by Daniel Mencher | Tufts should welcome Lawrence Summers with open arms.
Tufts students love controversy, and in the last few months they have had their fair share of it. The latest uproar is over a speech to be given on campus by Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard. President Lawrence Bacow invited Summers about one year ago to give the Spring 2007 Snyder Lecture on the topic of undergraduate education. The Snyder Lecture is given once per semester at Tufts, and the purpose of its endowment is to bring to campus speakers who will challenge conventional wisdom. “I invited Professor Summers because I believe he has very interesting and provocative things to say about undergraduate education,” Bacow told the S<small>OURCE</small>. “He stirred this pot repeatedly at Harvard, and the new core recently adopted by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences responds to many of his critiques of the status quo.”
The controversy arose because some have accused Summers of racism and sexism. Never mind that this is irrelevant, given the topic on which Summers is to speak—the charges are false. The accusation of sexism comes from the infamous debacle following a speech given by Summers pondering why women are underrepresented in careers involving math and science. After mentioning a few hypotheses, he cited one study that showed that women are biologically more inclined to excel in the humanities, and less inclined to excel in math and science. Shortly thereafter, he implored the audience to “prove [him] wrong.” This did not stop most faculty members at Harvard from branding Summers, a political liberal by any reasonable standard, a sexist, and campaigning for his removal from the university. Fortunately, their opinion did not mean a whole lot, so that even though Summers resigned the presidency to avoid the mounting attacks against him, he is still Harvard’s Charles W. Eliot University Professor.
The accusation of racism stems from several incidents. Once, when Summers was working at the World Bank, he signed a memo that implied that pollution-producing industries should be transferred to under-populated nations in Africa, because those nations were under-polluted. The color of the Africans’ skin was not a part of the reasoning, but even that is irrelevant. It turns out that the memo was written by a subordinate, Lant Pritchett, and was just an ironic joke in the context in which he submitted it to Summers, who signed it without reading it carefully. Later, as president of Harvard, Summers got into a dispute with Cornel West, a professor of African-American studies at Harvard. Summers confronted West with accusations of missing classes and inflating grades, and an angered West left to teach at Princeton. This cannot plausibly be called racism, unless the fact that West is black and Summers is white means that Summers may not accuse West of anything, even though it is Summers’ job to monitor professors’ conduct.
Lawrence Summers is, without question, a brilliant man. After acquiring his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1982, he went on to be a professor at MIT and Harvard, a domestic policy economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, the Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist at the World Bank, the Secretary of the Treasury at the United States Treasury Department, and the president of Harvard University, among other positions. Summers is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, has worked as a consultant for five foreign governments, was on the Board of Advisors for the Congressional Budget Office for four years, and was an editor for the Quarterly Journal of Economics for six years. In 1993, he won the John Bates Clark Medal, which is awarded once every two years to the most exceptional American economist under the age of forty. Summers has honorary doctorates from Yale and Princeton. He has published no less than six books and 135 articles, mostly about economics. If anything, Bacow should try to get Summers to teach at Tufts full-time.
Summers is neither racist nor sexist, and he will not be speaking about race or sex. But even if he were speaking on those topics, his controversial nature in those areas is no reason to avoid having him on campus. “Controversial speakers come to Tufts all the time. Moreover, they represent a range of views on the political spectrum,” Bacow told the S<small>OURCE</small>. “This is as it should be. After all, we are a university. We learn by testing our own opinions and beliefs against those who think differently from us.” The purpose of the Snyder Lecture is to have a keen academic mind challenge conventional wisdom, which is vitally important at any university because it is crucial for students’ intellectual development. It was in this spirit that President Bacow invited Summers to campus, and that dean James Glaser defended Bacow’s decision. “In my view, it’s important for our students (and our faculty) to hear from a wide array of speakers with a wide array of approaches and viewpoints,” Glaser told the Source. “It’s what a university is about. A university is not about sheltering people from views they disagree with.”
Mr. Mencher is a senior majoring in Spanish.
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