Here are two books that offer sharply contrasting views of Harvard University. About the only thing on which they agree is that Harvard is the most consequential university in America, if not the entire world.

It happens to be an excellent time to read about Harvard. The university is much in the news these days, due to President Lawrence Summers’s controversial comments about why women are underrepresented in the sciences. Hardly a day goes by without another public attack on or defense of Mr. Summers’s leadership.

Ross Gregory Douthat graduated from Harvard in 2002, and his book, “Privilege” (Hyperion, 304 pages, $24.95) is a lively account of what it is like to be an undergraduate there. Mr. Douthat regales the reader with entertaining anecdotes that show how difficult it is to have a satisfying sex life at college and how easy it is, by contrast, to conquer the academic challenges without breaking a sweat.

Richard Bradley, a graduate of Yale with a master’s degree in history from Harvard, does not like Lawrence Summers. In fact, he dislikes him so much that he wrote an entire book (Harper-Collins, 375 pages, $29.95) on how Mr. Summers threatens to destroy Harvard’s soul. Mr. Bradley is the former executive editor of George magazine who, when his name was Richard Blow, authored a best-selling biography of John Kennedy Jr.

Mr. Douthat’s book is a fun read. He is a rare bird, a campus conservative, but his reflections are free of the animus and isolation that often mar the views of a despised minority. He describes with detached humor the “civil war” between the far-left (he calls them “street liberals”) and the establishment-minded, careerist “parlor liberals.” He seems to be on good terms with both factions.

Mr. Douthat gives a candid portrait of academic decline and grade inflation, which were especially intense in the humanities departments, where students could get high grades with little effort. His portrayal of casual and loveless sex on campus echoes Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons.”

Mr. Bradley has no interest in undergraduates and their lives. He tells a harrowing story of high administrative politics, a story with good guys and bad guys. The good guys include Neil Rudenstine, Lee Bollinger, and Cornel West. The bad guys are Hanna Holborn Gray and Lawrence Summers.

Mr. Rudenstine is the president who preceded Mr. Summers. He favored affirmative action and the African-American studies department, and he was conciliatory towards the radical students who occupied his office to demand a living wage for university workers. Lee Bollinger is the candidate who lost out to Mr. Summers. He was a champion of affirmative action as president of the University of Michigan (he is now president of Columbia University). Hanna Holborn Gray, former president of the University of Chicago, was a member of the Harvard Corporation who preferred Mr. Summers over Mr. Bollinger. She, too, was known to favor merit over affirmative action, which puts her on Mr. Bradley’s enemies list.

Larry Summers was selected as president of Harvard in summer 2001. He had a distinguished career. He received tenure in the economics department at the age of 28, one of the youngest to achieve this distinction in Harvard’s history. At the age of 36, he went to Washington to work as chief economist for the World Bank, then spent eight years in the Clinton administration in high-level economic positions, ending as secretary of the treasury.

In Mr. Bradley’s eyes, even Mr. Summers’s accomplishments count against him. He speculates that Mr. Summers went into government because he knew he didn’t have what it takes to become a Nobel Prize-winning economist (two of his uncles had won the prize). Nothing Mr. Summers has ever done – including ascending to the presidency of Harvard – can convince Mr. Bradley that Mr. Summers is anything but a social climber who failed to win recognition as an economist.

Mr. Bradley depicts Mr. Summers as arrogant, ambitious, greedy for status, unable to make eye contact with others, and overweight. He didn’t get admitted to Harvard as an undergraduate; his divorce was bitter. Mr. Bradley even suggests that Mr. Summers exhibits Asperger’s syndrome, a sort of autism, though nothing qualifies Mr. Bradley’s to make such a diagnosis.

As treasury secretary, Mr. Bradley writes, Mr. Summers advanced free market capitalism and globalization at the expense of poor Third World nations. “Skeptics” saw Mr. Summers as an eager proponent of American cultural and economic imperialism, and the reader assumes that Mr. Bradley is one of those skeptics.

It gets worse. Mr. Bradley writes disparagingly of Mr. Summers’s “lousy manners.” He describes him as “loud, overweight, impatient, constantly late, and poorly dressed.” He is a “prodigious and sloppy eater,” who “wolfed down bites of pizza, much of which found its way onto his shirt,” and who talked and ate at the same time, spraying saliva on his listeners.

All this is the prelude to Mr. Bradley’s real gripes about Mr. Summers. Soon after Mr. Summers arrived, he met with African-American scholar Cornel West and asked him why he spent so much time on the political campaigns of Bill Bradley and Al Sharpton instead of scholarship. Insulted, Mr. West decamped for Princeton.

Mr. Summers’s lack of enthusiasm for affirmative action cast a chill over the entire African-American studies department, writes Mr. Bradley. He alienated large numbers of administrators and faculty members by his confrontational style. And he engaged in controversial symbolic acts such as inviting ROTC to return to campus and expressing patriotic sentiments. Mr. Bradley warns that Larry Summers has corrupted the university by inserting “values and priorities better suited to the world of politics and commerce.”

Mr. Douthat covers much of the same territory in 10 pages, but with sharply different conclusions. Mr. Summers had little patience for student radicalism, and, yes, he was “loud and active and curious, bustling about campus with questions and demands and displaying what we came to realize – to the dismay of the professoriate and the delight of just about everyone else – was a strong desire to shake things up.”

When he ate with the students in their dining halls, he occasionally spilled sauce and crumbs on his shirt, but he was “probing and debating and behaving in ways that would have been unimaginable during the excruciatingly polite presidency of Neil Rudenstine. Even his bulk was less a mark of sedentary self-satisfaction than an expression of his boundless appetite – for knowledge, for understanding, for activity and change and yes, for pizza.”

Unlike Mr. Bradley, Mr. Douthat does not lament Cornel West’s departure from Harvard. Was it rude of Mr. Summers to ask Mr. West – one of Harvard’s 17 elite University Scholars – to produce substantive scholarly work? Mr. Bradley thinks it was. Mr. Douthat notes that while West produced many popular books, his last scholarly work had been published in 1989.

Mr. Bradley’s book is harshly partisan, though it does have the virtue of uncannily forecasting the trouble that Mr. Summers was headed for. Mr. Douthat has written the journalistic equivalent of Erich Segal’s “Love Story”: a book that will be read for many years as an honest and probing portrait of the Harvard student experience.