A letter to the Crimson from Argentina makes a point that I haven’t heard yet but that is so important, it cries out to be emphasized:

To the rest of the world, Harvard stands for values greater than just academic excellence. Your editorial seems to suggest that because Dr. Summers could get a much-needed job done faster and better than anyone else, values such as personal dignity and civilized behavior are secondary.

Allow me to suggest that, as future leaders of the nation, you reconsider your own values.

It is gracious of the writer to concede that Summers could get the job done “faster and better than anyone else”—the evidence clearly doesn’t support that—but even assuming it’s true, his eloquent point remains.

Harvard students are smart and they will certainly, as their lives go on, become successful and influential. All the more reason, then, that they carry along with them the values of civility, decency, humility, and fairness—values that were conspicuously lacking in Larry Summers’ leadership. Harvard alums need not just be rich people, powerful people—they must also be good people. As opposed to, say, Andrei Shleifer, whose behavior was appalling, but who was protected and promoted by Harvard’s president.

These are intangible things, but in the long run, they may actually be more important than having a president who goes to pizza breaks and autographs dollar bills.

In a Crimson piece about the Corporation’s belated statement on the Andrei Schleifer scandal, Glimp Professor of Economics Edward L. Glaeser, a Summers ally, is quoted as saying this about David McClintick’s 18,000-word article on the scandal in Institutional Investor magazine:

“[It] is a potent piece of hate creation—not quite ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ but it’s in that camp.”

Not quite the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

David McClintick’s article was a painstakingly researched piece of investigative reporting into illegal and sleazy behavior. The fact that the protagonists involved are (I guess) Jewish is irrelevant. Unless every imputation of unethical behavior to a Jew is now to be considered anti-Semitic.

Along with Alan Dershowitz, Glaeser now becomes the second Harvard professor strongly suggesting that Summers’ critics are anti-Semitic. Neither man has come out and said so explicitly, but they’re inching up to it.

This is an ugly charge. If Dershowitz and Glaeser believe it, then they have an obligation to make their case explicitly, with all the seriousness it merits. Otherwise, they should stop hinting, and Glaeser should apologize to David McClintick.

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By the way, Crimson writer Anton S. Troianovski buries the quote in the story’s last graf. Are you kidding me? Here’s a suggestion: A full story with the headline, “Summers Ally Compares Journalist’s Account to Anti-Semitic Propaganda.”

And this one didn’t even cover him….

You think the Danish cartoons were insulting? Then don’t watch this animated commentary on the cartoon affair courtesy of the website dumpalink.com. (I don’t know them, but I hope they’ve had a nice life.)

Sample line: “Don’t want any more cartoons? Here’s an idea: Stop bombing shit.”

It’s wildly offensive, deliberately immature, pretty smart, and utterly American. Which is to say that it’s not going to go over real well in Pakistan….

Here’s some interesting material* from the Crimson’s report on Larry Summers’ visit to Dunster House last night:

….last night bore a closer resemblance to a Grand Slam event. Harvard University Police Department provided security, checking Harvard identification at the door—and a group of five Crimson editors and former Crimson executives seated in the third row greeted Summers with the letters L-A-R-R-Y painted on their chests in red paint.

Crimson editors are painting Summers’ name on their chests?

Um….Crimson folks? You people do realize how seriously your credibility has just been compromised, don’t you? If you guys want to be taken seriously—and if you don’t want the entire community to think you’re in the tank for Summers—you need to explain what just happened.

Also—not that there’s anything wrong with this—but you do realize how totally gay that is, don’t you?

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* Thanks to the poster who brought this incident to my attention….

Interested in giving money to a great university? Well, here’s a solicitation for a “unique new giving opportunity” that was sent around Harvard yesterday. While some question its veracity, others say that this truth-in-fundraising approach is just part of the new, post-Summers Harvard…..

