Larry Summers & Harvard University

[rtwngAvngr]

Nothing is more amusing than liberal indignation.

 

[Annie]

I don't know of his style, though I know he should not have apologized, at least not more than once. But he is brilliant:

http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/default.asp?page=1&SID=606917&ISS=21210&PUB=243

The students seemed to have liked him:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...ts24feb24,0,5551352.story?coll=la-home-nation

Students Hail Harvard President
Their strong support for Lawrence H. Summers is seen by some as a sign of a shift in campus politics.
By Ellen Barry
Times Staff Writer

February 24, 2006

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — If Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers was worried about how the undergraduates would greet him Wednesday night at his first scheduled event since announcing his resignation, those fears quickly were put to rest.

He got a standing ovation after he walked in. He got a standing ovation before he left. A row of students with red letters painted on their chests spelled out "Larry."

Sarah Bahan, 22, was wistful as she left the meeting. She had kind words to say about Summers' emphasis on hard sciences.

Mark Hoadley, 21, said Summers' monotone speaking style was balanced by a "dynamic mind."

Troy Kollmer, 21, said "a lot of students feel bad for him and think he got a raw deal."

The show of student loyalty has come as a surprise to many faculty members and administrators at Harvard, who grew to loathe Summers during a five-year tenure that brought a raw blast of politics to the 370-year-old institution.

In the past, it had been Harvard's students who forced change. In the spring of 1969, amid unrest over the Vietnam War, students angered by a campus ROTC program raided University Hall and threatened to burn the card catalog at Widener Library. The turmoil hastened the resignation of then-president Nathan Pusey, a classics scholar who had little patience for such activism.

This time, students held back while the faculty fumed. Undergraduates were well-insulated from the tempestuous management issues between Summers and top administrators; and Summers had endeared himself to students by showing up at early morning rugby matches and by gamely boogieing at school dances.

But somewhere in the controversy surrounding Summers is evidence of a change in campus politics, one professor said: These days, it is not unusual for students to be to the political right of their professors.

"This is a sort of 'I'm-not-a-feminist-but' generation," said J. Lorand Matory, a professor of anthropology and of African and African American studies. "I don't know if the word is 'conservative' as much as 'careerist.' "

The move to oust Summers began in earnest last year after he gave a speech that questioned whether "issues of intrinsic aptitude" explained the shortage of female professors in Harvard's math and science departments.

Already, he had angered many African American faculty members by confronting the scholar Cornel West, who then left Harvard for Princeton. Some deans and top administrators followed.

This winter, he was criticized for backing a friend, Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer, who was accused of defrauding the U.S. by investing his own money in a government-funded program designed to help transform Russia into a market economy. Harvard defended Shleifer in a civil suit, then paid a $26-million settlement.

Summers' support in faculty circles continued to dwindle until — at a faculty meeting Feb. 7 — there was no one left to speak in his defense.

Many students, meanwhile, thought the "intrinsic aptitude" flap of last spring had been resolved. "Our complaints ended when there was a reasonable dialogue," said Jonathan Blazek, 21.

The most comprehensive poll of student opinion came this week, after the Harvard Crimson e-mailed questions to 840 undergraduates. The 424 who responded were relatively supportive of Summers.

Thirty-nine percent said they approved of his job performance, 30% said they did not and 31% had no opinion. Asked whether he should resign, 57% said no and 19% said yes.

One reason for the disconnect between student and faculty attitudes toward Summers is that many of the most deeply felt complaints concern his treatment of professors and administrators — matters that have been quiet.

For example, Peter T. Ellison recently gave an interview to the Boston Globe, explaining why he had stepped down as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

He described Summers commenting, in a private meeting, that "economists are smarter than political scientists, and political scientists are smarter than sociologists" — playing into widespread fears that he favored some disciplines over others.

In the same meeting, Ellison said, Summers suggested shifting authority for a doctoral program from the sociology department to the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Ellison said he believed his authority was being undermined. Later, Ellison said, Summers promised to send out a letter saying the change would not occur.

