I find this quote remarkable:

But university professors, of all people, should not require mollycoddling

 But of course, as the son of two professors, one of whom is now a dean, I know (and whoever wrote that editorial should know), university professors require more mollycoddling than almost any other group of people (with the possible exception of their students). 

Linked here from Volokh, Matt. I haven't kept up with this as much as I should, perhaps; but I thank you for your Crimson-type inside dope about the FAS, which is eminently believable balance.

I was around when the cops dragged my fellow students out of University Hall; and I remember the Faculty asserting themselves in that situation.

I think it is important to let the world know this was not all about political correctness of the usual sort.

De-emphasize the College? Why?

Wow! What a great excuse to let everyone know you're a Harvard grad!

And what a great chance for other Harvard grads to step up and be recognized. 

Right, Harvard grads have a tendency to drop the Harvard brand.

Plus, media folks who attended Harvard are prone to writing articles, and writing rebuttals to articles, about how the future of the union rests on whose butt is sitting behind the president's desk up there. 

I'm trying to drive home the point that it's no more important than who's running Ohio State or Stanford or Auburn.

Yes, but my knee jerked before I got to the last graph.

Out. 

WVPete - relax.  Welcome to a newcomer. Relaxed new thinking is always good.   

you just can not stop a harvard man from talking about harvard. do they reprogram the DNA or something? it's certainly a psychiatric disorder.

As best I can make out, Yglesias' point can be reduced to: post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Yes, the thing that took place immediately before Summers left was his apparent pushing out of the Dean of Arts and Sciences.

But what reason do we have to believe that this was anything more than the straw that broke the camel's back, with the vast majority of straw coming from very different sources?

I don't see any evidence one way or the other on that point. 

And what a great chance for other Harvard grads to step up and be recognized.

Would that bother you? What's your point? Any chance you're related to a guy named Wallace, SFC? 

MIT.  Samuelson's nephew.

The tribulation of Larry Summers, soon to become a past university president, is a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing more than the way academic politics is played thoughout academia.  The game is one of exquisite personal humiliation.  That it occurred at Harvard University does not mitigate the nastiness, byzantine or machievellian nature of infighting in academia.  Academic politics becomes blood sport at large and small institiutions, within departments at undergraduate schools as well as at post graduate levels.

University Presidents are, as Matt said, selected because they have good interpersonal skill and can raise money.  At most instiitutions, the provost is the chief academic officer with a fair degree of power over the faculty-- much as  Condolezza Rice was at Stanford -- and the Provost does the hiring and firing of faculty, leaving the President above the fray.  In general, faculties vary in the degree to which they are and can be organized.  For example, the effort to organize medical school faculty produced the expression: It's like herding cats.  Yes, folks, that is where it originated.

 At Harvard the faculty has long considered itself to be independent and appears to have become organized in the effort to oust Summers.  Larry Summers had two strikes against him:  his peronsality and the decentrialized nature of the Harvard administration.  When Summers tried to make some well-considered, important changes in that institution, the Harvard SAS faculty, traditionaly over the years left to it own devices, did Summers in.  Strike Three.

Academic politics is not primarily of the left or of the right.  It is seldom about money.  Even at Case Western Reserve and Cleveland Clinic where one of the chief academic officers was pushed out, in public, on the front pages of the New York Times by one of his peers as a result of ethical problems with respect to links to the private sector both had.  It is intensely  personal and the old adage paraphrased holds true:  Politics in academia is so nasty because the stakes are so small.

I've seen more than a few comments that seem to imply that the "turf wars" and "politics" involved here are somehow special...

"I dunno if you've been around academia, but it is one of most politicized, turf-driven professions around.  Tenure does that to people--even in small institutions that don't make the NYT."

"Academic politics becomes blood sport at large and small institiutions,  within  departments at undergraduate schools as well as at post graduate levels."

Frankly, I'm having a tough time getting a handle on the perspective this is coming from.  I've seen turf war politics rapidly progress to the "nuclear" stage in businesses as small as 5 employees.  10 years as an independent consultant (and another 10 as a business owner) have given me some fascinating insights into how Machiavellian machinations compare and contrast between, say,  banking institutions, technology manufacturers, and media outlets, as well as educational institutions.

