Shots in the Dark

Thanks to all of you who have reported on some of what’s going on behind the scenes.

Feel free to post your answers on the message board…

1) Which Harvard figures of gravitas and stature are now spending much of their time conversing with members of the Corporation?

2) Which one of Harvard’s most important alumni and donors has now become directly involved in pushing for Summers’ firing or resignation?

3) Which 19th-century American conflict are people now citing as a likely scenario if Summers does not leave?

4) Which president of Harvard either has hired or is considering hiring a personal lawyer?

5) Which university is rumored to have substantially and deliberately over-reported donor contributions, possibly leading to the departure of a high-level administrator who did not want to be associated with the practice?

6) Which high-level Harvard figures believed that they had extracted a promise from Larry Summers to resign in the summer of 2005…only to be stunned when that promise was not honored?

7) What Harvard professor and/or administrator was Larry Summers referring to when, in a phone call from a public place at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he apparently told an aide, “Fuck xxxx”?
The call happened to be picked up by a live microphone nearby….

8) What Harvard president is said to be hunkering down, preparing for a fight, prompting rumors of “an intervention” from people who worry that he does not realize the extremity of the situation?

…has two relevant pieces.

This one reports on the new motion by physics professor Daniel Fisher calling upon the Corporation to act.

“This Faculty respectfully adjures the Governing Boards, especially the Corporation, to re-establish in collaboration with the Faculty effective governance and leadership of Harvard University,” the motion reads.

It’s a smart move by Fisher. He’s taking advantage of the Corporation’s love affair with secrecy. Now it’s not just the faculty and the president who are involved in this fight, it’s the Corporation—and the more the Corporation is mentioned in press accounts of this ugly controversy, the less they’re going to like it, and the more they’re going to want to distance themselves from the man who has always been the igniter of controversy.

The Crimson quotes Peter Gomes as saying that the Corporation will invariably try to keep any of its actions double-secret. (Like probation!)

“Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer professor of Christian morals and an expert on Harvard’s history, said Summers’ firing, if it happened, would be a ‘very hush-hush sort of thing. No one wants it said that the Corporation ever fired a president of the University.'”

Well…I do. Because why shouldn’t a governing board of a $30 billion, tax-free, non-profit organization publicly explain itself?

The Crimson’s second piece today looks at how, unlike last spring, President Summers can’t simply apologize and throw money at his current troubles….

What could he say? “Sorry, Bill. But someone had to take the fall.”

Instead, Summers sticks to a quote about Kirby’s firing that, in my opinion, is killing him: “This was his decision.”

Every time that quote is repeated, it reminds the faculty how their president dissembles. A decision to resign when the alternative is to be fired is not exactly free will.

The Yale Daily News has a pretty good wrap-up of events going on at Harvard.

(Which is to say, there’s not a hint of schadenfreude.)

The News gets a number of quotes that move the ball forward.

Judith Ryan: “I personally think that the only good solution would be for him to resign.”

Yale president Richard Levin: No comment.
This would fall under the “If your enemy is shooting himself in the foot, stand back and let him” category.

Stephan Thernstrom: “The Corporation … is probably rather troubled by what’s going on now. It would not be too astonishing if President Summers’ days were numbered, but that could be wrong.”
A remarkable concession from one of Summers’ strongest supporters. This does not bode well for the Harvard president.

Like the Times piece discussed below, this article seems pretty balanced. The real damage to Summers is its existence. Let me put it this way:

Harvard=Larry Summers, controversy, division, anger.
Yale=Richard Levin, stability, growth, no controversy.

That may or may not be fair, but public perception has nothing to do with fairness.

The rumors, conversations, and media coverage are getting hotter up at Harvard. There’s lots to cover today, so let me get right to it.

The New York Times finally weighs in, of course, in one of those stories that is likely to satisfy neither side of the fight.

