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.