Summers, speech and self-selection redux.
The funniest thing about the Larry Summers resignation is how much interesting, insightful, genuinely balanced commentary it's produced in the mainstream media. Compare the multi-facetted Summers commentary to the critical confusion over more serious topics like the Dubai Ports World controversy the question of whether Iraq is technically descending into "civil war" (with commentators on both sides asserting rather blithely that it is or is not) and the Summers talk seems like a breath of journalistic fresh air.
On one side, you've got Martin Peretz and Peter Beinart engaging in an unusual level of lucidity at in defence of Summers and in condemnation of his faculty plotters (Peretz in particular manages to stay on point for an entire TNR column, no mean feat). At TPM Cafe, Greg Anrig reminds us that, for all the attacks from the left of Summers' contempt for "diversity", he vastly improved Harvard's diversity in one crucial aspect: by wealth background. He did it by eliminating tuition for students from households earning under $40,000 and increasing financial assistance for middle-income families, and by talking, talking, talking about the wealth gap in elite academic admissions. (I also side with those who think Summers deserves real credit for trying to expand the range of ideological acceptability at Harvard: pushing patriotism and ROTC participation and speaking against Israeli devestature, but these are more debatable virtues.)
Then, level-headed, mildly affectionate, pieces by Eugene Robinson in the WaPo and James Traube in Slate suggest the emerging concensus position that, while Summers is basically a good egg, his failure of tact rendered him, as Robinson puts it in the Post, a terrible politician in a job that requires ridiculous amounts of diplomacy -- and diplomatic common sense. The strange conflict between Summers as champion of neglected undergrads, teaching a first-year survey course on globalization and haranging the faculty to make themselves more available, while at the same time riding a stretch limo with chauffeur around campus, suggests a man whose tonedeafness or irrational contempt for decorum undermines his egalitarian substance. And, per Ellen Berry's L.A. Times reporting, anybody who informs his FAS that "economists are smarter than political scientists and political scientists are smarter than sociologists" basically deserves what he gets.
Finally, there's the one aspect of Summers-ism his defenders don't seem willing to discuss: his weird, unsavoury-looking protection of Andrei Shleifer and the Harvard Russian privatization program, that Matt Bivens of The Nation wrote about way back in 2001.
In other words, Summers is a complex guy. The whole affair seems a good way to come back to my point about free-speech and its self-selection problem. When Summers made his wildly misconstrued remarks about "intrinsic aptitude" in the elite sciences (he did not claim that men were "smarter than women") to a conference on diversity and inequality in academia, I defended him tooth and nail, mainly on context but also on the legitimacy of the substance. The remarks themselves were only debatably offensive and were based on real research. While it was within anyone's rights to take offense (and for the experts in attendance to pointedly challenge Summers to his face at the conference), the shrieking insistence that ensued from various liberal quarters that we all had to be offended and that our collective, objective offense-taking warranted a grovelling apology at least and Summers' resignation and blackballing at most, struck me as a lot more ill-informed and offensive than what's recorded on the conference transcript.
The problem, though, is that ropey, controversial remarks almost never emerge out of a vacuum or fade back into one. The same tendencies that led Summers to "provoke" (his word) the prevailing orthodoxy on gender differences at the conference were the same ones that led him to make those off-the-cuff but wildly inappropriate criticisms of entire disciplines reported in the L.A. Times. By the same token, while I've got no great love for Cornel West, nobody ever seems to point out that the glaring problem with Summers' decision to (privately, as I understand it) confront West over his lack of serious research and leaves of absences from teaching was the massive political conflict of interest that existed between the two -- West's having taken those leaves of absense mainly to campaign from the left against Summers' potential boss in the 2000 Democratic primary and general election. But the instincts that would have led Summers away from West in the interests of propriety would, again, probably also have led him down a more well-trod path at that conference on gender equality, to worry more about appearances, and try to rein in or tone down his fight with the FAS. And so it continues.
Conservatives have rolled out the trope about the moderately liberal Summers' downfall proving once again the arrogant intolerance of the academic left (an image helped along by the faculty member quoted in the L.A. Times who actually laments the fact that the Harvard student body is looking "more like America" since the 60s.) But it's messier than that. There's intolerance of provocative dissent -- which we rightly condemn -- and there's the far more mundane, defensible intolerance of basic assholery. Which type of intolerance directly led to Summers' demise -- and therefore whether his resignation under duress is a basically good or basically bad thing -- is impossible to know due to the close marriage of provocative dissent and assholery in Summers' behvaviour, and in general. Free speech is vital, but it ain't easy.
