Shots in the Dark

I spent a lot of time on the phone today with reporters from various news organizations—quite large ones, actually—who suddenly had to whip up a report on Larry Summers and didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on at Harvard. I tried to be fair and balanced, blah-blah-blah, but the exercise was a test of patience, filled with questions such as, “What is this curricular review thing again?”, “How do you spell ‘Schleifer?”—that’s a tough one, actually—and “JFK did go to Harvard, right?”

The point is, there are a lot of reporters that haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on at Harvard who are now rushing to get up to speed, and invariably, the results won’t be pretty.

Case in point: Lois Romano’s report in the Washington Post, which clearly gives the impression that the inmates are running the asylum and Larry Summers been done wrong.

The first two grafs are boilerplate factual stuff. Romano then writes in her third graf, “Summers’s announcement comes after several weeks of inflamed rhetoric by his opponents on the faculty.”

Inflamed rhetoric? Oooh—sounds dramatic. Would be nice if she quoted some. But perhaps that is too much to ask. Better just to categorize it.

Anyway, speaking of inflamed rhetoric, Romano then goes on to quote Alan Dershowitz, who gives no indication of knowing about what is going on at Harvard College and seems to care about it even less. But when you have no idea what’s going on at Harvard and you need a quote fast, Alan Dershowitz is your man.

Here’s Romano: “It’s a real tragedy for Harvard,” said Alan Dershowitz, law professor of long-standing at Harvard and a Summers supporter. “It says that one group of faculty managed a coup d’etat not only against Summers but against the whole Harvard community. He is widely supported among students and in the graduate schools.“

A real tragedy. A coup d’etat against the whole Harvard community.

Nope. No inflamed rhetoric there.

Meanwhile, an assertion—totally unsupported—that Summers has wide support among the graduate schools. Maybe Dershowitz is right, maybe Summers did. But Romano is wrong to just let him throw that out there without any context.

And then inevitably Romano quotes that silly Crimson poll—you knew this was coming—without any discussion of its methodological problems or any context to the effect that most undergraduates have no idea and really don’t care about what’s going on with the Harvard administration.

In the next-to-last paragraph of the story, Romano then quotes an anonymous Summers critic who says, “This man could never get over not being the smartest man in the room. This is Harvard-we all have to get used to it.”

With all the people who have eloquently gone on the record talking about their criticism of Summers—Peter Ellison, anyone?—this slightly muddled quote, buried at the end of her story, is the best Romano can do?

And then, the final insult. Romano writes: “Although Summers’s supporters remained steadfast, sources say that some began to feel that his presence was disruptive and distracting to the school.”

Summers’ supporters remained steadfast? I’m sorry, but I think that is objectively wrong. Dershowitz did, true. So did Weiss and Mansfield. But Gergen, Pinker, Katz, Thernstrom and others all backed away from Summers. One reason the second vote did not take place is because Summers supporters were not remaining steadfast.

Romano’s piece is just sloppy, rushed journalism. It won’t be the last.

I mean, my gosh, if reporters want the real story, all they have to do is read this blog…..

The time on Larry Summers’ e-mail resignation: 1:14.

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,

I write to let you know that, after considerable reflection, I have notified the Harvard Corporation that I will resign as President of the University as of June 30, 2006. I will always be grateful for the opportunity to have served Harvard in this role, and I will treasure the continuing friendship and support of so many exceptional colleagues and students at Harvard.

Below are links to my letter to the community, as well as a letter from the members of the Corporation and a related news release.

Sincerely,

Larry Summers

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2006/02/21-summers.html

http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2006/0221_summers.html

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2006/02/21-board.pdf

For you fellow non-subscribers, here it is:

Summers to Quit Harvard Presidency
By DANIEL GOLDEN and ZACHARY M. SEWARD
February 21, 2006; Page A3
Lawrence H. Summers, losing a power struggle with faculty after a turbulent five years as president of Harvard University, is expected to resign this week.

Two people familiar with the situation said last night that the former U.S. Treasury secretary is expected to announce his resignation in advance of a faculty vote a week from today on a motion of no confidence in his leadership. It’s unclear what plan Harvard may have for naming a successor or when Mr. Summers’s resignation will take effect.

Backing for Mr. Summers from Harvard’s seven-member governing board, known as the Corporation, has eroded in recent weeks in the face of renewed criticism from many arts and sciences faculty members, the people familiar with the matter said. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, a Corporation member who pushed for Mr. Summers’s appointment in 2001, remains a supporter and was making calls on his behalf to at least one key Harvard official last week, one person familiar with the situation said. Several board members, including former Duke University president Nannerl Keohane and Urban Institute president Robert Reischauer, have been interviewing deans, faculty members and alumni in recent weeks about Mr. Summers’s performance.

