http://www.institutionalinvestor.com/default.asp?page=1&ISS=21210&SID=606917&PUB=243

I wonder if he was less successful at “Wall Street” than we were lead to believe?

But that’s also because Summers’ critique of “tubs on their own bottoms” was pretty well derailed early by his struggles on other fronts. He never had a chance to get in the way of the other schools at Harvard as he originally implied he might. There is probably a little of the “let’s you and him fight” in the attitude of the professional schools towards the FAS-Summers conflict.

The “abrasion” argument, in my mind, applies more to Summers’ unsuccessful approaches to individual faculty and to the loss of possible allies even within FAS due to rubbing them the wrong way. Now one might note that academics are considerably easier to “rub the wrong way” than many other professionals due to the fact that the institution of academia tends to cosset outsized egos to an extraordinary degree, and that would be fair enough. But if you’re appointed the head of an academic institution, it’s not a bad idea to at least partially adapt to the culture of the locals.

Still working on the meta-reply to withywindle’s concerns. It’s a very interesting general problem, and I think he’s accurately identified a point of significant contradiction and tension in my typical approach to many issues.

http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/27016

But if it cuts against an ideological argument, I think it also cuts against a “personal boorishness” argument–simply a matter of cui bono. And even if I were to accept that this accounts for all the difference between Arts and Science and the rest of the faculties–and I’m not sure I really believe that a majority of the Arts and Science faculties cares deeply about this issue of financial control and administration–this still leaves ideology as the crucial rhetoric by which the malcontents transformed their discontents into an argument more plausible to a sufficient number of the trustees, other faculty members, etc., who did not share their particular interest in Arts and Science financial turf.

I would also submit that the matter allows for some prediction. I predict, because ideology is the true tripwire, that the next major reformer at Harvard will concentrate entirely on institutional reform, and break no PC taboos. He will also be fairly successful at pushing through institutional reform. This, I think, will provide considerable evidence that the true “stickiness” at Harvard is not institutional, but ideological; that it is easier to change the institution than the beliefs. If the next major reform is to broach PC taboos successfully, but not to address institutional reform, I will take that as providing considerable evidence for the reverse.

“If anything, Summers was forced out of Harvard because he behaved so boorishly that he provided a bottomless supply of ammunition to his enemies, both the ideologues and the doctrine-free. Sometimes it’s just not a good idea to say “A is right and B is wrong”—for example, when you’re talking to B’s chief proponent.

“To be fair, it’s no easy matter to take over an immensely self-regarding institution that needs serious renovation. Summers’ predecessor, the amiable and ruminative Neil Rudenstine, had extricated himself from this dilemma by profusely thanking everyone in sight and taking tough issues under advisement for the duration. Summers was hired to kick some Harvard butt, whether in regard to the archaic system known as “every tub on its own bottom,” which granted almost total independence to the various graduate schools, or to the plummeting standard of new hires at the Law School. “We didn’t think we were hiring Dag Hammarskjold,” as one corporation member told me.

“And at first, Summers looked like an inspired choice. Besides being brilliant even by the Harvard standard of brilliance, he was willing to make tough decisions, and he was fundamentally forward-looking. He pointed out, for example, that while it was socially unacceptable at a great university to admit that one hadn’t read a play by Shakespeare, you could safely joke about not knowing the difference between a gene and a chromosome. ” …

“But Summers never came to grips with, or perhaps recognized, the special problem of the supremely self-regarding culture.”

http://www.slate.com/id/2136778?nav=wp

2) What precise parts of stodgy academic self-governance dramatically affect the outside world? And indeed, is (American) academia as stodgy as all that? I note that since 1950 i) an enormous system of state, city, and community colleges and universities have expanded to house a much larger proportion of college professors and students; ii) exfoliating bureaucracies within individual colleges and bureaucracies, decreasingly manned by professors and increasingly manned by professional administrators, has taken over an extraordinary amount of academic institutions’ day to day management; iii) the success of the reform most dear to the heart of college administrators–the significant decrease of the proportion of tenured faculty, by the adroit use of graduate students, adjuncts, and temporary faculty; iv) the transformation of the student body, to incorporate a broad range of the middle and working classes, as well as racial minorities; v) the disappearance or drastic attenuation of the Jewish quota; vi) the extension of co-education to virtually all academic institutions; vii) the increase in the number of women to a significant majority of the student body; viii) the disappearance of academic efforts to act in loco parentis as regards student sexuality; ix) cutting-edge research in science, accompanied by a continuing fruitful and evolving co-operation with private industry and government; x) in the humanities and social sciences, an intertwining with government and private foundations to subsidize an extraordinary amount of research; xi) and even at a relatively unchanged place like Swarthmore, the increase in number of the student body from about 1,000 to approaching 1,500 in the last few decades implies considerable institutional flexibility. I would submit that these are quite extraordinary changes, and evidence of a certain dynamism in academic institutions. Perhaps academia is still “relatively conservative,” compared with the American private sector, but perhaps that statement means less if both are considered to be dynamos of change.

3) I’m not sure you’re reading Burke properly. Burke recognized the importance of the local, but he also recognized the existence of France and England, and distinguished the behavior of so many millions of men and hundreds of villages as French, and the behavior of so many others as English. His arguments for the local and the particular were not atomizing: he recognized collectivities and abstractions of significant importance–the Established Church, Catholics, Parliament, India, Ireland, America, etc. Consider: “Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.” Admittedly a quote torn out of context, a brief selection, but I think indicative of something more than unabstracted localism in his thought. Indeed, Burkean argument against universal reductionism depends upon the recognition of particular beliefs and institutions that unite people–the mid-sized unities that ward against both atomization and universalism. (Incidentally, what you call a “forcible application of centralizing or universalizing frames of reference” may be no more than a recognition of reality. Cf, E. P. Thompson, _The Making of the English Working Class_–“the working class” can be an unreal abstraction, but it can also be a recognition of a forged and real unity.) You may find it paradoxical, but I find your inclination to localize to be one the one hand a universalizing impulse, and on the other hand an atomizing impulse that goes hand in hand with universalism.

