Everyone’s wanting to make the Larry Summers resignation to be simply another battle in the culture wars, and Alan Derschowitz is fanning the flames of that interpretation. HubBlog agrees that "the core opposition was comprised of 100 percent pure-octane lefties living in their own self-dramatized world."
I guess it’s one big Rorschach test, because humanities scholars and humanities-friendly social scientists - as well as those sympathetic to these disciplines - tend to have another interpretation of events. Most generously, they say, Summers was addressing big problems at Harvard but did so with supreme lack of leadership skills. Less generously, they point to Summers’ barely disguised contempt for humanities and "lesser" social sciences, as well as his micromanaging of tenure cases. None of this is to say politics weren’t at play, rather that political battles are difficult to remove from institutional and disciplinary ones. On one level, singling out Cornell West might be a political attack on a certain left-radical political stance; on the other hand it smacks of the hubris of an economist coming in and deciding that West’s body of scholarship was meaningless. (And no, it’s not: I’ve not read many academic essays with the succinct insights that "The Paradox of the Afro-American Rebellion" puts in 14 brief pages.)
Anyway, I could blather on, but here are a few posts I found worth reading on the subject:
Matt Yglesias: "…I would emphasize that there’s probably a lot of institutional politics in play…there was constant discontent with Summers’ efforts to centralize the administration of the university and a perception that he was trying to downplay the Faculty of Arts of Sciences in general and the College in particular as the centerpieces of the university…. Naturally, those on the short end of the stick were not pleased."
Tim Burke: "academics may or may not be liberal in their politics, but they are most definitely and dramatically conservative in their temperments, in their posture towards their own institutions. Change sits poorly with most academics. If you believe, as I do, that higher education is soon to experience serious, irresistable external pressure on some of its deepest traditions and accustomed practices, this is seriously worrisome…. [However,] I think it’s especially important for a reformer in an academic institution to try and formulate reforms in terms that are potentially applicable even-handedly, across the board, and offered in a collaborative spirit. If you want to argue that you expect your faculty to dedicate themselves more to teaching, for example, you don’t pick one or two people to harrass over that question."
Brian Leiter: "his ignorant remarks on women in the sciences [were] only the tip of the iceberg as to why he irritated his faculty. His departure, though, is probably a loss for Harvard: he forced the Harvard Law School to have actual tenure standards, and he had rather sensible instincts about academic merit."
By the way, has it occurred to anyone that the student body "likes" Summers sheerly out of contempt for the inaccessible star faculty who opposed the president?
And while we’re picking on Harvard, is it possible that the English department contains no associate professors?! Am I misreading something?
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