Philadelphia
WHAT went wrong at Harvard?
Tomorrow, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences will meet for the first time
since the resignation of the university's president, Lawrence H. Summers, two
weeks ago. The dean of Arts and Sciences, William Kirby, resigned in late
January, reportedly after clashing with Mr. Summers. When Mr. Summers leaves on
July 1, there will be a serious leadership vacuum at Harvard, which has been
torn by strife during his short five-year tenure.
Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary, assumed the presidency with a
high sense of mission. Determined to effect change, he took bold and
confrontational positions. He endorsed proposals to expand the campus across the
Charles River to Allston, attacked anti-Semitism and rampant grade inflation and
laudably argued for the return of R.O.T.C. to Harvard.
But whatever his good intentions, Mr. Summers often inspired more heat than
light. His stellar early career as an economics professor did not prepare him
for dealing with an ingrown humanities faculty that has been sunk in political
correctness for decades. As president, he had a duty to research the tribal
creeds and customs of those he wished to convert. Foolishly thinking plain
speech and common sense would suffice, he flunked Academic Anthropology 101.
While many issues are rumored to have played a role in Mr. Summers's
resignation (including charges of favoritism in a messy legal case involving
foreign investments), the controversy that will inevitably symbolize his
presidency was the manufactured outcry early last year over his glancing
reference at a conference to possible innate differences between the sexes in
aptitude for science and math. The feminist pressure groups rose en masse from
their lavishly feathered nests and set up a furious cackle that led to a
218-to-185 vote of no confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last March.
Instead of welcoming this golden opportunity to introduce the forbidden
subject of biology to academic gender studies (where a rigid dogma of social
constructionism reigns), Mr. Summers collapsed like a rag doll. A few months
later, after issuing one abject apology after another, he threw $50 million at a
jerrybuilt program to expand the comfort zone of female scientists and others on
campus. That one desperate act of profligate appeasement tells volumes about the
climate of persecution and extortion around gender issues at too many American
universities.
In a widely reported incident four years ago, Mr. Summers's private
conversation with Cornel West, one of Harvard's short list of distinguished
scholars who have the title of "university professor" (because they teach across
department lines), resulted in Dr. West angrily decamping to Princeton. Whatever
critique of affirmative action Mr. Summers intended was lost in what became a
soap opera of hurt feelings and facile accusations of racism.
There was a larger issue of campus governance at stake. While it is certainly
in Harvard's best interests to ensure that its university professors remain
productive at a high scholarly level (the president reportedly slighted Dr.
West's recording of a rap CD), it is unclear on what authority Mr. Summers was
challenging Dr. West in the first place. The provost, not the president, is the
chief academic officer of any university. But Harvard reinstituted a provost
only in the early 1990's, and the weakness of that position is suggested by the
provost's near invisibility through the public battles of the Summers
regime.
The ideological groupthink of Harvard's humanities faculty does patent
disservice to the undergraduates in their charge, but it is the faculty alone
that should properly determine curriculum and academic policy, a responsibility
that descends from the birth of European universities in the Middle Ages. Over
the past 40 years, there has been a radical expansion of administrative
bureaucracies on American college campuses that has distorted the budget and
turned education toward consumerism, a checkbook alliance with parents who are
being bled dry by grotesquely exorbitant tuitions.
Mr. Summers's strategic blunders unfortunately took the spotlight off
entrenched political correctness and changed the debate to academic power: who
has it, and how should it be exercised? Nationwide, campus administrations faced
with factionalized or obdurate faculties have in some cases taken matters into
their own hands by creating programs or reducing and even eliminating
departments. The trend is disturbingly away from faculty power.
Hence more is at stake in the Harvard affair than merely one overpriced
campus with an exaggerated reputation. Support for Larry Summers was strong
among Harvard undergraduates and outside the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which
constitutes only one of Harvard's many colleges and professional schools. The
Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz protested that Mr. Summers had been
removed by "a coup d'état." But by his failure to provide a systematic rationale
for his words and actions, Mr. Summers gave the impression of governing by whim
and impulse. The leader of so huge and complex an institution cannot be a
whirling dervish.
IT now remains to be seen whether Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences is
capable of self-critique. Will its members acknowledge their own insularity and
excesses, or will they continue down the path of smug self-congratulation and
vanity? Harvard's reputation for disinterested scholarship has been severely
gored by the shadowy manipulations of the self-serving cabal who forced Mr.
Summers's premature resignation. That so few of the ostensibly aggrieved faculty
members deigned to speak on the record to The Crimson, the student newspaper,
illustrates the cagey hypocrisy that permeates fashionable campus leftism, which
worships diversity in all things except diversity of thought.
If Harvard cannot correct itself in this crisis, it will signal that academe
cannot be trusted to reform itself from within. There is a rising tide of
off-campus discontent with the monolithic orthodoxies of humanities departments.
David Horowitz, a 1960's radical turned conservative, has researched the
lopsided party registration of humanities professors (who tend to be Democrats
like me) and proposed an "academic bill of rights" to guarantee fairness and
political balance in the classroom. The conservative radio host Sean Hannity
regularly broadcasts students' justifiable complaints about biased teachers and
urges students to take recording devices to class to gather evidence.
These efforts to hold professors accountable are welcome and bracing, but the
danger is that such tactics can be abused. Tenure owes its very existence to
past intrusions by state legislatures in the curricular business of state
universities. If politicians start to meddle in campus governance, academic
freedom will be the victim. And when students become snitches, we are heading
toward dictatorship by Mao's Red Guards or Hitler Youth.
Over the last three decades of trendy poststructuralism and postmodernism,
American humanities professors fell under the sway of a ruthless guild
mentality. Corruption and cronyism became systemic, spread by the ostentatious
conference circuit and the new humanities centers of the 1980's. Harvard did not
begin that blight but became an extreme example of it. Amid the ruins of the
Summers presidency, there is a tremendous opportunity for recovery and renewal
of the humanities. Which way will Harvard go?
Camille Paglia is the university professor of humanities and
media studies at the University of the Arts in
Philadelphia.
