Of Harvard's Excretion of Larry Summers

Larry Summers' ignominious exit from the Presidency of Harvard--not so ignominious, of course, that Mr. Summers wasn't shortly back in the Beltway, exercising a perhaps decisive and certainly unsalutary influence on the Obama administration's poor excuse for an attempt to respond to the financial apocalypse of 2007-2008 that he himself helped cause--is associated by most with his public utterances regarding the relatively low proportion of scientists who are women demonstrating "clear evidence" of the existence of "innate" differences between men and women in "aptitude." That portion of the public attentive to such matters was also likely to have heard of Summers' battles with onetime-Harvard Professor Dr. Cornel West, who ultimately departed for Princeton (a matter sufficiently notorious to have been significantly referenced in an episode of the Law & Order spin-off, Criminal Intent--indeed, the very episode where Bobby Goren first encountered Nicole Wallace).

Of course, this fell far short of exhausting the list of the controversies in which Summers was involved in his time as president of the Cult of the Good School's highest (American) object of worship. There was his "relationship" with Andrei Shleifer, which became a real issue when Shleifer, one of the architects of the catastrophe of '90s-era reform in Russia (Pinochet's Chile got the Chicago Boys, Yeltsin's Russia got the Harvard Boys), got himself sued by the U.S. government for fraud--and Summers saw the school not just pay the fine but let Shleifer keep his job. (Summers accused West of being an "embarrassment" to Harvard for recording a rap album--but to go by his behavior apparently did not think of Shleifer's professional and personal conduct in such terms.) And of course, there was Summers' determination upon a high-risk investment strategy that saw him invest 100 percent of the cash in Harvard's colossal endowment in the stock market--which was to cost the school billions in that financial apocalypse about which he was soon to be "advising" Mr. Obama. But neither of these episodes, nor any others likely them, got nearly so much press as those I cited above, and certainly his remarks about women in science, even though one might see his behavior here as far more problematic in character and consequence.

One may chalk that up to the nature of our coprophagic press, and its addiction to identity politics and Kulturkampf, the more in as the issues are simple and emotive, as Mr. Summers' offense to feminists certainly was, compared with more intricate matters such as financial scandal and the management of university endowments. However, to leave the matter there would be to overlook why the media and the political classes generally are so addicted to identity politics and Kulturkampf, namely that focusing on these conveniently changes the subject from matters of hard material interest and power to something else undeniably less consequential. After all, for a former Secretary of the United States' Treasury whose Washington career was not done yet to make stupid remarks about women's intellects is one thing. For him to be associated with persons compelled under the law to disgorge ill-gotten gains from the catastrophic wrecking and looting of a country--events with all sorts of unpleasant implications about not just the Harvard economists who masterminded Russian privatization, or Harvard broadly, but the economics profession and its relation to the gods of the global economy and the power elite more generally, and especially the nexus between the supposed "scholarship" and "expertise" of the Academy and the catastrophes and crimes of the "neoliberal project"--is quite another. So does it go with the questions about the management of Harvard's endowment, pointing again to involvement with colossal financial interests, as well as making some wonder what is done with all these assets and their associated income, and why institutions so flush should expect needy students to sell themselves into debt slavery to "get an education"--which may set some wondering just why the figure Joseph Stiglitz described to us from his memory of White House conferences was so eager to have the brokers throw every last penny of the billions in liquid assets America's closest thing to an Ancient University could scrounge up onto the glorified roulette tables of high finance, among much, much else that makes an obscene mockery of the "uplifting" rhetoric that is so much a part of higher education's insufferably pompous rituals.

Alas, such territory is where the devils of the mass media fear to tread, today as in the day in which Upton Sinclair wrote of "interlocking directorates" in The Goose-Step, and so instead we hear of Summers' more oafish comments for a time before the brass check earners of the mainstream media get back on their knees to Mr. Summers in exactly that way that has contributed mightily to the contempt in which so much of the public holds them today. Indeed, journalists did not even make much of Summers' remarks beyond their offensiveness to contemporary sensibility. And if this past year Mr. Summers has found the media on his case again it is my expectation that he will soon enough bounce back in their esteem, accountability not really existing for his kind, after all, as rather than retiring into private life he goes on to new positions and honors in the way of so many scandal-ridden "elder statesmen" before him while the commentariat subjects those who call things by their proper names to that cold Supercilious Stare P.G. Wodehouse described so well.