My question is why anyone is surprised that academia works the same way?  People are people, educated or not.  And it's not about "tenure", except tangentially.   Tenure is simply one of the ways that -Power- is expressed and realized in academic endeavors.  If tenure was eliminated, any variety of alternative mechanisms of a similar nature found in business and/or government would simply take it's place...

Is the common perspective that academics are somehow immune to this type of thing?  Perhaps having a parent in education blinded me to that fallacy early on... thinking back about some of the situations which arose just in the school district of a small Minnesota town (pop. ~20000), finding out that Harvard has political in-fighting is about as much news to  me as being told the sun rises in the east.

I know some of the above sounds sarcastic, but I really am curious... is the common perception that academics at any level are somehow "above" political-infighting?  If so, why?

apologies, accidentally posted twice. 

Coming from an education at Princeton, where undergraduate education and faculty research are seen as compatible and as more important than building up further the graduate program or instituting professional programs, I can definitely sympathize with FAS dismay at reduced attention to Harvard College.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

Wandering afield from the Summers controversy and to lighten things up, what follows are buttons created for the annual Brown-Harvard football game. The Brown band looks for ways to poke fun at the fine institution David in NYC is funding.

The last one may be more telling than we know now. 

2004        Poupon U
2003        Ask Me About Being a Prick
2002        I Received HONORS for WEARING This Button
2001        Big Drum Small Stick
2000        HARVARD MARRED
1999        HARVARD IS RUN BY RADCLIFFE
1998        R
1997        GATES UNIVERSITY
1996        CRIMSON DIED
1995        GO YALE
1994        HARVARD SHARDS
1993        HAARDVARK
1992        HARVARD SQUARES
1991        KNEEL RUDENSTINE      {Harvard's President}
1990        CRIMSON MISDEMEANORS
1989        BROWN THE CRIMSON
1988        MOW THE YARD
1987        BOK ITCH   {Harvard's President}
1986        BROWN-BAND IN BOSTON
1985        COOP d'ETAT
1984        FIGHT HARVARD FIERCELY
1983        HARD ON YARD
1982        12   {Harvard's score on some quality test}
1981        CRIMSON TIED
1980        PLUNGE THE JOHNS
1979        VERI TAS TY
1978        BURN THE BRIGIANS
1977        LAMPOON HARVARD
1976        MOUNT THE CLIFFIES
1975        HARVARD BEATS
1974        BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY
1973        RECYCLE THE CANTABS
1972        BOK BIER    {President when Summers leaves}

Summers was the first President in quite some time who was not, himself, a graduate of the College. 

Actually, this is not true. In fact, neither of Summers's two predecessors was a Harvard College graduate. Bok's bachelor's degree is from Stanford, Rudenstine's from Princeton.

RP Burke
Bexley, O.

Thanks for the correction on the college. 

 Actually, there is nothing monolithic about the Arts and Science faculty as you describe.  The chemists, physicists, etc at Harvard in FAS are very well funded and rather well paid, and in general the humanities and social science profs are way less well funded and way less well paid, and so it is all across the country.  If the physical science increase goes through it will be a welcome correction to a trend that saw NIH budgets sky rocket while the NSF and DOE were largely flat. 

But in the sense you describe, about faculty power, most of the FAS faculty at Harvard have already lost out long ago to science and engineering in general, and not just to bio. So it is everwhere.   

Since when is FAS the most prestigious faculty at Harvard?  Yeah, being a prof at FAS is probably more prestigious than being a prof at Harvard Dental School (excuse me, "Harvard School of Dental Medicine"), or God forbid Harvard Extension School.  But is it really more prestigious than being a professor at Harvard Law School?  I doubt it.

I've also been around a number of organizations, large and small, government, for profit, non-profit.  IME, the ferocity of the turf wars correlates with the certainty of keeping one's job. The wars are much more bitter in the government sector than in the private sector, and more so in academia.  

