CVPV

Race Matters, published on the one-year anniversary of the 1992 Rodney King riots, remains Harvard professor Cornel West’s most famous book. And after his recent brouhaha with Harvard president Lawrence Summers, Cornel West would have people believe that his ego matters just as much as his race.

Former Treasury Secretary during the Clinton Administration, Lawrence Summers, was only recently installed as Harvard’s twenty-seventh President. Yet his tenure to date has been marked by an aggressive desire to right what Summers sees as wrongs in the academic establishment.

Summers articulated his new program of reform in a major address at the Kennedy School of Government shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. In the address, the new President advocated a “reconciliation of values” between those on the left who attack American culture in general and the American military in particular, and those on the right who attack the idea of activist government in general and the Federal bureaucracy in particular.

The speech marked the ascent of centrist, New Democrat approaches to academic administration. Some pundits found themselves pleasantly surprised: It’s a rare occasion when a university President chides his faculty for not being patriotic enough.

Yet Summers’ struggle for reform isn’t limited to meaningful speeches on values and character. In November, the president instructed all of Harvard’s 2,000 plus faculty members to re-evaluate their grading practices in light of the rampant grade inflation that is slowly eating away at Harvard’s academic credibility. In 2001 alone, 91% of Harvard seniors graduated with honors, leaving some to wonder just what “with honors” means these days.

Indeed, the problem with grade inflation has reached such staggering levels that Harvey Mansfield, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard, is now giving students two grades: one that boosts their GPA, and another that reflects what they truly achieved in class.

One of Summers’ more controversial proposals is to vigorously pursue younger professors for tenure and tenure track positions. Providing younger, more energetic professors with job security would motivate them to focus more on undergraduate education and teaching duties, says Summers.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the move triggered bitter resistance on the part of some faculty members, who believed that tenure should be rewarded near the end of an accomplished career in academia. Yet Summers, who received tenure at the age of 28, seemed impervious to criticism when he recently vetoed the appointments of two 53-year-old academics to tenured positions at Harvard.

Simply put, as of mid-December, Larry Summers, along with other advocates of reforming higher education, was on a roll.

…to be continued…