Shots In The Dark

I've been frustrated with some of the reviews of Harvard Rules, because they're so ideologically predictable. Liberals haven't been asked to review the book. Conservatives (like the Wall Street Journal's Diane Ravitch) don't like the book, because they've circled the wagons around Larry Summers. So they criticize the book, without actually pointing to anything wrong inside it.

I'll link to some of those reviews as soon as I can find them online--Ravitch's appeared in the New York Sun—because, what the heck, if I can dish it out, I ought to be able to take it.

Sometimes, though, you get a review that you really want to share. Like this one from Publisher's Weekly:

<<In an attempt to place Harvard's current president, Larry Summers, in historical perspective, this intriguing study explores his policies, leadership style and previous career in reference to other presidents as far back as Charles W. Eliot (president from 1869-1909). Bradley, author of the bestselling American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, writes with tactful reserve about the backroom intrigues and infighting that have characterized Summer's presidency, always showing both sides of the issues-and the book is no less gripping for it. These struggles, involving such luminaries as Cornel West, Skip Gates, Robert Rubin and Alan Dershowitz, are riveting even when handled with kid gloves. But Bradley addresses much more than simply the contentious start to Summer's tenure at Harvard. On the one hand, he offers an insightful look at how the role of the American university president has changed from a moral and intellectual leader independent of political and corporate power to the administrator of an institution largely dependent on corporate and government largesse for its continued existence. On the other, he places Harvard's development and growth in a larger context, exploring its shifting goals, pedagogy and values in reference to other prestigious American universities such as Princeton, Stanford and Yale, as well as to American society in general. On a whole host of issues-including unionization, civil rights, affirmative action and militarism-Bradley uses events at Harvard to illuminate wider social trends and vice versa. Although Harvard alums will naturally gravitate toward this timely volume, it will also appeal to anyone concerned with the evolving relationship between higher education and American society.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.>>>

Thanks, PW. That is exactly what I was trying to do—use Harvard as a microcosm for trends in American universities generally while detailing a specific and compelling narrative. I'll be honest: this makes my day.

A theme of Bombardieri's article is that the humanists at Harvard feel slighted by Summers' emphasis on the sciences. It's a fair point: Summers clearly does consider the sciences more important to the university's future, both financial and intellectual, than are the humanities. He doesn't say that explicitly, but every action he takes suggests it, and his manifest lack of enthusiasm for the humanities reinforces the impression.

But if the humanists are on the defensive, they may have only themselves to blame. They do not make their case well. And as we all know, much of their work during the past decade or so has been so insular, so out of touch, and so unconcerned with connecting scholarship to the world outside their field, it's easy to see why Summers might consider the humanities largely irrelevant to the greater scheme of things.

I know this from my own experience in graduate school at Harvard, where I would read what some of my peers and professors were working on, and think, my God, how could anyone possibly care about this stuff? You'd need a translator just to get past the jargon, and even then, what was the point? Why would anyone care except fifty other people in the field?

So Summers has picked a fight. It's time for the humanists to respond. They need to a) reconsider their own project, their own raison d'etre, and b) make the case for the urgency, vitality and relevance of the humanities to the modern university. Take the fight back to Summers. Or, as he would say, prove him wrong.

It's time for the humanists to stand up for themselves and say, this is why we are important. This is why we matter.

If they can't do that, maybe Summers has a point. If they can, maybe he'll take note.

Bombardieri's article does contain one particularly telling insight—the photograph. It shows Summers walking into Lowell lecture hall at the start of the most revent faculty meeting. To Summers' left is a man who appears to be escorting Summers, and two men behind him look like members of a security detail.

The first man is university provost Steven Hyman, one of the university's highest-ranking academic officials. Whether by choice or no, Hyman has been reduced to a chaperone's role, flanking and protecting his celebrity boss as Summers is chased by a cameraman—he's like the guy who carries Michael Jackson's umbrella as Jackson makes his way into court. You have to think that this is not why Hyman became provost.

And if the two men are indeed bodyguards...

Has a Harvard president ever needed a bodyguard before? Or enlisted the university provost to watch his back? This is the kind of thing that gives rise to the impression of an imperial presidency.

Marcella Bombardieri, the Globe's education writer, weighs in with a piece on Larry's management style. Her argument: Summers' critics feel that he runs the university like a CEO or, some say, an "autocrat."

