CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Brilliant and abrasive, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers swept into Harvard four years ago as the prestigious university's new president, tasked to nudge its esteemed and often-fractious faculty into the new century, kicking and screaming if necessary. The resulting din has unleashed an academic avalanche.
This week, the mercurial, impatient academic showed a hidden side.
Under pressure from Harvard scholars smarting from his brusque management style and roused by his recent remarks suggesting women might have less innate aptitude than men in the realms of science and mathematics, a chastened Summers spent a long, miserable week -- in public and in private -- saying he was sorry.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday February 27, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 48 words Type of Material: Correction
Harvard president -- An article in Saturday's Section A said Harvard's board chose Lawrence H. Summers in July 2001 as the university's 27th president since its founding in 1640. Summers was chosen in March 2001 and took office in July 2001. Also, the university was founded in 1636.
Inside the slush-crusted campus on the Charles River, Summers' flurry of mea culpas was portrayed as the turning point in a four-year tug of war between administrators and professors that had bruised refined egos by the score. But what remains unclear after a month of mounting furor is whether Summers, 50, has been left weakened or transformed.
His critics in Harvard's faculty suggest that Summers -- a Harvard alum and former faculty member -- had overplayed his hand in a high-stakes campaign to remake the university. Even many of Summers' defenders conceded he had stumbled badly. But they insist he will emerge as a stronger leader to press his ambitious plans to widen Harvard's campus across the river, unite its scholarly fiefs and revamp its curriculum.
"We clearly need a president who's bold and has a visible public presence," said history professor James Kloppenberg. "But we also want someone who is thoughtful and thinks first before shooting. Too often, he's ended up shooting himself in the foot."
The tremors have rippled far from Harvard, as befitting the nation's oldest university and its academic pinnacle. Some educators wondered whether Summers' controversial pronouncements signaled an awkward attempt to return Harvard's presidency to an influential public perch largely abandoned since the 1940s. And conservatives eager to extend their culture war into academia rushed to champion Summers as a victim of leftist political correctness -- an odd fit for a star scholar and bureaucrat who had spent most of his career in liberal Democratic circles.
"What you have in a college presidency is a whole lot of responsibility and not a lot of authority," said Robert Atwell, a former president of the American Council on Education. "Summers may have been trying to change that formula, but a college president has to walk a tight wire, and I suspect he's learned that the hard way."
Summers first scrambled to make amends last month after ruminating out loud in an address to a meeting of the National Bureau of Economic Research. During the meeting, according to transcripts he later released under pressure, Summers suggested that "issues of intrinsic aptitude" -- rather than discrimination -- played the most crucial role in the low representation of women in science and mathematics posts.
Summers hedged his remarks with a researcher's dry, elliptical cautions, but women scientists in the audience homed in on his suggestion that innate differences between men and women explained the fact that science and mathematics have long been male provinces.
"If my reading of the data is right -- it's something people can argue about -- that there are some systematic differences in variability in different populations, then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley, those are probably different in their standard deviations as well," Summers said.
After several participants stormed out and later publicly rebuked him, Harvard's own experts in those fields pounced on Summers' statements, saying he distorted research that did not support his conclusions.
Psychology professor Elizabeth Spelke and social ethics professor Mahzarin Banaji wrote in an open letter to the campus that "the views he expressed at that meeting are wrong, and the most powerful barriers to gender equity in math and science come from the factors he ignored or downplayed: the pervasive, implicit prejudice against women." Spelke is known for her research on gender relations.
"There's a fine line between stimulation and provocation and I think his problems occur when his leadership moves into the zone of provocation," said Kay Shelemay, a professor of music and member of Harvard's Committee on General Education.
Summers apologized publicly four times to his faculty. For a tense two days this week, it seemed as if contrition was not enough. Angry critics rumbled that they would seek a vote of no confidence during a meeting of Harvard's undergraduate liberal arts faculty.