"This does not seem to me any longer to be a matter of style or personality, but of character," Ellison wrote in a statement to the Globe.

Many faculty members and administrators shared similar stories, detailing a growing climate of fear, said Elizabeth Nathans, former dean of freshmen. She left Harvard involuntarily in 2005 and now is an administrator at Boston College.

But, Nathans said, students did not know what was happening. "It is to the faculty's credit that they don't. Faculty members have been very circumspect, trying to deal with it privately," she said.

Since Summers announced his resignation Tuesday, his most vocal defenders have been students.

On a blog called "Summersville," students have placed memorial posters of their soon-to-be-departed president and floated plans for a protest at an upcoming faculty meeting.

"I don't think everybody on campus loves him, but there is sort of a general sense the situation was handled poorly," Harry Ritter, 21, said.

Ritter worries, he said, that the initiatives Summers began — the expansion of Harvard's campus, study-abroad programs and beefing up of the life sciences, among others — will founder.

"If the faculty now feels it has the power to kick a president out … what precedent does this set for the university? How well will the next president deal with the climate?" Ritter said. "There are students really angry about what has happened."

Michael Broukhim, 21, an editorial chair for the Harvard Crimson, said some students grew to admire the same qualities in Summers that alienated professors — such as his clear enthusiasm for subjects with real-world applications, like stem cell research and globalization.

"The fact that Summers worked in politics [as Treasury secretary] is indicative — he wants the university to be oriented, very practically, toward the public good," Broukhim said.

To Matory, the African American studies professor, it was no surprise that students were not calling to oust Summers. Students rarely have occasion to interact with a university president, he said, and tend not to follow internal faculty politics.

"If anything," Matory said, "the vast number of students don't care."

Harry Lewis, a computer science professor and former dean of Harvard College who left under pressure from Summers, said campus politics here had been shifting for decades, as more students from less affluent backgrounds enrolled.

A more diverse group, they are also "eager to prosper and less willing to take risks by rebelling," Lewis said. His upcoming book, "Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education," traces what he considers to be the decline in the quality of education at Harvard. It's left them far more likely to support the power structure, he said.

"The Harvard student body looks more like America than the Harvard faculty," he said. "That's what's happened."

 

[Annie]

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060227&s=stuntz022706

The New Republic Online
SUMMERS AND THE FUTURE OF HIGHER ED.
Future Shock
by William J. Stuntz
Only at TNR Online
Post date: 02.27.06

Fifty years ago, General Motors was on top of the world--and knew it. GM dominated the American automobile market, and the American market dominated the world. Every year, another line of Chevrolets and Buicks rolled out, pretty much the same as the last, save for the shape of the tailfins. Millions bought them. Wages rose and benefits increased. If costs were higher, customers seemed happy to pay. What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty. Today, GM is on the brink of bankruptcy. The standard line in news coverage is that health care and retirement benefits were too generous, and there is some truth to that. But the roots of this soon-to-be corporate failure lie in the way GM handled its success. Instead of using its market share and cash flow to invest in innovation and greater efficiency, GM sat on its lead. It worked well for the managers and factory workers of the 1950s: They got theirs. But because they got theirs, today's workers are about to get nothing.

Harvard is the General Motors of American universities: rich, bureaucratic, and confident--a deadly combination. Fifty years from now, Larry Summers's resignation will be known as the moment when Harvard embraced GM's fate. From now on, the decline will likely be steep. And not only at Harvard: Among research universities as in the car market of generations past, other American institutions will follow the market leaders, straight to the bottom. The only question is who gets to play the role of Toyota in this metaphor.

To a casual observer of the university world today, that picture likely seems too pessimistic. American universities are the best in the world, probably by a large margin. The best scholars and researchers in the world are drawn to America's shores to work in America's libraries and labs. Students, parents, and alumni seem willing to pay whatever they are asked; the gravy train shows no sign of slowing down, much less stopping. With its $26 billion endowment, Harvard sits atop what looks like an unstoppable juggernaut.

