FOCUS: The Complexities of Academic Leadership

Crimson articles over the past weeks report an outpouring of criticism of University President Lawrence H. Summers within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Lawyers, perhaps, are constitutionally inclined to see multiple sides of a story where some see only one. Faculty complain that they have been left out of Allston planning, but many have participated in a welter of committees, and on a task of that complexity, a considerable amount of centralized decisionmaking is required. (I do not know if there was more faculty discussion of Allston before Summers’ arrival, but there surely was not much progress.) The undergraduate curriculum, desperately overdue for an overhaul, finally is getting careful attention. Financial aid and admissions policies posing barriers to the admission of low-income students have been revised. Summers has had a hand in all of these and many other matters. Faculty accustomed to operating at what may be America’s most decentralized research university predictably resent any loss of control to the central administration, but the idiosyncracies of the status quo ante at Harvard should not be assumed to be a model of effective university governance.

Faculty complain that Summers is intimidating, and there is no doubt that he can be. Complaints that he has silenced people, however, need to be rounded out. He seems not yet to have fully found his way in making the transition from faculty member to President, and, alas, the two are not the same; criticism from the President feels different than criticism from a colleague. But that is different from refusing to tolerate dissent. I’ve crossed swords with him in more than one setting, and while being criticized directly and forcefully by the President can be unnerving, especially in the company of others, one can criticize him back just as directly. That, indeed, is one of his great virtues; he seems to care not about the fact that someone is expressing disagreement but instead about whether the disagreement is persuasive. (Perhaps we law professors, accustomed to the Socratic teaching style, are less troubled by this kind of give-and-take.) Other have told me they have had the same experience. I admire his willingness to analyze issues fully, on the merits, his desire to challenge and his willingness to have others challenge him. At the same time, I fear that his direct and sometimes confrontational approach can discourage the expression of dissenting views that I believe he welcomes. So while undeniably there is room for improvement in his leadership style, the cries of silencing seem somewhat misleading.

What Summers said at the conference of the National Bureau of Economic Research caused a firestorm, and he has said repeatedly that his words were not well chosen. The Crimson some weeks ago included statements from prominent psychologists on the topic of gender. Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker suggested that there was adequate evidence to take seriously the hypothesis that men’s and women’s distributions of quantitative and spatial abilities may not be identical. Berkman Professor of Psychology Elizabeth Spelke was far more critical, arguing that gender differences are negligible, that it therefore doesn’t matter whether they stem from biology or upbringing, and that the underrepresentation of women in academic science was far better explained by discrimination (an explanation that Summers also discussed, though he judged it to have less explanatory power than did she). But views, even hypotheses, expressed by the President have a different effect on the community than do views expressed by individual professors, and on an issue as important, complex, and sensitive as this, Summers’ speculative remarks were surely imprudent. But to Summers’ credit, he responded to the effects his remarks have had not merely with apologies but with action, creating task forces that include and indeed are chaired by prominent critics (which also suggests that the cries of silencing are overdrawn).

The Crimson’s reports suggest that some FAS faculty members are hoping that an expression of Faculty disapproval will lead to his departure. The Crimson indicates that some faculty are motivated by their objections to his recent remarks, some by opposition to a flow of power from FAS to the center, some by other complaints, still others no doubt by all of the above. Much has been said about how he can improve his leadership. But the Faculty may wish to consider not merely how it regards Summers but also how others will regard collective Faculty efforts to force him out. Some would say that the Faculty was trying to preserve its prerogatives against an energetic, if sometimes abrasive, President who was trying to press for change in many domains where it was badly needed. Some would say that the Faculty, rather than engaging in spirited debate about a controversial hypothesis that may (as he himself suggested) be overstated or mistaken, instead will not tolerate utterances by the President that surely fall within the bounds of academic inquiry—hardly an attractive image for a university whose motto is “Veritas.” Those characterizations would not, as I have tried to indicate, be a complete picture, but they would, I fear, contain an uncomfortable amount of truth.

Daniel J. Meltzer ’72 is the Story Professor of Law.