Mr. Summers and Corporation members couldn’t be reached for comment. A Harvard spokesman declined to comment.

Mr. Summers’s supporters, and even some of his detractors, say they are worried it will be difficult for Harvard to find a strong successor now that the faculty has demonstrated its clout. His propensity for controversial comments on educational and national issues was regarded by admirers as a welcome change from other college presidents who devote themselves primarily to fund raising. His resignation could renew concerns about whether presidents of elite universities can use their “bully pulpit” as they once did to express opinions on vital issues without risking their positions.

Mr. Summers’s resignation would end the shortest stint of any Harvard president since Cornelius Felton died in 1862 after two years in office. The Corporation selected Mr. Summers, a renowned economist, as a strong leader who would assert his authority over entrenched fiefdoms. His achievements include establishing an institute on stem-cell research, increasing faculty size and expanding Harvard’s campus.

However, a number of his initiatives, including curriculum reform, have bogged down. His brusque management style and sometimes outspoken views have offended faculty members and led to turnover among deans.

Arts and sciences faculty members voted no confidence in Mr. Summers last year after he gave a talk suggesting that innate gender differences might account for the relative scarcity of women with high-level academic careers in science and math. Faculty critics this year began assailing him on matters varying from the resignation of a key dean to the lack of any university discipline meted out to economics professor Andrei Shleifer, a close friend of the president. Last year, Harvard and Mr. Shleifer settled a civil suit brought by the federal government, stemming from allegations that he had violated conflict-of-interest rules by investing in financial markets in Russia while heading a foreign-aid program there.>>

Underneath—far, far underneath—the pomp and glitter of [2004] commencement, currents of unhappiness were making their way through the university. The president’s critics would have said that it was his intangible changes that mattered the most. That he was corrupting the university with values and priorities better suited to the world of politics and commerce. That, instead of free speech and vigorous debate—instead of veritas—the president of Harvard cared only about image, public relations, spin control. And that the thing they cherished most about Harvard—that in a world of never-ending competition and conflict, the university aspired to something higher, something more timeless—was rapidly vanishing. Like an extinct species, once gone, that precious quality would be gone forever. Those professors would either have to live in a world of Larry Summers’ creation, or go elsewhere. But if Harvard couldn’t remain an ivory tower, in the best, most optimistic sense of the phrase, what university could?

—Harvard Rules, page 343

Harvard Magazine has this on its website this morning: Tuesday morning, February 21, the Journal featured on page 3 a report, “Summers to Quit Harvard Presidency.”

The Harvard website, meanwhile, has a scintillating story about the “Harvard State Fair,” during which “students including Sara O’Rourke ’09 were challenged to try their hand at traditional farm chores such as milking.”

Meanwhile, here’s a telling sign of how Harvard has fallen: I hear through the grapevine that one network nightly news show is planning to do a “funny” story about the craziness in Cambridge.

This resignation could not have come any later.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting as of 4:02 AM that Larry Summers will resign in advance of next Tuesday’s faculty meeting.

The Journal’s piece is subscriber-only, but the Crimson summarizes it here.

Actually, there’s basically nothing to summarize, except that the Journal article—co-bylined by Dan Golden and former Crimson managing editor Zach Seward—cites two anonymous sources saying that Summers is going to resign.

The Journal does get the interesting bit of news that Bob Rubin has called at least one university official the past week urging him to support Summers.

If Summers resigns, how long will it be before Rubin too has to leave?

I read the Crimson this morning with dread. No, not because I saw some new scandal related to the Summers presidency. No new Cornel West scandal, no new anti-Semitism speech scandal, no new firing of (fill in the blank) scandal, no new AIDS scandal, no new Andrei Shleifer scandal, no new fundraising scandal, no new women-in-science scandal.

I read the Crimson because the Crimson did a poll, and it is dumb, and because it says that students are pro-Summers by a ratio of 3:1, it is sure to be used as evidence of the faculty’s foolishness by right-wingers everywhere who, without having a clue as to what is going on at Harvard, can now point to the Crimson’s poll and say how stupid and wacko the faculty is.

And sure enough, here comes Andrew Sullivan, now blogging for Time, who writes: “The p.c. left on the faculty may despise Larry Summers, but a new poll shows that the students are fine with him.”

(Sullivan, by the way, did his dissertation under Summers supporter Harvey Mansfield.)

