Harvard's Crimson Face

By Rebecca Winters

Undergraduates call it "dropping the H-bomb" when they reveal to a new acquaintance that they go to Harvard. That's because the Ivy League university's name invariably elicits a response to what administrators there call "the best brand in higher education." This month, however, the Harvard brand is taking heavy fire, thanks to the man who is supposed to be its most vigilant guardian, university president Larry Summers.

When Summers suggested at a Jan. 14 conference that innate differences between the genders might help explain why fewer women succeed in math and science, he intended to provoke an intellectual debate among a small group of academics. But because of that world-renowned brand name, Summers wound up drawing international attention to Harvard's own shortage of female professors, bolstering a perception that the school isn't welcoming to women and minority academics, and enraging many faculty members, students and alumni of both genders. "It's not appropriate for the man who holds in his hands the future of the brightest minds in America to say that 50% of them don't have the right aptitude" for science, says Nancy Hopkins, a biology professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She walked out on the talk.

Summers issued three statements of apology last week. In the final, most contrite one, he said, "I deeply regret the impact of my comments ... I was wrong to have spoken in a way that has resulted in an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women." Nevertheless, his original remarks set off a furor that will not quickly die down. A letter endorsed by some 120 Harvard professors said the speech reinforced "an institutional culture at Harvard that erects numerous barriers to improving the representation of women on the faculty."

The issue was simmering even before Jan. 14. Since Summers, 50, arrived, in 2001, the percentage of tenure offers at Harvard in the arts and sciences that go to women has fallen from 37% to 11%. Part of the problem, a group of female professors told Summers in a letter last fall, is that his focus on hiring "rising young scholars" slights women, whose "research careers tend to peak a bit later than men's careers" because of family responsibilities. Many at Harvard were upset last spring when Summers rejected a tenure recommendation for Marcyliena Morgan, a scholar of hip-hop in the African and African-American studies department, prompting her to leave for Stanford. Some Harvard women are worried that Summers' comments will make recruitment of top female faculty even tougher. Candidates for teaching, says physics professor Melissa Franklin, "do consider the feeling among other female faculty at the university."

Women aren't the only group that has been alienated by Summers' rough-and-tumble manner. Soon after leaving his post as President Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary and returning to the Cambridge campus where he earned his Ph.D. and taught economics in the 1980s, Summers questioned African-American studies professor Cornel West's scholarship and teaching, causing West to leave for Princeton and upsetting many in Harvard's African-American community. In a controversy in 2002, Muslims on campus said they were offended when Summers labeled as "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent" the efforts of a group of students and faculty to persuade Harvard to divest its holdings in companies that do business in Israel as a protest against its treatment of Palestinians. He rattled some Asian Americans at Harvard when he used an inaccurate statistic on child prostitution to illustrate a point about South Korea's economic growth. "Larry seems to have a knack for putting things in a way that annoys his audience," says Richard Bradley, author of the forthcoming book Harvard Rules. "He's constitutionally incapable of being inoffensive."

If nothing else, Summers' gaffes have provided new motivation for many Harvard groups to play hardball on their own behalf. His remarks on women's advancement in math and science raised some "important questions, and we should find the answers," says economics professor Claudia Goldin. Summers, she says, "said things I want to prove wrong." --With reporting by Matt Kelly/Boston

With reporting by Matt Kelly/Boston