A Faustian bargain
At Harvard, President Drew Gilpin Faust is proving herself to be immune to concerns about intellectual standards or racial discrimination. Indeed, she seeks "a different Harvard" -- one with so many black professors and staff that they could fill Harvard Stadium. President Faust, you see, is trying to overcome the past effects of the legacy, not of slavery, but rather of President Lawrence Summers.
President Summers's failings famously included insufficient celebration of the rap stylings of Professor Cornel West, who left in a huff for Princeton. Now things are looking up at Harvard. Last week the Crimson reported the return of a scholar of global hip-hop culture who was denied tenure during the Summers era.
This good news represents only the first wave of President Faust's efforts to overcome the Summers era. The Crimson also reports that President Faust means to seek new frontiers in racial discrimination:
Speaking before a crowd of 200 professors, administrators, and students at the Queen’s Head Pub on Wednesday, Faust fueled optimism among black leaders that her presidency will be a turning point for the black community at Harvard. After former University President Lawrence H. Summers’ tenure, which was marked by tension with some African-American scholars some black leaders say they see Faust as the antidote.Professor Henry Louis Gates commented for the article:“The fact that she is in this room provides a striking difference from some past presidents,” Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies J. Lorand Matory ’82 said at the reception for the Association of Black Faculty, Administrators, and Fellows, which he co-chairs. While introducing Faust, Matory remembered Summers’ tenure as a time of frustration.
Faust, who was greeted to applause and cheers, said she was eager to take on the challenge of making the University more diverse—to the point where Harvard’s black scholars and staff would no longer be able to squeeze into Queen’s Head Pub.
“The past five years reflect a period when Harvard’s black community felt particularly unwelcome and disenfranchised, mainly because the University’s leadership at the time was disinterested [sic] in, and even hostile toward matters of race and inclusion,” Gates wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “Rather than engage in a protracted battle for recognition, people simply sat that administration out.”Nobody knows the troubles he's seen! The Crimson gives us more Gates:
Only 5.8 percent of Harvard’s non-teaching staff are black, Gates wrote.The Crimson article quotes African, African-American Studies, and anthropology professor J. Lorand Matory. On the same day that it published the article on President Faust's racial dreams for Harvard, the Crimson also published an article on "Israel and censorship at Harvard" by Professor Matory. It is poorly written, poorly argued, and highly misleading where it is not simply false. Professor Matory, to put it bluntly, does not know what he's talking about, but he's got the spirit:According to the 2007 report on faculty development and diversity, only 1.2 percent of ladder faculty in the natural sciences are black.
There was only one black tenured professor in the humanities, according to the report.
“Harvard’s student population is very diverse, but the faculty and administrative population does not reflect the makeup of the student body,” Gates said.
[W]hy does the U.S. rightly defend Jewish people’s claims on European bank accounts, property, and compensation for labor expropriated during the 1930s and 1940s, while quashing the rights of millions of Palestinians refugees to lands, houses, and goods stolen as a condition of Israel’s founding in the late 1940s?Professor Matory's column is redolent of the worst of the old Harvard. With the likes of Professor Matory, President Faust's "new Harvard" may restore at least part of the old Harvard.
UPDATE: Rick Richman takes a look at Professor Matory's column in "Post-Summers Harvard." Thomas Lifson comments on the decline of Harvard and other other elite academic institutions in "How low has academia fallen?." And Carol Iannone comments on the return of "bean-counting" as a major preocuppation in "Summers over at Harvard."
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