Have you read the New Yorker article on the Harvard professor (of Chinese descent) who is trying to wrest credit for solving the Poincare Conjecture from the Russian mathematician who did solve it in order to claim that two Chinese mathematicians working under him solved it? Fascinating study in questionable academic ethics - worth an item when you're back on line.
 

The Summers interview is bad bad bad. A glossy handjob. I thought Harvard Magazine was supposed to maintain a smidge of independence from the University. Isn't that why Mass. Hall trudged out all those new magazines?
 

I haven't read it yet, no, but thanks for the recommendation—I will.
 

It’s one of the last gorgeous nights of the summer, but who could resist the invitation to comment….

First, in response to anonymous above: OK, maybe the editor’s retrospective pulled its punches. But two points: (1) Although HM is independent of HU, it is reliant on the contributions of alumni for a large share of its budget. And how many alums are anxious to read yet another retrospective dumping on a president who was fired? (2) The retrospective does make the very important point that one of the major legacies of LS is the massive growth in the presidential-provostial bureaucracy (ironic given LS’s complaints in the accompanying interview about how bureaucracy prevents change and leadership). It is good to see the count of increase in provost and vice president positions. Even better would be to see a full count of the number of staff employed by these new offices and the budget devoted to them.

So I think that HM has adopted a brilliant strategy: let LS talk long enough and he’s bound to say something that makes him look bad. His interview is an amazingly clumsy exercise in revisionist history. Let’s take a closer look:

• The vision that LS “articulated” “was a product of a great deal of deliberation within the Harvard community during the search process.” A contorted definition of community, maybe. There was essentially no faculty or student input into the search process. What community is he referring to here, exactly?
• The second part of LS’s vision of the future involves the “transformation in human nature” brought about by progress in the life sciences. This is either nonsense or seriously scary. No serious life scientists that I know believe that their studies are creating a transformation in human nature; instead, their efforts are about understanding basic biological processes, including perhaps insight into human nature. If LS is suggesting that the point of life sciences today is to effect a transformation in human nature, this is deeply unsettling, for reasons that hardly need to be elaborated.
• After talking in completely anodyne terms about the importance of global inequality, progress in the study of biology, and the need for leadership (institutional or individual?), LS goes on to assert that these observations constitute a challenging “vision” for the future of Harvard. Come on.
• Simple factual error number 1: it is not the case that “we now do have freshman seminars for all students….” Only about half of all College freshmen take freshmen seminars. Not enough seminars are offered to accommodate all freshmen. Doing so would involve either reducing the number of lecture courses offered (increasing yet further the enrollment of each lecture course) or staffing freshmen seminars with visitors, lecturers, etc. Beyond this, many freshmen continue to find the demands of their concentrations (particularly in the sciences) so intense that they cannot spare the time to take an entertaining but not required seminar in their first year.
• Second factual error immediately follows: we now do have “faculty led junior seminars in all the major departments.” What exactly constitutes a “major” department? Surely that classification should include the Economics department. And it is true that Economics has just introduced junior seminars. But these are only “faculty-led” if you adopt a pretty generous definition of “faculty.” Just check out the 2006-07 course catalogue.
• Student-faculty contact is a big problem at Harvard, all agree. But LS’s suggestion that this “will be helped by the major expansion of the faculty” is misguided. As his comments suggest, this expansion will largely occur in the sciences. In intellectual terms, fully justified. But it completely misses the fundamental problems of faculty-student contact. One is just sheer numbers: if Harvard wanted to get the same faculty-student ratio as someplace like Princeton, it would need to increase the number of FAS faculty by something like 500, not the 50 being contemplated. (Never mind LS’s desire to increase the size of the undergraduate body, exacerbating the faculty-student ratio issue.) Second is distribution. FAS faculty are about evenly distributed among the 3 divisions (sciences – social sciences – humanities). But half of Harvard undergraduates concentrate in the social sciences. This is where the huge crunch in faculty-student arises, with big concentrations like Government, Economics, and History simply unable to provide the small courses, good advising, and close contact with faculty that students demand. Really want to address this problem? Give each of those departments 30 more faculty, at least, and require all faculty in those departments (including Economics) to teach at least 2 undergraduate courses a year.
• LS says the concept of general education has to change so that students actually learn more science. I couldn’t agree more strongly. But during the period that he was closely involved with the curricular review, he opposed any reform that would actually forward this agenda, instead focusing on more showy reforms like sending students abroad for a few weeks or making them take a freshman seminar.
• Another factual error: LS refers to “the decision we’ve made to create a new school of engineering.” Who is this “we?” Yes, the DEAS plans to transform itself into an SEAS, and that will probably in the end happen. But to claim this as a done deal is way premature.
• LS complains about departments that allow one or two faculty to block “great appointments.” Just can’t resist pointing out the irony that his department, Economics, is probably the major offender in this regard.
• The claim that there has been no change in departmental structure in 40 years is silly. Departments have split, created wings, created joint concentrations, etc. The biological sciences this last year just reformed themselves to offer 6 rather than 2 concentrations. Yeah, some of the smaller humanities departments should probably be consolidated. But this is hardly a major governance issue. And how surprised could someone who worked in DC be that established institutions protect their interests?
• The statement about “our students’ desire for a common calendar in all the Harvard schools” is just laughable. I thought LS was an avid reader of the Crimson. How did he miss all the articles and editorials bloviating about how horrible a change in the calendar would be? Exactly where has this student demand for calendar change been expressed?
• The charge that FAS is somehow protected from the competitive pressures that the professional schools face is absurd. FAS finds it harder than ever to recruit and retain faculty and students. We are in a highly competitive environment, and struggling to adapt to it. To suggest that somehow the KSG, HBS, or HLS are more responsive to a competitive environment seems far-fetched – just ask students who have defected to their competitors. If there is one school at Harvard that seems to have kept its competitive edge in objective terms, it’s the College.
• The interview concludes, as it begins, with an allusion to the growth in the endowment. This should make us all very happy. But it doesn’t, because of the artificial and punitive approach to budgeting that has been adopted under LS. I’ve gone on far too long to elaborate on this, but let me try to put the point sharply: if a major goal of the university is to enhance faculty-student contact, why is FAS being taxed and subjected to non-negotiable budget demands rather than being allowed to share in this lovely increase in the endowment to engage in a major increase in the size of its faculty?
• Overall, the tone of this interview, with its laudatory treatment of the professional schools, is astounding. Given LS’s testy relations with most of the professional schools, it seems downright disingenuous. It is the case that LS has had or has appointed deans of some of the schools – HBS, KSG, HLS – who are willing to put up with being publicly bullied and humiliated by him in exchange for a few bones, like their nice treatment in this interview. Suggesting that this model of “governance” is appropriate for structuring the education of undergraduate and Ph.D. students at Harvard is just pitiful.

