Timeline: Five Years of Faculty Meetings

Lawrence H. Summers chaired his last Faculty meeting as University president yesterday. Below, a look back at Summers’ years in the University Hall president’s chair.



OCTOBER 16, 2001 Summers’ first Faculty meeting as University president came in the shadow of the Sept. 11 attacks. Summers said he would establish an “informal advisory group” of faculty and administrators to address the anthrax scare that was gripping the nation.



NOVEMBER 13, 2001 William C. Kirby, then the director of Harvard Asia Center, argued for increased study abroad. “We think the planets will remain in alignment if, for example, a semester of tutorial has to be missed,” Kirby said.



FEBRUARY 12, 2002 Then-Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles received a standing ovation, a day after announcing he would resign. “The light in Jeremy’s office is as close as Harvard comes to an eternal flame,” Summers said.



MAY 21, 2002 Summers introduced Kirby as the dean-to-be, saying, “The better people know Bill…the more loudly they tend to sing his praises.” And he bid the East Asia scholar well with a Chinese expression of good will: “I wish you a prosperous wind.”



OCTOBER 15, 2002 Kirby’s first Faculty meeting came a month after the president famously called some professors’ actions “anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent” in an address at Memorial Church. “My hopes would be, as a University, that we could be a place where a wide range of perspectives could be discussed freely,” Summers said at the meeting, responding to criticism from some professors.



NOVEMBER 12, 2002 The Faculty had its first discussion of the curricular review. Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes urged the Faculty to take advantage of this “one moment of intellectual adventure in our time.”



FEBRUARY 11, 2003 Professors voted to dismiss Randy J. Gomes and Suzanne M. Pomey, members of the class of 2002 who in the fall had been convicted of embezzling almost $100,000 from the Hasty Pudding Theatricals.



MARCH 11, 2003 Ten professors spoke out harshly against a plan to eliminate shopping period in favor of preregistration. Music professor Robert D. Levin ’68 called the proposal “practically and aesthetically repugnant.” Another professor called for an emergency meeting to plan Harvard’s response to the looming invasion of Iraq.



MAY 6, 2003 Faculty members spoke in favor of an overhaul of the College’s sexual assault policies. The only professor to speak against them was political scientist Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, who said that casual “hookups” might define sexual behavior on campus.



OCTOBER 22, 2003 Summers announced plans to move two graduate schools and some undergraduate housing across the Charles, causing a minor uproar among professors. Physicist Daniel S. Fisher said the Faculty’s new interdisciplinary energy “is in danger of being dissipated” by Allston.



NOVEMBER 18, 2003 Asked whether the Faculty would vote on his Allston proposals, Summers replied with a quick “no.” In a follow-up, he said, “Matters that are curricular are matters of the Faculty, but matters regarding the allocation of resources by Massachussetts Law are reserved for the Harvard Corporation.” Professors did vote to add the words “gender and sexuality” to the name of the Committee on Women’s Studies. In an interview later, Mansfield said the change would “make obvious what they were all along, which is a department of feminist studies.”



OCTOBER 19, 2004 Professors debated what Kirby called an “unacceptably small” number of tenure offers to women. Summers attributed it to the “sinusoidal character” of attention given to the recruitment of women over the years. 



DECEMBER 14, 2004 Summers pledged that the low numbers of tenure offers to women would not be repeated, saying, “We have already matched last year’s sorry total.” Mansfield argued that the real problem lay in the dearth of conservative women. “Try to find a conservative professor at the Radcliffe Institute,” he said.



FEBRUARY 15, 2005 A month and a day after Summers suggested that the small number of women in science might be due to issues of “intrinsic aptitude,” tensions exploded in what Summers called a “searing afternoon.” “We are not cowards, we are not spineless, and we are not with you,” said anthropology chair Arthur Kleinman. Ruth R. Wisse, a Yiddish literature professor, called it “a show trial to beat all show trials.”



FEBRUARY 22, 2005 At a continuation of the previous week’s meeting, the Faculty rejected a proposed three-professor committee to mediate between them and Summers. The president was conciliatory, saying, “I am determined to set a different tone.”



MARCH 15, 2005 Gathering in the Loeb Drama Center, the Faculty stunned itself by voting 218-185 to express a lack of confidence in Summers. “I think this will give us a mandate to do more,” German literature professor Judith L. Ryan said after the meeting.



APRIL 12, 2005 Returning to other business, Kirby said that a speedy conclusion to the curricular review “is not possible, nor is it desirable.” And Classics chair Richard F. Thomas asked whether Summers had considered allowing schools other than FAS to grant PhD degrees and separating the Graduate School from Arts and Sciences from FAS. Summers responded with a terse “No and no,” but then-Dean of GSAS Peter T. Ellis later said that Summers was lying.



MAY 4, 2005 J. Lorand Matory ’82 asked Summers how he planned to increase the number of non-white administrators and professors and whether Summers had any plans to attempt to lure former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 back to Harvard. Summers reiterated a commitment to diversity, but declined to comment on “individual faculty matters.”



SEPTEMBER 27, 2005 Kirby announced that he was slowing the pace of faculty hiring “to allow our financial resources to catch up.” The meeting came two months after Conrad K. Harper, the Harvard Corporation’s sole black member, resigned from the board. “The Corporation now looks more like Harvard in the 19th century than in the 21st century,” Matory said at the meeting.



JANUARY 10, 2006 A report by the Faculty’s Resources Committee warned of possible deficits of $100 million by 2010, but outlined a financial plan that would cover those deficits. English chair James Engell asked whether administrators were certain of the Faculty’s financial health: “It’s very exhilarating to ski downhill, but one wants to be assured that the chairlift works.”



FEBRUARY 7, 2006 At the meeting that spelled Summers’ downfall, 13 professors rose to attack the president two weeks after he forced Kirby to resign. None spoke in Summers’ defense. The turning point of the meeting came when engineering professor Frederick H. Abernathy asked Summers for his opinion on the controversy swirling around economist Andrei Shleifer ’82.

“I am not knowledgeable of the facts and circumstances to be able to express an opinion as a consequence of my recusal,” Summers said, eliciting murmurs and eye-rolling from the audience.



MARCH 7, 2006 The first meeting since Summers’ resignation was closed to both the president and the media. Professors discussed charges of anti-Semitism that had been tossed about, with mathematician Wilfried Schmid telling Wisse to “stop poisoning the atmosphere at this university.”



MARCH 14, 2006 Professors resumed discussion of the curricular review, considering draft legislation for secondary fields and delaying concentration choice. “The last few weeks have been difficult and unusual ones,” Kirby said, adding, “we should remain on track.”



APRIL 4, 2006 The Faculty approved the first legislation to come out of the curricular review, implementing secondary fields. But before the vote was held debate became bogged down in procedural matters, and Summers took a vocal role. “May I make a suggestion to you all?” he interjected at one point.



APRIL 18, 2006 Professors approved delaying concentration choice to the middle of sophomore year, as well as a proposal to revamp the life sciences curriculum. But quorum was only met after some professors trickled in in the middle of the meeting. “Usually there is a bigger crowd when there’s controversy, and it was pretty obvious there wasn’t going to be controversy today,” Faculty Council Vice Chair Laurel Thatcher Ulrich said after the meeting.



MAY 2, 2006 Faculty failed to reach quorum for a vote to require classes of five or more students to be evaluated for the CUE Guide. But the proposal ran into opposition from several professors who said the move would be an encroachment on “professorial autonomy.”