Today is Class Day at Harvard—congratulations, seniors—and the Crimson celebrates by publishing another of its cranky attacks on the faculty.

The paper editorializes….

The Faculty has addressed few of the critical problems facing undergraduate education in any meaningful way, including those of curricular reform and the need for better teaching. Instead, it spent much of the year focusing on the ouster of University President Lawrence H. Summers—the most undergraduate-friendly Harvard president in recent history—while at other times it had difficulty even attaining quorums at its meetings to discuss undergraduate matters.

The editorial goes on to excoriate the faculty primarily for failing to make sufficient progress on the curricular review while devoting its energy to ousting Summers.

I know the Crimson is staffed with smart people, so I’m mystified by this argument. Can the Crimson editors not see any connection between the leadership of President Summers and the disaster that is the curricular review? Do these folks have such a short memory that they forget that, while Summers was actively directing in the review, it was an even larger failure than it is now? That it was Summers who appointed Kirby, an ineffectual dean who, for various reasons, was not up to the job of leading an academically serious curricular review? That, in working to oust Summers, the faculty was doing the most undergraduate-friendly thing it could? It will be very interesting to see the state of the review after a year of Derek Bok; I have no doubt that the comparison will be instructive.

The Crimson editors often lament the state of advising at Harvard College…do they not see that the worst department is the economics department, and that because this was a core of political support for Summers, he conspicuously failed to raise this issue with that department? (You can trust that he would have if it were classics, that’s for sure.)

And do the Crimson editors not see that Summers manipulated an easily-pleased audience, mobilizing student opinion to try to shore up his support, politicizing his relationship with the student body in a way that was extremely disturbing to the faculty, which consciously resisted efforts to draw the student body into this fight?

Crimson editors, it’s a fine thing that Summers visited student pizza feeds, danced at freshman parties, urged the teaching of more seminars, and wanted to improve the student social life. His push of a plan for free tuition for low-income families was important in both symbolic and practical ways. Absolutely, give him credit for these things.

But there is an inexorable connection between a dud of a curricular review and Summers’ leadership. Then there’s the fact of FAS deficits that will be approaching $100 million annually, in large part because of Summers’ high-spending habits—and if you think this won’t affect undergraduate education, you are much mistaken. The reporting of your own staff has shown that.

The Harvard faculty certainly has its shortcomings—many of which, in my opinion, are traceable to the longstanding culture of the university—and it does not explain itself well. But on this one, the Crimson is just wrong.