Something incredible happened at Harvard yesterday: the university’s president was forced out of office decades before his time.
That happens less than once in a lifetime, so we eagerly turned to the papers today to see what they could tell us about this dramatic development.
Any crisis or controversy involving the Harvard name inevitably draws the national press like moths to a flame, and Summers’ departure was no exception, as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times all ran front-page stories this morning.
Using material from five reporters, the New York Times provided a good overview of the Summers narrative with its story — and an apt starting point for a look at the overall coverage.
“Lawrence H. Summers resigned yesterday as president of Harvard University after a relatively brief and turbulent tenure of five years, nudged by Harvard’s governing corporation and facing a vote of no confidence from the influential Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” the Times reported, adding that his announcement “raised questions about future leaders’ ability to govern Harvard with its vocal and independent-minded faculty.”
“Hailed in his first days as a once-in-a-century leader,” the Times wrote, Summers took office with ambitious plans but “eventually alienated professors with a personal style that many saw as bullying and arrogant.” While a series of missteps and divisive decisions (culminating with the latest uproar this month after Harvard’s dean of the faculty abruptly resigned) set the stage for Summers’ departure, said the Times, his “greater problem was the intense ill will and even loathing toward him within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the university’s largest unit.”
Adopting a typical above-the-fray tone, the Times story provided little analysis of what Summers actually accomplished in office, but it did explore the 51-year-old economist’s future employment possibilities and described in depth the thinking in Summers’ camp these past few weeks, as he pondered whether his presidency could be salvaged. Members of the Harvard Corporation (the secretive and all-powerful board that alone can remove the university’s president from office) had recently been speaking with professors “to gauge their reaction to a resignation or even a forced dismissal,” and two faculty members who had taken part in such discussions “said yesterday that they believed it was the corporation’s idea, more than Dr. Summers’s, that he step down.”
Stating things a bit more forthrightly, the Wall Street Journal produced the single best Summers story today with its article (subscription required) headlined, “Facing War With His Faculty, Harvard’s Summers Resigns.”
“The resignation of Lawrence H. Summers as president of Harvard University, after years of escalating battles with his own faculty, throws into disarray the efforts of the nation’s oldest, richest and most influential university to reform itself for the 21st century,” the Journal led off, adding that “[h]is exit exposes deep fault lines in Harvard’s faculty.” (Here outspoken law professor Alan Dershowitz makes his first appearance with the indignant accusation that “This is an academic coup d’etat by one small faction … the die-hard left of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.”)
Contributing more inside baseball on the Harvard Corporation’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering, the Journal reported that its members first “decided they should familiarize themselves with faculty concerns” after the FAS faculty startlingly voted that they lacked confidence in Summers’ leadership last March. The Corporation’s alarm grew after the resignation of William Kirby, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, amidst rumors that Summers had forced him out: “In recent weeks, board members polled the university’s deans. The majority responded that the time had come for Mr. Summers to step down, according to a person familiar with the matter.”
The Journal piece expertly detailed how Summers’ aggressive leadership ran into resistance at nearly every turn, and reported the telling detail that Summers quickly realized he was mistaken in thinking Cambridge would be “a nicer place” than Washington. It also deftly noted that Summers’ temporary replacement, 75-year-old Derek Bok, announced on Feb. 11 he was stepping down as chairman of Common Cause due to his age — just 10 days before it was announced that he would resume Harvard’s presidency “until a permanent successor is found.”
The Los Angeles Times was equally blunt with its lede, writing that the besieged Summers, “a former Treasury secretary renowned for his intellect and impatience,” managed with his resignation announcement to “avoi[d] open warfare with a growing bloc of alienated faculty members and en[d] a five-year tenure mired in controversy.” The paper noted that “Summers’ stint as Harvard’s president was one of the shortest in the university’s history,” and included yet more details about the behind-the-scenes strategizing, with one professor saying “if Larry Summers wasn’t pushed, there wasn’t much pull for him, either.”
The Times provided some wonderful color, from Dershowitz (“This is a coup d’etat …”) to Cornel West (“I’ve always said, ‘I’m praying for him, but chickens come home to roost.’ And they have come home”) to an education leader who “compared Summers’ tumultuous tenure at Harvard to a Shakespeare play, complete with tragic hero.” At Treasury, said the Times, “Summers carved a reputation for incisive takes on policy that were accompanied by awkward public comments and withering treatment of subordinates.”
The most complete coverage of yesterday’s big news, however, was produced by those wont to care most: Harvard’s hometown papers. Declaring that Summers’ resignation will bring “to an end the shortest tenure of a Harvard chief since the Civil War,” the student-staffed Harvard Crimson included in its reporting the first sit-down interview with Summers after his announcement. The undeniable highlight of the Crimson‘s coverage, however, was an eloquent editorial bemoaning “Harvard’s Loss.”
“For all the controversy, all the brusqueness, all the je ne sais quoi that made Summers offensive, for all the faults that Summers brought with him to Mass. Hall, Summers also brought a vision. More than that, he brought the ability to articulate that vision and the willingness to struggle passionately for it. And we agree with that vision,” the paper’s editors wrote. “Summers can only be faulted for being too much a public intellectual and too little a politically aware university president — a fault of excess, perhaps, but not a fault that should have cost Summers his job.”
But the best all-around coverage was provided by the Boston Globe, which went all-out with a big Summers package covering various angles of the story with the authoritative and deep voice that metro dailies can still produce at their best.
One piece described the unforgiving atmosphere and intense pressures modern university presidents face, while an article on Summers’ direct style succinctly grasped the paradox of his tenure, reporting that “The boldness and bluntness that contributed to Lawrence H. Summers’s downfall as Harvard University’s president also enabled him to alter the course of an often self-satisfied institution, prodding it to make changes that were long overdue.” The sprawling package also included a full piece from the ever-present Dershowitz explaining his coup d’etat theory, and a neat timeline showing just how unusual Summers’ resignation is, with the last one by a Harvard president coming in 1828.
In its excellent lead story, meanwhile, the Globe reported that Summers was “quite angry about the outcome” of this final crisis of his presidency, although it did allow him to avoid an embarrassing no-confidence vote by the faculty next week. In an interview, Summers told the paper “he first began thinking about resigning after a faculty meeting two weeks ago” and that “he finally made his decision last Wednesday, informed members of the Harvard Corporation, and then left Thursday on a long-planned ski trip to Utah with his family.”
Harry Lewis, who was forced out as dean of Harvard College by Summers in 2003, compared the “sense of inevitability” surrounding yesterday’s announcement to President Nixon’s downfall. “It’s sad that it came to this,” Lewis said. “Summers is very bright and very talented, and I just think his talents were not the right one for this position.”
It called to mind some apt comments Summers made in an address to Harvard alumni in New York last year. In an appearance shortly after a faculty vote rebuked him last March, Summers said, “I am so proud to be at Harvard and to have the chance to be only its seventh president since the Civil War.”
He later discussed the problems facing women at Harvard, but he very well could have been describing his own deteriorating situation:
“These problems weren’t made in a week, a month, or a year,” Summers said. “They’re not going to be solved in a week, a month, or a year.”
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.
