‘Difficult Marriage’ Ends

An era ended quietly at yesterday’s meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Without the oratorical fireworks that had grown commonplace and that some of the 200 professors packed into University Hall were anticipating, Lawrence H. Summers used his last meeting as University president to exhort the Faculty to shed tradition and overhaul its approach to education and research.

“I believe the Faculty as a whole can do much more to meet the challenge of the moment by moving beyond existing structures and approaches to higher education,” Summers said. “Our resources and our moment in history demand commensurate imagination, daring, and a readiness to think boldly and big.”

Having refrained from offering his own opinion throughout the Faculty’s debates in the past year, Summers seized his last meeting in the president’s chair to restate his ambitions for Harvard. And in veiled terms, he chastised the Faculty for alleged recalcitrance in the face of the changes he aggressively sought to make.

“There is only one important question on which history will judge us,” Summers said. “Did we do all we could to blaze new paths for higher education and change the world through our teaching and research? Or did we continue to do traditional things in traditional ways, enjoying the greater comfort that increased resources provide?”

At the Faculty meeting two weeks ago, Summers promised to offer “a few observations” at the next session. The comment seemed ominous to some professors.

But after the president concluded his speech—“I urge you to join together with purpose for the large task before you and wish you much joy and success in your pursuit”—the Faculty burst into extended applause. While some professors offered just a few short claps, one of the Faculty members who applauded longest was J. Lorand Matory ’82, the professor of anthropology and of African and African American studies who motioned the no-confidence vote that Summers lost last spring.

Summers made only oblique mention of his many clashes with the Faculty. Near the end of his speech, the president alluded to reports that professors had risen up against him largely because of his brusque leadership style: “The greatest faculty is one in which the values of consensus, respect and collegiality are cherished, but also balanced against other values—clear excellence, measurable progress, and the urgent demands of a world whose needs change.”

It was also the last Faculty meeting for William C. Kirby as dean of the Faculty, a post which he resigned in January under pressure from Summers. Speaking before the president, Kirby garnered a 30-second round of applause after thanking the president, his colleagues, students, and the staff.

But the spotlight belonged to Summers, who peppered his speech with notes of reconciliation. “Difficult marriages sometimes end, and so it is with ours,” he began. “Life is too short for anger, and yet, it is too long not to reflect on experience.”

GEN ED IN LIMBO

Beyond the good-byes of the two most powerful members of the Faculty, the meeting foreshadowed the looming debate over what will succeed the Core Curriculum.

Kirby announced that incoming Interim President Derek C. Bok had called on the dean to appoint a committee of professors to draft legislation for the fall on the next system of general education. But the shape of that system, as speeches in the last half hour of yesterday’s meeting demonstrated, is far from clear.

Two professors who have played key roles in the curricular review rose to say they were dissatisfied with the current proposal, which the Committee on General Education released last fall.

Charles S. Maier ’60, the Saltonstall professor of history who served on that committee, said that the proposed looser distribution requirements should be reconsidered.

“I, myself, after reflecting on this issue, am not comfortable with the final recommendations of the report that every department and every course should count for general education,” said Maier, a former Crimson editorial chair.

But Maier also shied away from the argument that moral reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and foreign cultures should be included as requirements.

“You cannot mandate all the things that we each think wonderful and essential,” he said.

After Maier, Kemper Professor of American History James T. Kloppenberg said he has been “rethinking the position that I have taken on the ‘trust the students, trust the faculty’ model.”

Instead, Kloppenberg, a member of the Education Policy Committee that created secondary fields and moved back concentration choice, advocated a service-based model of education.

Students, he said, need “the capacity to engage in moral reasoning and to have sufficient empathy to use that ability and to participate in public affairs.”

And Wolfson Professor of Jewish History Jay M. Harris called distribution requirements “an abdication of faculty responsibility,” saying that professors should consider implementing several models of general education simultaneously.

In yesterday’s speech, Summers said that “improving the experience of students of Harvard College” was his “highest priority for this Faculty.”

The shape of that experience, as yesterday’s meeting made clear, is still far from set as Summers and Kirby take their leave from a school that they led through a tumultuous half-decade.

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