The New York Times Magazine here profiles Larry Summers, the unusually blunt President of Harvard University. Two aspects of the article are likely to be of interest to readers of this site:
(1) The discussion of the dispute between Summers and Cornel West makes for a good read, though West is described, I am dismayed to see, as a "philosopher," though his PhD is not in philosophy, his work is (at best) really bad philosophy, and he has never held an appointment in a philosophy department. (I'm sure the Straussians will be up in arms about my latest "argument from authority.")
(2) The most interesting part of the article for law professors is Summers's clearly apt diagnosis of the pathologies afflicting Harvard Law School. The article reports:
The Times: "Summers had identified Harvard Law as the one school most in need of presidential supervision, for despite its magisterial reputation it had been losing both students and scholars to other institutions."
Leiter: Its a magisterial reputation that's in decline, and Summers has picked up on that. When I was a visiting professor at Yale Law School, which now dominates Harvard within legal academia in a way it did not a generation ago, I was told that in the late 1980s, of students admitteed to both Harvard and Yale, 60% chose Yale, 40% Harvard. After a decade in which US News ranked Yale #1 every year (including years when Harvard's reputation scores were higher!), and Harvard as low as #5, and #3 most years recently, 80% choose Yale, and only 20% choose Harvard. Meanwhile, Harvard has been rebuffed by Richard Revesz (now Dean at NYU) and Michael McConnell (on the faculty at Utah, and now a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit), and lost Larry Lessig to Stanford (largely for personal reasons) and Joseph Weiler to NYU.
The Times: "Summers has announced that he will extend the tenure review process. Previously, the university president's power to review -- and perhaps veto -- tenure decisions applied to only the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a few other schools. The law school, which has made a series of what Summers calls ''idiosyncratic choices'' in the awarding of tenure, has put up the most resistance to this extension of presidential power. Summers has already trampled on several proposed appointments to the college, which of course only increases apprehension elsewhere."
Leiter: Summers has put his finger on *the* problem at Harvard, and it will be interesting to see what comes of it. One reason Yale has pulled so far ahead of Harvard is that Yale largely stopped hiring junior faculty (the weakest members of the Yale faculty are, almost without exception, faculty hired as assistant professors, who then all got tenure), while Harvard continues to hire tons of them, and tenures almost all of them (the Harvard tax faculty has been the exception on this score). This is why, today, the average professor who looks at a list of Harvard faculty, is likely to notice that at least half the faculty wouldn't be appointable at another top law school. The other difficulty, of course, is that even Harvard's senior hiring is in the mold of "one from column A" (someone really good) and "one from column B" (someone who satisfies the vocal political demands of part of the faculty).
The Times: "[Harvard Law School professor] Martha Minow said [regarding changes to the tenure practices], ''I think a lot of people think it's a bad idea,'' though she personally is waiting to see whether Summers exercises the judiciousness and restraint he has promised. She and her colleagues may also not agree that they have accepted, as Summers told me they have, ''some of the concerns about inbredness, political correctness, lack of intellectual energy that were seen on the outside.''
Leiter: Harvard Law School is inbred and it does suffer from bouts of political correctness (on the left and the right). Just as Summers was right about Cornel West, he's clearly right about Harvard Law School. This should be an interesting battle. That the very able Elena Kagan is the new Dean of Harvard Law School may prevent this from boiling over.
(By the way, lest this sound too adulatory about Summers, let me remark that his little "critics of Israel are anti-semites" speech was pathetic: but what can you expect from the President of an essentially right-wing institution like Harvard? But that's a different matter.)
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