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.
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.
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.
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.
