Today there are very few university presidents who use their privileged perches. One of the minor tragedies of modern America has been the transformation of the college president from public intellectual to fund-raising bureaucrat. Most presidents steer clear of any involvement in the substance of academic life–the ideas and the scholarship–for fear that someone, somewhere, will be offended. When Lawrence Summers was appointed 27th president of Harvard, there was hope that he would be different. But the former Treasury secretary’s first few ventures in these waters suggest that the academy has gotten used to having its presidents bland and boring.
Summers has been cautiously carving out a new role. He has urged that the university do something about grade inflation, now out of control at Harvard, where more than 50 percent of the grades given out each year are A’s. He gave a talk to the Kennedy School in October in which he scolded those who have demeaned patriotism (the left) and government (the right) over the past few decades. He has spoken of diversity in a broad sense, including factors other than race. But the high drama of his presidency so far has been the recent controversy over his discussions with Cornel West, a leading member of the Afro-American Studies department. Whatever they talked about–and there is some dispute about the specifics–clearly the conversation went badly, with West feeling that he had been attacked and insulted.
Summers told me that he “felt bad about the misunderstandings that arose from that first meeting and values the mutual respect that came out of the second one.” But he did confirm that he had “encouraged Professor West to write a major academic book.” Is this so scandalous? Over the past several years West has done little other than produce a CD of rap music and advise Al Sharpton on his “bid” for the presidency of the United States. West’s earlier work is not that impressive, either. In a long review in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier concluded of his books: “They are almost completely worthless… noisy, tedious, slippery… sectarian, humorless, pedantic and self-endeared.” I have read some of West’s work, and Wieseltier’s judgment sounds about right.
Of course, there are probably many people in the academy–think of modern literary criticism–with work that is as weak and fatuous as West’s. The real scandal of academic life is not that the president talked with one faculty member about his scholarly output, but that he doesn’t do it with more faculty members. If a man of Summers’s intellect were to cast a cold eye on what passes for scholarship in many humanities departments today, the university would benefit from it.
On the other hand, being a university president is a political job, and Summers clearly has more to learn on this front. It’s one thing for Cornel West to leave, as he has confided to friends that he will. It’s quite another for Harvard to lose the impressive collection of talent–including the philosopher Anthony Appiah and the political scientist William Julius Wilson–that Henry Louis Gates has put together there over the past few years.
Perhaps Summers was in Washington for too long. In Washington, a politician’s primary worry is of an attack from the far right. At universities, it’s the opposite. The right barely exists. Harvard’s conservative theorist, Harvey Mansfield, is about as significant on campus as the ultraliberal Paul Wellstone is in the Senate. On campus the killer bees are all on the left. And sure enough, the Cornel West affair was quickly elevated and hijacked by all kinds of people, from left-wing law professors to Latino scholars to Jesse Jackson (inevitably), who all want to use it to get attention. One may bemoan this state of affairs and talk of tenured radicals, but this is the institution as it exists. You must know it to change it.
Great university presidents who have left a mark on their colleges and beyond have all been unafraid to court controversy. One can think back to Charles Eliot and James Conant of Harvard, Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago and even in recent years to men like New School University’s Jonathan Fanton, Boston University’s John Silber and Bard College’s Leon Botstein, who have led rather than followed. But they have all also been skilled politicians who understood how to handle the peculiar, almost medieval institution that is the academy. The reason that Giamatti chose to direct his wrath at the Moral Majority in 1981 was that he had come into office with a reputation as a neoconservative. By noting that he had a common enemy with the campus left, he gained their trust–and was able to make the changes he wanted to. Summers acknowledges that “I have sought to involve myself in the academic life of the university, actively discussing ideas and policies.” He now needs to get into its political life as well.
