Tempest on the Charles
Some 30 years ago, as an associate professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, I was summoned by the dean to a faculty meeting to discuss the appointment of a chairman of the department of city and regional planning. The faculty was up in arms over the conditions surrounding this selection, so much so that the department's leading professor stood up angrily and told the dean, "You are the worst living example of deceit, dishonesty, duplicity, and perfidy that I have ever encountered in my life." And this was the nicest thing he said before he turned on the associate dean: "And you are a Judas-like figure within the faculty; now all we have to do is find the 30 pieces of silver." The dean, to put it mildly, was upset: "I never," he said, "get into a fight with a pig because the pig enjoys it, and I get dirty." Then he sat down. Tension between faculty and administration, in case you were unaware, is a time-honored tradition.
Larry Summers, Harvard's president, has taken serious flak ever since he had the temerity to inquire why women were underrepresented in tenured science and engineering positions at top universities and research institutions. Summers conceded upfront that he might well be wrong in his analyses, adding that he hoped research would disprove him and offering that he merely hoped to "provoke" his audience.
Well, provoke he did. So much so that last week, 218 of the faculty of arts and sciences passed a vote of no confidence in him (with 185 dissenters). In another motion, 253 (to 137) backed Summers for daring to raise the issue but criticized his managerial approach. Translation: There is opposition not just to Summers's off-the-cuff remarks but also to his activist role in the university's governance.
Wake-up call. Harvard needs an awakening (if not a rude one). Summers is right to criticize the grade inflation that has resulted in over 90 percent of Harvard students graduating with honors. He's also right to press the faculty to spend more time on undergraduate teaching. And surely he's right to challenge the core curriculum. It has long been filled with too many narrow-gauged courses reflecting the special interests of junior faculty.
Summers deserves applause for taking advantage of Harvard's rich endowment to bring in lower-income students, including a groundbreaking program to provide scholarships to all students whose parents earn less than $40,000 a year. In the critical area of tenure, Summers has pushed to hire more rising young scholars. This was the backdrop to the current controversy because of its effect on women. Younger professors tend to spend their 20s and 30s--the very years when women are concerned with childbearing and child-rearing--on intensive research and publication. Summers noted that women, on average, may be less willing than men to work 80-hour weeks and make the family sacrifices that high-pressure academic careers require, including flexibility of schedules, weekend retreats, and evening teaching sessions. The conflict between the career clock and the biological clock puts married women at a competitive disadvantage with single and married men so that the pool from which top university appointments in science and engineering are made is disproportionately male. It is a problem that extends outside the university, too. Summers was surely doing all of us a service to focus on this issue, however clumsily he may have framed it. Since the fracas began, Summers has agreed to the appointment of two task forces, one on women in the faculty, another on women in science and engineering. The key question is not whether women can excel in math, science, and engineering. It is how can exceptional women who are mothers pursue careers in ways that enable them to strike a suitable balance between work and home.
The conflict at Harvard has become a national issue, not just because of Harvard's position as America's leading university but also because of how rare it is for university presidents to involve themselves in such hot-button issues--a tricky business with professors who enjoy lifetime tenure and are, shall we say, possessed of amply developed egos, especially among a faculty as distinguished as that of Harvard.
Even after Summers apologized repeatedly, many in the faculty are clearly unwilling to forgive or forget, as last week's no-confidence vote indicates. Many Harvard professors don't want Summers to just take off his hat; they want to take off his head. This is a pity. In the future, Summers might do well to speak more in his role as university president and less as a brilliant academic. But it would be a great loss if this dispute is allowed to suppress honest debate and set back the pace of academic reform.
This story appears in the March 28, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.