According to reporter Alan Finder, Summers’ critics “cited deficits in the budget of the Faculty of Arts and Science; what they described as a slowdown in the hiring of new faculty members in disciplines not favored by Mr. Summers; the departure of a number of senior administrators; and a $26.5 million settlement by Harvard of a civil suit filed by federal prosecutors that involved investments by a Harvard economics professor, a friend of Mr. Summers, who was working on a federal contract to help privatize Russia’s economy.”

(To the poster below: There is your list of grievances.)

I did a little informal ranking of the article, categorizing its 26 paragraphs as either pro- or anti-Summers. “Pro” meant anything that sounded like a defense of him; “con” was either criticism or damaging factual information.

By my judgment, 16 of the article’s paragraphs were unflattering to Summers, and ten of them were in defense of him. If you figure that a number of the unflattering paragraphs were simply informational, I think that comes out to be a pretty fair piece of reporting. Summers’ supporters might have asked for a few paragraphs detailing what Summers’ accomplishments during his presidency have been.

What is most damaging to Summers is the mere existence of this article, which brings Summers’ trial to a broader public eye than previously.

Of course, there are always things that one wishes could be placed in context for people not familiar with the culture of Harvard.

Such as:

—Finder devotes two paragraphs to the Crimson editorials in support of Summers, without mentioning that the Crimson edit board has drifted to the right in recent years and that the edit board is obsessed (God knows why) with the passage of the curricular review. Stick a fork in that thing, guys. It’s done. Time to move on.

—Finder quotes Harvey Mansfield as saying that Summers’ opponents “are mostly the feminist left and its sympathizers. They fear that affirmative action will be abolished or diminished. They want more diversity, which means, paradoxically, more people like themselves. They want to run the university, and I think that Larry Summers wants to take it in a different direction.”
Of course, if you tap Harvey Mansfield on the knee with a little hammer, he’d say exactly the same thing.

—Bill Kirby is coming out of this looking (from a public perception standpoint) better and better. He is allowed to give a quote talking about the extent of faculty growth under his deanship…but Finder only briefly references the high-eight-figure deficit he is leaving for his successor. Proving that people fired by Larry Summers invariably come out looking good.

—Ruth Wisse says, “I think [Summers’ critics] feel that he is more and more vulnerable, because when he was attacked, he did not defend himself. I think that this is a posse looking for excuses to lasso its target.”
With all due respect to Professor Wisse, this is one of those quotes that says more about its speaker than its subject.

Give Dick Cheney a gun, and sooner or later he’ll use it to shoot someone….

Members of Congress have been using their staffers to rewrite unflattering portrayals of themselves on Wikipedia…

The Globe discovers that India is kind of important….

Ann Coulter is offensive…

War, especially a war grounded in deception, can turn good people into brutal thugs….

Hillary Clinton is a boring speaker….

The Crimson weighs in this morning with an editorial urging the faculty to drop its planned vote of no-confidence in Larry Summers.

“At best,” the Crimson argues, “such a vote will be a dilatory and untimely distraction from more vital issues facing the Faculty—a dean search, the curricular review, and the Allston expansion among them; at worst, the motion can be seen as a crass power grab in the wake of the Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby’s resignation.”

To which one can only say, Do these people read their own newspaper? Because the editorial seems wholly disconnected from all the fine reporting that the Crimson has done in recent months.

Consider the three “vital issues facing the faculty” raised above: the decanal search, the curricular review, and the Allston expansion.

If the faculty does not stand up for itself, it will have no meaningful role in the decanal search. Now, one can argue that it shouldn’t, but even in a time of good relations between FAS and Mass Hall, that’s not a strong argument.

“At the heart of the matter, [Kirby’s firing] seems to be an honorable parting of ways over managerial differences between Kirby and his boss, Summers,” the Crimson says.

Call the Harvard police, because this sentence can only have been written by someone on crack.

