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Monday, February 13, 2006
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GORMLESS The Harvard Crimson, voice of the Harvard student body, is discouragingly evasive and pompous on the Shleifer/Summers controversy. Can twenty-year-olds have written this sentence? The Shleifer affair is indeed a serious matter, but Faculty members’ propriety in bringing it to the scene now is questionable. Indeed a serious matter…propriety…questionable. This is your father’s Oldsmobile. But put that aside. Even more doddering is the editorial’s illogic: The lawsuit was filed in 2000 and settled in 2004. It has been covered comprehensively by this newspaper and in other sources for the duration. True, a recent Institutional Investor article on Summers’ role in the incident does raise concerns about his handling of the events, but the facts of the situation remain at best unclear and are not deserving of a renewed firestorm. Um, 2004 wasn’t very long ago, and this complex, costly, and destructive case remains a matter of analysis and dispute. Far from comprehensive, press coverage of the largest legal settlement in Harvard’s history has been so sketchy as to have raised serious questions among some observers as to why. And it’s just because “the facts of the situation remain…unclear” that they need investigation and response. For while we don’t know everything, we know that a high-profile Harvard faculty member guilty of moral turpitude and reckless institutional damage has gone scot-free. |