In media age, role of college president evolves

Dr. Freedman points to presidential luminaries of the past century: Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia from 1901 to 1945; Abbott Lawrence Lowell, at Harvard's helm from 1909 to 1933 (a bronze statue of his beloved dog Phantom remains on campus); and Robert Hutchins of the University of Chicago, president from 1929 to 1945.

It wasn't that these men weren't controversial or political. Mr. Hutchins drew ire for his push to reorganize university departments and abolishing college football, and Dr. Butler ran for vice president on the ticket of William Howard Taft. But speaking out today is infinitely riskier, says Freedman, with presidents dogged by fear of alienating alumni, trustees, students, legislators, and donors.

Fundraising has become a crucial component of the job, with money "such a priority that the president becomes more like a corporate businessman crafting partnerships and less like a public intellectual who might be a bestower of wisdom for the entire society," says Stanley Fish, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Add to that a growing public skepticism, and it's a far cry from the mid-century mood, when Americans greeted their university presidents as repositories of the nation's wisdom.

"Higher education has taken an enormous beating in the public eye as costs go way up and support goes way down and students are transmogrified into consumers, faculty are reimagined as labor, and presidents are reclassified as CEOs," says Dr. Bowen. In the corporatization of higher education, "we become more commonplace, more like the business world, and we have opened ourselves to public attack."

It's a shift of seismic proportions, he says, but the earthquake has taken years.

Still, many insist, no matter how delicate or difficult the job, there's no excuse for ignorance, no justification for an offhand remark that might betray bias.

From the mouth of someone as momentous as Summers, worries Susan Ganter, executive director of the Association for Women in Science, a single comment can reverse years of gains.

"What we worry about when someone with that level of prestige makes that statement, is that a lot of women out there are listening and it will deter them," she says.

And no matter how fully - if reluctantly - many academics have relinquished the idea of presidents as "philosopher-kings," Dr. Nelson says, they still want to respect their leaders. In terms of Harvard colleagues' esteem, "I don't think Summers can completely recover from this."

No wonder, says Cary Nelson, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "It's the president of Harvard, and he sounds like he's wielding a caveman club in his rhetoric."

As calls for no-confidence votes die down, thanks in part for repeated notes of contrition and responsiveness by Summers, middle ground may still be hard to find.

Daniel Fisher, a professor of physics and applied physics, was the only one to explicitly call for Summers's resignation at a meeting last Tuesday, urging faculty members to look beyond the specifics of the controversy to the president's general "misgovernance of Harvard," years of "double-speak and squandered opportunities."

The question now, for many on campus, is when the drive for censure will be sated. To Dr. Fish, the ordeal harks back to the Puritan days of Harvard's founding in 1636. "During the Cornel West flap, the image I kept having was of [Summers] being roasted over a spit in public for about five months," he says. "Now I think the metaphor would be more like serial humiliation, as in some sort of Puritan practice of putting offenders in the socks or making them wear dunce caps in public for a certain amount of time every day."

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