Embattled Harvard President Set to Leave Post

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• STUDENTS CHANTING:

  Stay, Larry, stay!

• MARGARET WARNER:

  Students crammed into Harvard Yard yesterday to cheer their embattled president, Lawrence Summers.

• LAWRENCE SUMMERS:

  I look back on the last five years with a great sense of satisfaction and pride. Harvard's greatest days are in the future.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  Hours earlier, Summers had posted a letter on the Harvard web site saying he would leave the presidency at the end of this academic year. He wrote: "I have reluctantly concluded that the rifts between me and segments of the Arts and Sciences faculty make it infeasible for me to advance the agenda of renewal that I see as crucial to Harvard's future."

  The former treasury secretary and Harvard professor returned to the Ivy League university in 2001 and quickly embarked on ambitious projects, among them, to make it easier for poor families to send their children to Harvard, to expand the school's international focus, advance younger faculty and boost scientific research.

  He earned support from many students who backed him three to one in a recent Harvard "Crimson" poll.

• STUDENT:

  He makes his voice heard and whether people agree with him or not I think it's an important quality to have.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  But Summers also sparked controversy. An early dispute with prominent African-American Professor Cornell West over grade inflation and West's outside activities led West to leave Harvard for Princeton.

  In another celebrated case, Summers suggested last year that innate gender differences may partly explain why few women reach top science posts.

  Many Harvard professors, especially women, were outraged.

• SPOKESPERSON:

  I think he's made a big mistake, and it's an opportunity for a lot of people to take out some of their complaints about him.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  By then, Summers was on a collision course with the powerful faculty of the Harvard College of Arts & Sciences; they passed a no-confidence vote last March and had scheduled another one for next week.

  Yesterday, Law Professor Alan Dershowitz suggested the faculty did Summers in.

• ALAN DERSHOWITZ:

  This is the hard left flexing their muscles and saying we don't like the way Larry Summers thinks; we don't like what he says; we don't like what he does; and we're going to get rid of him.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  Former Harvard President Derek Bok will in temporarily after Summers leaves.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  And now for the larger implications of the Larry Summers story we turn to Elizabeth Coleman, the president of Bennington College in Vermont, and Ann Marie May, an associate professor of economics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She's a visiting professor this year at Middlebury College, also in Vermont.Welcome to you both.

  Professor Coleman, what did the Larry Summers tell us more broadly about the relationship, about the balance of power between college presidents and faculty?

• ELIZABETH COLEMAN:

  Well, it certainly suggests that it's a critical issue and the first thing I'd guess I'd say is that this balance shifts and changes from institution to institution and from issue to issue.

  But what we've seen, I think, in the Harvard case is that when a president provokes faculty, even a small number of faculty, it's a matter — it raises critical problems for their leadership and unless that provocation ceases in some ways, and unless things move away from the focus being on the provocation itself, it becomes increasingly difficult to lead.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  So are you saying, then, that — explain to people who aren't familiar with the academic world that a college president is not like the CEO of a company.

• ELIZABETH COLEMAN:

  No. They are in some respects. They are with respect to their responsibility for the totality of the institution and virtually every aspect of it.

  So that's the sense in which a president is the CEO. There is nothing that a president can say, that's not my business. Nor is there anything that they can say they are not responsible for.

  What's different in higher education, typically, is their authority; and their authority does not extend in the ways that a CEOs does. So that a president who seems to go too far in exercising their prerogatives and what they think of their prerogatives to set the course of institutions, to challenge certain kinds of things that are going on, the question of whether they have the authority to do so becomes immediately an issue.

  One of the things that was very striking about — from the beginning about almost every controversy with the exception of the women's issue, one got very little about matters of substance and a lot about matters of form. There has been an enormous emphasis here on, really, the manners, almost, of Larry Summers, the style of Larry Summers and whether or not he had the right, actually, to say and do certain things rather than the substance of what he was saying and doing.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  Professor May, let me ask you about the power of the faculty. You're a faculty member yourself. Some have likened the position or authority of faculty to doctors in a hospital, to maybe members of an orchestra, but it is quite different from being an employee in a typical company. Is that how you see it?

• MARI MAY:

  Oh, I think that's certainly true. There's a level of professionalism and professional respect that faculty expect to receive from presidents. And it is rather challenging because I think that the two groups have two different views of their relationship. Faculty see it as a collegial relationship where their views should be valued and weighed on serious issues that face the university. Presidents, I think, oftentimes have a necessarily more hierarchical notion of that relationship.