Summers appointed a weak dean because he didn’t want a strong one; and then, when the dean’s weakness proved a source of frustration for Summers—see curricular review, below—Summers repeatedly badmouthed him to various professors and members of his staff, then canned him. I’m not sure I’d call that “an honorable parting of ways.” Nor would I call it an acceptance of responsibility; ultimately, the managerial shortcomings were not Kirby’s.

The curricular review—which, until a year ago, when 1/14 forced him to back off, was masterminded by Summers—is so minor and ill-considered, it is an embarrassment to Harvard, something the Crimson does not seem to realize, and the university would be better served by scrapping the thing and starting over. How did this situation arise? Because Larry Summers never wanted the faculty to do more than rubber-stamp what he recommended, and for the review’s first years, he tried to dictate its course.

The Allston expansion is certainly important….but as one professor involved in it e-mailed to me, “The Allston Science and Technology planning is a joke. Summers first has a S/T [science/technology] task force staffed with people he can control. Now, HMS is balking at the plan drawn by the task force. What does Summers do? He sets up a new University Science and Planning committee and asks the committee to collect recommendations from all S/T depts and report to him by May.”

That’s just one person’s opinion, true. But the fact is, we know little about the Allston planning, because the process has been less than transparent.

This is not confidence-inspiring.

The Crimson goes on to argue essentially that, because there are other constituencies at Harvard—alums, students, other faculties—the FAS faculty should sit down and shut up. The logic is curious. The Crimson does not generally worry much about what is going on elsewhere at the University, and when it sees undergraduate interests threatened, it is the first to portray Harvard as a college which just happens to have some other, far-off buildings. Its concern for the other faculties seems, well, selective.

Finally, the Crimson says, “Harvard’s governance is set up in a way that makes plain that professors, who are ultimately employees, do not hold the reins of power. That function is left to the Corporation…. So far, neither its members nor the alumni Board of Overseers have found cause to bring Summers to task.”

This is not just obnoxious—”who are ultimately employees,” what the hell is that supposed to mean?—it is wrong.

Yes, Harvard’s governance is different than, say, Oxford’s, where the dons run the university. But the relationship between the faculty and the governing boards has always been more complicated than employer and employees. The faculty, for example, tend to stay at Harvard longer than the Corporation members do, and they tend to know more about what’s really going on at the university than do members of the Corporation, who these days drop in about once a month for their secret meetings. Who can forget Bob Rubin’s remark last spring that he was unaware of any faculty discontent over Larry Summers?

In any case, there’s a larger problem here that the Crimson is missing: the University is in the midst of a profound crisis of governance, in which the powers of the Board of Overseers have been usurped by the Corporation, which has itself been corrupted. So much so that one Corporation member, Conrad Harper, felt that the only way he could express his frustration was to resign in protest of Larry Summers.

Such a resignation had never before happened in Harvard’s history. That would seem to constitute bringing Summers to task, don’t you think?

As has been discussed on this blog, there is also the question of whether Bob Rubin and Larry Summers, two Corporation members, were not using the University to protect their own reputations in choosing to allow the Andrei Shleifer scandal to go to court, costing Harvard tens of millions of dollars. Was Shleifer going to testify that Rubin and Summers knew of his illegal investments in Russia while they were at the Treasury Department? We may never know.

There remains on the Corporation just one member, Jamie Houghton, who was not appointed during Larry Summers’ presidency. If there’s ever been a time in Harvard history when the Corporation was so stacked by the Harvard president, I’m not aware of it. (This is a story that the Crimson ought to have done.)

Perhaps the Crimson should spend less time fretting about a faculty that, right or wrong, is standing up and speaking its mind, and more time reporting on the small, unaccountable, and secretive governing body at the helm of this university. Is there a reason why Harvard is the only university in the country with such a governing board? Why Harvard’s is the only governing board (that I know of, at least) which does not disclose even the general outline of its conversations? Why, during the second leadership crisis within a year, the members of the Corporation still will not speak publicly to the Harvard community?

As I’ve said before on this blog, the Crimson has a history of being deferential to power, and this editorial continues in that vein, despite the excellent work of the Crimson’s own reporters.

