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Some professors back Harvard's Summers
Edited for length and contentBy Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff As critics of Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers step up pressure for him to resign or radically alter the way he leads the university, a few professors have begun rallying to his defense. Late yesterday, one of Harvard's most famous faculty members, law professor Alan Dershowitz, issued a statement backing Summers's presidency, in which he said the storm of opposition "sounds like the trial of Galileo." "This is truly a time of crisis for Harvard," he wrote. "The crisis is over whether a politically correct straightjacket will be placed over the thinking of everybody in this institution by one segment of the faculty." In an interview yesterday, Dershowitz noted that the recent condemnation has come from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which includes the undergraduate college and the traditional doctoral programs, but is only one of Harvard's 10 schools. "They are only one constituency and they must stop pretending they are the university," he said yesterday, adding that he does not believe faculty members fear Summers. "There is a hard-left ideological group who are opposed to him; there is a group of faculty who will never forgive him for the statements he made about Israel." Steven Pinker, who has been one of Summers's most outspoken defenders, said some professors are afraid to stand up for the president because they could be punished by colleagues who sit on committees that control the fate of a student or a research project. Posted by: Biff Wellington 2005-02-17 |
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