On one side, you've got Martin Peretz and Peter Beinart engaging in an unusual level of lucidity at in defence of Summers and in condemnation of his faculty plotters (Peretz in particular manages to stay on point for an entire TNR column, no mean feat). At TPM Cafe, Greg Anrig reminds us that, for all the attacks from the left of Summers' contempt for "diversity", he vastly improved Harvard's diversity in one crucial aspect: by wealth background. He did it by eliminating tuition for students from households earning under $40,000 and increasing financial assistance for middle-income families, and by talking, talking, talking about the wealth gap in elite academic admissions. (I also side with those who think Summers deserves real credit for trying to expand the range of ideological acceptability at Harvard: pushing patriotism and ROTC participation and speaking against Israeli devestature, but these are more debatable virtues.)
Then, level-headed, mildly affectionate, pieces by Eugene Robinson in the WaPo and James Traube in Slate suggest the emerging concensus position that, while Summers is basically a good egg, his failure of tact rendered him, as Robinson puts it in the Post, a terrible politician in a job that requires ridiculous amounts of diplomacy -- and diplomatic common sense. The strange conflict between Summers as champion of neglected undergrads, teaching a first-year survey course on globalization and haranging the faculty to make themselves more available, while at the same time riding a stretch limo with chauffeur around campus, suggests a man whose tonedeafness or irrational contempt for decorum undermines his egalitarian substance. And, per Ellen Berry's L.A. Times reporting, anybody who informs his FAS that "economists are smarter than political scientists and political scientists are smarter than sociologists" basically deserves what he gets.
Finally, there's the one aspect of Summers-ism his defenders don't seem willing to discuss: his weird, unsavoury-looking protection of Andrei Shleifer and the Harvard Russian privatization program, that Matt Bivens of The Nation wrote about way back in 2001.
In other words, Summers is a complex guy. The whole affair seems a good way to come back to my point about free-speech and its self-selection problem. When Summers made his wildly misconstrued remarks about "intrinsic aptitude" in the elite sciences (he did not claim that men were "smarter than women") to a conference on diversity and inequality in academia, I defended him tooth and nail, mainly on context but also on the legitimacy of the substance. The remarks themselves were only debatably offensive and were based on real research. While it was within anyone's rights to take offense (and for the experts in attendance to pointedly challenge Summers to his face at the conference), the shrieking insistence that ensued from various liberal quarters that we all had to be offended and that our collective, objective offense-taking warranted a grovelling apology at least and Summers' resignation and blackballing at most, struck me as a lot more ill-informed and offensive than what's recorded on the conference transcript.
The problem, though, is that ropey, controversial remarks almost never emerge out of a vacuum or fade back into one. The same tendencies that led Summers to "provoke" (his word) the prevailing orthodoxy on gender differences at the conference were the same ones that led him to make those off-the-cuff but wildly inappropriate criticisms of entire disciplines reported in the L.A. Times. By the same token, while I've got no great love for Cornel West, nobody ever seems to point out that the glaring problem with Summers' decision to (privately, as I understand it) confront West over his lack of serious research and leaves of absences from teaching was the massive political conflict of interest that existed between the two -- West's having taken those leaves of absense mainly to campaign from the left against Summers' potential boss in the 2000 Democratic primary and general election. But the instincts that would have led Summers away from West in the interests of propriety would, again, probably also have led him down a more well-trod path at that conference on gender equality, to worry more about appearances, and try to rein in or tone down his fight with the FAS. And so it continues.
Conservatives have rolled out the trope about the moderately liberal Summers' downfall proving once again the arrogant intolerance of the academic left (an image helped along by the faculty member quoted in the L.A. Times who actually laments the fact that the Harvard student body is looking "more like America" since the 60s.) But it's messier than that. There's intolerance of provocative dissent -- which we rightly condemn -- and there's the far more mundane, defensible intolerance of basic assholery. Which type of intolerance directly led to Summers' demise -- and therefore whether his resignation under duress is a basically good or basically bad thing -- is impossible to know due to the close marriage of provocative dissent and assholery in Summers' behvaviour, and in general. Free speech is vital, but it ain't easy.
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