Reply #6: Here's the 'big finish' of the opus

[MADem]

...The knife in the back came over the resignation of the dean of the FAS, William Kirby. I count Kirby as a friend. I like him. I've read some of his work on Chinese history. I'm no expert, but it is persuasive history and elegantly written. Still, the sad fact is that almost no one would have said a few months ago that he was a good dean. Not, that is, until Summers let him go. Then Kirby became a hero and a pawn to those professors who had tried so long to bring Summers down. The fight, of course, was over how future deans would be chosen. It is not clear what process will be mandated, but it is evident that the FAS wants a big hand in the decanal appointment. This is not democracy; it is chaos, the politicization of an academic office.

I don't know which of Summers's achievements are now in peril. Certainly not the stem-cell research center or the aids projects in Africa. The inevitable move linking Harvard in Cambridge to Harvard in Boston across the Charles River will proceed. Google's digitization of the Harvard libraries seems unstoppable. So what is endangered? The élan and confidence with which Harvard links big science with medicine, economics, politics, philosophy, and the arts, no longer separate or separable fields but tied together in their pursuit of humane ends. That is Summers's vision.

As the Corporation was caucusing with faculty, friends of Harvard were a bit dazed by our impending defeat. My friend Yo-Yo Ma was one of these people. He had persuaded Summers that his Silk Road Project to study the movement of music through space and time--and to make and play that music--had a place at Harvard. Summers instantly grasped the idea, and the Silk Road is now part of Harvard's curriculum. "What I like about Larry," said Yo-Yo to me on the phone from a Silk Road program in Charlottesville, Virginia, "is that he understands that nobody knows everything: not he, not you, not me. But he also understands that one cannot have a coherent view of the world without trying to know what the other knows. Larry's is an analytic mind, and yet he makes so much room for the cultural and emotional sphere, even the irrational--that which is ultimately human." So what kind of president will Harvard seek now? Almost certainly a lesser person than the one it just forced out.