A valediction forbidding gloating

Despite its enormous importance to the country, our economy and our culture, American higher education seldom makes a prominent appearance in the media and almost never in the context of serious discussion. Last week's news was something of an exception, offering back-to-back stories in the New York Times on Tuesday and Wednesday. The first was about the funny or impertinent e-mails that students write to their professors, and the second was about the resignation of Harvard President Lawrence Summers.

I have an e-mail account, so there wasn't a lot the Times could teach me about student e-mails. The paper might have taught me something about the Summers resignation but didn't. Some subjects are simply too complex and too subtle for the template of the news story, and the administration of higher education is pretty clearly one of them.

I never met President Summers, but, without exception, my friends on the Harvard faculty — and all Princeton professors have friends on the Harvard faculty — agreed in their dim view of the man's "style," which they characterized with a gradation of adjectives ranging from "detached" to "obnoxious." My friends, of course, are all in Arts and Sciences, the division that had already wounded him with one vote of no confidence and was poised for the coup de grace of a second.

There were other constituencies with other views. Superstar law professor Alan Dershowitz called the resignation "an academic coup d'etat" by the faculty "hard right." And students (remember them?), some of whom attended his valedictory press conference teary-eyed, backed Summers three to one. Now that is a statistic that would command my attention even if I did not know that many of them were young people who, faced with the opportunity of admission at either Princeton or Harvard, chose Harvard. Putting it another way, students I wanted here wanted Summers there. They opined that he paid more attention to undergraduates than did some of his most vocal faculty critics.

The presidential art of annoying the faculty is widely practiced, but Summers had perfected it to a high degree. Two episodes at least made national news, the first of them of great local interest here. It is alleged that one of his earliest administrative achievements was to have insulted Cornel West into rejoining the Princeton faculty. Being judged superior to a poke in the eye with a sharp stick may seem a modest basis for institutional pride, but we reveled in it. Later came the celebrated Female Scientists Gaffe. That had no explicit implication for any other institution, unless you could imagine one that might have a brilliant female scientist at its head.

But there is no reason, beyond the most parochial self-indulgence, for Princeton to view Harvard's discomfort as we might view a football victory. Some time ago, I wrote a smug column pointing out that Harvard and Princeton were searching for presidents at about the same time, with results in which our trustees might daily find augmented cause for self-congratulation. But Harvard is not simply a prominent or famous university. It is the iconographic flagship of American higher education, and American higher education is the envy of the world. To borrow a phrase once used of General Motors, what is good for Harvard is good for America. It is not a good thing that our flagship must now bob about with its motors on idle while it tries to rechart its course.

The factors defining the "success" of a college or university are many and complex. Though the importance of access to adequate financial resources would be difficult to exaggerate, there is something more important still: clarity of mission. An institution has to know what it is trying to do, and the sense that the president and faculty share its goals must be reality as well as rhetoric. Most undergraduates, and particularly I would think Princeton undergraduates, must be blissfully unaware of what might be called the "governance climate" of higher education. On many campuses, and I mean many, the default relationship between faculty and presidents is adversarial, driven by suspicion, disrespect and, at times, even a kind of permanent, low-grade loathing. Many other schools are so huge and complicated that the only conceivable model is the corporate model.

Incidentally, I fear that Princeton is approaching the tipping point, but that is the subject of another essay. This one concerns Harvard. Its unusual system of fiduciary governance centered in a very small and secretive "Corporation" combines the best features of two models of archaic oligarchy: that of the Puritan synod and of the club of nineteenth-century robber barons. That is not sarcasm. Archaic oligarchy enjoyed many advantages, especially economies of scale and time not wasted in committee meetings. Remember the old Politburo. The Harvard Corporation made an inspired choice time before last. Let's hope they do it again. 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.