The following remarks by Harvard Economics Professor Caroline Hoxby express with wonderful clarity why so many members of the Harvard faculty are unhappy with Summers and his leadership.
I don't have a link for this speech because I haven't seen it anywhere online, but I have a reliable source at Harvard who can vouch for their authenticity (i.e. this transcript came originally from Hoxby herself) and for Hoxby's releasing them without restrictions on redistribution.
Remarks by Caroline Hoxby
Economics Department, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University
Addressed to President Summers and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences
at the meeting of the Faculty, February 22, 2005
(Released by Professor Hoxby with no restrictions on redistribution.)
I rise to speak today in part because who I am helps to define what this discussion is not about. This discussion is not about right versus left. Nor is it about political correctness.
No one who knows my research thinks that I am politically correct. This discussion is not about free speech. I believe in voicing one's opinion and, because I am a scholar, in having an opinion that is based on evidence and logic. This discussion is not about economists versus everyone else. I am a dyed-in-the-wool economist, and I love the give and take of a good economics seminar, which is characterized by incisive and free-ranging questions. But, a good economics seminar never descends to bullying or personal aspersions, and being an economist does not give one license to use such methods.
This discussion is about management: how to manage a university well. What is a university? To be sure, there is an outer crust of buildings, equipment, and finances. These things are valuable but fundamentally replaceable.
The core of a university is its faculty which is not only a set of great individual intellectuals but which is an amazing, self-perpetuating network of scholarship and teaching that advances through time. This network is maintained by ten of thousands of voluntary ties. Every time one of us engages intellectually with a colleague, in agreement or disagreement or pure curiosity, we build a tie. Every time we discuss how to teach or advise a dissertation, we build a tie. This network is inter-generational. Many of us were drawn into academia because people in previous generations threw out lines, as it were, to us across time and space. Perhaps because we are grateful to our intellectual forebears, we are eager to throw out lines to the next generation, to create scholars and leaders whose decisions and ethics are informed by thousands of years of thought. When a university is functioning at its best, looking at its core is like looking at a great shimmering web, shimmering because energy is flowing along all the ties.
How can this web work when it is so dependent on voluntary engagements for which there is no tangible reward? It works because we have respect for one another's intellectual expertise; because we have respect for one another's teaching experience; and because we are true believers in our shared intellectual enterprise. We identify with the university's mission.
Every time, Mr. President, you show a lack of respect for a faculty member's intellectual expertise, you break ties in our web. Every time you humiliate or silence a faculty member, you break ties in our web. Any time you deride a faculty member's knowledge of teaching and of Harvard students, which is based on hard-won experience, you break ties in our web. When you engage in speech that harms the university's ability to foster scholarship and that is not thoughtful, not deliberate, and not grounded in deep knowledge, you break ties by the hundreds. When in the aftermath of such speech, you allow outside commentators to defend you by attacking the integrity of this faculty, you convey the impression that you do not identify with the university and you undermine the basis of our shared enterprise.
Sometimes it seems, Mr. President, that you (and perhaps the Corporation also) have a view of some of this faculty that is a caricature: self-absorbed people who care a great deal about their privileges and not much about their students and the quest for knowledge. The result of this caricatured view is that it seems logical to adopt a management strategy in which decisions are discussed with only a small inner circle, there are forums for airing views but few mechanisms for incorporating them, and resistence is assumed to stem from obstinance, not thought and experience.
I do not know where you, and perhaps the Corporation also, got this caricatured view of the faculty, but it is not true to my experience. My experience is that this faculty is incredibly dedicated and hard-working and, if anything, inclined to hide how much work they do from students for fear of discouraging them. My experience is that this faculty is passionate about research and passionate about students and struggles every day with the tension between the two. Every student wants faculty to take an hour out of research for teaching; every student wants to work with faculty who are on the cutting edge of research. The tension is fundamental, and often faculty relieve it by taking another hour from their families or personal lives. My experience is that faculty are deeply invested in the success of the university and willing to consider any change that will improve it. In my experience, they are people who are not only willing to be convinced by their colleagues but accustomed to being convinced by colleagues who make a good case.
If one adopts my view of this faculty, then the logical management strategy is one in which problems and solutions can be openly discussed, consensus can be built, and, most importantly, it is assumed that the faculty are knowledgeable and worthy of trust.
Our presence in this room today leaves little doubt that the management strategy practiced for the past three and a half years has worked less than well. The question for each of us today is not whether the President can change superficial aspects of his management style but whether he will come to trust this faculty's expertise and intentions. Only if he does, I believe, can this university succeed as it deserves to succeed.