Some Students Petition for Summers, But Others Rally Against Him Today

As the international press converges on Harvard to cover the controversy surrounding University President Lawrence H. Summers, students and alumni are sending their own messages of support, criticism, and apathy.

Both existing and newly formed student groups are organizing petition drives, letter-writing campaigns, thefacebook.com groups, and at least one demonstration in anticipation of tomorrow’s faculty meeting.

Much of the organized student response has been in support of the embattled president, as groups like Students for Larry and Alums for Summers targeted e-mail lists to solicit signatures to their petitions and denounced Summers’ critics for stifling academic dissent.

The Coalition for an Anti-Sexist Harvard, meanwhile, plans to rally in front of the Science Center this afternoon to protest Summers’ stance on women’s issues, which they say is unacceptably insensitive, and call on him to resign.

Students for Larry, which had collected over 350 online signatures by yesterday evening on an op-ed originally published Friday in The Crimson, is considering a counter-protest.

Undergraduate Council President Matthew J. Glazer ’06 acknowledged criticisms of the University president in an interview before the UC meeting last night.

“I think a lot of the concerns that the faculty has brought up rang true with the students, mostly that Harvard is too often run like a corporation instead of a school,” he said. “A lot of students feel that President Summers is out of touch with their needs.”

But most students who took Summers’ Freshman Seminar 47t: “Globalization” last year are vocally offering the opposite opinion, and wrote a letter to that effect published in today’s Crimson.

“From my experience I’ve found him to be a very open-minded guy who really cares about students’ opinions on all kinds of things,” said Daniel A. Koh ’07, one of the eight signatories on the letter.

Strong opinions on the controversy were plentiful, but not pervasive, in dining halls yesterday afternoon.

Many students commented that the issue had been blown out of proportion, while some offered strong reaffirmations or condemnations of Summers’ leadership and his comments on women’s underrepresentation in the sciences.

“It does make me angry as a woman in science that someone in such a high position of power thinks that about women, but the reaction on campus has been a little overzealous,” said Susan E. Maya ’08, who expects to concentrate in biochemistry, at lunch at Annenberg.

But Anna F. Moriarty ’07, dining at Quincy House, said she saw the University’s response to Summers’ remarks at an economics conference last month as insufficiently weak.

“If he had said it about any other minority group, within an hour he’d be out,” she said. “It’s so much more acceptable to make sexist comments.”

Alumni are joining the debate as well.

Jason E. Bressner ’99, who helped start Alumni for Harvard, another alumni group in support of Summers, reported that his group’s online petition had collected 151 signatures as of 7 p.m. yesterday.

The current criticism of the president, Bressner said, “demonstrates a disturbing lack of objectivity, a myopia that’s unacceptable and unwelcome in institutions of higher learning.”

Another recent graduate, Amee Chew ’04, is helping to organize the Coalition for an Anti-Sexist Harvard rally this afternoon. She said the demonstration, which will feature speakers from student organizations including the Radcliffe Union of Students and Harvard Socialist Alternative, will tie criticism of Summers’ remarks on women to wider issues affecting women at Harvard such as providing childcare for all Harvard employees and dismantling final clubs.

“We can’t have good faith in the University to speak to all of these problems if our own president doesn’t think it’s a big deal how much discrimination affects women in academia,” she said.

—Liz C. Goodwin contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.