I heard Alan Dershowitz on NPR yesterday, claiming that Lawrence Summers’ resignation from the
Harvard presidency proved the power of the “hard left” on the Harvard faculty, and that he feared they would influence not only the choice of a future president but of faculty colleagues as well. It put me in mind of the remark by Helen Whitney, wife of Benno Schmidt, that her husband was chased from the Yale presidency by “the deconstructionists” on the Yale faculty. As a sometime non-deconstructionist Yale faculty member, I can testify that this judgment was arrant nonsense; and I suspect Dershowitz’s analysis of the Harvard situation was, too.
The “hard left” of the Harvard faculty is probably hard to find. And university faculties on the whole are slow to organize to take action against administrators they dislike: it generally takes years for faculty ire to build to the point of a non-confidence vote, such as that registered by the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences last year, or the motion of censure of the Dean of Yale College voted by the Yale faculty during the academic year 1991-92—which led to the resignation of that Dean, then to Schmidt’s own. Summers after all is in year five of his presidency, and Schmidt lasted for six years.
Yet the article on Summers’ resignation in the New York Times today leaves me even more bemused than Dershowitz’s NPR melodramatics. It’s a decent coverage of the event, but you don’t get much substantive discussion of how universities work, and why they work that way, and why boards of trustees (such as the Harvard Corporation) pick the kinds of CEOs they do, and why this doesn’t necessarily meet the approval of faculties. Without having any real insider information, I suspect the Summers story is an instructive instance of what may lie ahead in many universities, as academic culture encounters an increasing insistence on governance on the corporate model.
It’s true that the Harvard presidency is front-page news, but when you read on you are not sure why. Serious engagement of the media with what universities are all about and how they run is strangely lacking, given the American obsession with higher education. Should those of us who are in the university be vexed, or grateful?
Peter Brooks
A Yale College senior just brought to my attention the fact that I placed the resignation of Benno Schmidt et al in 2001-02, when in fact this occurred in 1991-92, as I very well knew. Can't kkep my centuries straight! Very sorry. PLease make the mental correction.
PB
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