Those of us who have been watching the battle for the American campus will be looking to Cambridge, Massachusetts, this week, where the fate of Harvard’s president, Lawrence Summers, hangs in the balance. On February 28, the faculty of arts and sciences is scheduled to consider a no-confidence vote that – if passed – would be the second such vote in a year. More ominously for Mr. Summers, reports are starting to circulate in advance of the vote that his colleagues on the Harvard Corporation, a group of seven individuals who govern the university and its vast endowment, may, for their own reasons, remove Mr. Summers from his job. Or that he may just resign.

Mr. Summers has shown flashes of brilliance since taking over in July 2001 as president of America’s oldest, richest, and most famous university. We were among those who cheered his willingness to confront political anti-Semitism on campus; his speech in Memorial Church, where he said the signers of a petition to get the university to divest from Israel were anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent, is one of the most important ever given by a Harvard president. When Mr. Summers came under attack for remarks on gender differences, we observed – in an editorial called “The Soul of Harvard” – that Mr. Summers’s travail could not be separated from his defense of Israel.

Certainly his critics in the contretemps over his remarks on gender included many who participated in movement that Mr. Summers proclaimed anti-Semitic in effect. And we have admired enormously a number of other gestures by Mr. Summers, including his attendance as recently as February 10 at an extraordinary Sabbath dinner that drew hundreds of students and faculty members and at which he drew a standing ovation. He showed his understanding of the role of Harvard in wartime, beginning with his appearance at a commissioning ceremony for the Reserve Officers Training Corps program that was kicked off Harvard’s campus in the era of protest against the war in Vietnam.

But Mr. Summers has made it hard for even his defenders. He accepted $20 million from the same Saudi billionaire whose check Mayor Giuliani tore into shreds when it was offered in the wake of September 11. He failed to stand his ground in the contretemps over his remarks on gender, and when some intrepid women rose to his defense, he seemed embarrassed. When a reporter starts calling around in respect of the Summers story, one of the things he hears is that it is hard to defend the president if the president won’t defend himself.

Mr. Summers, moreover, managed to get rid of the phenomenally successful – and well-compensated – manager of Harvard’s endowment, Jack Meyer, a point that has been covered by journalist David Warsh, publisher of economicprincipals.com. There is a feeling that Harvard’s major agenda items – a new capital campaign, a review of the undergraduate curriculum, an expansion of the Cambridge campus across the Charles River into the Allston neighborhood of Boston, which now houses the Harvard Business School and athletic fields for Harvard College – have been moving slowly under Mr. Summers’s leadership. The announcement of the departure of the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, William Kirby, was clumsily handled.

Our sense of the situation is the members of the Harvard Corporation would be making an error if they allow Mr. Summers’s departure, if it comes, to be viewed as a victory for the hard left in the ideological battle on campus. What, after all, is the point of raising the kind of endowment the Harvard Corporation has raised if the governance of the university can be whipsawed by an out-of-control faculty of arts and sciences? It may be that Mr. Summers lacks the extraordinary dignity of, say, Nathan Pusey, who back in 1969 stood so admirably on principle in the face of the protests against the Vietnam War in the face of which the university eventually caved. But what that episode showed is that even a great president can’t maintain a stand on principle if he doesn’t have the Corporation behind him.

What is really being tested here, in other words, is not Mr. Summers but the Harvard Corporation itself. It is going to be impossible for the corporation, which numbers seven men and women, including Mr. Summers, to stand above the fray. One way or another – in the choice of a successor to Mr. Summers, if it comes to that – it will need to make clear where it stands in respect of the larger political struggle that has, once again, washed over the campus.