O Captain! My Captain!

Shortly after he became our president, Lawrence H. Summers invited Professor Cornel R. West ’74 for a talk. I gather Harvard was paying West about a quarter of a million dollars a year. West, whom my classmate and friend Leon Wieseltier aptly described in The New Republic as “self-endeared,” had found time to make a rap CD that his own website touted as a seminal event in musical history. But he was frequently absent from Cambridge, and had published very little scholarly work. Many thought Summers’ request that West stay at home for a bit and write to be the height of impertinence. At the time it seemed to me that this was just telling the emperor to go buy some clothes: I make a princely $85,000 after a dozen years here, and teach and publish quite a lot, really.

My teacher Nina Garsoian used to tell me, “Ne drazni gusei! Don’t annoy the geese!” Larry didn’t get the message to stay away from the well-fed flock of lunatic leftist puritanical geese on the Faculty. Apparently he thought being the president of America’s oldest and most prominent university gave him the right to do something other than fundraising—even the right to exercise his First Amendment rights. So in the spring of 2002, lower Manhattan was still a blackened gash left by Islamo-Nazis, and suicide bombers were murdering Israeli grandparents and children at their seder tables. The deduction: Harvard should divest from companies that do business with Israel, honked the herd. (Some European geese—may they get bird flu—went farther, banning Israeli academics, even critics of government policy, from journals and meetings.) When President Summers suggested, much more charitably than necessary in my view, that the result, if not the intent, of the divestment petition was anti-Semitic, his remarks were decried as censorious. Censorious? I thought uffishly, wondering why I’d moved to the Kremlin on the Charles instead of joining the IDF and getting a nice new Galil assault rifle. I’ll show you censorious.

Meanwhile, America has been at war, and Summers still couldn’t keep away from those geese. He had the temerity to suggest that Harvard ought to allow the armed forces of the United States to recruit on campus. My God, doesn’t this man realize Cambridge is a district of Pyongyang? He must be anti-homosexual, that’s it: it’s “Don’t ask don’t tell,” not being at war, that matters. (I don’t care for the word homophobic, which means in Greek “one who fears the same thing,” an interesting problem that seems to marry Kafka to Zen.) And then there was the list, thoughtfully and diffidently presented, should you care to read his remarks, of possible reasons—reasons others have proposed, mind you—for the dearth of women in science. So he’s a misogynist, too! Help! For the record, I’m happily married to my male partner of 25 years. My mom is a professor of chemistry. Neither Dennis, nor my mother the scientist, nor your reporter perceives any bigotry in Larry Summers.

And there’s l’affaire Shleifer (from which he recused himself). And his favoring some academic departments over others—have Harvard’s administrators ever preferred one branch of learning to another? For the answer, divide $250,000 by $85, vide supra. And his active participation on ad hoc committees. Didn’t he understand the use of the rubber stamp? And he locked horns with a dean, which is also, provided one steadfastly refuses to consult precedents, without precedent.

I haven’t met Larry, but once when I was worried about a seminar I badly wanted to teach, and mentioned this to him in an e-mail about the first no-confidence vote, he actually got on the phone and wrote back to tell me they had already approved the course. When a colleague of mine disagreed with a tenure decision in another department, Larry rang him and talked long and earnestly with him. This was an approachable president willing to listen to others if they spoke up. He wanted to change things, to reform the Core for real, to engage people in vigorous, open conversation. Many students I met loved it. He talked to them. To my own surprise, I found myself saying “we” about Harvard.

After the first vote of no confidence, which, one must remember, represented the opinion of about two-sevenths of the 703-strong Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which is itself only one of several faculties of this University, Summers tried to address his critics’ concerns. The second motion of no confidence was a set-up that showed that nothing would do. It’s plain his enemies were out for blood. And at this point, let’s lose the goose metaphor. This was an academic 9/11, this was an act of spiritual assassination, an assault on free speech, intellectual inquiry, and ideology-free academic standards aimed at the heart of American scholarship. We are Manhattan now; and we cannot rest from this mental fight. If we shirk it, then William F. Buckley, Jr., is right that it’s better to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard.

I wish President Summers had given his friends some time to work to dispel the cloud of caricature and misrepresentation, but it seems that the Harvard Corporation, despite its admirable and proper defense of Summers against his detractors, may have concluded that even a fair fight would do us more harm than a capitulation. And for all I know Summers, while caring deeply for our community and wanting to continue to serve it, also decided that he’d been battered enough: that is fair. Whitman’s heartbreaking American dirge, from which this jeremiad draws its title, will long remind one of this loss—but I’ve not forgotten the Battle Hymn of the Republic, either.

James R. Russell is Mashtots professor of Armenian studies.