Why Can’t College Presidents…Be Pundits?

The Washington commentariat reacted to the resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers like wasps into whose nest a stick has been thrust. “The Harvard faculty deposed Lawrence Summers because he wanted them to care about something beyond themselves,” wrote Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic. Summers was ousted, editorialized the Washington Post, because he “did not shrink from saying” that Harvard was failing in its core mission: “to pose tough questions, promote critical thinking, and generally challenge complacency and prejudice.”

“The enraged,” thundered TNR editor-in-chief Martin Peretz, apparently stringing together the worst insults he could think of, “did not want to hear his honest thoughts. They wanted him to be silent. They wanted him to behave like a politician.”

The feeling is one with which Prof. Henry Higgins, the elocution professor from Shaw’s Pygmalion and Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, was familiar. Higgins takes Liza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl Higgins has trained to speak like a “lady,” to a society ball where she is hailed as an aristocrat, even nobility. But he is baffled and infuriated after the ball when she explodes and runs away, just because he treats her not like a colleague or companion but as a research experiment. It’s because she’s a woman, Higgins complains to his cohort Col. Pickering. “Why can’t a woman,” he asks in a song, “be more like a man?” Why can’t she be more like a chum, like the two of them, like Pickering.

If I were a woman [Higgins asks] who’d been to a ball,
Been hailed as a princess by one and by all,
Would I start weeping like a bathtub overflowing?
Carry on as if my home were in a tree?
Run away and never tell me where I’m going?
Well, why can’t a woman–be like me?

Why Can’t College Presidents…Be Pundits?

Why can’t a college president, the pundits wonder, do what they do? Why can’t he pose tough questions, express his honest thoughts, refuse to be silent–and still keep his job? Why did the Harvard faculty revolt when Summers, as Peretz puts it, “raise[d] a hypothesis –one of many, and not necessarily his own view,” that women may be innately ill-equipped to be research scientists? That, after all, is what they do–Peretz, Beinart and Washington Post editorial writers.

Well, why can’t a college president–be like them?

Because Summers wasn’t a columnist or editorial writer. And although he was, as part of his university presidency, a professor, another group allowed to express with impunity their honest thoughts and raise hypotheses not necessarily their own, that wasn’t why newspapers gave his opinions the prominence he obviously craved.

He was a leader, a university president. And he was run off because he was a president who acted like a professor provoking a class or a columnist provoking public debate. A leader’s job is to bring others to his point of view, something rarely accomplished by insulting them–as Summers did over the quality of Cornel West’s scholarship and the number of hours West spent in the classroom–or by speculating that members of their cohort may be doomed by their gender to scientific research mediocrity, no matter how right he is and how wrong they are.

The Post editorial referred to the difference when it cited “complaints that [Summers] was acting like a corporate chief executive — as though there were something wrong with that.”

But just as there is something wrong with a university president behaving like an opinion columnist, there is also something wrong with a university president’s behaving like a corporate CEO. The two jobs are fundamentally different, and Summers’ failure to understand that difference wound up costing him his job.

It’s easy to confuse the two kinds of executives. Both are called presidents, both report to boards of directors and regents, and both sit atop hierarchical organizational structures with the corporate CEO’s chief operating officer, executive and senior vice presidents seemingly comparable to the college president’s chancellor, deans and department chairs.

The difference is that the COO and vice presidents are the corporate CEO’s subordinates. University deans and department chairs, on the other hand, are likely to have more security in their jobs than the president has in his. In fact as tenured professors, they are likely to have the closest thing our economy offers to absolute job security. It is they who can, with impunity, pose tough questions, express their honest thoughts and refuse to remain silent. Unlike the CEO’s corporate subordinates, professors aren’t answerable to the university president. He typically doesn’t hire them in the sense of selecting them from among other candidates. He can’t fire them.

He is, however, expected to lead them. His job is not dissimilar to the job of a legislative leader like a speaker or majority leader leading legislative colleagues, or a governor or president leading legislators whom he cannot hire or fire, on whom he cannot impose his will by fiat, but must lead through a combination of persuasion and the exercise of the levers of power he does have. It is, in other words, and pace Martin Peretz, a political job. Like a president or a speaker of the house, a college president has staff, a budget, some perks to hand out, the initiative and the bully pulpit. If he deploys them skillfully he can go where he wants to go and take his–not subordinates, not exactly colleagues, call them his constituents–he can take his constituents with him.

Bullying them, confronting them, deceiving them, condescending to them may work for a while. But they were there before he came and will likely be there after he leaves. They are not dependent on him for their status or security. Sooner or later, if he assaults them, they will stymie or defeat or just outlast him. And then they will have won and he will have lost, as Summers lost.

He lost not only his job, but his hope of getting a more politically diverse faculty, of linking, as Peretz put it, “big science with medicine, economics, politics, philosophy, and the arts no longer separate or separable fields but tied together in their pursuit of humane ends,” of getting senior professors to teach survey courses–a noble goal; my father tried for a time to get his colleagues in the University of Wisconsin Economics Department to teach introductory economics.

The pundits and editorial writers are right in this: Summers’ loss is Harvard’s loss. But they are wrong to think that it was taken from him. Like columnists, like professors, he couldn’t resist the urge to bloviate. His urge to provoke controversy was apparently stronger than his aspiration to reform Harvard, so he gave in to the urge and gave up the aspiration.

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