But juggernauts that seem unstoppable never are. And when the sun shines brightest, it is best to look for clouds on the horizon.

One need not look far to find them. Three key American enterprises have seen costs rise much faster than inflation over the past generation, and all three are enterprises in which America leads the world: housing, health care, and higher education. Houses have grown bigger and better, as anyone who has looked at contemporary bathrooms and kitchens knows. Doctors do things they could not imagine a generation ago. Costs may have risen faster than quality, but there is no doubt that quality has risen, and risen substantially.

Higher education is similar--on the cost side. Benefit is another story. There is little reason to believe that undergrads and graduate students are better educated today than a generation ago. More likely the opposite. Teaching loads of senior professors have declined; probably teaching quality has declined with it. The culture of research universities has grown ever more contemptuous of students, especially undergraduates, who are seen as an interruption of one's real work rather than the reason for the enterprise. Which means that, year by year, students and their parents pay more for less. That isn't a sustainable business plan.

If undergraduate education is too often an afterthought, graduate education is too often a con game. A sizeable percentage of PhDs will never get tenure-track teaching jobs, which are the only jobs for which their education trains them. Since no jobs await them, they hang around longer getting their degrees, all the while teaching classes and doing research for their academic sponsors. It's a great deal--for the sponsors. For the grad students, it's akin to buying a daily lottery ticket as a retirement plan. The grad students keep coming, but eventually that well will dry up; the quality of the talent pool will decline. No system that depends on systematic irrationality can long survive, much less succeed.

The problems go beyond education to the production of knowledge itself. Universities compartmentalize knowledge, chopping it up into ever more and smaller pieces. I teach and write about American criminal justice. Scholarship on crime and criminal justice is divided among a half-dozen different schools and departments: law, political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, and public health. Scholars in each of those areas know next to nothing about scholarship in all the others. (I'm no better than anyone else on this score.) No wonder our work is ignored by policymakers; each of us can elaborately describe his own piece of the elephant but none sees the beast whole. One could tell the same story with respect to dozens of other fields of study.

Overspecialization breeds self-indulgent scholasticism. Too many scholars write for an audience of dozens (if that--a good friend of mine says he writes for six people), and far too few write for thousands, fewer still for millions. In a bygone era, the best intellectuals wrote for educated people generally, not for a handful of specialists. American universities are chock full of brilliant minds that keep their brilliance locked up in a closet, talking only to people in their small corner of the intellectual world. Graduate education and academic promotion standards push scholars to fine-tune their disciplines' methodologies. (The very word--it means "methods"--captures something of the disease: In universities, as elsewhere, there is an inverse relationship between the pretentiousness with which a task is described and the quality with which the task is performed.) Broadening one's field of vision tends to be a bad career move.

Summers cared about problems like these, as only a lover of ideas can. In a conversation with the law school's lateral appointments committee, he said that not so long ago, the people who made tax policy were all lawyers--but that now, nearly all are economists. He wondered whether that fact said something troubling about legal education. Seems like a pretty good question to me. Evidently, most of my Arts and Sciences colleagues prefer a president who knows and cares too little about what they do to criticize it, whose comments on their job performance consist only of the occasional pat on the back. Most universities work that way: like an awards dinner for a child's soccer league--no distinctions are drawn; everyone gets a prize. Harvard seemed, briefly, to set a different standard. No longer.

The newspapers have been filled with stories of Summers's supposed obnoxiousness. Few of the stories note the coin's other side: The academic world has never seen a university president so eager to hear and engage opposing arguments. Summers might indeed tell you you're flat wrong, an experience people in my job too rarely have. But you could tell him that he's full of shit--and he'd smile and argue back.