Marcella's piece is fine, though it reads like she's still having trouble getting people to detail specific incidents in which Summers exhibits such behavior. But I think that people are really dancing around the issue. It's not just that Summers runs Harvard like a CEO; there are plenty of chief executive officers who are inclusive, lead by example, inspiring, a firm hand in a velvet glove. I think you could find plenty of CEOs who could make the transition to university president without the carnage that Harvard has seen since Summers arrived.

So forget about the CEO language. That's not the fundamental issue. The fundamental issue is that people see Summers as a really bad CEO, whose management style actually detracts from the work of the university.

The truth is, Summers' critics see him as an arrogant, bullying, inconsiderate jerk—the Michael Eisner of Harvard. They don't think a man with this personality can lead the university. And they doubt his ability, at this point in his life, to change. After all, he was supposed to have changed already—when critics in Washington leveled exactly the same charge against Summers. And that makeover obviously didn't take.

But this is a tough thing to say in public. It can sound petty; it can make the accuser look weak,. It opens the faculty up to criticism from conservative pundits who rush to defend Summers merely because some apparently left-wing faculty are criticizing him, regardless of the substance of their complaints.

Here's Harvard's problem, though: If the faculty don't articulate this complaint, they'll lose the PR war. They might lose it even if they do. Either way, when the dust is settled, the anti-Summers feelings won't change. It'd be as if Howell Raines stayed on at the New York Times despite the strength of the feeling against him.

I'm not saying an organization can't function in such an environment. Summers is a man of remarkable energy who desperately wants to revive his presidency, and I have no doubt that he's going to work extremely hard to do so.

But how well Harvard functions in this such an environment...

At some point you do have to wonder if Summers is fighting for his job more because of the personal stake he has in keeping it, or because he really, truly believes that for him to stay on is in the best interests of the university. Now, that would be an interesting question for one of Summers' critics to pose this Tuesday.

Reuters reports on a small but symbolically telling controversy at Harvard: a new and administration-sanctioned service called Dormaid that allows students to hire a maid to clean their rooms. Yesterday the Crimson editorialized against Dormaid, arguing that the service would introduce another distinction between the haves and the have-nots at Harvard.

I agree. In Harvard Rules, I wrote with some skepticism about the student job of "dorm crew," in which some students clean other students' bathrooms. That creates unhealthy divisions between students who need the money from that job and those who sit back while others clean their toilets.

Some might say that hiring working-class men and women to clean student bathrooms would create similar problems. Maybe. But that's not the only option. How about simply expecting students to clean up after themselves?

This is an easy way for Harvard to teach its students some sense of responsibility, perhaps even that dreaded word "character." Isn't that part of an "education"?

Making every student do work that they might otherwise think of as beneath them is something I have some experience with. I happened to go to a small prep school, Groton, which was well-stocked with the children of affluent lawyers, financiers, and businesspeople. (My own father was a magazine editor, my mother a paralegal.)

Partly to save money and partly to curb the students' sense of entitlement, Groton had long mandated something called "work program." Every student was required to help with manual labor—whether it was cleaning classrooms, mopping bathrooms, or washing dishes in the dining hall. No one was exempt.

Of course, at the time we all thought it was a pain in the ass. And certainly it wasn't as if we were compelled to work on an assembly line or in a coal mine. But looking back, I do think that work program instilled in the students an appreciation for the kinds of tedious and sometimes degrading jobs that some people who weren't born into such fortunate families will never escape—and that the vast majority of us would never have to depend on.

As Harvard extends its efforts to recruit children from lower-income families, the official approval of Dormaid takes the university in exactly the wrong direction. On the other hand, maybe this is the direction a university headed by a free-market economist will inevitably go. The student who founded Dormaid, a sophomore named Michael Kopko, defended his business like this:

<<"In a free economy it's all about choice, and the Crimson is trying to take choice away from people," the student entrepreneur told Reuters. "I think it's a very uneconomic and narrow view. It's essentially against creating wealth for society.">.

How fascinating—and depressing—that Kopko defines Harvard as a "free economy," a values-free university which is essentially nothing more than an economic marketplace. When I talk in Harvard Rules about "the struggle for the soul of the world's most important university," this is exactly what I mean.