A 2nd poster poses this intriguing question:

Anonymous said…

So,based on the previous post, are we to conclude that Summers’ contract was indeed renewed for another five years at the Feb 6th meeting?

A poster below has written such a provocative post—and one that certainly sounds informed—that I’m going to repost it in its entirety here. Draw your own conclusions.

Anonymous said…

Dear Richard,

I think you fail to understand the rationale behind the leak that Bill Kirby was about to be fired and the role that the Crimson played in Kirby’s dismissal. Larry Summers appointed Bill Kirby because he was weak and likely to do the president’s bidding. Kirby was then in a difficult position. He carried out many unwise and unjust policies as directed by Summers, yet he was too weak, and basically too decent and honest, to do everything that Summers wanted. Furthermore, Summers constantly undermined him, blaming Kirby whenever one of Summers’ ideas turned out to have been stupid. All these made for an untenable working relationship between the two men, and Kirby had planned to resign in the spring in as decorous a manner as possible. He is concerned about his reputation and his career, and his instinct has always been to put as good a face on things as possible.

Summers, however, knew that he had a meeting of the Governing Boards (both the Corporation and Overseers) coming up on February 6th. He was aware that questions were likely to be asked about the parlous state of FAS finances, which are entirely Summers’ fault. It is Summers who was overenchanted with “big” science; Summers who insisted on an uncoordinated, rushed plan for science on both sides of the river (building Harvard’s most-expensive-ever science buildings in Cambridge while simultaneously starving FAS to pay for his science theme park in Allston); Summers who offended donors, spent money that he could not raise, and generated controversy that delayed a campaign indefinitely. Summers was aware that some Overseers were deeply discontented and were planning to ask questions about his leadership. In short, Summer was worried that the meeting would go down a dangerous path and might lead to his contract not being renewed for another five years.

Summers therefore decided to leak the information to the Crimson that Kirby was about to be fired. He thought that the timing was perfect. He was in Davos. Kirby was just returning from a trip to New York. The news of Kirby’s departure would occupy the entire meeting of the Governing Boards. Summers could lead a long discussion of how Kirby would be replaced and how the replacement would solve all of the problems in FAS.

It appears, from conversations with members of the Corporation and the Board of Overseers, that Summers’ plan worked at least in part. They were duped. Many of them went home on Monday night satisfied that Summers had a plan to replace Kirby and that, with his replacement, all would be well.

Back to the leak. The leak was given not only to the Crimson but also to the Boston Globe (Marcela Bombarieri). This happened at approximately 7 p.m. The Crimson and Marcela then went looking for confirmation. It appears that a second source called the Crimson, but possibly the Crimson found the second source on their own. Both of the Crimson’s sources were so close to Summers that they were indubitable. Marcela telephoned around on Friday evening trying to find sufficient confirmation to satisfy her editor, who probably has higher standards of journalism than the Crimson. Finally, at about 9 (time approximate), the Crimson telephoned Kirby and said they were going to run the story THAT EVENING that he was being fired. Kirby had a short time to give them a letter of resignation so that he could appear to have resigned. Kirby spent the short time at his disposal editing his letter (which may have been partly composed already). He was no given no time even to call his own deans. This was by design. If Kirby had had time, at least a couple of his deans would have advised him not to resign–to insist on being fired. They would have told him that, if Bill had the stomach for a fight, he would have the faculty’s support.

The Crimson, in short, was doing the dirty work of the President. It is not entirely clear to what extent they knew what they were doing and to what extent they were tools. What is clear is that the Crimson has largely been bought off by Summers. This happened sometime just before graduation last year when Lauren Schuker, then editor-in-chief, was given inducements to support Summers. It should be noted that, at about that time, Schuker changed her Facebook.com entry to include laudatory statements about Summers, including one extraordinary statement about being “fascinated” with Summers and finding him “SEXY”. From that time onwards, that some Crimson reporters have been largely in Summers’ employ.

