Cool Hand Larry, take 2
Last night I wrote about the resignation of Harvard President Lawrence Summers in "Cool Hand Larry." A member of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences responds:
I would like to voice a dissenting view on Scott's entry about the resignation of Harvard President Larry Summers yesterday. I would certainly agree that the President's comments a year ago concerning women and science did not help his case among many of the faculty and may have provided a rallying point for some--although as I understand his remarks, President Summers was posing a perfectly respectable question about data that deserved (and still deserves) a considered answer.The professor asks us to withhold his name and adds: "By the way, let me thank you all for Power Line -- it is an endless source of insight and clear-thinking, and has now, together with Bill Bennett's 'Morning in America' radio show, become a routine part of my mornings."Still, the connection between that event and its aftermath and the President's resignation is slight in my opinion, as President Summers could easily have weathered that particular storm. The real problem was that he was perceived by many across the institution -- rightly or wrongly--as being dishonest, conniving and lacking any leadership abilities that didn't mirror the Danny Devito lines in the film "Matilda," when the Devito character says to Matilda something like "I'm big; you're little. I'm smart; you're dumb. I'm right; you're wrong."
Anecdotes about the President and this sort management style circulated widely during the last five years but were probably best exemplified by the experiences reported by Peter Ellison when he served as dean of the Graduate School (see, for example, the Boston Globe article of February 16 when he finally talks about why he stepped down). The resignation of William Kirby as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences--an event understood to have been manipulated from the President's office, largely through calculated leaks to the student press--together with "the Shleifer affair" (cf. "How Harvard Lost Russia," Institutional Investor, January 24, 2006) were the proximate and incendiary events that led to the extraordinary outpouring of views and emotions at the FAS meeting earlier this month (although it may be true that for some members of the faculty these events also blew air on the still hot coals of the "women and science" business).
In other words, I firmly believe that insofar as the case merits examination, it's probably more one for a business school course on leadership than a "warning legend" for the body politic about political correctness run amok.
Amity Shlaes devotes her new Bloomberg News column to the resignation of President Summers: "Harvard sold Larry Summers down the Charles River." The folks at The New Editor report Alan Dershowitz's take in "Some Harvard professors are Stalinist." Our friends at RealClearPolitics have posted Professor Dershowitz's column: "Coup against Summers a dubious victory for the politically correct."
