More Summersiana

The Crimsonreported last week that Harvard “professors are facing a backlash in the court of public opinion,” frustrated by “attacks in the national media that are painting them as reactionary, lazy, radical, and worse.” If so, Camille Paglia’s piece in today’s Times seems likely to add to the frustration. Paglia, hardly a member of the Reactionary Right, lamented that Larry Summers was overpowered by"an ingrown humanities faculty that has been sunk in political correctness for decades,” characterized by “ideological groupthink.” The president, Paglia contended, was guilty of “foolishly thinking plain speech and common sense would suffice.” The unwillingness of Summers’ critics to provide concrete (non-ideological) explanations for their actions “illustrates the cagey hypocrisy that permeates fashionable campus leftism, which worships diversity in all things except diversity of thought.”

The Crimson article reports on possible plans for a more coordinated (and convincing) public explanation by Summers’ faculty critics. One Summers critic announced that she was “so sick of hearing that charge” of political correctness; another termed the allegation “ridiculous.” Timothy McCarthy, a lecturer on History and Literature and on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, takes perhaps the most brazen approach. “Those who characterize Summers as an undeserving victim of ‘political correctness’ fail to apprehend the real significance of his truncated tenure,” McCarthy assuredCrimson readers. One reason why? “‘Political correctness” was a concept invented by conservatives to malign progressive attempts to democratize and diversify the academy and to make higher education more hospitable to a broader range of people and ideas.” If the concept was invented and doesn’t really exist, Summers could hardly have been a victim of it. (Well, that clears things up.) McCarthy might want to peruse FIRE’s speech code archives before making this argument again.

This revisionist history, of course, runs up against what Alan Dershowitz has called the “400-pound gorilla” of the controversy: the explanatory note attached to the no-confidence motion introduced last February. That note ticked off a variety of violations of campus ideological orthodoxy by Summers. Faculty debatefromthe timeframed discussion of Summers’ performance in large measure through the terms of the ideological critique leveled in the explanatory note. Along with what could be termed scandal fatigue, a combination of Summers’ personality, administrative ambitiousness, and his positions explains his downfall (and it’s hard to separate the latter two factors, since Summers’ desire to increase the power of the presidency was in part related to his hopes of implementing his agenda). But to claim that his positions played no role in his resignation, as some at Harvard now seem to be trying to do, is difficult to sustain.

In today’s Globe, Robert Putnam reflects the party line that “Summers was not forced out by a radical segment of the faculty of arts and sciences.” He adds that Harvard’s “faculties, including its Faculty of Arts and Sciences, want bold change . . . Harvard faculty have followed strong leaders in the past, and they will follow them in the future.” Indeed, I have no doubt that many in the faculty would cheerfully follow someone like Shirley Tilghman.

But Putnam also explains a key difference between Summers’ resignation and the immediate aftermath of the no-confidence vote last spring: “What was most dispiriting about Summers's final year to those who shared his values was that he relinquished the capacity to say no, even to bad ideas.” Paglia echoes the point more acerbically. Commenting on Summers’ $50 million “diversity” initiative last spring, she notes, “That one desperate act of profligate appeasement tells volumes about the climate of persecution and extortion around gender issues at too many American universities.”

The faculty could have foreclosed criticism from the likes of Paglia simply by amending last spring’s no-confidence motion to deny any connection between it and the explanatory note, and to affirm that Summers was being censured for his failures of leadership, not his pedagogical or policy statements. That course was not followed, and it’s hard it to rewrite history now.