Some interesting stories today. This Boston Herald article discusses the odds of either motion on Summers' leadership passing, and considers them low. I think the important thing is the expectations game. Will Randy Matory's motion pass? Maybe not. But if 35% of the faculty in attendance votes for it, that's still a pretty significant base of support for a proposal that makes everyone uncomfortable. Will Theda Skockpol's more compromising motion pass? Maybe. But how much support does it need to have to mean anything? 51 percent? Seventy-five percent?

This Bloomberg piece discusses Harvard's "faceless" Corporation. It's a hugely important subject for the Harvard community. The Corporation chose Summers in a highly secretive process, and since Summers has been appointed, he's had the opportunity to choose four members of the seven-member Corporation (and Summers makes five). If Harvard were a company—and it is, in many ways—you'd say that it has a governance problem. And it does. This is the governing board of a tax-free institution which receives almost half a billion dollars a year in federal aid—but the Corporation refuses to publish an agenda for its monthly meetings, any minutes of those meetings, or meet with the press. It is the smallest governing body, so far as I can tell, of any university in the United States. And it's certainly the most secretive. Maybe the faculty should have a vote of no-confidence in the Corporation....

And finally, you can listen to me talking about Harvard Rules on WBUR here.

Thanks so much to the 70-something people who braved the record-setting cold last night to come talk about Harvard Rules at the Old South Meeting House. And thanks to Alex Beam for his skilled moderation, and to the good folks at the Ford Hall Forum who staged the program. These people have a great speakers' list, and not just because they invited me... I'm tempted to head back to Boston to hear the Boston Herald's Howie Carr talk about the fabulous Bulger brothers.

Apologies for the technical difficulties yesterday, which resulted in essentially the same item being posted twice. I blame it on Kinko's, a computer that crashed, and the eccentric Cantabridgian at the terminal next to mine who kept trying to engage me in conversation even as he listened to his Walkman and sang (loudly, but not well) and repeatedly offered technical help to the young women working nearby, who rather nervously—and quite understandably—declined.

Larry Summers' press secretary, the much-debated Lucie McNeil, is leaving Summers' employ for greener pastures--the National Geographic Society. The Boston Globe has a little item on the news, including a reference to one of my more curious encounters with her.

McNeil says she had planned to leave before the latest brouhaha, and who could blame her? Her job couldn't have been easy. Nonetheless, she enjoyed a less-than-stellar reputation with reporters who covered Summers, and was known for either a) rudely keeping them at a distance, or b) yelling at reporters whose work she disapproved of.

The question I could never figure out: Was this just her nature, or was she merely following orders?

Either way, it'll be interesting--and telling--to see who her replacement will be.

And has anyone kept track of personnel turnover at Harvard in the past few years? I'd bet a lot that it has never been higher.

Dateline: Kinko's, Harvard Square

It's wonderful to be back in Cambridge and Boston...despite the fact that my arrival coincided with a bitterly cold blizzard. Today the temperature is expected to hit a record low for this day in March.

But despite the cold outside, the reception here has been warm. Thanks very much to everyone at WGBH, CN8 Nitebeat, WBUR and Fox News for having me on. And thanks too to the good people at the Harvard Bookstore and the Harvard Coop, who have been so supportive of Harvard Rules, even though, as one bookseller told me, "lots of people buy it and then hide it under another book."

Ah, well--there are worse things than being a guilty pleasure.

I also spent a rewarding couple of hours last night with the reporters and editors of the Harvard Crimson, who plied me with alcohol and then asked tough questions. (These folks have a future in journalism.) I've read and relied upon so much of their work, it was a real pleasure to put faces to names. Stay in touch.

I'm headed to LaGuardia to catch the Delta Shuttle to Boston, so the posts may slow for the next couple of days. If you're interested in putting a face/voice to a blog, I'll be on WGBH tonight—don't know when exactly, it's taped—then CN8's "Nitebeat"—that's really how they spell it—between 7 and 8 PM, and then on New England Cable News between 8:15 and 9 (after which I will promptly collapse).

On Wednesday March 9, I'll be discussing Harvard Rules on Fox 25 News sometime after 8:15 but before 9 AM, and then on WBUR's "Here and Now," from 9:15 to 9:45. And of course Wednesday night I'll be at the Ford Hall Forum at the Old South Meeting House, starting at 6:30..... Tune in if you can; I'll be doing my best to be a) presentable and b) coherent.