Problem is, university faculty don't want to talk back to their bosses; they don't want to have bosses. And their preferences matter. The past 40 years have seen faculty take near-total control of leading universities. These institutions are democracies of a peculiar sort: Only a part of one constituency gets to vote. Two kinds of people teach in universities: those who invest in some combination of teaching students and writing scholarship (the best people invest in both), and those who go through the motions. Which group do you suppose is more likely to attend the meetings and write the memos and vote on the motions of no confidence? The correlation isn't perfect: There are great teachers and scholars who do invest in institutional governance, and thank God for them. Over time, though, general tendencies swamp individual variations, and the general tendency here is disastrous. It is as if you took the bottom half of GM's factory workers a half-century ago and told them to run the corporation, promising that whatever they did, their jobs were guaranteed and their pay could only rise. It's a great gig while it lasts.

Summers was brought down not because he was politically incorrect or bad at soothing academic egos, though those things contributed far more than they should have. The core problem is that he wanted to shake up the comfortable world of higher education. Most Americans think of universities as a bastion of the political left, and in one sense they are. But in a deeper sense, institutions like Harvard embody a particularly blind sort of conservatism: All change causes discomfort, and so must be resisted. In this deeper sense, Summers was and is very much a man of the left--the best kind of left. Good for him. Harvard's governing board has now chosen, publicly and emphatically, the status quo. Bad for them, and before long, bad for all of us. A friend of mine who runs a small business likes to say that the last move of a failing enterprise is to fire all those who want change. It's hard to imagine another such reform-minded president in a top university anytime soon. From now on, the forces pushing change will all come from the outside. Inside, we will see only denial and resistance, in equal measure. The downward spiral will accelerate.

Not just in Cambridge. The health of any single university is no large matter. But in this market, the top players set the terms for everyone else. If the Ivies and Stanford and the top state universities continue to do things the old-fashioned way, schools farther down the food chain have to do the same, or risk losing their best faculty members. It's a little like the early stages of a Ponzi scheme: Everyone wants to keep it going as long as possible, and the odds are it won't end just yet. My generation of academics (I'm 47) will get ours and then, probably, get out before the crash--just as GM's managers in the 1950s got theirs, then went on to rich retirements. But woe to those who come after us.

When one sees a large competitive opportunity, it's usually a good bet that someone else has seen it already. Universities in other parts of the world now enjoy an enormous opportunity. And the competitive position of American schools is worse than GM's in the 1950s. Then, Germany and Japan were still prostrate; no one could imagine that within a generation their economies would seem poised to overtake America's. Now, it's easy to imagine that a generation hence, Chinese or Indian universities will dominate the world, or perhaps that some intellectual entrepreneur will bring Oxford or Cambridge back to the top of the heap. Or--this is the scenario to root for--maybe Bill Gates will use a few of his billions to create a new university from scratch, one that does not follow the old rules, and a new style of education will take the market by storm. The only thing that seems certain is that the world of higher education will look very different than it does now. For Harvard and for the high-end universities with which it allegedly competes, that world will look a lot worse than this one.

I feel a little like an aging French nobleman in, say, 1780. Life is good. One day soon, it won't be. But who cares? I've got mine.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

See! He's awesome. Liberals in academia just can't stand being questioned on their crap.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

They made a martyr of this guy.

 

[Adam's Apple]

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w060227&s=stuntz022706

Excellent article, Kathianne. Kudos to you for bringing it to the board. Now I wish more than ever that we had a man like Larry Summers at the head of our university.

 

[Annie]

Excellent article, Kathianne. Kudos to you for bringing it to the board. Now I wish more than ever that we had a man like Larry Summers at the head of our university.

Thanks. This guy was really brought down by one department at the university, which is a shame.

 

[musicman]

http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/default.asp?page=1&SID=606917&ISS=21210&PUB=243

"In the past, it had been Harvard's students who forced change. In the spring of 1969, amid unrest over the Vietnam War, students angered by a campus ROTC program raided University Hall and threatened to burn the card catalog at Widener Library. The turmoil hastened the resignation of then-president Nathan Pusey, a classics scholar who had little patience for such activism."

