Harvard’s 10,000
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Amid the press attention that is now going to be devoted to the 218 members of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences who yesterday passed a motion that “the Faculty lacks confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers,” it is worth remembering the old slogan of “10,000 men of Harvard.” For 185 professors voted against the motion, and the 218 radical professors are a drop in the bucket compared with the tens of thousands of Harvard alumni, students, and tuition-paying parents. Yesterday’s voters did not include the professors at the Harvard Business School, the Law School, or the Medical School, or the alumni of those schools.
The motion for lack of confidence was put forward by a Harvard professor, J. Lorand Matory, who had signed the petition calling on Harvard to divest from Israel. It singled out Israel for opprobrium among all the countries of the world, and President Summers correctly and courageously rejected it as being anti-Semitic in effect, if not intent. That earned him the enmity of Mr. Matory and no doubt of many of the other left-wingers on the faculty who insulted him with their vote yesterday.
Mr. Summers and his employers on the university’s key governing board, the Harvard Corporation, will use their own judgment in reacting to the faculty vote. No doubt they’ll weigh the likelihood that there is a much greater diversity of opinion among 10,000 men – and women – of Harvard. And they’ll weigh the fact that at Harvard, the faculty members work for the president, whereas at some other universities, it’s the other way around.
If Mr. Summers and the Corporation were to reverse that policy and structure and give the 218 professors the impression that they can hire and fire their superior, it would destroy the power of Harvard’s presidency, which derives in the end from all of Harvard’s constituencies, not only the narrow left-wing majority of professors on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Which would be a tragedy, for Harvard’s unusual structure no doubt has much to do with the fact that it towers over so many other universities in terms of great quality as an institution of learning.
