1959, when he delivered it, undergraduates at least knew something of both cultures. Now they know neither Middlemarch nor genomes, neither the Missa Solemnis nor quarks.
Well, which is it? Are they astute? Or ignorami? Or are they ignorami who astutely recognized that Summers' devotion to their well-being meant the elimination of requirements they don't like and a new student pub?
I don't believe that. But it is the logical, if inadvertent, implication of Peretz's own argument.
Who was intimidated by Summers? Peretz asks in the end. "Only those who couldn't answer his questions."
I imagine that was sometimes true. In Harvard Rules, I recount the story of one undergraduate whom Summers humiliated in a meeting because the student asked him a challenging question based on a faulty premise. And perhaps there were some who could have responded to Summers but simply couldn't handle his aggressive style. When you call a law professor stupid in front of the entire law school faculty, that can intimidate people.
But it's a wildly unfair generalization. A fairer generalization might be that people whose professional future lay in the hands of a man widely seen to play favorites and punish personal critics were intimidated by him. People who worked for Summers and feared that disagreeing with him or falling into his bad graces would cost them their jobs were intimidated by him. I know this because I interviewed many of those people for Harvard Rules.
Marty Peretz, who has been very fortunate financially, doesn't have a job and doesn't need one. More power to him for that—and because of that. It helps give him an unusual perspective on Harvard. But sometimes, that perspective is more than wrong; it is callow.
