While many in the media have focused upon the controversial statements made by Summers or his political disagreement with left-leaning members of the faculty, it is also possible that these factors merely provided a pretext for members of the faculty to express their dissatisfaction with other aspects of Summers' presidency. Besides the aforementioned controversies, which undoubtedly provided the proximate cause for Summers' resignation, other factors have been proposed as contributing to his critical loss of support among the majority of faculty members. The first is Summers' reputed leadership style, described by many as arrogant, blunt, and intolerant of dissenting opinions. Many faculty members claimed they felt intimidated into remaining silent when they disagreed with Summers. Along the same vein, several prominent administrators abruptly left (or were forced to leave) their positions during Summers' tenure: Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis, Associate Dean of the CollegeDavid P. Illingworth, Dean of Freshmen Elizabeth Studley Nathans, and finally Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences William C. Kirby. Another factor that has been proposed is a supposed substantive disagreement about the structure and philosophy of the undergraduate curriculum, amidst an intensive curricular review initiated during Summers' term. Summers proposed that more emphasis be put on undergraduate education and requested that professors take greater responsibility in teaching their undergraduate classes, as opposed to delegating to teaching fellows. Summers also encouraged Harvard to expand its international programs and connections, hoping that more students would have and use the opportunity to study abroad.[9]
Re the Jan 2005 talk on women in science.
http://www.answers.com/topic/lawrence-summers
The members of the Harvard Corporation, the University's highest governing body, are in charge of the selection of the president and issued statements strongly supporting Summers.
FAS faculty were not unanimous in their comments on Summers. [....]
Summers had stronger support among Harvard College students than among the college faculty. One poll by the Harvard Crimson indicated that students opposed his resignation by a three-to-one margin, with 57% of responding students opposing his resignation and 19% supporting it. [5]
[....]
After the Harvard Corporation accepted Summers' resignation, hundreds of millions in pledged contributions were canceled by donors who were disappointed by the Harvard Corporation's failure to stand up to the college faculty [8]. Harvard college alumni, as well as students and faculty at Harvard University's professional schools (in particular Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School), and other large donors generally supported Summers. Summers' dismissal was viewed by many as an indicator that the humanities faculty at the College had power that was disproportionately large relative to their contributions to the University, and that they would seek to use their entrenched position as tenured faculty to block curricular reforms, championed by Summers, that would place greater emphasis on math and science.
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What's odd, iirc, is that it was the humanities departments that had failed to promote women ( 4 out of 36? ). Perhaps they were trying to blame Summers for their own failings.
Summers said he was only putting forward hypotheses based on the scholarly work assembled for the conference, not expressing his own judgments -- in fact, he said, more research needs to be done on these issues
....
The conference, on women and minorities in the science and engineering workforce, was a private, invitation-only event, with about 50 attendees.
....
Summers spoke during a working lunch. [....] He said he was synthesizing the scholarship that the organizers had asked him to discuss [....]
“The Crimson was one of the only publications to explicitly point out that he had never actually uttered the infamous phrase about ‘innate differences. ‘ ” Unfortunately, Summers’ habitual reaction to being (perhaps deliberately) misrepresented is like Gore’s on the ‘invented the internet’ misquote: Faced with a “media frenzy”, Summers’ “familiar script “ is “first declaring the whole thing a misunderstanding, then apologizing for unintentionally hurting any feelings, and finally taking institutional measures to rectify the problems some saw as the heart of the conflict.” [refhttp://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=506127 How Larry Got His Rep Published On Thursday, March 03, 2005 ]
[ These are all notes to add to previous entries. ]
re 1991 memo re
Summers apologized, telling his critics that the memo was supposed to be a “sardonic counterpoint, an effort to sharpen the analysis” and that he had not been advancing a serious policy option. The week after the story broke, the Economist came to Summers’ defense, editorializing in eerily familiar terms that if Summers “was merely trying to provoke debate,” “it is to be hoped that he succeeds—and that the Bank does not, instead, go silent on the subject.”
[ref ‘got his rep’] Unfortunately, Summers’ reaction to being (perhaps deliberately) misrepresented is like Gore’s on the ‘invented the internet’ misquote: //// quote ‘got rep’ re misunderstand/apologize/
RE MANNER OF SPEAKING Accusations of ‘abrasive/wonky personality’ were heard as early as ///, //howlong// before Bill and Hillary Clinton appointed Summers as Under Secretary to the Treasury at the beginning of their administration in 1993, putting him among the Clinton Wonks like Gore and Reno (and, at that time, Hillary). During his progress upwards through the Clinton Treasury, “Summers underwent a dramatic transformation, coating his famously bold personality with a keen sense of tact and thoughtfulness.
UNSORTED MATERIAL
In my opinion....
