Summers gone

In today’s FT, Lucy Kellaway has a good column on that peculiar form of cat-herding known as university administration. She begins:

If I had to write down all the senior management positions I would hate to hold the list would go on forever. All big management jobs are beastly: they are stressful and frustrating and almost always end in failure.Yet at the top of my list of undesirable jobs would be running Harvard University, where Larry Summers resigned as president last week – just in time to save himself the ignominy of a vote of no confidence. It is not just the top slot at Harvard I would turn down. It is the head of any university, in particular a successful one.

The rest of the column is behind the firewall, but it lists seven characteristics that make academics employees from hell: - they are highly intelligent - they have low emotional intelligence - they are not team players; indeed, in most departments their colleagues are rivals - criticism is a way of life - there is no proper line of authority - they are complacent, and have a vested interest in the status quo - academia is a status industry, which makes pettiness the strongest currency If I had to guess which of these played the biggest role in the decline of Summers, I would rank the 6th, especially the egregious form of complacency known as tenure, at the top. But the one factor that Kellaway does not list is the one that was decisive: politics. As Alan Dershowitz argued last week, Summers’ problems at Harvard were essentially political:

It started as a hard left-center conflict. Summers committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military. ... In the minds of at least some vocal members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, expressing such politically incorrect views is the academic equivalent of provoking Islamic extremists by depicting Prophet Mohammed in a political cartoon.