Unique New Giving Opportunity

Nathaniel Eaton University Professorship
To select friends of Harvard:

Events of the last few days have unexpectedly created the opportunity for a few specially chosen friends of Harvard to endow a new University Professorship to be occupied by outgoing president Lawrence H. Summers. Please consider this unique opportunity to help establish the Nathaniel Eaton University Professorship. To underscore the distinction of the first incumbent, the name of this chair harks back to Harvard’s earliest days. Nathaniel Eaton, a friend of John Harvard, was Harvard College’s first head – not president, as there was neither a Faculty nor a board of Fellows or Overseers over which to preside. He was simply Master Eaton, and his faculty consisted of a single assistant master. Eaton served for the academic year 1638-39, after which applications to Harvard fell to a low, not since equaled, of zero, and the College went dormant for a year. The Nathaniel Eaton University Professorship will be distinctive not only for connecting today’s Harvard to its origins and for recalling the brief tenures of both Eaton and Summers. Eaton was also Summers’ equal in scholarly brilliance and in brusque faculty management style, and both Summers and Eaton were troubled by governance crises. Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison recounts Eaton’s brief term in office:

The trust placed in Nathaniel Eaton by the community was hardly justified. Very little is known of the single academic year in which he conducted the College, in the former Peyntree House, and that little is not to his credit. ‘He was a Rare Scholar himself, and he made many more such,’ wrote Cotton Mather; the studies were, one infers, of the English freshman grade; but Eaton was too prone to drive home lessons with the rod. At the opening of the second academic year, in August, 1639, the Master made the mistake of beating his assistant so briskly with a walnut-tree cudgel, ‘big enough to have killed a horse,’ that Thomas Shepard rushed in from the parsonage next door to save the poor man’s life, and the magistrates haled Eaton into court for assault. On that occasion there was a general ventilation of complaints against Eaton for brutality, and against his wife for the quality of food and quantity of drink dispensed to her boarders. The magistrates, who had been whipped themselves in school or college, were not disposed to dismiss Eaton for an occasional flogging. But the food question was more serious. … Eaton was promptly dismissed, and fled the country, and after sundry adventures in Virginia, Italy, and England, died in debtors’ prison in Southwark, hard by his friend Harvard’s birthplace. – Three Centuries of Harvard, 9-10.

The great university of which we are privileged to be members rose from the ashes of Eaton’s administration.

Donations may be sent to the Recording Secretary, designated for the Nathaniel Eaton University Professorship.

The Columbia Spectator and Yale Daily News both run articles saying, essentially, Whew! So glad it happened at Harvard and not to us.

Okay, that’s a little reductive. The Spectator editorial actually praises Larry Summers for his vision and encourages president Lee Bollinger to avoid Summers’ mistakes.

(It occurs to me that if Larry Summers had been president at Columbia, where political sensitivity is dramatically greater than at Harvard, he would have been not just ousted, he would have been run out of town on a rail.)

The Yale Daily News article discusses the stylistic differences between Yale president Richard Levin and Larry Summers. Apparently they interviewed some very wise commentators:

Richard Bradley ’86, the author of “Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World’s Most Powerful University,” said the absence of criticism by Levin following the remarks about women and science seems logical.

“Any criticism President Levin might have made would probably have been viewed as a product of the Yale-Harvard rivalry, rather than considered on its merits,” Bradley said in an e-mail. “In any case, criticizing the president of another university doesn’t seem like Levin’s style.“

As readers of this blog will know, the way conservative commentators rush to portray the ouster of Larry Summers as another example of political correctness run amok makes me want to stab myself in the neck with a jagged shard of glass. But that would only give those folks satisfaction.

So, in this op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, I tried to channel my frustration in a more constructive mode.

Here’s the nut graf:

“The real lesson of Summers’ failure at Harvard is very different… Summers was ousted not because of a clash of conservative versus liberal ideologies. After all, Summers was Bill Clinton’s former Treasury secretary. He is a liberal. The real problem was that Harvard’s faculty rejected the encroachment of Washington politics.”

If you like that, do check out the rest….

Things have been busy here on upper Broadway for the past couple of days. Apparently someone important just resigned his job….

Sam Teller of FM, the Crimson’s weekly magazine, interviews me for their “Fifteen Minutes With…” feature. I slagged Sam last week for what struck me as over-the-top questioning during his interview with Judith Ryan, but he was fair to me and so I take it all back.

Which is not to say that I was completely satisfied, Sam.

To wit: Your headline calls me a “Harvard critic.” Eh…not really. I can live with “Larry Summers critic,” but I’m a big believer in Harvard.

Also, if you’re going to call me a Harvard critic, shouldn’t you at least mention that I went there? “A.M., ’91,” if you must know. (“Harvard dropout,” if you prefer.) I know you Crimson folks don’t give a damn about the grad school, but I did study and teach at Harvard for three years. You can look it up in the CUE guide!

Also, you have a little punctuation error that makes it look as if I refer to MIT prof Nancy Hopkins by her first name. I’ve never met the woman, and since I talk about her being caricatured, it’s unfortunate that I sound comfortable referring to a female professor I’ve never met as “Nancy.” Not so.

