Harvard president's exit fuels debate over what price academic freedom?

BOSTON - Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers, an Ivy League academic who served as treasury secretary President Bill Clinton's Cabinet, is an unlikely conservative martyr. But after announcing his plans to resign, it looks as if Summers is becoming just that.

In his five years as Harvard president, Summers has supported ROTC on campus, suggested that men may excel over women in the scientific elite partly because of genetics, and confronted a prominent professor, Cornel West, over the academic value of his rap CD.

He also has argued that the school's brilliant minds should spend more time teaching, and should work more closely together to solve real-world problems.

Conservatives, few of whom run top universities, adopted Summers as one of their own. Now many of them say Summers' downfall underscores how those schools have lost touch with the country.

"Larry Summers is a liberal, [but] he was trying to do the right thing," said David Horowitz, an outspoken critic of liberal faculty bias on campuses. "These universities have been taken over. It's 10 percent who got rid of him. They're hard-line Stalinists. They're not liberals."

Some moderates and even liberals hear at least some truth in what Horowitz says.

"It's unfortunate that it's seen as an issue of liberal vs. conservative, because real liberals are horrified by the academic hard left," said Harvey Silverglate, a Boston civil rights lawyer and author of the book "The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses."

"Academic freedom can't survive the control by that cult," he said.

Summers said Tuesday he would step down rather than continue to grapple with Harvard's core Faculty of Arts & Sciences, which passed a no-confidence vote in him last March and was poised to take another one this week. An economics professor, Summers said he would return to teach at Harvard after a yearlong sabbatical.

Students had backed Summers - the Harvard Crimson student newspaper lamented his loss in an editorial - but there were signals before his resignation that the seven-member Harvard Corporation was growing weary of his clashes with faculty members.

Summers' spokesman could not be reached to comment.

Critics of Summers say the real issue was his confrontational management style, not his controversial comments or his ambitions for Harvard, which they say they generally supported. By the end, they insist, he had offended a diverse group of faculty.

"There's a real free-speech issue, but it's Larry squelching other people's free speech," said Daniel Fisher, a physics professor. "He's an incredible bully."

But many supporters saw politics in Summers' departure.

Law professor Alan M. Dershowitz has argued Summers was done in by a core group of faculty angered over his support for the military, Israel, and for his comments on women in science - the last of which he apologized for repeatedly.

"I'm clearly in the left 20 percent of the country, nationally. I'm a Ted Kennedy liberal," Dershowitz said. "In the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, I'm in the 10 percent side of the conservatives.

"That doesn't show I'm out of sync with the country," he said. "It shows how out of sync Harvard is."

Right-of-center pundits could not agree more, at a time when some conservative students feel under attack in the classroom for their beliefs. The Wall Street Journal's editorial page wrote: "Only on an American university campus" would Summers "be portrayed as a radical neocon."