High Ground

The 2006 academic year is now over, and the most important event of the year in this small but significant precinct of American life was surely the diktat of the seven-person Corporation of Harvard College that Larry Summers leave the presidency of the country's oldest university. More precisely, given the hands in which the university has been left, it was the year's most important disaster. I have every confidence that former President Derek Bok, a judicious and wise man, will be able to do the nettlesome caretaking job required of him during the next year, even if he has chosen as his dean of arts and sciences an oleaginous retread, Jeremy Knowles. But it is not he who will determine the institution's future.That task will fall to the aforementioned Corporation, self-selecting ever since 1650. At its head is Jamie Houghton, nonexecutive chairman of Corning Inc. , the company founded by his ancestors more than a century and a half ago. He certainly was enthusiastic about Summers's designation in 2001. But I suspect what impressed him were the raw particulars of Summers's resume: at 28, Harvard's youngest tenured professor; a distinguished career as an academic economist; chief economist of the World Bank and then secretary of the Treasury. Houghton did not comprehend, I imagine, that Summers's surgical--and therefore subversive-- intelligence, his uncommonly skillful mind, would inevitably conflict with the most entrenched and narrow-gauged interests in the university. Actually, that was originally why his arrival brought so much, well, yes, satisfaction to many in 02138 and its environs. Summers was not alone is his feeling that it was time for far-reaching change at the university. When Nannerl Keohane was elected a fellow of Harvard College, she told some press flack that she was "enthusiastic about the prospect of working with President Summers." But it took her hardly more than a half-year of membership on the Corporation before she began to maneuver to put an end to Summers's presidency. But who is Nannerl Keohane? In the mean Cambridge game (if ever there was a Cambridge Diarist, this one is it) of electing people to "the academy of the overrated," Keohane will always win by a landslide. She is known as a scholar, but I am not sure why. She displays nothing resembling erudition about anything. The book to which she owes her reputation--I think it was her Ph.D. dissertation--was published 26 years ago. But she is a recognizable type in the academic cosmos: the professor who disguises mediocrity with status. She is not an intellectual; she is a dignitary. Keohane was president of Wellesley College and then went on to preside for a decade over Duke University. I thought of her when the latest scandal hit Duke. The picture of the university from which Keohane departed barely two years ago is not a pretty one. The racial situation at Duke seems to border on the treacherous, and the unnervingly elevated status of athletes and athletics--in what is, after all, a school with high academic standing--is, to say the least, troubling. Those are not issues that Summers would evade. (In fact, he didn't.) But in her brand-new book, Higher Ground, a collection of pronouncements to high-minded audiences, she barely pauses over these matters, except to allude to them in one or two sentences as almost so obvious that they are not worth discussion. You can tell that this is a dignitary's book, by the way, because Keohane writes of herself in the plural: "In preparing this book, we have omitted ...." She, or rather they, omitted more than she realized. Keohane knew very well, I think, what was at stake in Summers's presidency. The struggle between Summers and a variety of politicized social scientists and working-class-hero humanists, with whom Keohane allied herself and dragged along some of her panicky corporation comrades, was a holding action--a desperate one reinforced by "progressive" politics (as in the rotc controversy), by an anti-Israel and even anti-Jewish animus (as in the divestment matter), and by a certain strain of academic feminism (as in the refusal even to discuss an uncomfortable thought). But even all this was finally not the heart of the matter. The Summers scandal was really about his intention to correct a cultural decline that his critics refuse even to recognize. Remember C.P. Snow's lecture about "The Two Cultures"? Well, in 1959, when he delivered it, undergraduates at least knew something of both cultures. Now they know neither Middlemarch nor genomes, neither the Missa Solemnis nor quarks. Summers's assault was on this unacceptable situation. But there are some for whom it is entirely acceptable. The ranks of these Summers detractors included those who simply sup off Harvard, while his supporters largely consisted of scholars who add luster to it. I note that in Keohane's book, she says nothing about science in the university and beyond. Suzanne Preston Blier, a professor of African art, told the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that she knew, absolutely knew, that the trouble caused by Summers was hurting fund-raising, according to The Financial Times. She had other sad monetary tales to tell. Frankly, she is out of her head. During commencement events last week-- undergraduate, graduate, and reunions of every school and vintage--Summers received so many plaudits and standing ovations that he might have been forgiven for thinking that the coup had never taken place. As for money, my own impression of wealthy alumni who were once my students is that Summers made them more generous; and, as for the future, they will wait and see. I know of at least three gifts in the $100 million range that were very likely to materialize and now are dicey. The most astute constituency at Harvard, it turns out, is the cohort of undergraduates. They called him Larry from the beginning, a genuine sign of affection and a proper sign of esteem. The fact is that Summers spent more time with students than most professors, few of whom grade their students' papers or even know their names. Is he haughty? No. Ask the students who cheered whenever they encountered him. So who was intimidated by him? Only those who couldn't answer his questions.

By martin peretz