Mae Kuykendall is a retired professor of law at Michigan State University College of Law. She is coauthor of the forthcoming “Votes of No Confidence: Theory and Practice.” Harry Lewis is professor emeritus of computer science at Harvard University, where he served as dean of Harvard College and interim dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is author of “Excellence Without a Soul.”
Universities are under attack and have been for several decades, from alternating political directions. Today the national mood, and the federal government, are calling for traditions of academic freedom to be curtailed, faculty voices to be regulated, reading lists to be monitored, viewpoints to be forcibly balanced.
Recent revelations of malodorous email chatter between economist and former Harvard president Larry Summers, his Harvard English professor wife, Elisa New, and convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein are unlikely to increase public confidence in how Harvard does its business. Why should Harvard be trusted to do anything without oversight?
Summers knows he is damaged goods — he has stepped down from his outside gigs, and The New York Times has announced that it is not renewing his contract as an opinion writer. At this point, why should Summers even have a job at Harvard? Senator Elizabeth Warren has described him as too untrustworthy to be in a classroom with students. (Summers has taken leave from teaching while Harvard investigates the recent disclosures.)
But a longer view of these events teaches a different lesson. When faculty members recognize grave deficiencies in their leaders, they should be allowed to speak up. The best remedy when individual faculty members make fools of themselves is for other faculty to point that out — and for the university to protect them when they do.
Twenty years ago, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted that it lacked confidence in the leadership of then-president Summers. Such motions are rare in universities and were unprecedented at Harvard.
The faculty took a good deal of heat for that vote. Professors were accused of being thin-skinned, afraid of contrarian thinking, and resistant to tough leadership. About a year later, with another no-confidence vote looming, Summers announced that he would resign as president.
Recent disclosures of Summers’s relationship with Epstein vindicate the unease shared by the faculty majority that had formed its opinion from direct experience with his leadership. The no-confidence motion had no particulars — everyone who voted for it might have had their own reasons for doing so.
The no-confidence vote was widely caricatured as a takedown by feminists and their fellow travelers of an independent thinker about matters of gender and intellect — even though Summers’s infamous 2005 remarks to the National Bureau of Economic Research, in which he suggested that the highest level of scientific and mathematical ability might be less common in women than in men, were substantially informed by a best-selling book by Steven Pinker, a colleague from the psychology department. Intellectually defensible or not, those old women-in-science remarks now read differently in the context of the banter in the emails between Summers and Epstein about Summers having a “needy” mentee with whom he was a “friend without benefits” but had hopes of “getting horizontal.”
Less well remembered is that Summers resigned just before a second no-confidence vote was scheduled to occur, following his prevarication — or “inartful” response, in the words of one of his defenders, then Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz — to a question by engineering professor Fred Abernathy in early 2006. Abernathy asked in a faculty meeting how Harvard could defend its role in a scandalously corrupt execution of a multimillion-dollar contract with the US government to help Russia establish a capitalist economy. Summers’s legalistic response angered Abernathy. In the end Harvard had to pay millions to settle a lawsuit in the matter, and Andrei Shleifer, a colleague and friend of Summers in the economics department, lost his named professorship in the fallout.
Summers won’t be fired for his email exchanges with Epstein, and he shouldn’t be. Nothing has come to light in the emails suggesting any unlawful action on his part. It’s all words, and no faculty members should be fired for their words. Summers is protected by the same standard that protected those professors who, two decades ago, spoke up in public to make Harvard’s governing bodies understand that Summers was unfit to continue as president.
On the other hand, Harvard could choose to rescind such honors as Summers holds. He has already stepped away — but not resigned — from his position as director of Harvard’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.
There is also the question of whether he might lose his university professorship, Harvard’s highest academic distinction. This might seem to be an obvious response to disgraceful behavior. Summers would remain a tenured professor even if not of the highest rank. But it is possible that this particular distinction was part of an understanding he reached with the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing board, as a condition of resigning the presidency years ago. In that case, Harvard might be breaching a contract with Summers by revoking it.
A larger question raised by this sorry affair is what role character and judgment play in academic appointments — and appointments to any kind of leadership position. Harvard used to be far more forthright in valuing character in faculty members. It has gradually subordinated that subjective criterion in favor of allegedly more objective metrics of academic achievement and promise. On those measures, Summers has always ranked high, and it is among the tragedies of this email affair that the university and the nation could lose access to the many benefits those talents might yet bring us. In addition, Harvard might lose one of its few vocal politically centrist faculty members.
Harvard gradually stopped trying to judge the character of the faculty because it was too often used as a pretext for excluding people, or whole groups of people, we don’t like. (One has to wonder if Warren would be equally confident that Summers is too untrustworthy to teach had the two of them not so vehemently disagreed in the past on matters of public policy.)
It is not wrong to be skeptical about the use of character as a way of sidetracking people we disagree with. The university will be stronger if disagreeable people remain part of the academic community, as long as their other talents earn them a place. The same is true of the nation as a whole; traditions of free expression and respectful disagreement, now severely threatened within the federal government, support the long-term welfare of society. But we should still take away from the current mess that people don’t outgrow their character defects and bad judgment.