Hmmm...in 1969, it was the students. Now, it's the faculty. Where, oh where do we begin searching for the constant?

Could it be that this is all the handiwork of the same spoiled, ungrateful, and destructive generation? Some say the radical left simply donned suits and ties, and became the new establishment.

 

[Mr.Conley]

This winter, he was criticized for backing a friend, Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer, who was accused of defrauding the U.S. by investing his own money in a government-funded program designed to help transform Russia into a market economy. Harvard defended Shleifer in a civil suit, then paid a $26-million settlement.

One reason for the disconnect between student and faculty attitudes toward Summers is that many of the most deeply felt complaints concern his treatment of professors and administrators — matters that have been quiet.

The move to oust Summers began in earnest last year after he gave a speech that questioned whether "issues of intrinsic aptitude" explained the shortage of female professors in Harvard's math and science departments.

Already, he had angered many African American faculty members by confronting the scholar Cornel West, who then left Harvard for Princeton. Some deans and top administrators followed.

F off, liberal twit.

(Begin Sarcasm)
I fall before you well reasoned, fully supported, logical arguements. You are truely a master orator and an enlightened man.

(End Sarcasm)

It really doesn't speak highly of your position if the only way you can defend it is by shouting explicatives and calling people liberals. Maybe you should consider putting some thought and reason into your arguements.

One suggestion rtwng, instead of going to all the trouble of typing up a whole sentence calling someone a liberal, why don't you create a standard phrase. Then you can just insert variables. It could go something like, "Person X thinks this on issue Y therefore he/she is a liberal/moron/democrat." Since thats all you ever say anyway, why not just make the process a little faster by standardizing it?

 

[rtwngAvngr]

(Begin Sarcasm)
I fall before you well reasoned, fully supported, logical arguements. You are truely a master orator and an enlightened man.

(End Sarcasm)

Actually, you fall before me humiliated and defeated, revealed as the pompous assmeister you truly are, but let's not quibble over details.

 

[Mr.Conley]

Actually, you fall before me humiliated and defeated, revealed as the pompous assmeister you truly are, but let's not quibble over details.

(Resume Sarcasm)
Behold children, the partisan. Thriving in his preset worldview, no amount of reason, logic, or factual information can tear him from his conjectured opinions, no matter how baseless they are. In attempts to spread his seemingly perfect ideas to the world, he often comes across his greatest enemy, an independent thinker, someone who doesn't rely on the Democratic or Republican parties to form their ideas for them. At first he will valiently try to defend his position, but soon he is reduced to shouting invectives and claiming victories where there are none in an attempt to bolster his increasingly unteneable position. Rather than trying show him the light of truth (Veritas) hold your position until he finally concede defeats by not posting anymore.
(End Sarcasm)

Wow, an assmeister, your usual crop of explicatives are running out so you've had to create new ones, ay?

Oh well, since you don't actually know anything about this topic whatsoever, I guess that's all you have to contribute. If you want apologize or at least post something constructive, the ball is yours.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

(Resume Sarcasm)
Behold children, the partisan. Thriving in his preset worldview, no amount of reason, logic, or factual information can tear him from his conjectured opinions, no matter how baseless they are. In attempts to spread his seemingly perfect ideas to the world, he often comes across his greatest enemy, an independent thinker, someone who doesn't rely on the Democratic or Republican parties to form their ideas for them. At first he will valiently try to defend his position, but soon he is reduced to shouting invectives and claiming victories where there are none in an attempt to bolster his increasingly unteneable position. Rather than trying show him the light of truth (Veritas) hold your position until he finally concede defeats by not posting anymore.
(End Sarcasm)

Wow, an assmeister, your usual crop of explicatives are running out so you've had to create new ones, ay?