I wonder what “p.c. left” Sullivan is referring to? It’d be nice if he could name a name. Except that—oh!—that might undermine his argument.

But that’s what a bad poll will do. Let’s look at why it’s bad.

The Crimson e-mailed 840 students asking them various questions about Summers. The results? “Just 19 percent of undergraduates in the survey said that Summers should resign, while about 57 percent said he should not.”

But consider the techniques of the poll. We don’t actually know how these 840 students were chosen or whether they were generally representative of the student body. How many were men? How many were science majors?

Of the 840 people surveyed, about half—424 people—responded.

More than half of the respondents were freshmen.

Which means a) that half of the people who answered this poll have absolutely no idea what is going on, but answered it anyway. And b) as few as students from each class other than first-years answered this poll.

I’m not an expert on polling, but right away, that raises some issues. Freshmen, for one thing, are surely less likely to want Summers to resign, since, barely cognizant of Summers’ history at Harvard, they wouldn’t see much of a reason for him to.

I see on the message boards some posters have raised the issue of respondent bias—whether strong Summers supporters are more likely to be represented in the pool of respondents, if most students don’t have particularly strong feelings about Summers (as might be expected, given their level of contact with/knowledge of him).

So…we don’t know how the respondents were selected, we don’t know the exact breakdown by class, we know that more men responded than women—who, given the women-in-science speech, are less likely than men to be strong Summers supporters—and we know that the poll is dominated by freshmen.

All told, sounds like a poll that probably shouldn’t be trusted. I expect it’s true that Summers has more support among students than among faculty. But I also expect that we’re going to hear this 3:1 ratio tossed around a lot in the next few weeks.

I hear, for example, that the Boston Globe is working on a story about student opinion regarding Larry Summers….

I neglected to mention one point about Marcella Bombardieri’s piece that struck me.

Bombardieri quotes an alum named Jack Corrigan who supports Summers and lists some of his accomplishments—the stem cell institute, free tuition for low-income families, and “a project with Google to digitize Harvard’s library.”

Couple thoughts about that last.

First of all, that initiative was supposed to be the doing of Harvard library director Sidney Verba. Now I guess we know who really made it happen.

Is it good for Harvard? Not particularly. Is it good for Google? Yes, incredibly good, to have Harvard sign on to a project that is hugely controversial, because many writers see it as the biggest threat to copyright protection in history.

So why would Summers okay the deal? (Or, perhaps, pressure Verba to okay it?) Could it have been because his former chief of staff at the Treasury Department, Sheryl Sandberg….

…is now a vice-president at Google, and happened to meet with Summers the same day she met with Sidney Verba? In another context, that would be called lobbying. But it’s not as if Larry Summers ever spent any time in Washington.

Anyway, I’m sure the two visits were entirely coincidental….still, Mr. Corrigan, you might want to omit that particular “accomplishment” from your roster.

(It is interesting, though—that’s such an odd thing for an alum to emphasize, it feels like a talking point….)

Marcella Bombardieri has a solid piece in the Globe about Summers’ allies starting to lose faith that the president can govern.

In the second graf of the piece, Bombardieri rightly puts her strongest quote:

”I’m a little sad and a little nervous,” said Larry Katz, an economics professor and a friend of Summers. ”Here is someone I think is a brilliant scholar, and a person of great skill and integrity, but he seems to have failed to connect with so many other bright scholars on campus.”

Asked if Summers could still govern successfully, Katz said, ”I think it’s unclear. Everyone has to think about what’s in the best interest of the university, not the specific interests of any one person.”

If that’s the strongest answer Katz can give—”everyone has to think about what’s in the best interest of the university”—then Summers truly is in freefall.

David Gergen—surprise—backpedals away from Summers as well. Bombardieri writes that he “stressed that he didn’t know the full story behind the grievances of Summers’s critics.”

(If that’s the case, then why was he such a steadfast Summers supporter for so long?)

The Corporation ”is going to have to consider its fiduciary responsibility, to consider what’s in the best interests of Harvard,” Gergen added.

In other words—Larry Summers is no longer in the best interests of Harvard.

Steve Pinker adds that Summers has made it hard for his defenders to defend him by not sticking up for himself. For example, the curricular review suffered from Summers’ withdrawal and a subsequent lack of “vision,” Pinker argues. Given that the review was led by Summers for three years before Summers exited from it, and it was a disaster throughout, this remark would fall under the category of historical revisionism.

The 2/28 vote of no-confidence will never happen. (If it does, every member of the Corporation should instantly proffer his or her resignation.)

We are in the endgame now.