Also, I can’t believe you quoted me as saying that I find the New York Times Magazine “so dull.”

Okay, so I did say that. And okay, so I do think the Times Mag is massively boring. But still…I’m trying to make a living here.

And finally, since we talked about this blog so much, couldn’t you at least put in a hyperlink to it on the electronic version of the interview? Seems only logical.

There. Thanks to the rest of you for indulging that. And Sam, I enjoyed our conversation.

You’ve got to give Alan Dershowitz credit: the man stays on message. And regarding the resignation of Lawrence Summers, his message is this: a “coup d’etat” by the “radical hard left” has toppled a visionary president who made the mistake of expressing “politically incorrect views.”

Here’s Dershowitz in the Washington Post: “One group of faculty managed a coup d’etat not only against Summers but against the whole Harvard community.”

Here’s Dershowitz in the Crimson: “I think this is an academic coup d’etat engineered by the hard left and stimulated by Summers’ politically-incorrect statements, but then joined by an assortment of others—including some who had been dismissed and disempowered by Summers, some who didn’t like his style, and a few well-intentioned people who didn’t understand the damage they were doing to the University.”

Here’s the effect of Dershowitz’s words as manifested in a Globe editorial: “Summers’s departure raises fears that a small number of faculty from only one part of the university have staged a coup….”

And here is the headline for the editorial that Dershowitz, inbetween giving interviews to the Globe, etc., cranked out for the Globe:

Coup against Summers a dubious victory for the politically correct

First sentence: “A plurality of one faculty has brought about an academic coup d’etat against not only Harvard University president Lawrence Summers but also against the majority of students, faculty, and alumni.”

Well, let’s consider that opener, which is disingenuous from its first noun, “plurality.”

If the FAS professors who opposed Summers were the architects of a coup, by definition they have to be a small group—that’s what coups are, a takeover of power by a small group—and “plurality” usually suggests the largest of several groups, but one falling short of a majority. (“Bill Clinton won a plurality of the 1992 vote against George Bush and Ross Perot.”)

But as Dershowitz surely knows, the bloc of professors aligned against Summers was a majority within FAS—if it were only a plurality, Summers would probably have taken his chances with that second vote of no-confidence.

It is, however, hard to argue for the existence of a coup when you have the majority of the university’s largest faculty—and wealthiest school—in opposition to the president. Hence “plurality.”

Dershowitz does not, however, hesitate to use the term “majority” when he refers to the allegedly pro-Summers opinion of students, faculty, and alumni.

How does he know this? Well, there’s the Crimson poll of undergraduates, shaky though it may be. But about graduate students, Dershowitz has no idea. Faculty in other graduate schools? Ditto. One might expect that Dershowitz would know the pulse of the law school, but given the number of law school faculty who disagreed with Summers’ inaction on the Solomon Amendment, it seems unlikely that HLS is a solid pro-Summers bloc. Alumni? Well, alumni giving is down about ten percent since Summers became president, and I’ve certainly spoken with quite a few of them who don’t like Summers (particularly women). But maybe I’ve just happened to reach all those crazy radicals among the Harvard graduates working in law, business and finance here in New York City.

Let’s face it: Dershowitz is simply making this stuff up.

Why, then, does he think that there’s been a coup by the radical hard-left? What evidence does Dershowitz present for such a serious accusation? Let’s look.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences includes, in general, some of the most radical, hard-left elements within Harvard’s diverse constituencies. And let there be no mistake about the origin of Summers’s problem with that particular faculty: It started as a hard left-center conflict. Summers committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military.

No evidence here, just a couple of canards. So let’s dispense with them, shall we? (Won’t take long.)

The first is that the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences has a “radical, hard-left”—sounds scary, doesn’t it? Oooh!—constituency. It’s true that there are a handful of left-wing professors within FAS. But in general, it’s not a very politically active body, and it is hardly full of extremists, as Dershowitz claims.

The second myth is that Summers expressed politically incorrect views. No: Summers expressed stupid views. Economists are smarter than political scientists. Men are smarter than women. Seoul had a million child prostitutes.

The reason that Harvard faculty rejected these declarations is that, while couched as wisdom delivered from on high, they were uninformed, irresponsible, and beneath the level of intelligence the FAS faculty expects of the president. Not because they were politically incorrect.

