>Is it any wonder that the Right hates academia? Academia is the
>only industry in the USA where workers can force out the CEO.
Well at Harvard, and maybe Yale. (The Yale propaganda I was fed long ago claimed that at Harvard, the president rules, while at Yale, the faculty rules. Dunno.) But at Ohio State, you think the same could happen?
Meanwhile, Dershowitz blames the far-leftists in the humanities (see below)!
Doug
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Wall Street Journal - February 22, 2006
Crimson Tide
Facing War With His Faculty, Harvard's Summers Resigns
President's Ideas, Manner Alienated Many Professors; Fault Lines on Campus
A Record of Pushing Change
By DANIEL GOLDEN and STEVE STECKLOW
The resignation of Lawrence H. Summers as president of Harvard University, after years of escalating battles with his own faculty, throws into disarray the efforts of the nation's oldest, richest and most influential university to reform itself for the 21st century.
After just five years on the job, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary resigned yesterday in advance of a faculty vote on a motion of no confidence in his leadership. In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Summers said he made the decision last week after concluding that his differences with faculty members were irreparable. The problems ranged from the resignation of a prominent dean to Mr. Summers's handling of a scandal involving an economics professor who is one of his closest friends. Deeper issues include what some considered Mr. Summers's abrasive personality and the way he tried to ram change through an entrenched bureaucracy.
His exit exposes deep fault lines in Harvard's faculty. Scientists, economists and some in the professional schools formed the core of Mr. Summers's support, while he was generally unpopular with humanities professors. Law professor Alan Dershowitz says he and other Harvard faculty are furious that the university's board, which is called the Corporation, apparently caved to pressure from the professors who led the ouster charge. "This is an academic coup d'etat by one small faction...the die-hard left of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences," he says.
Other faculty members complain that Mr. Summers, 51 years old, who will be leaving this June, isn't going soon enough. "Larry can do a lot more damage in the next four months," says Daniel Fisher, a physics professor. "The failure of the Corporation to immediately appoint an interim president makes it harder to re-establish effective leadership and harder to heal the fissures among the faculty that Summers has caused."
Harvard's board reached back and named Derek Bok, 75, as its interim leader effective July 1. Prof. Bok left the presidency in 1991 after 20 years on the job. A person close to Harvard's six-member board says he agreed to accept the post about a week ago. On Feb. 11, Prof. Bok announced he was stepping down as chairman of Common Cause, a government watchdog group, citing his age. Harvard's board said Prof. Bok will serve until a permanent successor is found.
One person in communication with the board says its members are concerned the uproar on campus will rebound against them for picking and sticking by Mr. Summers. Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, for example, endorsed Mr. Summers's candidacy for Harvard's presidency in 2001 and fought unsuccessfully within the board in recent months to save his job. Last week, Mr. Rubin called Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard's law school, to ask why Harvard's professional schools were letting the arts-and-sciences faculty dominate the discussion, according to two people familiar with the situation.
With a $25.9 billion endowment, Harvard is the nation's wealthiest and most famous university. When its board tapped Mr. Summers, it was looking for an aggressive reformer who would administer strong medicine to help Harvard maintain its edge against younger, nimbler rivals.
His ambitious agenda included improving scientific research, expanding the university's international focus, breaking down barriers between departments, and persuading some faculty to move to Harvard's expanded campus in an unglamorous Boston neighborhood.
One goal was to encourage students to spend time abroad during their undergraduate years, something he once said wasn't done at "the traditional Harvard." He also wanted to foster cutting-edge, interdisciplinary science in areas such as stem-cell research.
Mr. Summers made some progress toward these goals. But in his blunt demands for change, he quickly became ineffective by alienating key constituencies.
In the end, he failed to appreciate the cultural differences between the hierarchical structure of the federal government and the more collaborative atmosphere of academia -- where the senior employees enjoy lifetime tenure. Mr. Summers recently told associates that when he went from Washington, D.C., to Cambridge, he thought he was going from a meaner to a nicer place. He told them he quickly learned he was mistaken.
On a national level, Mr. Summers's abrupt departure may make colleges think twice before hiring big names with limited experience in academic administration.
The beginning of the end was a no-confidence vote among the arts-and-sciences faculty that Mr. Summers lost last year. The cause was comments he made at a conference on work-force diversity, where he suggested that innate gender differences could help explain why fewer women reach the highest levels of academia in science and math. After the vote, Harvard's board members decided they should familiarize themselves with faculty concerns, which had been building for years, says a person familiar with their thinking. Board members including former Duke University President Nannerl Keohane and Urban Institute President Robert Reischauer soon recognized the depth of discontent. Their alarm grew with the recent resignation of William C. Kirby as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Mr. Kirby had been appointed by Mr. Summers and placed in charge of changing the curriculum. The effort became bogged down, displeasing Mr. Summers, and Mr. Kirby resigned. The news leaked to the press before it was made official, embarrassing the university. Faculty rallied to the defense of Mr. Kirby, who couldn't be reached for comment.
In recent weeks, board members polled the university's deans. The majority responded that the time had come for Mr. Summers to step down, according to a person familiar with the matter.
'It Was Institutional'
"A year ago, the faculty's concern was very personal: 'We don't like you,' " one professor said. "This time, it was different, it was institutional: 'The institution isn't running right, and it's your fault.' "
Harvard appointed Mr. Summers in 2001 to succeed Neil Rudenstine, a scholar of the Renaissance. He served 10 years as president but was reluctant to challenge Harvard's decentralized structure, summarized by the phrase, "Every tub on its own bottom." Individual schools wouldn't raise money together or share funds, for example.
