Professors: University Past Shouldn't Follow Summers' Political Future

Few people would question whether former University President Lawrence H. Summers has the brains to be President-elect Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary—after all, he held the same position in the Clinton administration.

But when post-election rumors that Obama would tap Summers for the post began to fly, it reopened wounds dating back to his turbulent tenure as Harvard’s president.

The National Organization for Women and other women’s groups have issued sharply-worded statements opposing Summers’ potential appointment that may have succeeded in knocking him off Obama’s short list, according to The Politico, a Capital Hill newspaper.

This round of Summers backlash has focused on his comments at a 2005 conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research, in which he suggested that “intrinsic” physiological differences between men and women may in part account for the relative lack of women in top science and engineering jobs.

But in fact, Summers’ most incendiary battles with members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences were over what they saw as his abrasive leadership style, his firing of then-FAS dean William C. Kirby, and his possible role in the government fraud scandal that implicated his close friend, economics professor Andrei Shleifer ’82.

And while these issues proved fatal to his presidency, both his supporters and critics now suggest that Summers’ difficulties leading Harvard don’t mean he wouldn’t make a good Treasury secretary.

‘LOTS OF BIG EGOS’

Summers, who has also served as the World Bank’s chief economist, helped oversee the longest period of sustained economic growth in U.S. history as President Clinton’s Treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001.

And with the U.S. scrambling to recover from the worst financial meltdown since the 1930s, some have argued that the Treasury needs a leader with the experience required to make bold decisions.

“The next Treasury secretary will have to do a number of things for which they will get blamed after the fact,” said Richard Zeckhauser, Summers’ colleague at the Harvard Kennedy School. “We need someone who is willing to do that, rather than someone who is trying to make everybody happy.”

Zeckhauser, a close friend of Summers, said that Summers’ management style was not conducive to a University setting, where there are “lots of big egos” to be massaged.

Nurturing was “not Larry’s strength,” Zeckhauser said, and his penchant for blunt criticism did him no favors with the cadre of faculty members who had opposed his presidency from the start.

But Summers was able to weather his time in the Clinton administration without instigating conflicts, Kennedy School professor Jeffrey A. Frankel said.

The fact that Summers had trouble leading the University, Frankel said, “says more about Harvard than it does about him.”

FIGHTING THE FACULTY

From the outset of his presidency, several professors criticized what they saw as Summers’ heavy-handed involvement in Faculty affairs and complained that he exerted too much influence on their deliberations.

He initially served as an ex officio member of the curricular review’s Committee on General Education, chaired by then-FAS Dean Kirby, but Summers was soon pressured by Faculty members to bow out.

The ongoing tension between Summers and members of the Faculty was further strained by Kirby’s sudden decision to resign in January 2006.

Though Summers and Kirby never publicly acknowledged their falling-out, sources close to the central administration said at the time that Summers had forced him out.

Following Kirby’s resignation, former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Peter T. Ellison wrote in a statement that Summers’ “undermining the authority of a dean in front of others, hollow statements of support, and denials that appear less than fully truthful” had driven him to leave his administrative position.

Ellison also called for Summers to step down as president, making him the highest-profile Harvard affiliate to do so.

Summers’ battle with the Faculty reached its breaking point at a Feb. 7, 2006 faculty meeting, when engineering professor Frederick H. Abernathy, who had never previously addressed the Faculty during Summers’ tenure, questioned the University president’s involvement in a national scandal that implicated one of Summers’ close friends and colleagues in Harvard’s economics department.

In the early 1990s, Andrei Shleifer had been the Russian project director for the Harvard Institute for International Development, which received funding from the U.S. State Department’s Agency for International Development to advise the former communist country as it moved toward economic privatization.

During his time advising the Russian government, Shleifer invested personally in the country, and in 2004, a federal judge found Shleifer liable for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. The judge also ruled that Harvard had breached its government contract, and the University paid $26.5 million to settle out of court. Shleifer was required to pay an additional $2 million as part of the settlement.

Despite the controversy, Shleifer was allowed to keep his endowed Harvard professorship, in part due to his close relationship with Summers, according to a January 2006 article in Institutional Investor magazine.

A month after the article was published, Abernathy and 15 other FAS professors spoke out against Summers, and on Feb. 9, German and comparative literature professor Judith L. Ryan submitted a motion for a vote of no confidence in the University president—the second called for in two years.

Summers resigned less than a week later after five years on the job, making him the shortest-tenured Harvard president since the Civil War.

A DIFFERENT WORLD

Some of Summers’ strongest critics during his tenure at Harvard, including Ryan, said last week that they believe that the Treasury Department and the University are different enough that many of their complaints would not be applicable if Obama appoints Summers to his Cabinet.

Economics Professor Kenneth S. Rogoff said that what he sees as Summers’ swift, bold decision-making style is vital given the current financial crisis and will outweigh the effect the Faculty’s previous criticisms could have on his nomination.

“I think we’re in a crisis, and in this situation, those qualms will be cast aside in account of his superior qualifications for the job,” Rogoff said.

Obama’s first appointment may indicate his willingness to tolerate blunt managerial styles. Rahm I. Emanuel, who will serve as White House chief of staff, is known for his short temper and office tirades.

Additionally, Summers had a low-profile but important advisory role in the Obama campaign, and was at Obama’s side for his first press conference last week, along with the rest of the president-elect’s economic transition team.

Frankel said that he believes Obama will be able to wade through the controversies surrounding Summers’ past and select the most qualified person for the position.

“Most of Larry’s abilities are off the charts,” Frankel said. “His diplomatic skills evidently weren’t sufficient to get him through Harvard, but I think they’re sufficient to get him through Washington.”

—Staff writer Lauren D. Kiel can be reached at lkiel@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer June Q. Wu can be reached at junewu@fas.harvard.edu.