In need of something to back up his smears, Dershowitz plays his trump card: “The original no-confidence motion contained an explanatory note that explicitly referenced ‘Mr. Summers’ apparently ongoing convictions about the capacities and rights not only of women but also of African-Americans, third-world nations, gay people, and colonized peoples.'”

Dershowitz concedes that this left-wing—for he’s right, it was left-wing—language was deleted from the statement, but he implies that the omission was effected as a way of hiding the faculty’s true agenda.

That is exactly wrong.

The reason the language, written by anthropologist Randy Matory, was deleted was because Summers’ less ideological opponents believed that it would lose the day for them; in other words, that Matory’s views were not representative of the faculty, but of Matory.

And, of course, they were right. The no-confidence vote passed because Summers’ opponents believed that he was an incompetent leader, not because of some cloaked desire to stand up for third world nations and colonized people.

Dershowitz goes on to argue that Summers’ opponents believe in free speech only for those who agree with them, but not for Larry Summers or his defenders. (It’s a women-in-science controversy reference.) Their attitude, he proclaims, was “Free speech for me, but not for thee!”

As a reporter who’s covered this story for years, I can tell you that this is an idiotic suggestion. It was not the faculty who stifled free speech, but the president. Larry Summers created a climate on campus in which members of the Harvard faculty and staff felt not just uncomfortable, but scared, to express their opinions; they feared professional and personal retribution. On February 20, 2004, the Crimson editorialized about this very phenomenon, writing: “As Summers has consolidated his hold on Harvard, his adminstration has demonstrated an unsettling penchant for secrecy…. Summers’ tactics hint at contempt for students and faculty.” In an interview with me, Crimson editor Kate Rakoczy noted that “the people who work for Larry are scared to death when the Crimson calls.”

Larry Summers believed in free speech? Not for Cornel West, he didn’t; he chastised West for the professor’s political involvement. (And when asked by a member of the New York Times editorial board later to explain himself, Summers stated that West had “a sexual harrassment problem.” But of course, as with so many of Summers’ nastier remarks, that was supposed to be off the record.)

Larry Summers believed in free speech? Not for Zayed Yasin he didn’t. Remember, this is the president who forbade anyone working for him to say a word in defense of the 2002 undergraduate commencement speaker who made the mistake of choosing a dumb title (“My American Jihad”) for his otherwise praiseworthy talk. This is the president who never said a word to Yasin, one of Harvard’s most upstanding students, after a national news organization falsely accused Yasin of supporting Hamas. Larry Summers let Zayed Yasin twist in the wind, and he did so because he did not want Yasin to express his views. Rather than reaching out to Yasin, Summers described him in semi-private conversations as a “little shit.”

Larry Summers believed in free speech? Try telling that to the multitude of Harvard administrators who worried that the wrong remark might cost them their job…to all the professors who worried that they and their departments would be punished if they spoke to the press…to reporters who found his press office obfuscatory if not outright deceptive…to the deans of Harvard schools who dared to put out a press release without running it through Mass Hall first, to make sure that it contained language that made Larry Summers look good.

The irony is that, in fact, it’s really Dershowitz who has the hidden agenda here; there’s a subtext to his argument. Alan Dershowitz almost surely believes—and implicitly suggests—that the core group of Larry Summers’ opponents is anti-Semitic and that their opposition to Summers is based on the fact that Summers is Jewish.

While Dershowitz may have many reasons for supporting Summers, judging by what he has said in public, Summers’ opposition to anti-Semitism is paramount among them. The law school professor never spoke out for Summers more vigorously than he did during the debate over the Morning Prayers anti-Semitism talk. Similarly, he supported Summers’ opposition to a speech by anti-Semitic poet Tom Paulin. (By contrast, he publicly broke with Summers when the president declined to stand up for gays in the Solomon Amendment debate.)

There’s certainly nothing wrong with Dershowitz agreeing with and standing up for Summers on this issue. But when it informs his description of the “radical hard-left”—when, in this context, and for those who know the back story, Dershowitz is clearly using code words for anti-Semitic—it is deeply wrong for him to talk about a secretive minority of the faculty staging a coup d’etat.

Dershowitz closes by writing, “Now that this plurality of one faculty has succeeded in ousting the president, the most radical elements of Harvard will be emboldened to seek to mold all of Harvard in its image. If they succeed, Harvard will become a less diverse and less interesting institution of learning governed by political-correctness cops of the hard left.“

I wonder: If there really is a “political correctness cop” in this discussion, is it faculty members of all different politics and temperaments who opposed Larry Summers, or is it Alan Dershowitz?