En los Estados Unidos continua el debate sobre el anunciado –y forzado– retiro del Presidente de la Universidad de Harvard, Larry Summers, luego de haber presentado su renuncia anticipada con fecha 21 de febrero.
Summers dejará su cargo en junio próximo al cumplir 5 años enfunciones. Sus discursos y publicaciones como Presidente de Harvard dan cuenta de las diversas iniciativas que desarrolló durante este tiempo y de su visión del rol que dicha institución cumple en el mundo académico global.
Este asunto está siendo discutido desde distintos puntos de vista en la prensa internacional. Muestra hasta qué punto aún la más prestigiosa y sólida institución de educación superior del mundo está sujeta a las reglas de la política, a los vaivenes de la opinión pública y a los resultados de la constante negociación entre las fuerzas internas y externas que dan, o rompen, la estabilidad de las corporaciones universitarias.
Constituye por lo mismo un simplismo atribuir la renuncia de Summers a la polvareda que en su momento levantó su intervención referida a las razones que podrían explicar la menor representación de las mujeres en carreras de ciencias básicas. (Sobre esta polémica pueden consultarse las opiniones de William Saletan y Richard Posner en sus respectivos Blogs).
Para un análisis de la caída del Rector Summers ver más abajo el artículo publicado por la revista The Economist, 23 de febrero, 2006
Artículos de interés
Academic, Heal Thyself, Camille Paglia, Op-Ed; The New York Times, Marzo 6
Professors Mull Response to Vitriol in Media Anton S. Troianovski;The Harvard Crimson, Marzo 2
How the Liberal Arts Got That Way, Matthew Pearl, OpEd; The New York Times, Febrero 26
Summers en Harvard, cuestión de estilo, Noemí Prins; La Vanguardia, Febrero 26
Case Study: A Shake-Up at Harvard, Patrick Healy; The New York Times, Febrero 26
At Harvard, Resignation Puts Big Plans on Pause, Patrick Healy and Albert Finley; The New York Times, Febrero 23
University prepares to search for new leader, amid speculation, Jenna Russell; The Boston Globe, Febrero 23
Faculty clout helps oust Summers, Sara Miller Llana; The Christian Science Monitor, Febrero 23
Summers Postmortem, Beyond Cambridge, Scott Jaschik; Inside Higher Ed, Febrero 22
Lawrence Summers’s Dishonest Opposition, Alan Dershowitz; The Huffington Post, Febrero 22
Entrevista a Larry Summer de Arturo Fontaine T.; Emol, 21 febrero 2006

A defenestration at Harvard
The Summers also sets
Feb 23rd 2006 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
The ousting of Larry Summers had more to do with the balance of power on campus than ideology
HARVARD likes to think of itself as the best university in the world. People who didn’t go there may beg to differ, but this week Harvard proved that it is undoubtedly a world-beater in one discipline: academic back-stabbing.
On February 21st Harvard’s president, Larry Summers, announced that he is stepping down after just five years in his job, making him the shortest-serving president since Cornelius Felton, who died after two years in office in 1862. Derek Bok, who ran the university in 1971-91, will serve as interim president until a replacement can be found. Mr Summers’s abrupt retirement not only raises questions about Harvard’s commitment to free speech, given the long-standing jihad against him; it also throws the university’s ambitious reform programme into disarray.
Mr Summers’s departure was precipitated by another resignation—that of William Kirby, the dean of the powerful Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). Mr Summers edged Mr Kirby out because he thought that he had allowed the reform of the curriculum to get bogged down. But the departure was handled badly even by Mr Summers’s abrupt standards (the dean apparently learned about his resignation from the press). And the resulting furore gave Mr Summers’s critics a chance to table a vote of no confidence.
The vote, set for February 28th, was particularly perilous for Mr Summers because the FAS had already passed a vote of no confidence in him in March 2005. This didn’t destroy him last year because the powerful Harvard Corporation—the university’s six-member board—chose to back him. But this time things were different. Opposition to Mr Summers had strengthened and the Corporation was losing confidence in its president’s ability to run the university. Mr Summers jumped before he was pushed.
This was all rather unfair. None of the other faculties has ever joined FAS in expressing no confidence in Mr Summers. A poll in the Harvard Crimson revealed that undergraduates were opposed to Mr Summers’s ousting by a majority of three to one. Alan Dershowitz, a law professor, dubbed the situation as “an academic coup d’état” by the “hard left”.
