Back in 2002, when Harvard President Lawrence Summers asked
then-Harvard professor Cornel West to cut back on his hip-hop
recordings and return to serious scholarship, for which the
university was paying him, after all, West went straight to the
media and charged Summers with being insensitive to
African-Americans. What followed was a game of power politics,
which Summers won decisively.
West’s primary complaint was that Summers had “disrespected” him
and everyone else who shares his skin tone. Avoided entirely was
the substance of Summers’ request. Illuminated with floodlights was
how that request made West feel.
Predictably, a small chorus of Harvard faculty backed West up.
One hundred sixty-seven Harvard professors signed a letter
supporting West, who had not published a serious scholarly book in
more than a decade, as Berkeley linguistics professor John
McWhorter noted shortly after the dispute became public.
“This is pure and simple about telling our colleagues how much
we respect and admire them,” Harvard professor David Elwood said
about the letter supporting West.
“We aren’t trying to send a message to anyone except our
colleagues in Afro-Am — and maybe the rest of the world,”
professor Theda Skocpol told the Harvard Crimson. “Events
of past weeks have given the impression that there’s something less
than total support for Afro-Am at Harvard.”
It was a battle of symbols and messages. Summers’ confrontation
might be perceived by the outside world as “something less than
total support for Afro-Am at Harvard,” and they couldn’t have
that.
But underneath lay a more substantial concern: If the university
president could make Cornel West — the brightest mass of glowing
gas in Harvard’s large and glittering constellation of star
professors — quit the recording studio and return to the library,
then what could he do to the lowly professors, assistant professors
and lecturers whose lights remained invisible to anyone without a
telescope trained on obscure academic journals?
Summers called West’s bluff, and the celebrity professor chose
to leave rather than work for a boss who demanded results. But in
that victory were sown the seeds of Summers’ future troubles.
Faculty members learned from the West affair that they’d have to
be a lot tougher to win a confrontation with this president. So
when Summers’ remarks at a January 15 National Bureau of Economic
Research conference prompted MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins to copy
West and run to the media to breathlessly proclaim that the Harvard
president does not sufficiently respect her disadvantaged subset of
the population, the faculty were ready.
This time a mere letter would not do, and Summers’ opponents
knew it. By a vote of 218-185, with 18 abstentions, Arts and
Sciences faculty members on Tuesday expressed no confidence in
Summers — despite his numerous apologies for guessing that perhaps
men had a greater aptitude for science than women.
Of course, there are more than 700 members of the Arts and
Sciences faculty at Harvard, which calls into question the
importance of Tuesday’s vote.
It looks like the attempt to push Summers out the door does not
have widespread support among Harvard’s faculty. Rather, it appears
to be coming from the usual suspects: left-wing professors who
either enjoy challenging authority in general or who have a vested
interest in keeping a strong-willed and reform-minded university
president from poking his nose into their world of intellectually
questionable courses and activism masked as “research.”
At many, probably most, universities, a faculty council or the
full tenured faculty is charged with granting tenure. At Harvard,
that responsibility rests fully with the president. Faculty vote to
give tenure, but the president has the final say and has full
authority to nullify a faculty vote.
Last year, Summers vetoed the unanimous decision of the African
and African-American Studies department to offer tenure to
Marcyliena Morgan, whom the Boston Globe describes as a
“hip-hop scholar.”
Probably Morgan’s most noted accomplishment was founding
Harvard’s Hip Hop Archive. Her academic credits consisted of
publishing exactly one book, and the Globe reported that
her classes received poor reviews from students. Nonetheless, the
department voted to grant her tenure. Her husband, Lawrence Bobo,
whose academic work was more noteworthy, already had tenure at
Harvard. After Summers’ veto, both Bobo and Morgan left for
Stanford.
Summers’ refusal to grant tenure to someone who so clearly did
not deserve it, though she had the support of her department, had
to have sent shockwaves throughout the faculty.
The president’s unwillingness to cave to political correctness
(remember his warning that “profoundly anti-Israel views are
increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual
communities”) and his desire to push out professors who prefer
dabbling in pop culture to creating serious scholarship should have
made him a hero at an institution that prides itself on being
America’s most prestigious and intellectually challenging
institution of higher education.
And perhaps he does have the support, albeit silent, of most of
the faculty. He certainly has the support of the Harvard
Corporation, which functions as Harvard’s board of directors. But
his independence and refusal to value academic trendiness over
academic rigor have made him the primary target of a disaffected
minority of faculty members for whom he represents a serious
threat.
Officially, the dissatisfaction with Summers centers on his
remarks about women and his “management style.” More likely, the
conflict stems from a fear among Harvard’s poseurs, professional
activists, and intellectual lightweights that Summers could emerge
from this controversy as a strong and highly independent president
— one who will bend only so far to political intimidation.
A university president not susceptible to political intimidation
is the worst nightmare for any political activist disguised as a
professor. That reality, and not Summers’ benign comments on women,
is the most probable driving force behind this increasingly absurd
controversy.
