Controversial figure Lawrence Summers is due to speak at Tufts next month. The question is, will anyone listen?
The former Harvard president, whose alleged views on race and gender have sparked controversy, is scheduled to deliver this semester's Richard E. Snyder Presidential Lecture. His speech will be entitled "Rethinking Undergraduate Education."
The speech will come on the heels of Shelby Steele's fierce criticism of affirmative action in last semester's Snyder Lecture and the nationally-publicized parody in The Primary Source that condemned affirmative action while using language that many considered racially insensitive.
This combination of events has led many to oppose Summers' appearance on campus.
Associate Professor of Music John McDonald is suggesting that faculty and students boycott the event.
"The best way we have come up with to show our objection is to buy tickets and not show up on March 14 at 7:30 [p.m.] in Cohen Auditorium," McDonald said in an e-mail.
Gary Goldstein, a professor in the physics and astronomy department and a faculty representative on the board of the Tufts Progressive Alumni Network (TPAN), recently sent University President Lawrence Bacow an e-mail objecting to the scheduled speech. "I think this is not a time to be inviting people who have contributed in one way or another to making racist and sexist attitudes more mainstream," he told the Daily. Bacow, who personally selects all the speakers in the Snyder Lecture Series, said in an e-mail that the purpose of the series, as specified when the gift to create it was given, is to "bring to campus people who have challenged conventional wisdom in their professional ... work."
He said that most of the past Snyder speakers have been somewhat controversial, including Salman Rushdie, author of "The Satanic Verses."
"Tufts would be a very dull place if we shied away from inviting controversial speakers," Bacow said.
Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser, who coordinates the lecture series, agreed with Bacow. "Challenging comfortable views is something [Bacow] hopes comes from this lecture series," he said.
In terms of the inconvenient timing of Summers' lecture, Glaser explained that Bacow invited Summers a year ago, when racial tensions were not as prevalent an issue at Tufts. "We didn't select the timing," Glaser said.
Glaser and Bacow both said that Summers will not be speaking about any of the race- or gender-related issues that make him controversial.
"I invited Larry Summers to come speak at Tufts because I thought he had something interesting and important to say about undergraduate education," Bacow said.
"For all his critics at Harvard and elsewhere, very few argued with his agenda to make Harvard more student centered; to encourage faculty to spend time teaching undergraduates," he said. "In many respects, he was trying to make Harvard more like Tufts."
Still, some think that bringing Summers reflects poorly on Tufts. "I think the president does need to consider what message he's sending with the speakers he invites to the most well-known lecture series on campus," Professor of History Steven Marrone said.
"I think the Shelby Steele lecture did hurt some people on campus, and I think we need to think about that and not rub salt into the wound," Marrone, who also voiced this opinion at the recent Town Meeting on Stereotyping and Campus Climate, said.
He said that he too plans to relate these sentiments to Bacow. "I'm ... part of [a group of] faculty that will be writing the president to ask him to pay special attention to the Snyder Lecture Series and the way it will relate this year to the campus climate with stereotyping and race."
Summers, who served as secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton and was president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, has been involved in a variety of controversial incidents.
One of them involved a memo he signed while working at the World Bank in the 1990s. According to an article in Harvard Magazine, the memo states that "underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted," so industries with high amounts of pollution should be moved there.
The memo was reportedly written by Lant Pritchett, an economist working under Summers at the time.
Although Summers admits to signing the memo, he said that he had not carefully read it first. Pritchett has also maintained that the memo was doctored and taken out of its original context, where he said it was meant to be ironic, before it was publicized to the nation.
As president of Harvard, Summers also saw a fair share of controversy. According to Cornel West, a black professor who formerly taught at what is now the school's Department of African and African American Studies, Summers criticized him and confronted him with allegations made by some that West had been missing classes and inflating grades. West eventually left Harvard and returned to Princeton, where he taught at before Harvard.
Summers also overrode a unanimous vote by the same department to offer tenure to hip-hop scholar Marcyliena Morgan. As a result, she and her husband, sociologist Lawrence Bobo, who had tenure, left Harvard and went to work at Stanford.
Most recently, Summers made comments at an academic conference suggesting that women may innately possess fewer skills in science and math than men. Summers resigned his post as university president in 2006, soon after making these comments.
Despite his resignation, some feel that the controversy surrounding Summers has been blown out of proportion.
President of the Tufts Republicans Jordan Greene pointed out that Summers has espoused many liberal views over the years.
"Summers was a political appointee of President Clinton and has a long track record of supporting liberal social policies and Keynesian economics," he wrote in an e-mail.
But it is because of these specific incidents that many feel the lecture series is going too far. "I would like to see the series bring people to campus with views that we want to foster - like diversity, like the opening up of opportunities for all," Goldstein said. "And that has not been what I've seen."
Senior Biodun Kajopaiye, the president of Tufts' Black Men's Group, also disapproved of the choice to bring Summers to campus. "Because of what he represents and the climate on the school campus, I think we could have picked somebody better," he said.