Mr Summers arrived in 2001 with a mandate for change. The Corporation recognised that Harvard could keep its edge over up-and-comers like Stanford only by remaining nimble. And they were impressed by Mr Summers’s clear vision of reform. He wanted to refocus undergraduate education, improve science teaching, build a whole new campus across the river and make Harvard a global university. The Corporation bet that the former treasury secretary had the right qualifications for the job: he had taught economics at Harvard before going into government, and his bulldozer-like personality would bully the reforms through.
Ever since then the bulldozer has been hitting walls. He clashed with Cornel West, a well known black professor, over Mr West’s commitment to academic research. He challenged the banning of the army training corps from the Harvard campus. He suggested that a petition urging the university to sell stakes in companies doing business in Israel might be “anti-Semitic”. He went out of his way to defend his friend Andrei Shleifer from accusations that the economist had violated conflict of interest rules by investing in Russia. (Harvard and Mr Shleifer paid almost $30m to settle a civil suit brought by the American government over the issue.) And, most famously of all, Mr Summers infuriated the feminist establishment (and many others) by wondering out loud whether prejudice alone could explain the shortage of women at the top of science.
It is tempting to present Mr Summers as a neo-conservative fallen among liberals. In fact, ideologically he is something of an old-time liberal himself (he devoted a great deal of energy to boosting the number of poor students at Harvard). His problem has always been that his affection for any agenda is less than his love of a good debate. Political correctness depends on self-censorship, especially over group differences, and Mr Summers is constitutionally incapable of not examining people’s premises.
In the end, though, character was less important than power. There was a set of much more basic tensions between Mr Summers and his critics. These tensions might be dressed up as ideological, but they were really about the privileges and perks of academic life.
The most obvious was undergraduate teaching. Undergraduates get a raw deal for their $40,000 a year. The core curriculum is an antiquated mess. Star professors palm their pupils off on graduate students and then give them top grades to keep them happy (one survey found that 91% of Harvard graduates get honours compared with just 51% at Yale). Mr Summers tried to use the bully pulpit to force professors to teach more seriously; hence his attack on Mr West.
The second was a tension between science and the humanities, or between hard and soft subjects. Mr Summers made no secret of his personal enthusiasm for the hard sciences; he was scathing about squishy “ologies”. Some Harvard types speculated bitterly that he wanted to turn Harvard into an Ivy-clad version of the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the university that accepted the young Larry when Harvard turned him down.
Above all, there were the tensions that flowed from his desire to strengthen a famously weak presidency. He tried to ensure that more money was funnelled through the president’s office. (In 2002 the central administration controlled much less than the dean of the FAS.) He directed money to graduate schools he approved of, installed sympathetic deans and tried to shape the professoriat by choosing scholars whom he admired. The FAS fought back.
Nice job, if you have no opinions
This is not to say that Mr Summers didn’t create unnecessary difficulties. He didn’t suffer fools gladly (and fools with PhDs are particularly sensitive to charges of stupidity). He measured all academic life by the standards of economics and mathematics. He infuriated Harvard by bringing an entourage of Washington flunkies and by being ferried around in an official car. And he annoyed his allies by giving in: were his comments about women really so terrible that he had to pledge $50m to promote women in science?
Yet there was more to the Summers wars than the main protagonist. His defeat prompts a bigger question: is the modern university governable? With 20,000 students and annual expenses of about $2.8 billion, Harvard is huge. Its senior employees have lifetime tenure and there are plenty of other tough constituencies, from pushy alumni to students who are paying through the nose to be there.
The job of a university president is shrinking from being a public intellectual to being a mere fund-raiser, and a temporary one at that. During the 20th century the average tenure of Harvard presidents was 20 years. But Mr Summers’s predecessor, Neil Rudenstine, lasted only for a decade, and had a very public nervous breakdown in the middle of his reign. Mr Summers was gone in half that time.
Harvard will probably have no shortage of applications for the job of running the world’s richest university (its endowment is now $26 billion). But it is hard to imagine a reformer wanting the job, particularly now that the FAS has tasted blood and the Corporation has given in.
Harvard has tended to go through bouts of reform followed by periods of consolidation. The most important bout of reform came with James Conant (1933-53), who took a Brahmin university—regional, parochial, snobbish, resistant to Jews, women and new subjects—and turned it into a national, meritocratic university. Harvard now desperately needs to push through equally radical reforms: improving undergraduate education while also seizing the opportunities of science and globalisation; correcting many of the problems of the sixties, while also reaching out to poorer students. Even if he was the wrong messenger, Mr Summers definitely had the right message.
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