Sorry to post this anonymously, but I am truly embarrassed to be spending one of the last beautiful nights of the summer getting worked up about the dear departed leader.
 

This post says it very well indeed, and with more details than many of us coulld muster. Well said, 10:59 -- but unless you're a junior faculty member or hope to be a dean why no give us your John Hancock!
 

This is trivial but one correction to 11.59... undergraduates, as represented by The Crimson's editorial voice, *do* want a change in the calendar. They complain about having to worry over exams / papers over Christmas & New Year break; they worry about losing out on internships and summer jobs that start before they could possibly arrive to take them up; and also end too soon. Basically they want alignment not so much with the rest of Harvard, but with American colleges generally.
 

Anonymous 10:59 made many admirable points, but did not comment on this astonishing paragraph from the Summers interview:

“Another part of resisting complacency is making sure we hire professors before they do their best work, rather than after. I was honored to have a chance to approve the tenure of two people from within the philosophy department, which is one more than the number who received tenure from within during the twentieth century. And there are many more examples. This can bring about a great change at Harvard over time if it is maintained, because it is often the young people who develop their careers here who prove to be the best teachers and the ones who are most committed to their students.”

Here we find typical LS made-up “facts” (five people personally known to me, including myself, were tenured from within in the Philosophy Department in the twentieth century post WWII, and I’d guess about three more from earlier); a completely bogus characterization of the general FAS practice of hiring scholars who have already shown themselves to be leaders in their subjects (others can give their own examples, but all the philosophers hired with tenure from elsewhere in the last fifty years did their best work while at Harvard, as was expected when they were hired, and this includes Rawls’ Theory of Justice, published seven years after Rawls came to Harvard, Putnam’s Meaning of Meaning, published ten years after his arrival, and Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published four years after his); and, finally, an assertion based on no grounds whatsoever that those promoted from within are more dedicated teachers (there are examples on both sides I could give, and there are no studies I know of that go beyond the anecdotal).
 

Prof. Goldfarb makes a very important point that goes well beyond the important correction regarding the Philosophy Department. Summers' insidious campaign to justify himself at the expense of the faculty, Harvard, and now other institutions of higher education is disgraceful and damaging.