FOCUS: An Engaged Scholar-President

Implicit in the recent discussion of University President Lawrence H. Summers’ remarks is a debate over the nature of the presidency of Harvard. One view is that our president should be a pleasant figurehead who presides over a growing endowment and speaks donation-related platitudes. The other view, which I favor, is that our president ought to be an active intellectual, someone who participates fully in the scholarly life, engages in academic debates, and sometimes even throws out hypotheses that are wrong.

Reasonable people can have different beliefs about the most desirable attributes of a university president. After all, many of our competitor institutions make do with presidents who understand that their comments must be blander than my four-month-old child’s rice cereal. Controversy can create difficulties, and if avoiding controversy is more important than intellectual discourse, then the University would be better served by a genial figurehead than by a scholar-president.

But I am confident that most members of the Harvard community share my belief that nothing is more important than our intellectual mission and the free exchange of ideas. I think that it is enormously valuable to this intellectual mission that we have a true scholar leading our academic community. I find it remarkable that our president is one of the most intellectually-engaged people that I have ever known, and I think that Harvard’s eminence in the world of ideas is greatly strengthened by having this kind of leadership.

It is wonderful that our students are exposed to a Core class where the University president enters into the intellectual arena and debates the impact of free trade. It is remarkable that we have a University president who gives graduate students and young faculty members serious advice on their research. It is important that we have a president who seriously engages with the scholarship of every prospective faculty member. It is extraordinary that we have a president who relishes advising freshmen and changing the lives of undergraduates by teaching a freshmen seminar.

While many members of our community can teach Core courses and freshman seminars and attend workshops and critique papers, there is something particularly special about the president of Harvard being so involved in the process of scholarship. This involvement sends a clear message to our students and to the world that scholarship is an exciting vocation and that the world of ideas, which all of us love, is a joyful world that must be cherished and supported. The enthusiasm of our scholar-president for teaching and research sends an unmistakable signal to the world that scholarship is precious and that what we do is important.

Of course, the cost of having an intellectually-engaged president is that occasionally he will emit ideas that are politically offensive or, in some cases, just plain wrong. After all, as Karl Popper taught us, providing refutable hypotheses is at the very core of scientific progress. I would hesitate to count the number of incorrect hypotheses that I come up with in the course of a year. Luckily, I have colleagues and students who point out my errors. If we are to have a scholar-president, we must treat his false hypotheses in the same way that we treat the false hypotheses of our colleagues and in the same way that we would expect our own mistaken ideas to be treated. We must vigorously refute his errors with compelling evidence but not with personal attacks. And just as we cherish our colleagues who make themselves vulnerable by the extent of their intellectual engagement, we should also cherish a president who loves the process of scientific inquiry so much that he makes himself vulnerable by his intellectual openness.

When our president stumbles as a result of his ardor for knowledge, we should empirically refute his error, but at the same time champion his engagement with scholarship. I would rather see Harvard led by an occasionally mistaken scholar, who stands for and loves what we do, than by a fund-raising bureaucrat who protects himself from error by avoiding intellectual discourse.

Edward L. Glaeser is a professor of economics.