4) And of course, just because I’m conservative, doesn’t mean I genuflect to Burke. My own allegiances are also to a rather older humanist and republican conception of virtue, politically inflected, which does not entirely coincide with Edmund’s beliefs. I take political narrative–indeed, narrative generally–to be a complement to citizenship in a secular republic, and engagement in political narrative a civic duty. Your resistance to political narrative, and to narrative in general, is a useful corrective to overly reductionist and simple-mindedly ideological political visions; but in isolation, and raised to a commanding principle, I fear it undercuts the political vision necessary for a citizen.

I also think that understanding what part of an issue is local IS important to everyone, that it has broad implications that we should all care about. I’m going to work up an entry about this later today, since I think you’re perfectly right in seeing a pattern in what I tend to claim about a wide range of issues. I’ll hint a bit at what I’m going to say by noting that it strikes me as very strange to claim that global, large-scale or universalizing frames of reference are the preferential frame of reference for conservatives. I think in many ways my inclinations are (perhaps appropriately) Burkean in their implicit conservatism; that I am suspicious of the forcible application of centralizing or universalizing frames of reference precisely because such frames of reference not only misunderstand causality in empirical terms but because their acceptance is what permits the oppressive superimposition of state or global power onto customary habitus (which is what ultimately accounts for the frequent long-term failure of such superimpositions as well).

Academic self-governance is a non-trivial problem. Over here in Germany, there are medieval traditions that persist in some forms of the university, and it has made reform in any coherent sense enormously difficult. Indeed, university reform has been on the political agenda in Germany for as long as I have been paying attention, nearly 20 years now. Improvements have come mostly at the margins.

Timothy’s argument is that academic institutions are more conservative than other institutions in their arrangements, and I think that is correct. Companies, for example, are at least nominally subject to market discipline. If they lose too much money for too long, they cease to exist as institutions. Government agencies, while rarely eliminated entirely, also face budget discipline on a regular basis. Universities are tuned to much longer time frames; their governance models draw on medieval values; their ability to draw students changes extremely slowly; and, if the endowment is strong, their finances are extraordinarily stable.

I just don’t see any support for this assertion “The story that matters most for other academics, for citizens in general is the ideological one, because that will have the most impact on them” from point 4).

Inasmuch as Summers’ departure points to a larger lesson, it is what Timothy is saying: Any ambitious attempt to reform a large university (unless that institution is somehow in deep crisis) it is structurally very difficult, more difficult than a corporate turnaround or a reorganization of a public agency. If there is a mismatch between society’s present and future needs and what universities contribute, then fixing that mismatch is made harder by the structure of a university.

2) You mention academic freedom (which is not precisely at issue–it was not the politics of West’s work, but its quality, that attracted Summers’ attention), but I think it is more precise to say that the issue is one of academic self-regulation. Has academia so politicized its professional standards that outside interference, whether by an academic president, a legislature, or some other representative of society at large, is justified at this moment in time? But even to pose this question, to challenge academic self-regulation at all, requires a generalizing (negative) judgment about the nature of academia. To say that local institutions and conflicts are the point at issue resists the possibility of a generalizing question and judgment, and so, I think, is not a neutral response to the matter, but one that aligns you with the defenders of academic self-regulation.

3) Let me try again on localism. The argument that the local significance of Harvard matters most is not one made in isolation, but as one of a host of local significance arguments–that the events of a particular institution, village, what have you, are best explained in terms of the particular institution, village, what have you. It is, by this point, a standard approach to history. But what this standardized approach does, in effect, is to disaggregate the world into loose atoms–all individual, but all no more or less like any other atom. And while this has virtues in explaining the individual atom, the patterning of chemical composition, texture, color–the relationship of one atom to another, their significant commonalities–allow you to distinguish the world as more than just endless atoms. This is, I suppose, a version of the old tree-and-forest argument; I would submit that if you focus too hard on the Harvard tree, you lose sight of the ideological forest.

4) But the question is one of importance, perhaps, at heart. You said to begin with that “So whatever the deeper issues might be, the unsuccessful tenure of Larry Summers at Harvard is first and foremost a story about the details of leadership and management.” First and foremost for whom? Perhaps for residents of Harvard–but what about for the rest of us? The local implications, precisely because they are local, are unlikely to affect us very much. The general implications–the ideological ones–are the ones most likely to resound through the world. The story that matters most for other academics, for citizens in general is the ideological one, because that will have the most impact on them; the local genealogy of the event is ultimately at best marginally relevant to the ideological effect. And indeed, when Minerva’s owl has flown, we will see that the slight ideological impact Summers’ resignation has on the nation at large may well have mattered more than the profound local effect it has on Harvard. It is certainly not out of court to make the argument.

5) De Tocqueville argued well and strongly for the structural continuities between the ancien regime and revolutionary France. But to say the enduring structures matter more than their ideological content is missing part of the picture–perhaps the most important part.

6) Local and institutional context somehow seems like the sociology of religion: important, but not centrally addressing the importance and the claims of religious belief.

7) I’m not exactly sure we conservatives regard Summers as one of our martyrs, where “our” refers to political conservatives. He is an occasional co-belligerent, a canary in a coalmine, but obviously no political conservative. (Save, perhaps, in an academic context.) He does seem to be a martyr in the cause of larger civilizational values and institutions which we cherish–not least our ideals of academia as it ought to be–but we would prefer a world where liberals and conservatives could differ on many particulars, but be equally fervent in his defense.