Joke is on Harvard with Summers at the helm

Among the maxims of La Rochefoucauld is one that claims that there is something in the misfortunes of even our friends that is not entirely displeasing to us. Like so much in La Rochefoucauld it is deeply cynical, and deeply true. Eventually the Germans actually developed a word for this psychological phenomenon, a word so necessary that English had to borrow it: Schadenfreude, or pleasure born of sorrow. Of course, we are talking my pleasure, but your sorrow. When I first arrived at Princeton there was an ancient curmudgeon, long retired from active service, who on occasion would show up in our faculty lounge of a morning to read the obituaries in The New York Times. I once heard him remark to himself, morosely but approvingly, "Younger than I am!"

There is a fair amount of schadenfreude in the currently hottest topic in the groves of Academe, the topic of President Lawrence Summers of Harvard University. Unless you are brain dead, you are aware that Mr. Summers is in deep, deep doodoo for remarks he made concerning women and science, audibly musing as to whether there might be some gender differentiation as regards scientific aptitude. Yes, the musings were voiced in the interrogative mood, and, yes again, the university is the arena in which no cow is sacred, no intellectual hold barred, no question ruled out of order ... but, still!

Developments in Cambridge suggest that the thought crimes, over which professors throughout America are tisktisking with schadenfreudlich satisfaction, were merely a catalytic agent that released the power of more general, simmering discontents. In today's paper there is a photograph of the man — surrounded by henchmen, reporters, cameras and microphones — of the genre usually reserved for indicted politicians or newly convicted felons. The accompanying text reports that the prexy "promised that he would temper his management style and begin treating people more respectfully." That is the sort of fulsome socialist self-criticism that used to be the prelude to being shot in the basement of the Lubyanka.

There are lots of reasons to have a dim view of President Lawrence Summers. Some are global. After all, this guy actually has his signature on the dollar bill that keeps retreating in disgrace before the euro. Others are more local. Princetonians suspect that if the Harvard trustees had viewed Amy Gutmann as a candidate for the Harvard presidency instead of as the woman candidate for the presidency of Harvard, The New York Times would have had to rustle up some other copy for the past several weeks. But if arrogance and egotism were really disqualifications to academic success, well ... do I really have to finish the sentence?

Time flies, and the current student generation will mostly be unaware that the presidencies of Princeton and Harvard fell vacant at about the same time and that, in consequence, the two institutions were "searching" at about the same time. I have taken much pride in Princeton over the years, but I have to say that I was never prouder than when "we" made such an imaginative and inspiring choice, and one all the more scintillating when compared with the dull and conventional one "they" made. Even so, there have to be limits to parochial chortling. Harvard University is, in an iconic sense and even in some ways actually, the premier institution of higher learning in America, indeed in the world. It does the cause of higher education no good to see the president of this institution subjected to a series of academic shaming ceremonies, even though, deep down inside, it may be secretly pleasurable.

No compensation is better than overcompensation. The possibly ironic outcome of this protracted episode is that far from retarding the advancement of women faculty in such fields as physics, chemistry or engineering, it is almost certain to accelerate it. It is a sad truth that the most effective way to get the county commissioners to come up with a long-needed traffic light is to produce a couple of traffic fatalities.

Despite a certain amount of fashionable cavil within the academy itself, education remains America's most powerful engine of desirable social change. Education — especially education in science and technology — remains our soundest path to economic strength and the sanest basis of our national security. And that is to take a merely narrow, national view. It goes without saying that in making available the best possible education to the most able of our young people — and not merely the most privileged among them — we have to call upon the intellectual talents of all our best potential professors, and not merely those who currently occupy tenured positions. But since what goes without saying too often goes unsaid, even the unseemly shaming of a Harvard president may not be without its redeeming social value. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 Professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.