Unlike some modern university presidents, Mr. Summers didn't see his role as only a fund-raiser. While donations to Harvard remained high under Mr. Summers, the percentage of alumni who gave to the university declined and a fund-raising campaign was postponed.
"I think Larry is a guy who loves to be -- and is about 99 out of 100 times -- the smartest guy in the room," says Harvard donor Bruns Grayson, managing partner at ABS Ventures, an investment concern in Waltham, Mass. Mr. Grayson says Mr. Summers's personality didn't lead him to curb his donations and that he supported Mr. Summers's goals for the university.
Another donor, Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and a friend of Mr. Summers, says the turmoil hasn't changed his family's giving but may have led others to hold back. "Many donors would probably have had some concern that the whole governance mechanism was spinning slightly out of control," Mr. Fisher says.
Instead, Mr. Summers focused on modernizing the university. He tried to change the university's policy of awarding tenure to the most accomplished scholars by promoting younger, less-heralded candidates who showed promise. That led to grumblings by some faculty of age discrimination.
But it was mostly personal clashes that created the early tensions with faculty. Mr. Summers chastised Prof. Cornel West, a prominent black member of the Afro-American Studies department for making a hip-hop record and for missing classes to help with a political campaign. Prof. West later left to teach at Princeton University. Mr. Summers startled faculty at the Kennedy School of Government by questioning whether the school prepares students better for public service than Harvard's law and business schools. Mr. Summers later said he was misunderstood, but some came away thinking he was questioning why the renowned program exists at all.
Mr. Summers wasn't afraid to wade into the kind of sensitive political subjects that tend to roil university campuses. In 2002, he suggested that a petition from professors urging the university to sell stakes in companies doing business in Israel may be "anti-Semitic."
"To use that kind of language is pretty inflammatory," says Richard G. Heck, a philosophy professor at Brown University who was then a Harvard professor and who signed the petition. Prof. Heck says the episode colored views of Mr. Summers. In future battles, "I had the sense that people were less willing to give him the benefit of the doubt."
The Russia Project
Mr. Summers also was drawn into a controversy over Andrei Shleifer, a star in Harvard's economics department. He and Harvard last year paid nearly $30 million to settle a civil suit brought by the U.S. government alleging that Mr. Shleifer violated conflict-of-interest rules by investing in Russia. The genesis of the case dates back a decade, when Mr. Shleifer headed up a prominent Harvard project, using government funding, to help Russia develop financial markets.
The unraveling of Mr. Shleifer's project was costly and embarrassing to Harvard. It hurt Mr. Summers, too, since the Harvard president is a close friend of Mr. Shleifer. The president officially recused himself from Harvard's internal deliberations over possible discipline for Mr. Shleifer but testified in a deposition that he urged a dean to protect the professor. Harvard didn't discipline Mr. Shleifer, angering some of its faculty.
Faculty members have diverging views of what finally forced Mr. Summers's resignation. Prof. Dershowitz says it was Mr. Summers's attempts to ameliorate his remarks about women in the sciences. After Mr. Summers pledged $50 million to bolster women in sciences, his faculty critics "saw blood in the water," Prof. Dershowitz says. "Nothing he could do was right. And they built a constituency."
Judith Ryan, professor of German and comparative literature who proposed next week's no-confidence vote, says it was Mr. Kirby's resignation. "It raised questions about...how many people there are who can work effectively with President Summers," Prof. Ryan says. He "created an atmosphere in which we didn't trust him and he was not effectively able to lead us and that had led to malaise, or even paralysis."
According to people familiar with the situation, Mr. Summers also alienated Jack R. Meyer, who until last year was chief executive of Harvard Management Corp. The group oversees Harvard's endowment and posted strong gains under Mr. Meyer's tenure. He and about 29 others in the fixed-income group left the affiliate last year. Although it wasn't the catalyst for his departure, Mr. Meyer was disappointed Mr. Summers didn't stand up to alumni who criticized some employees' pay, these people say. The controversy reached a head in 2003, when the top two HMC investment managers earned $35.1 million and $34.1 million, respectively.
In his conference call yesterday, Mr. Summers said his relationship with some faculty had become too dysfunctional for him to continue. In a letter published on the university's Web site, he wrote: "I have reluctantly concluded that the rifts between me and segments of the Arts and Sciences faculty make it infeasible for me to advance the agenda of renewal that I see as crucial to Harvard's future." (Mr. Summers's letter1)
In the call with reporters, Mr. Summers said he decided to step down last week before departing on a ski vacation. James Houghton, the senior member of Harvard's governing board and chairman of Corning Inc., said the board had accepted the resignation "with great regret."
Mr. Summers didn't back down on his position that Harvard and its faculty need to change, for example by attracting "young and emerging scholars who are transforming their disciplines." After five years of his presidency, he said on the conference call, "I think that the university is a much less complacent place." He listed among his accomplishments an initiative to improve access to Harvard by students from poorer families.
In 1983, Mr. Summers became, at age 28, one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's history. Mr. Summers decamped to Washington in 1991 as chief economist of the World Bank. He prompted an outcry for suggesting, in a memo, that toxic waste could be exported to Third World countries. He later called the notion a "whopper" of a mistake.
In 1999, Mr. Summers succeeded Mr. Rubin as Treasury secretary under President Clinton, a position he held until January 2001.
Mr. Summers intends to take a year-long sabbatical beginning in July, to give speeches, write and get involved in national policy debates. Next year, he plans to rejoin Harvard's faculty in order to pursue an academic career in economics, public policy and international affairs.
--Zachary M. Seward, Charles Forelle and Suzanne Sataline contributed to this article.