Towards an Open University

So you say you want a resolution. You say you want the protection of academic speech. You say you want an open university. In the same breath, you decry the fact that your professors have the nerve to publicly debate the president of Harvard. You hope to hush the voices of women who assert they’ve been excluded at this place. And you would hate to see a community of intelligent people actually end up with a say in how things are done around here.

In truth, a genuine concern for an open university compels us to support our Faculty in their grievances as they gather at their emergency meeting today. And it compels us to take our own stand as responsible students for a different kind of Harvard than the one we’ve seen of late.

We should stand for a Harvard that rejects what is surely the most damaging kind of political correctness at work here—the untouchable orthodoxies of the administration and Corporation—the kind which silences voices that fail to echo their own. We should stand for a Harvard that welcomes academic inquiry from a Faculty far more representative of American society. We should stand for a Harvard that recognizes the benefits of faculty, students, staff, and, of course, women participating in its discourse and its decision-making.

Like many of the Faculty’s statements, this obviously goes beyond a mere reaction to University President Lawrence H. Summers’ January comments regarding women in the sciences. Apologists for those comments have accused critics of using them as an opportunity to bring up supposedly unrelated questions.

If only those pesky professors would keep their mouths shut. It’s not like the Faculty of Harvard could possibly know what they’re talking about, right? They’re asking insignificant questions that distract us from more important matters, aren’t they?

Not quite. These are questions of the Faculty’s ability to constructively dissent from the Mass. Hall party line without fear of reprisal. These are questions about an attitude that some call anything but collegial towards faculty belonging to already underrepresented groups, from former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 to members of the Committee on Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. There are questions of real input into the planning of Harvard’s future, whether regarding Allston, the Curricular Review or university governance as a whole.

Faculty members and students alike have been granted precious little space to publicly pose such questions until now. Grievances have been forced to build up over the years with few chances to deal with them as they arose. Their reappearance today speaks less to the opportunism of critics than to what has allegedly become an autocratic atmosphere, a climate of fear.

And after all, is it not reasonable for critics to attribute more importance to the concrete issues at stake than to those January comments alone? They know that Summers’ policies speak more powerfully than his prose—in the halls of Harvard, at least, if not in the national media. They know, for example, that a decline in female tenure rates from 36 percent to 13 percent over the course of Summers’ term is at least as telling as talk of “intrinsic aptitude.”

And discrimination here may well be more than the “lesser factor” Summers says he believes it is. The way to really limit the scope of academic inquiry on campus is to exclude from the academy diverse perspectives informed by diverse backgrounds, the perspectives of perfectly qualified members coming from different sectors of our society.

In effect, if not in intent, our administration seems to have presided over just this kind of exclusionary policy, whether through the expectation of an 80-hour workweek without providing adequate childcare or through the public humiliation of distinguished professors.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are concrete demands being made by both faculty and students which, if implemented, could return the spirit of free inquiry, the equality of opportunity and the sense of pride we all want to have in our school. There is also a recognition that the demands go beyond Summers to the very soul of this university.

An open university will take an administration and an atmosphere on campus that truly encourages free academic debate and internal dissent instead of seeking to squelch it, monopolizing the microphone and intimidating those who speak outside the official parameters.

It will require a new kind of transparency that lifts the veil of secrecy from over Mass. Hall and Loeb House, where the seven-member Corporation, made up almost exclusively of male millionaires out of touch with Harvard life, meets twice a month behind closed doors to decide on policies for the rest of us.

Such a university will open up debate and decision-making on critical questions affecting the quality of life and discourse in the Harvard community, from a student center to a new curriculum, to input from all members of that community: the Faculty, students and workers. This openness could ensure an administration that’s responsive to the needs, values and desires of all of us—including those who continue to be marginalized on our campus, such as women.

Summers’ position as the most powerful president in recent history should not cow us into silence or blind reverence. That is not an appropriate role for those who care about their university. This does not mean that we should simply abide by what the faculty says, nor criticize whatever Summers does. What it means is that we should listen closely to the critics in our midst, and formulate a coherent stance of our own that does not just mimic what the nearest authority figure says.

The debate over Summers’ comments has opened up some space for the Harvard Faculty—and for all of us who belong to this community—to petition for redress of legitimate grievances. History will judge those who govern this institution by whether they transformed it in response to those grievances, or whether they blindly continued down a path that makes a mockery of the values and commitments of an open academic community.

Michael A. Gould-Wartofsky ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Currier House.