Oh well, since you don't actually know anything about this topic whatsoever, I guess that's all you have to contribute. If you want apologize or at least post something constructive, the ball is yours.

Actually, Kathianne's articles confirmed my view. He was well loved by normal people, but hated by doctrinnaire groupthink lefties such as yourself. They attacked his character with bogus charges like CONDESCENSION, like they always do.

 

[Mr.Conley]

Actually, Kathianne's articles confirmed my view. He was well loved by normal people, but hated by doctrinnaire groupthink lefties such as yourself. They attacked his character with bogus charges like CONDESCENSION, like they always do.

Ok, obviously you are not keeping up. If you had actually paid attention, you would have noted in my first post (Post 2 in the thread) that I like and support Larry Summers reform efforts. Make sure to check your facts before you say something.

Then again, as the same article you quote says, the students didn't deal with Summers nearly as often as the faculty. As I said in my first post, my personal experience with Summers gave me the impression that he could be a difficult man to deal with.

Besides, why is this political? Summers was president of Harvard University, not the United States. No national politics are involved. The only reason you even know he exists is because its Harvard we're talking about. Yet somehow you connect this with some vast, left-wing conspiracy to oust a liberal from a position of power. Take a look at that statement, seems a bit retarded, no?

 

[Mr.Conley]

At first he will valiently try to defend his position, but soon he is reduced to shouting invectives and claiming victories where there are none in an attempt to bolster his increasingly unteneable position. Rather than trying show him the light of truth (Veritas) hold your position until he finally concede defeat by not posting anymore.
(End Sarcasm)

So it was said, and thus it was.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

So it was said, and thus it was.

Conley. The situation here is the same all over with libs; whenever someone doesn' cower to their snobbery and lies, they attack his character. So it is.

 

[Mr.Conley]

Conley. The situation here is the same all over with libs; whenever someone doesn' cower to their snobbery and lies, they attack his character. So it is.

You were rejected, weren't you? Now it all falls into place.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

You were rejected, weren't you? Now it all falls into place.

After all this time, this is what you come up with? You're pathetic.

 

[William Joyce]

''Ascribing bigotry to those with whom you disagree," one critic wrote in the Boston Globe, ''is the last refuge of cowards."

But it works like a charm.

 

[Adam's Apple]

Getting back to the question of whether Harvard is a teaching university....
This article is worth reading. I think it's a diagnosis of an ailment at all U.S. universities. I know it is a perfect description of what passes for teaching at our biggest state university.

The Cambridge Question
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman, U.S. News & World Report
4/10/06

When you consult a doctor, are you more impressed by the certificates on the wall or the practical experience of his competence? When you fly, would you care that the pilot had an aeronautics degree but only 10 hours' flying time? Academic qualifications are like bikinis: What they reveal may be less significant than what they conceal.

This had become the disturbing reality at Harvard when five years ago it brought in a new reforming president, Larry Summers. A Harvard degree remained prestigious, but most of those who graduated were dissatisfied with their undergraduate education there. It was not commensurate with what they expected from an outstanding faculty. Many asserted they learned less from the academic stars, most of whom they rarely saw, than from their fellow students.

Research, not teaching, has become Harvard's core purpose; the tenured faculty are scholars first and teachers second. More and more undergraduates are taught by graduate assistants and part-time faculty, who handle full loads for a third or less the salaries of full professors. (Last year, full professors at Harvard were paid an average of $163,200 and held 64 percent of the academic posts.) The emphasis on research, not teaching, results in a competition among universities for faculty stars. They are attracted less by money than by the freedom to do their own research, so they shun heavy teaching loads.

Summers was critical of this world of unengaged professors and overburdened teaching assistants. He understood that the core curriculum at Harvard was an antiquated mess, basically a way of enabling the faculty members to teach their esoteric specialties in the name of choice.

for full article:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/060410/10edit.htm

 

[Annie]

That explains why the students loved him, while the faculty at the Arts & Sciences school had a problem with him.