Lawrence Summers, Provocateur

Lawrence Summers, Provocateur

By JAMES TRAUB

Published: January 23, 2005

AWRENCE SUMMERS is at it again. Three years had passed since the blithely tactless president of HarvardUniversity and former Treasury Secretary said something that grossly offended one of his institution's core constituencies, and the academic world generally. (In 2001, he said that "serious and thoughtful people" - including Harvard professors - "are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in effect if not their intent" and that too many people - including Harvard professors - "when they think of police, think too quickly of Chicago in 1968.")

Mr. Summers appeared to have locked himself in whatever padded room universities presidents normally occupy. And then, this month, he escaped: He suggested at an economics conference that the low representation of women scientists at universities might stem from, among other causes, innate differences between the sexes.

Mr. Summers's provocative yodel set off a worldwide avalanche of commentary and condemnation. One of the most prominent female scientists at M.I.T. walked out in the middle of the talk; a Harvard faculty committee on women wrote the president a letter saying he had done grave damage to the university's reputation.

Mr. Summers was forced to don the hairshirt. He personally apologized to Harvard's standing committee on women. He was, he said, only trying to "stimulate various kinds of statistical research" and was dedicated to increasing the number of female scientists at Harvard. It may be another three years at least before Mr. Summers slips out of the padded room for another talk on the wild side.

And what should we think of that? That is, what are the obligations of the leaders of the great universities, if any, toward provoking debate? Are they a species of public intellectual, or a species of chief executive, responsive to only their internal constituencies - students, faculty, alumni donors?

Mr. Summers is an exceedingly rare bird. University presidents are among the most timorous and emollient of public speakers. Many of them are undoubtedly sharp-witted and sharp-tongued in private; but most are so concerned about offending any constituency that they confine themselves to stately and orotund utterances. Richard Freeman, the Harvard economist who organized the conference, held on Jan. 14, said he asked Mr. Summers to speak in his capacity as world-class economist, not institutional leader; otherwise, "he would have given us the same type of babble that university presidents give."

Some academic leaders do take a stand on public issues, but most who do align themselves with the forces of right-thinking opinion. Twenty years ago, A. Bartlett Giamatti, then the president of Yale, was much admired for taking on Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. But Mr. Falwell had few admirers at Yale; a truly courageous president would have defended him. Much the same is true of today's many champions of diversity and affirmative action.

It was not always so. In the first half of the 20th century, there was no bigger bully pulpit than the presidency of Harvard. Charles Eliot, a vinegary character who believed that his chief qualification for the job was "the capacity to inflict pain," played the role of public seer in the last half of the 19th century. James Bryant Conant, a champion of the emerging meritocracy of the 30's and 40's, had the effrontery to propose "wielding the ax against the root of inherited privilege" through a program "to confiscate (by constitutional methods) all property once a generation." A quarter-century later, Kingman Brewster of Yale, a WASP of antediluvian lineage, committed class betrayal by suggesting that the Black Panthers could not get a fair trial in the United States.

Mr. Summers has not achieved, and perhaps has not sought, this leadership role. Though he has become a hero among cultural conservatives - a very poor source of street cred, by the way, in the Ivy League - he has won few converts, including at Harvard. Perhaps this is because he seems almost perversely committed to speaking against the grain of his institution and of academic culture generally.

I spent dozens of hours with Mr. Summers while writing about him two years ago, and he insisted more than once that he had no ambition to serve as academia's in-house neoconservative gadfly. But he did feel that in a time of suffocating propriety, tact-free speech was a cause as worthy as laying the ax to inherited privilege had once been. He talked about the need for tough-mindedness and for a willingness to challenge orthodoxies.

Mr. Summers may have felt that biological cognitive difference was just the kind of taboo that demanded scrutiny; or perhaps he just thought, in his economist's way, that it was an intriguing speculation worthy of further research. When Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist who argues that significant innate differences exist between men and women, was asked by The Harvard Crimson whether Mr. Summers's remarks were within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, he said, "Good grief, shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of academic rigor?"

But claims of intellectual superiority or inferiority are not only wounding; they call into question the university's self-understanding. Nancy Hopkins, the M.I.T. professor who walked out on Mr. Summers, remarked that Harvard should be amending its admissions policy if it really believes that women suffer from an inherent cognitive deficit in the sciences. After all, if Mr. Summers had made the same speculation about African-Americans, his comments would have seemed beyond the pale.

Perhaps Mr. Summers inadvertently bumped up against the limits of his campaign to anatomize the pieties of academic culture. But it may be better for Harvard if he doesn't spend too much time in his padded woodshed.