Two thoughts on the motions below: One, that there's a choice thickens the plot. And two, Randy Matory has dispensed with the political language of his earlier motion for a straight-up vote of no-confidence. There's something quite powerful about that stark, solitary sentence. It certainly clarifies the issue.

I don't know how the faculty will see Theda Skocpol's motion now that Matory has given them a viable alternative. Will his motion be seen as too strong? Will Skocpol's be considered too conciliatory, too soft? Or will people vote for both?

Incidentally, the last item on the docket is discussion of the curricular review. The faculty will almost surely run out of time before getting to that...leaving just two more faculty meetings before the end of the year. The likelihood that nothing serious will happen with the review before 2006 is growing.

The agenda for the March 15th faculty meeting has been e-mailed around, and the following two motions are on the docket:

<< 1. Professor J. L. Matory will move that the Faculty vote on
the following resolution:

The Faculty lacks confidence in the leadership of
Lawrence H. Summers.


2. Professor T. Skocpol will move that the Faculty vote
to affirm the following statement:

The Faculty regrets the President's mid-January statements
about women in science and the adverse consequences of those
statements for individuals and for Harvard; and the Faculty also
regrets aspects of the President's managerial approach as
discussed in recent meetings of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The Faculty appreciates the President's stated intent to address
these issues, and seeks to meet the challenges facing Harvard
in ways that are collegial and consistent with longstanding faculty
responsibilities in institutional governance.">>

Larry Summers has had one big advantage in the public relations battle over his NBER remarks: the paucity of women on newspaper editorial pages. (Quick—name one female columnist who writes for the Times and isn't Maureen Dowd?)

Now a debate over this issue has spilled into the press. Former Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich is attacking Los Angeles Times op-ed editor Michael Kinsley for not doing enough to get women onto the op-ed page of the LAT. Kinsley, Estrich argues, has a "Larry Summers problem." She also says some other stuff that sounds way over the line of common decency.

Harvard Rules hit the bestseller list this week—in Boston, anyway. The book debuted at #10 on the Boston Globe hardcover non-fiction list. Since a book about the future and character of a university isn't exactly a guaranteed bestseller, I'm pleased and grateful for the support. For a point of reference, consider what's #9: He's Just Not That Into You.

Now, that's going to be tough to beat....

Thanks, too, to Vanity Fair, which lists Harvard Rules in its "Hot Type" column in its April issue.

While Larry Summers is off to a Harvard conference in Mexico City, I keep hearing rumbles from campus of impending unrest....

Folks at Harvard are buzzing about two stories in the new issue of Business Week. (Subscriber-only on the web, sorry.) The first, a news story titled "Harvard No Longer Most Likely to Succeed," discusses the Summers' fallout on his administration's agenda. The second is an editorial, and it's called "Harvard's Lessons in Management—Summers' Provocative Style May Push His Lofty Goals Out of Reach."

Coming from a conservative, business-friendly organ like BW, these articles are a pretty tough one-two punch; they'll get read by Harvard's money people, and, more than the faculty, they constitute the bottom line.

The editorial is particularly wounding: "Summers joins the ranks of recent leaders brought in to generate change in organizations only to misfire and fail," it says, lumping Summers in with Carly Fiorina of Hewlett Packard and Howell Raines of the New York Times. "Creative organizations, be they universities or corporations, cannot be coerced into change. In the
21st century, they must be coached, cajoled, and coaxed."

Of course, there's one big difference between Summers and Raines and Fiorina: He still has his job. It's an irony that Summers wants to make Harvard more like big business—hiring consultants, limiting employee access to the press, closer partnering with the private sector, almost doubling the president's salary—except when it comes to the job security of the CEO.

Still, that Summers remains president is what makes this story so compelling. Can a 50-year-old man famous for his brilliance—and infamous for his arrogance—really, truly change?

The Crimson reports on a remarkable meeting last Friday between Larry Summers and Harvard parents. Summers began by making a joke about his reputation for being provocative. But the question-and-answer session later got hot, as parents pressed Summers on his remarks about women in science. Here's the key exchange, as reported by Zachary M. Seward:

<<“You should know that there are a large number of parents who are glad that you are here to bring a degree of non-emotional common sense to the University,” said one father to broad but reserved applause.

“And there are a lot who think you’re a jerk,” called out another dad from the rear of Sanders Theater, drawing scattered applause but mostly silence from the crowd.>>

Summers reportedly looked shaken by the incident. My first reaction to that is, Who wouldn't be? But on second thought, it makes me think that the Harvard president may still not realize just how much his comments angered some listeners. Maybe that's something you have to feel...emotionally.

