[Mb-civic] Academic, Heal Thyself By CAMILLE PAGLIA

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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March 6, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Academic, Heal Thyself
By CAMILLE PAGLIA

Philadelphia

WHAT went wrong at Harvard?

Tomorrow, Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences will meet for the first
time since the resignation of the university's president, Lawrence H.
Summers, two weeks ago. The dean of Arts and Sciences, William Kirby,
resigned in late January, reportedly after clashing with Mr. Summers. When
Mr. Summers leaves on July 1, there will be a serious leadership vacuum at
Harvard, which has been torn by strife during his short five-year tenure.

Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary, assumed the presidency with a
high sense of mission. Determined to effect change, he took bold and
confrontational positions. He endorsed proposals to expand the campus across
the Charles River to Allston, attacked anti-Semitism and rampant grade
inflation and laudably argued for the return of R.O.T.C. to Harvard.

But whatever his good intentions, Mr. Summers often inspired more heat than
light. His stellar early career as an economics professor did not prepare
him for dealing with an ingrown humanities faculty that has been sunk in
political correctness for decades. As president, he had a duty to research
the tribal creeds and customs of those he wished to convert. Foolishly
thinking plain speech and common sense would suffice, he flunked Academic
Anthropology 101.

While many issues are rumored to have played a role in Mr. Summers's
resignation (including charges of favoritism in a messy legal case involving
foreign investments), the controversy that will inevitably symbolize his
presidency was the manufactured outcry early last year over his glancing
reference at a conference to possible innate differences between the sexes
in aptitude for science and math. The feminist pressure groups rose en masse
from their lavishly feathered nests and set up a furious cackle that led to
a 218-to-185 vote of no confidence by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences last
March.

Instead of welcoming this golden opportunity to introduce the forbidden
subject of biology to academic gender studies (where a rigid dogma of social
constructionism reigns), Mr. Summers collapsed like a rag doll. A few months
later, after issuing one abject apology after another, he threw $50 million
at a jerrybuilt program to expand the comfort zone of female scientists and
others on campus. That one desperate act of profligate appeasement tells
volumes about the climate of persecution and extortion around gender issues
at too many American universities.

In a widely reported incident four years ago, Mr. Summers's private
conversation with Cornel West, one of Harvard's short list of distinguished
scholars who have the title of "university professor" (because they teach
across department lines), resulted in Dr. West angrily decamping to
Princeton. Whatever critique of affirmative action Mr. Summers intended was
lost in what became a soap opera of hurt feelings and facile accusations of
racism.

There was a larger issue of campus governance at stake. While it is
certainly in Harvard's best interests to ensure that its university
professors remain productive at a high scholarly level (the president
reportedly slighted Dr. West's recording of a rap CD), it is unclear on what
authority Mr. Summers was challenging Dr. West in the first place. The
provost, not the president, is the chief academic officer of any university.
But Harvard reinstituted a provost only in the early 1990's, and the
weakness of that position is suggested by the provost's near invisibility
through the public battles of the Summers regime.

The ideological groupthink of Harvard's humanities faculty does patent
disservice to the undergraduates in their charge, but it is the faculty
alone that should properly determine curriculum and academic policy, a
responsibility that descends from the birth of European universities in the
Middle Ages. Over the past 40 years, there has been a radical expansion of
administrative bureaucracies on American college campuses that has distorted
the budget and turned education toward consumerism, a checkbook alliance
with parents who are being bled dry by grotesquely exorbitant tuitions.

Mr. Summers's strategic blunders unfortunately took the spotlight off
entrenched political correctness and changed the debate to academic power:
who has it, and how should it be exercised? Nationwide, campus
administrations faced with factionalized or obdurate faculties have in some
cases taken matters into their own hands by creating programs or reducing
and even eliminating departments. The trend is disturbingly away from
faculty power.

Hence more is at stake in the Harvard affair than merely one overpriced
campus with an exaggerated reputation. Support for Larry Summers was strong
among Harvard undergraduates and outside the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,
which constitutes only one of Harvard's many colleges and professional
schools. The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz protested that Mr.
Summers had been removed by "a coup d'état." But by his failure to provide a
systematic rationale for his words and actions, Mr. Summers gave the
impression of governing by whim and impulse. The leader of so huge and
complex an institution cannot be a whirling dervish.

IT now remains to be seen whether Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences is
capable of self-critique. Will its members acknowledge their own insularity
and excesses, or will they continue down the path of smug
self-congratulation and vanity? Harvard's reputation for disinterested
scholarship has been severely gored by the shadowy manipulations of the
self-serving cabal who forced Mr. Summers's premature resignation. That so
few of the ostensibly aggrieved faculty members deigned to speak on the
record to The Crimson, the student newspaper, illustrates the cagey
hypocrisy that permeates fashionable campus leftism, which worships
diversity in all things except diversity of thought.

If Harvard cannot correct itself in this crisis, it will signal that academe
cannot be trusted to reform itself from within. There is a rising tide of
off-campus discontent with the monolithic orthodoxies of humanities
departments. David Horowitz, a 1960's radical turned conservative, has
researched the lopsided party registration of humanities professors (who
tend to be Democrats like me) and proposed an "academic bill of rights" to
guarantee fairness and political balance in the classroom. The conservative
radio host Sean Hannity regularly broadcasts students' justifiable
complaints about biased teachers and urges students to take recording
devices to class to gather evidence.

These efforts to hold professors accountable are welcome and bracing, but
the danger is that such tactics can be abused. Tenure owes its very
existence to past intrusions by state legislatures in the curricular
business of state universities. If politicians start to meddle in campus
governance, academic freedom will be the victim. And when students become
snitches, we are heading toward dictatorship by Mao's Red Guards or Hitler
Youth.

Over the last three decades of trendy poststructuralism and postmodernism,
American humanities professors fell under the sway of a ruthless guild
mentality. Corruption and cronyism became systemic, spread by the
ostentatious conference circuit and the new humanities centers of the
1980's. Harvard did not begin that blight but became an extreme example of
it. Amid the ruins of the Summers presidency, there is a tremendous
opportunity for recovery and renewal of the humanities. Which way will
Harvard go?

Camille Paglia is the university professor of humanities and media studies
at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

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