I've been getting a daily blow-by-blow account. And there, I've just gone and used a fighting metaphor to describe the situation.
It isn't a fight. There aren't two sides lined up to bash each other. This is not about "faculty vs Larry Summers". That is a complete misreading of the situation. But it is the way the media is presenting it. It is the way we do politics now. It is not the way Harvard's faculty is responding to Summers.
There are very few people at Harvard "against" Summers. There are a lot of people who dislike his autocratic leadership style and his power consolidating and centralizing tendencies1.
Let me offer a little Harvard background that most people are probably unaware of. The President of Harvard has direct say over who gets appointed to faculty positions. Thumbs up or thumbs down. No appeal. Part of the significance of this is that it is nearly unique among universities in this day and age to have this power formally a part of the President's office (this dates to the beginning of Harvard and is not new to Summers).
What this means is that when the faculty experiences declining numbers of women getting appointments, the President of the University is directly responsible. Summers cannot wiggle out by saying that there aren't any qualified women. In his tenure, he has been presented, after lengthy searches, with qualified faculty candidates - who also happened to be women - scholars of solid reputation and proven ability as determined by the current department faculty and the search committees and Summers turned them down.
Within Harvard, this is about who gets to determine the appropriate directions and topics of research. Faculty members feel that those decisions should reside with them and not with the Administration. Rightly so, if academic freedom means what we usually take it to mean.
. . .
1 Academics have disliked these tendencies in university administrations since Plato's Academy. It is the one thing on which you can get academics to agree. Put five Harvard professors in a room and get ten reasoned opinions, twenty interesting ideas worthy of further research, and a hundred questions that some enterprising graduate student should pursue. And ten shouting matches leading to pistols at dawn - or the moral equivalent thereof. I've seen it happen.
Posted by Martial