Charles William Eliot towered over American academia in the 1920s. And after World War II, Harvard titan James B. Conant played a similar role. Conant inveighed against the use of the GI bill to aid the education of returning veterans. His elitist stance provoked little controversy at the time even though the bill passed and transformed American higher education.
Summers brought his own stylistic issues to the job. Accustomed to government pomp, Summers took to getting around Boston in a chauffeured limousine. Faculty members who once had easy entree to Rudenstine's office found Summers' quarters guarded by campus police.
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.
Summers' defenders say his activist manner has been a tonic to a campus that had overdosed on gentility. He has often showed up at undergraduate dorms to engage undergraduates in intellectual debates.
"He's not the shy and retiring type," said law professor Alan Dershowitz, who backed Summers' right to make provocative statements even though he disagreed with some of them. "He talks with his hands, he's effusive and ebullient, sometimes he interrupts, gets in people's faces What people get wrong about him is this is the way he listens, he just doesn't sit there and smile at you."
Summers also arrived with a reputation as a classic Democratic liberal. As a young economics researcher, he had found worth in the nation's maligned welfare system. In the upper rungs of the Clinton administration's Treasury Department, he had a "clear history of working for progressive causes," said Gene Sperling, Clinton's top economic policy advisor. Sperling cites Summers' support of debt relief for struggling Third World nations and universal education for deprived girls.
But Summers soon made a series of controversial decisions that came across to many faculty members as attuned to the conservative zeitgeist. Summers plunged into a dust-up with African American celebrity philosophy professor Cornel West that ended with West's defection to Princeton. Then, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Summers moved to raise the profile of ROTC military trainees on campus, a tack that galled peace activists.
Sperling and other Summers intimates say he has not changed his stripes. But when Summers' comments on the innate differences between women and men inflamed the campus last month, conservative commentators cast Summers as a victim of an American academy ruled by political correctness and doctrinaire left-wing thought.
