The Harvard Parallel Lawrence Summers Hoped Nobody Would Make
When the Harvard Arts and Science faculty expressed their lack of confidence in university president Lawrence H. Summers on March 15, 2005, it was an act unprecedented in the history of the United States’ oldest institution of higher education. This isn’t the first time, however, that the country has witnessed Harvard faculty members and a Harvard president arrayed on opposite sides of an issue rending the body politic. In 2005 Harvard faculty and its president are opposed on issues related to expanding women’s access to faculty positions in math, science, and engineering. In 1927 Harvard professor of law and later Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell were arrayed against one another on a controversial issue that was convulsing U.S. and world opinion, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrants, labor activists, and anarchists who were convicted of murder during a payroll robbery in Braintree, Massachusetts in 1920. Labor radicals, liberals, and immigrant communities mobilized on their behalf as evidence of a frame-up mounted. An important turning point in the shift of public opinion toward sympathy for Sacco and Vanzetti came when Professor Frankfurter published in the Atlantic Monthly in March 1927 a careful analysis of the evidence in the case and concluded that the legal proceedings had been unfair and a new trial was warranted. Under procedures then in effect, however, Judge Webster Thayer, the original trial judge, reviewed all motions for a new trial and, prejudiced against the defendants, rejected all such motions.
Harvard’s President Lowell entered the story when Governor Alvan T. Fuller responded to the many demands for clemency he was receiving by appointing a three-person advisory committee on which Lowell played the key role. Lowell guided his colleagues through a formal review of the evidence and the questioning of witnesses and even members of the jury. Reasoned in form, the committee’s investigation interpreted every piece of evidence, however helpful to the defense, as either backing up the charges or unimportant to the disposition of the case. Thus the Lowell committee admitted that Judge Thayer’s off-the-bench remarks indicating extreme prejudice (“Did you see what I did with those anarchist bastards the other day?”) were “indiscreet” but claimed his conduct of the trial and his rejection of motions for a new trial were right and fair. Similarly unimportant to the committee was the failure of the prosecution to tell the defense about a witness who, the committee admitted, “had an unusually good position to observe the men in the car” and who, after the trial, had signed an affidavit stating that Sacco and Vanzetti were not the men who had committed the crime.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. later recalled what his father, a Harvard history professor and friend of Frankfurter’s, thought of the Lowell committee: “they were old Yankees and they couldn't believe that the judicial process operated by other old Yankees could be unfair.” In a period of explosive prejudice against labor radicals and recent immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, Lowell and the Protestant elite sent a message about who was in charge and who was to be kept down.
Like his predecessor Lowell in the 1920s, Summers sent a message about who is in charge and who is to be kept down when he delivered his remarks at the NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce. Like the Lowell committee’s review of the evidence in 1927, Summers's remarks about women’s capabilities for advanced mathematics and scientific work were rational in form but designed to back up a preconceived idea about women’s innate inferiority. Arguments about the intellectual inferiority of women or of specific racial and ethnic groups shift with the times, but they turn out to be pseudo-science, reflecting the bigoted attitudes and discriminatory purposes of their proponents. The transcript of Summers’s remarks, released after much pressure, disclose that his opposition to outsiders was not limited to women. In speaking about the need to review “marginal hires,” Summers made clear that he shares the distorted and prejudiced concept of affirmative action common in some white male circles. Far from being marginal, women and minority men who make it into the academy often exceed in preparation and accomplishments the levels achieved by their white male counterparts.
Lowell, vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, was an anti-Semite who had campaigned against the accession of Louis Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court and had established a quota to limit the number of Jewish students admitted to Harvard. In the 1920s, Lowell helped send Sacco and Vanzetti to their deaths. In the current decade, Harvard President Summers effectively keeps women and minorities from their rightful place in the academy and strives to maintain authoritarian leadership at America’s most renowned university. In expressing their lack of confidence in Summers, Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty members are acting in the tradition of fairness, openness, and support for the true rational inquiry of such 1920s predecessors as Professors Frankfurter and Schlesinger. Let us hope that it is the spirit of openness that prevails and that Harvard fully unlocks its doors at all levels in all fields to women and minorities.