Even if Summers were a guileful and calculating figure with a hidden agenda of drastic change, he would have a tough row to hoe. But he’s not: he’s a blunt and overbearing figure with an overt agenda of drastic change. It should come as no surprise that Larry Summers is not quite as popular a figure as his gracious predecessor was. One of Summers’s oldest friends on the faculty said to me: ”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.”
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. It’s not easy to imagine Summers winning these people over. Of course, he may not have to. Harvard’s greatest presidents have been an exceptionally cold and nasty lot. One of them, Charles W. Eliot, once said that the most important attribute of a college president is the capacity to inflict pain.
Largo, largu