Harvard's *new* Summers brouhaha

For seven years, John H. Summers taught students in Harvard's Social Studies program -- simultaneously getting a crash course in elite students' sense of entitlement, he says.

Now ensconced at Boston College as a visiting scholar, he's given vent to his ire in the (English) Times Higher Education Supplement, in a piece titled "All the privileged must have prizes." He would routinely ask his students what they valued in their teachers. "Invariably," he wrote, "they said good teachers made them 'feel comfortable.'"

Nothing was permitted to disturb the cocoon-view that the students would move frictionlessly into the ruling class, unless stroking counts as friction. The "corruption" of grade inflation was part of this cosseting environment; no teacher dare give less than a B without risking "petty harassment." "I do not mean merely that the students are never so aggressive and articulate as when they hunt for grades," Summers, who had a series of one-year appointments, wrote. "I mean that they wage political reprisals against the B-minus grader and send gifts to high-placed academic directors." (Stephen Bradt, a Harvard spokesman, said he could not respond to the allegation about gifts unless Summers provided more specifics. In an email exchange, Summers said he wanted to stress that his charge was aimed at students, not administrators. If any gifts were received, as he says he had heard, he believes they were returned -- and that the staff of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies were not swayed by them: "I have every reason to believe in the perfect integrity of the director of studies and of my colleagues." Anya Bernstein, the director of studies in the social-studies program, was on vacation and couldn't be immediately reached.)

Summers was forced, he says, to change one course title from "Anarchist cultural criticism in America" to the more anodyne "America and its critics." "Here was the same method of cultural hygiene that has transformed Harvard Square from a bohemian enclave into an outdoor mall."

For his prototypical Harvard student, Summers cited Jared Kushner, scion of a real-estate magnate, who was already making his own property deals while in college, and whom Summers taught: "Jared later purchased The New York Observer for $10 million … As publisher, one of his first moves was to reduce pay for the Observer's stable of book reviewers. I had been writing reviews for the Observer in an effort to pay my debts."

A perfect synechdoche! "[T]he sedulous banality of the rich," Summers concluded, "degrades teaching into a service-class preoccupation whose chief duty is preparing clients for monied careers."

However, Bob Sommer, president of the Observer Media Group, said that the Observer's budget and space allocation for books coverage have, in fact, increased during the Kushner regime, contrary to industrywide trends -- and that payments per review had not changed, either. Of John Summers, he added: "There was a deliberate editorial decision not to keep him on as a reviewer."

See the comments below the Summers piece for a lively debate among people with various connections to Harvard.