There are so many contributing or possibly contributing factors to to current financial mess, that anyone with any experience can be linked to some of those factors. What's clear is that the Clinton administration of the 90s cleaned up Bush Sr's mess, changing the biggest deficit (at that time) to the biggest surplus. From the beginning of the Clinton Administration in 1993, Summers was in Clinton's Department of the Treasury, as Under-Secretary and Deputy Secretary, before succeeding Rubin (who has been called "his mentor") as Secretary. As a strong supporter of Bill and HIllary Clinton, I would applaud the choice of Summers. To nitpick about some statements being less than PC (when read on the same level that brought us "Gore said he invented the internet") seems very counterproductive, and likely to bring both Bill Clinton and the feminists into disrepute. Summers was part of the most successful Treasury Department in several decades; let's bring him back and let him direct the next one.
UPDATE: I'll keep adding more info and links as I get them.
Someone posted elsewhere:
You may also be interested in his send-pollution-to-Africa memo:http://www.whirledbank.org/ourwords/summers.html
From http://www.ustreas.gov/education/history/secretaries/lhsummers.shtml
As undersecretary and deputy secretary of the Treasury, Summers worked closely with Secretaries Bentsen and Rubin in formulating domestic and international economic policies. He played a key role in designing the United States support program for Mexico in the wake of its 1995 financial crisis and in crafting the international response to the Asian financial crisis of 1997. As deputy secretary, Summers was also instrumental in the introduction of indexed Treasury debt securities, and in the reform of the Internal Revenue Service. When President Clinton appointed Summers as secretary of the Treasury, he called Summers “a critical part of our economic team during the entire life of this administration.”
During Summers’s tenure as secretary of the Treasury, the United States used budget surpluses to repurchase Treasury debt for the first time since the 1920's, and extended the life of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Summers led efforts to modernize the financial system, extend financial privacy protections, provide for digital signatures, and insure the viability of the over-the-counter derivatives market. Summers also championed reforms to address corporate tax shelters and predatory lending practices.
It was also made an issue in confirmation hearings.
DATE: December 12, 1991 TO: Distribution FR: Lawrence H. Summers Subject: GEP …. The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.
Re Summer’s talk in January 2005
(available at http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html
Someone posted elsewhere:
One thing that is hurting the U.S. economically is that China and India are far surpassing us in terms of science and technology. Many of their physicists/engineers are women. Not so in this country. An economist who does not understand these developments is ineffective, if not dangerous.
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I replied:
IN a quick reading of that Jan 2005 thing, I see that Summers is thinking very hard about the problem of US glass ceiling in those fields and how to approach it. Also he talks a lot about the pattern you mention, that a company(nation/INdia/CHina) that seeks brilliant people who are being discriminated against elsewhere could out-compete the discriminating competition. He’s obviously smart and can put these factors together.
According to the Boston Globe coverage at the time (dateline Jan 17, 2005) “The conference, on women and minorities in the science and engineering workforce, was a private, invitation-only event, with about 50 attendees. Summers spoke during a working lunch. He declined to provide a tape or transcript of his remarks [....]”
The version at the url you gave may have been expanded. But still this began as a “working lunch” talk where “[T]he organizer of the conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research said Summers was asked to be provocative, and that he was invited as a top economist, not as a Harvard official.” So if he does not mention China/India, that doesn’t mean he was unaware of what they were doing as of January 2005.
IN any case I”m sure he’s heard a lot about it by now!
He’s probably leaning over backwards to correct any errors, since he has negative-symbol rep to compensate for, rather than being able to coast on a symbolic status of his own.
Would Bill Clinton have chosen a sexist in the first place, or not noticed such tendencies during the years between promoting Summers on up the ladder to Sec of Treas?
Summers has said that he was ASKED to summarize some research that the organizers provided him from various sources. He was summarizing it as requested — NOT giving his OWN opinions.
Blaming him for this –is like blaming Palin for the wardrobe that the RNC supplied to her.
http://anglachelg.blogspot.com/2008/11/effective-democratic-government.html
All the blogospheric people who have made an industry out of Clinton bashing and demonizing Bill’s administration while refusing to hold anyone else accountable and who have been at the forefront of proclaiming what incredible change The Precious will bring to Washington are now having to deal with the very basic fact that the new preznit won’t be able to do jack shit without using the people Left Blogistan loves to hate.
It’s only The Village and the self-appointed “experts” (often members of the media or else Ivory Tower academics, all of them the worst kind of Stevensonians) of Left Blogistan who hate Clinton and Gore (and for pretty much the same reasons - their joint fantasy that they are opposing white trash racists) and who insist the Clinton administration was a failure.
More on the Harvard Jan 2005 talk. Here is an article at the time analyzing the transcript. Imo the article is shallow; I'll try to do a better analysis when I can.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/02/18/summers2_18
What Larry Summers Said
Bowing to faculty demands, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers on Thursday released atranscript of his controversial remarks on women and science. He did so while releasing yet anotherapology for those remarks and as the head of the Harvard Corporation released a statement