As expected, Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary who took the helm at Harvard University in 2001, has announced his resignation, effective at the end of this academic year.
Best known for his comments last year in which he suggested that gender differences between the sexes might explain why few women pursue studies in science and math, Summers was also under seige by the faculty. The Harvard faculty were expected to give Summers a vote of no-confidence next week — a vote that stemmed as much from his leadership style as from his comments about women in science.
The Boston Globe‘s coverage of Summers’ announcement points out that his management style may have helped elevate Harvard’s reputation in the eyes of many. As the Globe reports:
The boldness and bluntness that contributed to Lawrence H. Summers’s downfall as Harvard University’s president also enabled him to alter the course of an often self-satisfied institution, prodding it to make changes that were long overdue, said many of those who observed him up close.
When the Harvard Corporation chose Summers to lead Harvard in 2001, there was a sense among its members that the nation’s most prestigious university had become complacent. Summers was brought in to shake things up, and he didn’t disappoint.
Among other initiatives, he jump-started the university’s expansion into Allston and decided that the new 200-acre campus on the other side of the Charles River would focus largely on science. He called for a new emphasis on undergraduates and argued that their curriculum should focus more on actual knowledge and quantitative disciplines and less on ways of thinking. And he took bold steps to make a Harvard education more accessible to low-income families.
Summers was also outspoken in his belief that Harvard and its scholars should be players in the public arena, not just intellectuals in an ivory tower. That belief led him to step into thorny public debates such as divestment in Israel and a perceived lack of patriotism among university professors, but it also led him to push Harvard to elevate disciplines such as public health and education with a direct impact on people’s lives.
But, as Lawrence Summers found out, leadership in academia presents its own set of thorny issues.
Andrew Careaga 