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.