A smart piece today by Drake Bennett in the Boston Globe discusses the absence of anti-porn feminists from the current debate over pornography's growing popularity. It's social conservatives versus libertarians and First Amendment advocates, Bennett argues. Where are Catherine McKinnon, et al?

I haven't followed this debate closely, partly because it doesn't seem like there's been much of one. Porn chic mystifies me, and despite the fact that Jenna Jameson and I are published by the same company, I'm disturbed by it. Jameson, I understand, has actually had a pretty tough life. But there she is in glossy magazine ads for MP3 players, and whatever political context surrounds her is airbrushed away. She's just a woman with huge breasts and golden hair whom hundreds of thousands of people have watched having sex....and now she's selling electronics to teenagers. Perhaps this is the inevitable reductio ad absurdum of capitalism, but shouldn't liberals be a little concerned? Or is this just one of those social issues that liberals cede to conservatives?

Part of the problem is the difficulty of talking about politics in our entertainment-driven culture. As a former editor of George, I can testify to the fact that most people don't want to concede just how political entertainment is. They want to turn their minds off. If you raise the question, for example, of race in "Survivor," or the political implications of Donald Trump's mantra, "You're Fired," they react like you've just put castor oil in their milkshake.

Those who enjoy talking about politics and culture might want to read a book called Citizen Girl, by my friends Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. It's art, it's politics, it's entertainment—and it's two young feminists looking askance at porn with candor and wit.

Coincidentally, a self-described Summers' supporter, undergraduate Kelly Shue, has written this piece for the Harvard Independent arguing that Summers' supporters have grown overconfident. It's considerably more thoughtful than Mansfield's article.

Shue's conclusion: "As supporters of Larry Summers, we should at least recognize that the other side has a credible argument. Summers's critics are more sensitive to the harms of prejudice [than are his defenders]. Before we dismiss them as irrational and over-emotional, we need to consider that such critics may actually be the pragmatists. They alone are considering the full consequences of free academic inquiry into innate gender differences. "

An interesting, and open-minded, point.

Conservative political scientist Harvey Mansfield stands up for Larry Summers in this Weekly Standard piece, in which he proves that intelligence in scholarship and wisdom in personal politics do not always go hand in hand.

Mansfield writes: "Summers is easily the most outstanding of the major university presidents now on the scene--the most intelligent, the most energetic, as well as the most prominent. So, alarmed at his abilities and intentions, the Harvard faculty decided it would be a good idea to humiliate him."

You see this technique so often in conservative punditry, I'm amazed that it seems to work, and yet it does. (Look at the success of Fox News.) A simple assertion that the side one supports is unquestionably right, followed by a wild caricature of the opposition's arguments. Do they teach this stuff at conservative summer camp?

Summers may have been humiliated, but this result was hardly the intention of his faculty critics, who were not, in any event, motivated by "alarm at his abilities and intentions." They are fighting about what kind of a place Harvard is to be, and what kind of a man--yes, so far, always a man—will lead it. Agree or disagree, isn't this a conversation worth describing with some pretense of fairness?

But no. Mansfield goes on to describe Summers' critics as "feminist women and their male consorts on the left." (For Mansfield, who has recently become interested in the subject of "manliness,"this means Alan Alda-esque wimps and gays.)

That's about half the faculty, he says. The other half are "moderate liberals who are afraid of the feminists rather than with them."

Huh. Is that how Mansfield would describe the forty-plus member department of economics, where there are two tenured women? The equally large department of mathematics,which has no tenured women? Or his own 43-person department, which by my count is about 75% male?

Mansfield goes on to write that Summers' "accusers were relentless and, as always with feminists, humorless."

This is another neo-con technique: to deliver some incredibly insulting remark and then, when people get pissed about it, respond, "You liberals just can't take a joke."

That Harvey Mansfield is at Harvard is wonderful. It's vital to have a range of political opinions there. I interviewed Professor Mansfield for Harvard Rules—on the record—and thought him gentlemanly, courteous, thoughtful, and quite a nice guy.

But this mode of argument—unfounded assertions, sweeping ad hominem generalizations, denial of competing realities—is beneath a Harvard professor. Can you imagine what conservatives would say if a liberal spoke like this?