Summers' No Confidence Vote at Harvard

Andrew Cline has an interesting article on the real reason that Harvard President Lawrence Summers received a no-confidence vote from Harvard faculty recently. (Hat tip to Betsy for the link.) Officially, displeasure with Summers was because of his insensitive remarks about women, but according to Cline, it's due to Summers' proven strenth and indpendence that scares the professional activists. At most universities, a group of faculty grant tenure to professors. Not so at Harvard, where the President holds that authority. Although the faculty still votes on tenure, the President has the final say and can veto any faculty vote.

Last year, Summers vetoed the unanimous decision of the African and African-American Studies department to offer tenure to Marcyliena Morgan, whom the Boston Globe describes as a "hip-hop scholar."

Probably Morgan's most noted accomplishment was founding Harvard's Hip Hop Archive. Her academic credits consisted of publishing exactly one book, and the Globe reported that her classes received poor reviews from students. Nonetheless, the department voted to grant her tenure. Her husband, Lawrence Bobo, whose academic work was more noteworthy, already had tenure at Harvard. After Summers' veto, both Bobo and Morgan left for Stanford.

Summers' refusal to grant tenure to someone who so clearly did not deserve it, though she had the support of her department, had to have sent shockwaves throughout the faculty...his independence and refusal to value academic trendiness over academic rigor have made him the primary target of a disaffected minority of faculty members for whom he represents a serious threat.