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Thursday, March 02, 2006

STUNTZ IS WRONG

William J. Stuntz, a Harvard Law professor, is angry about the fall of Lawrence Summers, which is fine. But he’s let his spite create a wholly unconvincing scenario for the future of American universities. To hear him tell it, principled reformer Summers represented fat, complacent American higher education’s last chance to save itself. Now that heedless tenured aristocrats have run him out of town, there’s no stopping the decline and fall of all campuses. Because it’s not just about Cambridge:

The health of any single university is no large matter. But in this market, the top players set the terms for everyone else. If the Ivies and Stanford and the top state universities continue to do things the old-fashioned way, schools farther down the food chain have to do the same, or risk losing their best faculty members. It's a little like the early stages of a Ponzi scheme: Everyone wants to keep it going as long as possible, and the odds are it won't end just yet. My generation of academics (I'm 47) will get ours and then, probably, get out before the crash--just as GM's managers in the 1950s got theirs, then went on to rich retirements. But woe to those who come after us.


Woe? Whoa. Stuntz, with his sad lack of faith in self-correcting market mechanisms, has messed up here. In fact, quite a few scrappy American universities and colleges are competing with the Ivies, offering more faculty attention and other goodies, and it’s working. A number of observers have pointed out that the unquestioned supremacy of the Ivies no longer pertains, and that savvy applicants and smart professors take advantage of an increasingly broad range of attractive university choices these days.




I happen to agree with Stuntz that Harvard is too rich and bland and careful now; it’s just that I ultimately see Summers as part of all that, not a rebel against it. After all, it was on his watch that Harvard, like any smug, clueless organization, failed to punish one of its own for serious, institutionally damaging misdeeds (this may change -- there are signs, now that Shleifer’s protector is out of a job, that Harvard will do the right thing and sanction him). And don’t forget Harvard’s equally pathetic response to the recent plagiarism scandals in Stuntz’s law faculty.

No, Summers was not the person to resuscitate Harvard. No one person can do it. The place will have to wake itself up somehow. As alumni donations continue to tank (despite a national upward trend, Harvard’s have for some time been significantly down), and as more and more students realize they might be able to get a livelier intellectual experience somewhere else, the Harvard community will grasp that it runs the risk of becoming a luxurious simulacrum. Then it'll get to work.