In addition to the Globe, the Crimson, and Reuters, here are some other news outlets reporting on the upheaval at Harvard:

Fox News, Providence—Harvard President Again Facing Vote by Angry Faculty

Guardian Unlimited, UK—Harvard President Again Facing Criticism

The same story, an AP story by education writer Justin Pope, also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Forbes.com, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe (the Globe needs an AP writer to tell it what’s going on at Harvard?), the Ledger of Lakeland, Florida, New York Newsday, the Houston Chronicle, the Columbus (Ohio) Ledger-Enquirer, the Monterey Herald, the Akron Beacon-Journal, the Fort-Worth Star Telegram, the South Caroline State, the Biloxi Sun Herald…and, yes, the New York Times (though not, it seems, in the dead-tree version—a big break for Summers, who surely wants to keep this out of the Times).

It’s an interesting compilation—I’ve omitted a fair number, because my fingers are getting tired— pretty much covering the country. Soon enough, I expect, English-language overseas papers will be getting into the act.

For those custodians of Harvard’s reputation, this should be a sobering concern. (That would be you, Jamie Houghton—do you want to be remembered as the Corporation senior fellow on whose watch Harvard stumbled and fell?)

One controversy linked to a specific speech will not inflict long-term damage upon an institution’s reputation. But controversy after controversy after controversy, and the general public starts to absorb an impression…and once impressions form, they are not easily undone.

The question then becomes, what to do, what to do? Is it better to stick it out and face an indefinite more of the same? Or to get all the controversy over with in one grand barrage of publicity and announce a fresh start?

I can’t help but wonder if the hardest part of all this for the Corporation members involved isn’t the simple admission of a mistake.
________________________________________________________________

P.S. The New York Times, by the way, really ought to be embarrassed for not having done anything on the Shleifer scandal. It’s a fascinating and important story about how the world really works. Then again, the paper didn’t do anything on the Harvard AIDS scandal either, in which dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Africans died while Larry Summers tried to wrest control of a federal grant from its legal recipients. I’m told that, after all the coverage of the 1/14 troubles, the Times felt it would be “piling on” to cover the AIDS scandal. That’s a novel type of news judgment, but the Times works in mysterious ways…

There’s still opportunity, of course. If I were pitching a Harvard piece to my editors there, I’d use the Shleifer scandal as the hook…something like this: “For the second time in a year, Harvard president Lawrence Summers is facing an unprecedented vote of no-confidence from his faculty—and his close relationship with a scandal-tarred professor is a major reason why.”

A poster two items below chastises me for my “touching” devotion to the Crimson, and suggests that the Crimson is being manipulated by both faculty and administration. Perhaps. Although—in the spirt of my touching devotion—it’s hard to look at any particular story and say that they’ve run something that wasn’t newsworthy. I’ve always thought that, if anything, the Crimson is overly deferential to the powers-that-be. Lately, though, they’ve shown an admirable feistiness; breaking the news of Kirby’s firing was a big story.

(I understand, by the way, that Crimson managing editor Zachary M. Seward will be taking some time off to catch his breath. A shame: Seward, author of the recent two-part series on how Mass Hall handled the 1/14 crisis, has good instincts and good sources. Let’s hope his successor builds on all the good work he has done.)

The poster suggests that anyone looking for neutral information should turn to Harvard Magazine and its report on the latest faculty meeting. To which I say, by all means. The more sources of information, the better. There are, as I learned during my long-ago graduate seminar with Bud Bailyn, many different approaches to historiography, and one must approach all of them with a healthy skepticism.

Harvard Magazine is generally not the most neutral source of news, but it did an excellent, thorough, and fair report of last winter’s troubles. Its report on the faculty meeting is a transcription of that meeting, and it makes for fascinating reading. There is no editorial comment whatsoever, but at times you can viscerally feel how uncomfortable and tense that meeting must have been, as one professor after another rose to ask pointed and painful questions.