Comments on: Summers Resigns

By: darcy

darcy — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 23:35:50 +0000

FYI, some of the stories about Larry Summers that aren’t public knowledge (referred to in Dylan Thurston’s comment) might be in these comments on Bitch Ph.D. In one case, Summers unilaterally switched grant rights from one PI to another, over the grant agency’s original decision.

By: David Davenport

David Davenport — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 17:20:00 +0000

… and started the bust-up of the dream Afro-American Department that Henry Louis Gates had been building for years.

Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

By: burritoboy

burritoboy — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 21:45:48 +0000

Garymar,

The amount of government aid that goes to Harvard (or any other major research university, public or private) is actually quite massive and for some institutions goes well into the hundreds of millions or more per year (I don’t know what Harvard’s numbers look like specifically, but we’re definitely talking very large amounts of money). Not all of that aid goes to individual faculty members, some of it goes to groups of faculty members and lots goes directly to the university itself (generally, the university can take up to half of the grant money granted to it’s faculty for “overhead”).

Beyond that Harvard receives massive tax-breaks due to it’s non-profit status. How running several very large internal hedge funds (which are then spun off to be private for-profit funds to the monetary benefit of Harvard), real estate speculation and so on fit into a non-profit are questions for minds far more elevated than mine.

By: vivian

vivian — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 02:05:18 +0000

According to some senior faculty of my acquaintance, more than once Summers singlehandedly vetoed tenure decisions that had been recommended not only by departments but all the way up the academic chain. Many rejectees were women. With impressive publications. To the point where some senior faculty feared lawsuits.

Quite the departure from his stated goals. He didn’t really want to shake the place up, he wanted the same inscrutable elitism, only his elites were folks like Pinker and Dershowitz.

I cannot confirm this, however – #41 do you have any more data?

By: garymar

garymar — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 00:44:00 +0000

Harvard is a private university, right? None of my tax money goes to its support, except through NIH, NSF, etc and I believe that money goes to individual researchers, and there are review committees overseeing those grants. So it’s hard to get upset one way or another, since I’m neither student, faculty, nor alumnus, nor a relative of one.

So I shouldn’t even be posting this comment. But I couldn’t help myself.

By: abb1

abb1 — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 17:32:18 +0000

What happen to that fella (Harvard professor of economics, IIRC) who was caught stealing horse manure on cape Ann – anybody know?

By: pablo

pablo — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 11:30:36 +0000

Thanks for fixing my screw-up Tom. I was referring to the World Bank.

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 07:57:51 +0000

Hmmm … isn’t there something very interesting going on here, where deep issues of governance and corruption are being hidden by noise about “culture war” issues? The noisemakers get to stir the pot, pulling out Orwell and Stalin and PC CONSPIRACY, thus driving the relatively less powerful to not speak at all, else be attacked, and of course a few will always rise to the flame-bait. Then it’s talk-show time and pundit-frenzy, while the economics swindle proceeds with almost no notice.

Someone could write a very interesting analysis about the tactics at work.

By: Martin James

Martin James — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 07:24:01 +0000

I’m amazed at how unsophisticated the analysisnasbeen regareding whether Summers was a success at Harvard.

If a univeristy is an institutional relationship between money ( endowment, grants, and tuition), professors and students and a university community has objectives regarding the future of its money, professors and students, then the measure of his success would be evaluated in those terms.

The anecdotes against Summers here have been primarily that fundraising was imperiled and the faculty were unhappy.

The anecdotes for Summers have been that fundraising was good and the faculty were unhappy.

As an outsider, the general direction Summers seems to have been pushing was more support for science, number crunching and a drive for younger star professors and less support for the humanities at least as it pertains to politcal causes or minority/gender diversity.

So what is the opinion of the board on his priorities. Is Summers vision of what makes for a top institution correct or incorrect?

Despite the enemies and resignation, did he or did he not further Harvard on the path towards the objectives he supported?

By: Dylan Thurston

Dylan Thurston — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 05:35:23 +0000

I was a junior faculty in the math department at the time of the first vote. Both the junior and senior faculty in the department seemed quite opposed to Summers on the whole, although perhaps for different reasons; one senior faculty member commented to me that many of the most outrageous things he had done were not public knowledge, so he was surprised the junior faculty were so opposed.

For myself, I thought he was doing a bad job for a number of reasons, including some which have not been discussed much, like the planning for the Allston expansion or the treatment of the non-prestigious schools like the School of Public Health.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 05:03:16 +0000

Is it too late to note that the BBC (and other news outlets) continue to misreport what Summers said about women and science?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4738030.stm

http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=1217

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/02/summers_is_out_for_school.php#comment-16208

By: josh

josh — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 04:08:18 +0000

There seem to be several basic positions emerging in this thread:
1) Summers was ousted for his political views, which was bad
2) Summers was ousted for his political views (or actions), which is what he deserved
3) Summers wasn’t ousted for his political views, but because he’s a jerk
4)Summers wasn’t ousted for his political views, but because the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are jerks
5)Summers wasn’t (necessarily) ousted for his political views, but he should’ve been
For what it’s worth, I think Summers was ousted because of his political views AND because of his management style; that these two grounds for disatisfaction were both separate, and interacting (that is, the problem wasn’t just his political views, but the manner in which he expressed them); and that whether or not he was justified in holding the views he did, and regardless of the merits of the policies he favoured, his resignation is for the best. If he had been able to pursue his objectives effectively, he might yet have done some good (and some not-so-good) here; but his personality had come to overshadow his ideas and agenda, and seems to have been a barrier to making further progress (To paraphrase one faculty member (from memory): ‘we had planned to review the core curriculum last year, but we wound up spending most of the time complaining about the personal failings of our President. This year we’ve scheduled twice as many faculty meetings—so that even if we spend as much time complaining about the personal failings of our President, work can still get done’).

By: Ben A

Ben A — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 02:59:38 +0000

The women in science comments were huge. They weren’t a sufficient to undermine Summers resignation, but they were, I think, necessary for the situation to end in his resignation. They were the trigger for the first no confidence vote. And without that, we never get here.

It’s absolutely correct that “PC faculty torpedo Summers” is not the whole story. Summers pissed a lot of (non-ideological) people off. But it’s a big part of the story, and denying that is unsupportable.

By: Martin James

Martin James — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 02:25:31 +0000

Daniel,

I know Lant Pritchett and

1. Lant did write it and
2. Lant thinks Larry has unfairly taken the blame for it for a long, long time.

By: Tom Barnet-Lamb

Tom Barnet-Lamb — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 02:15:49 +0000

I think Pablo is referring to Summers’ time as US Treasury Secretary and, among other things, his famous memo suggesting that it would be a good thing all round if poor countries acted as dumps for toxic waste.

I think that this memo was written when Summers worked at the world bank, where he was chief economist.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/bwi-wto/sumers99.htm