  And so when you start out with two different sorts of visions of the relationship, the challenge is in managing those visions and in coming to an agreement and in managing conflict.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  Let me ask you about one incident. I don't want to get into the incident, itself, but use it as an example, and it was the one involving Cornell West, African-American Studies professor, very eminent scholar in his field, and there was a private conversation between Larry Summers early on and Professor West dealing with things like did he give – were his grades too high or did he have too many outside activities – and it turned into a major, major incident. Is that kind of thing properly the province – or seen by faculty as properly the province of a president, or does the faculty say essentially that's an academic matter, that's up to us?

• MARI MAY:

  Well, I think the faculty do reserve the right and the prerogative to make those difficult decisions. But they also, at the same time, accept that there are procedural balances in place so that it isn't just one faculty member who can reign over their students but there are all kinds of procedures established so that you can redress grievances.

  What does strike me as inappropriate would be for a president to contact an individual faculty member to ask them specifically about grades, just as it would be inappropriate for a trustee to do the same thing.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  President Coleman, back to you on that. In terms of who really in the end has the power over the academic – I mean, we all take as a given that the college president goes out and raises money and is the public face of the university, as I'm sure you know, but how about the academic direction of an institution?

• ELIZABETH COLEMAN:

  Well, of course, there are differences. I mean, we have a tendency in these things to talk about both the faculty and presidents as kind of monolithic. So one of the points I'd like to make is that faculty differ, they are come complex bodies and they think for themselves and independently and separately and they don't always think in a block and certainly presidents differ. Some presidents are more deeply involved in the academic life of the college than others.

  I would say that any who person heads and leads an academic institution has a responsibility to be deeply committed to its academic mission and to do whatever they can to further that mission. So the idea that presidents of colleges and universities should stay out of academic matters to me is a notion that is enormously dangerous and misses the nature of the principled work of educational institutions, which is to educate students as brilliantly as we possibly can, and that involves, in my judgment, that's where the collegiality, of course, comes from, it's from a shared mission.

  There are moments when we have different roles to play in that mission, but as far as I'm concerned, the idea that presidents should stay out of academic matters is extremely dangerous.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  So, Professor May, when Larry Summers said in his letter that this rift with the faculty made it impossible for him to pursue his "agenda for renewal," what does that say to you? Or does it say anything to you about the power of the president of a large university like this or any university to actually make a change in direction if the faculty doesn't support it?

• MARI MAY:

  Right. Well, that's the challenge of leadership, is trying to garner support. And I think that is a challenge that is increasingly more difficult for presidents across the country.

  One thing we haven't talked about is the increased budgetary pressures that are encouraging presidents to have to be all things to all people. And they, in turn, will impose in some ways that perspective onto the faculty. Faculty react by trying to do the best that they can but respond to those pressures as well. And I think that's part of the conflict that we see now that is – seems to be exacerbated. It's increasingly difficult for presidents to have collegial relationships with their faculty.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  Do you agree with that, President Coleman?

• ELIZABETH COLEMAN:

  No, no, I don't. I think that the character relationship is, is it's not so abstract and that's something that's borne out of shared pressure, shared work, shared sweat and some principles some shared convictions about the urgency of our work.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  Can I — may I just interrupt you, we have a minute. I want to hear from both of you, Professor — President Coleman first briefly and then to you, Professor. Do you think this incident in and of itself, Larry Summers' resignation, will make college presidents less willing to speak out publicly on controversial matters?

• ELIZABETH COLEMAN:

  I hope not. And I think you are touching on something that is a question and this is what possibilities are there for bold leadership and I hope that people will not take this to mean that there is any less possibility for that kind of leadership.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  And Professor May?

• MARI MAY:

  Well, I think what it hopefully will encourage is for presidents to be very careful when they do speak — to have some kind of substantiation for the claims that they make. And I think part of that problem for President Summers was the venue in which he spoke. But hopefully it will lead to an important exchange about the issue. The issue was important but it was the style in which the message was delivered perhaps, and unsubstantiated as it was, that led to a good deal of difficulty.

• MARGARET WARNER:

  And you're speaking, of course, about the women in science. Well, we have to leave it there, Professor and President, thank you both.

• ELIZABETH COLEMAN:

  Thank you.

• MARI MAY:

  Thank you.