University news

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have stories today on potent influences on the academy. The Times looks ar Harvard’s president, Larry Summers. The Post looks at Microsoft. The New York Times Magazine quotes one of Summers’ friends at Harvard saying, “There are a lot of people on other parts of the campus I’ve met who just despise him. The level of the intensity of their dislike for him is just shocking.” Glenn Reynolds thinks this is because he’s to the right of the “ideologically correct” academy. But this is less about ideology than power. As the article makes clear, Summers is doing two things that scare a significant chunk of the faculty. First, Summers is centralizing power within his office, taking a more personal role in tenure and hiring decisions. In any university this would prompt grumblings, because it means a loss of autonomy for departments and schools. Second, and much more important, Summers is taking a positivist approach to areas of thought that have historically been thought of as the humanities. The key grafs:

[T]he intellectual revolution that Summers says he hopes to capture in the new curriculum is not limited to science itself. ”More and more areas of thought have become susceptible to progress,” he said, ”susceptible to the posing of questions, the looking at the world and trying to find answers, the coming to views that represent closer approximations of the truth.” Tools of measurement have become ubiquitous, as well as extraordinarily refined…. The great universities have traditionally defined themselves as humanistic rather than scientific institutions. Summers’s point is not so much that the balance should shift as that the distinctions between these modes of understanding have blurred, though clearly in a way that favors the analytic domains — the soft has become harder, rather than the other way around. Most faculty members at Harvard worry much more about this hard-soft spectrum than they do about the left-right one…. It is quite possible that just as Charles W. Eliot came to be seen as the man who brought the range of modern knowledge into the traditional university, so Summers will be seen as the man who decisively moved those universities toward increasingly analytical, data-driven ways of knowing.

Clearly, these preferences are starting to drive the tenured faculty around the bend:

I met professors who so thoroughly loathe the new president that they refuse even to grant his intelligence, perhaps because doing so would confer upon him a virtue treasured at Harvard. Despite the protections of tenure, virtually all of Summers’s critics were too afraid of him to be willing to be quoted by name.

Those dumb enough not to recognize Summers’ smarts are headed for a great fall (Bill Sjostrom points out just how savvy Summers must be). The next few years are going to be fun for those who write about Harvard. The Post story is about the rise of Microsoft’s influence on college campuses, and the inevitable backlash this is causing on campus. An example of the latter:

“[I worry] that in the face of budget shortfalls, universities will sacrifice their research autonomy, offering up curriculum and academic integrity to the highest bidder,” said Mark Schaan, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University who was part of a group of students at the University of Waterloo, the Canadian equivalent of MIT, who last year urged administrators to turn down Microsoft’s donations.

That’s the rhetoric. Here’s an example of Microsoft’s role in funding campus research:

Among those who say they have benefited from Microsoft’s donations is Howard University associate professor Todd E. Shurn. Two years ago, he was struggling with how to best teach a multimedia class that would combine computer science, art and communications skills. Two of Shurn’s former students, who had gone on to work at Microsoft and had come back to Washington on a recruiting visit, had an idea: Why not build the class around Windows Media Player? The class could create a new interface, or “skin,” for the program. The professor was intrigued. He fiddled around with the technology for a few days and concluded it was worth testing. Microsoft provided $5,000, software and books and sent one of its technicians to help set up the computers the students would be using. The experiment was a success, Shurn said, so much so that he expanded the project the next year to include a contest open to the entire school. Microsoft, of course, provided the money for the awards.

Boy, that is evil. I have no doubt some of my fellow academicians are dreading the rise of these kinds of influences. I say, bring them on.