Shots In The Dark: Drew Faust in Harvard Magazine

Monday, July 02, 2007

Drew Faust in Harvard Magazine

With his characteristic eloquence and understatement, John Rosenberg profiles Drew Faust in this month's Harvard magazine.

Rosenberg's thesis, which would provide the theme for an interesting book:

Scholarly curiosity has motivated her research and writing, aligning her own career experience closely with that of the professors she will now lead. But her subjects and discoveries, unlike those of most of her former peers, bear an almost uncanny relevance to thinking about the culture of elite research universities. For after a century of intellectual and institutional preeminence, universities have entered an era when their assumptions and performance face questions both from within and from the wider society.

Other nuggets from the article:

—Faust was treated for breast cancer in 1988 and thyroid cancer in 1999. (Has that been reported elsewhere? If so, I missed it.)

—Faust credits Neil Rudenstine as being the driving force in her transition from scholarship to academic administration

—Faust calls "This Republic of Suffering," due from Knopf next spring, her "scholarly denouement."

—Faust wants to restart university-wide academic planning

—Faust wants the arts at Harvard to be comprehensively reconsidered, saying that this is "a world in which the arts are taking on much more importance in undergraduate life in our peer institutions."

(I think this is a nice way of saying that the arts at Harvard are lousy; so far as I can tell, there's no great shift in the importance of the arts at Yale, Princeton and Stanford.)

Faust is circumspect, as always. And as you might expect, so is the article.

¶ 7:21 AM

Comments:

Also in Harvard magazine these thoughts from Derek Bok, which Faust would do well to heed. Do they represent another not so subtle criticism of Summers?

Listening to discussions about reorganizing universities, I have discovered that much of the talk comes down to a desire to expand the power of university leaders at the expense of the faculty. Proposals of this kind are by no means unique to Harvard. Recent writings on higher education, often by past presidents, include the same recommendation. The most common justification is that the world is changing so fast (“at warp speed,” to use the term currently in vogue) that there is simply no time to engage in widespread faculty consultation without missing out on important opportunities.
...
Such pronouncements sound plausible; they play upon a pervasive unease that changes are sweeping over America that existing institutions are unable to address adequately. Nevertheless, the diagnosis does not ring true to my experience. In four decades of observing the world of higher education, I have yet to encounter a significant problem that developed at anything approaching “warp speed,” let alone a speed too rapid to allow for thoughtful deliberation. ... Yet even here [in the "world of science"], the problem is not that opportunities pass too quickly but that their full significance is not clearly perceived soon enough. If that is the difficulty, the remedy is not to give the administration more power but to create better mechanisms for scanning the environment to alert university leaders at an earlier stage to emerging problems and possibilities.

Looking further at proposals to strengthen the hand of those in charge, I suspect that they proceed from an unspoken premise that unilateral decisions by the leadership will somehow be bolder, sounder, and more creative than decisions arrived at through faculty debate. This assumption has deep roots in the lore that has grown up around higher education. Countless tales have been told through the years about the inherent conservatism and political infighting of university faculties. ... The cautiousness of faculties has likewise been celebrated by a series of authors such as F.M. Cornford, who claimed (tongue in cheek) that “nothing is ever done until everyone is convinced that it ought to be done, and has been convinced for so long that it is now time to do something else.”

It is certainly true that professors can resist change and that, like most human beings, they are often loath to give up their prerogatives. For all that, however, American universities have fared quite well over the past 50 years, the very period when faculty power reached its zenith. As the international rankings attest, they have done better than most of our more hierarchical institutions in holding their own against foreign competition. Moreover, when I try to recall serious errors of judgment on the part of universities, I find it easier to think of examples beyond the customary purview of faculties, such as the excesses of intercollegiate athletics or the money lost through expensive forays into for-profit distance education, than to list comparable mistakes at the hands of professors.

It is also well to remember that there are severe limits to what one can accomplish by adding power to the administration. In universities like Harvard, where professors do not belong to unions, the most important activities under faculty control have to do with teaching and research. Such functions are not likely to be improved by removing them from the faculty and placing them under executive control. No one ever raised the level of scholarship by ordering professors to write better books, nor has the quality of teaching ever improved by telling instructors to give more interesting classes. In these domains, good work depends on the talent and enthusiasm of professors. Much of the time taken up by faculty deliberation, however frustrating it may seem, is not wasted. Rather, it is a necessary process for generating the sense of ownership and shared commitment that is needed to elicit the best teaching and research.

# posted by Anonymous : July 2, 2007 10:37 PM

Wow, extremely thoughtful and significant comments from former President Bok. I still need to read his book.....

SE

# posted by Standing Eagle : July 3, 2007 3:00 PM

Do you mean the specific dates of treatment, or the fact that she is a cancer survivor? I believe at least the latter is known... in fact, a commenter alluded to it in this thread:

http://richardbradley.net/2007/02/gender-double-standard.html

# posted by Waiting Emu : July 5, 2007 1:00 AM

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