No, it's not surprising that there are turf wars in any organization, but nothing compares, in my experience, with those in academic institutions. Ironically enough, MNSpectator, my inside experience was as a grad student at the the U.  But I've worked with academic institutions since, and have found the autonomy that professors feel they have leads to a no quarter given attitude toward turf.

The folks at FAS have the unique responsiblity of training undergraduates. And it is Harvard College that is the heart of the University. FAS is also the most diverse faculty in terms of academic interests -- economics, government, history, english, statistics, etc. are all in FAS.  

The Cranky Historian

Two points

1) The diversity of intellectual interests of FAS is not, as you state, directly related to the Summers controversy. I was simply trying to explain why one could make an argument that it is the most “prestigious” of the Faculties. Put another way, it’s the most “Harvard” part of “Harvard.” The reason FAS could force Summers out of office, the reason its opinion matters, is because it is the Faculty entrusted with undergraduate education. And at the end of the day, it’s Harvard College that gives Harvard its symbolic power.

2) All Professors at a large research university like Harvard have to teach, including the Big Names. The standard teaching lode is 2/2, that is two courses a semester. Some professors, if they run a research center or have some other administrative obligation, may receive a partial teaching reduction.

It is also true that graduate students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences – which is also a part of FAS (i.e., none of this contradicts my earlier point) – also do a lot of teaching. Mainly this takes the form of leading small group discussions and doing much of the actual grading of papers and exams. Graduate students never lead lectures or teach their own classes.

In terms of advising senior thesis, the accessibility of Professors (big-name or just the standard solid, sober, scholarly variety) to work one-on-one with undergraduates varies by department. Some departments make a certain number small group discussion classes – which are always taught by Professors – a mandatory part of the degree’s course requirement. And some departments are better than others about giving undergraduates Professors as thesis advisors.

The picture is different at a large public university where often graduate students and adjunct lecturers are called on to carry quite a bit of the teaching lode, e.g., not just grading and small-group discussions, but actually running large lecture courses. [Please note, I am not in any way saying that the quality of education at public universities is deficient. Quite the contrary, I’m sure you can get a better education at most public universities than in the cloistered world of the Ivy League. But quality of education is a separate issue from what I’m responding to here]

In sum, certainly a place like Harvard or Princeton isn’t the same as a small liberal-arts college like, say, Amherst College where there is no graduate program, all classes are small, and every aspect of teaching, from lecturing, leading discussion, and grading, are carried out exclusively by professors. But it would be wrong to think that Professors do no teaching.

The Cranky Historian

They certainly don't have less prestiege, and law is definitely more prestigious than the humanities and low-prestiege social sciences like sociology.  I doubt it's any more prestigious than high-prestiege, high-paying areas like physics and economics, but it's no less prestigious either.

Cranky - appreciate your perspective. 

I am interested that you worked so hard to defend Harvard.  Then, I guess assuming that I might be from a large public university, you emphasized how grad assistants/adjuncts were actually more prevalent there. You border on being guilty of protesting too much!   In fact my reference point is from a couple bretheren of Harvard. We "knew" that we were actually being taught by the good professors while Harvard undergrads only saw the big names on paper or hallway doors.

Aside from our bantering, being the president of a large prominent university is almost a guarantee of failure. There are so many demanding and differing constitutencies that the phrase herding cats comes to mind! 

My bretheren were those who did not go to Harvard. I was amongst those who were looked down upon by those who did go to Harvard.  While I went to school w/ some blue bloods, they did not dominate. I got a couple of degrees amongst a large number of people who got there on work, not names or dollars.  We took great pride in getting an education, not in lording where we were getting it over anyone.

Back to the larger issue of educational leadership.  I care about universities for the opportunities they provide, so leaders are important. Speaking for myself so much of what I am as an adult was formed in my 4 undergrad years - intellectually and socially.  I can get all caught up in the organizational internecine warfare aspect of Summers and Harvard but I don't want to forget it is supposed to be about a culture of learning.  I don't want to encourage making a university a replica of other parts of society. There is a benefit to some of the ivory towerness.

Off my soap box for now.