I'm a long time faculty member at a major research university. I'm generally sympathetic to many of these remarks, and those of Prof. Becker. Summers was well intentioned and had good ideas. What I think these commentaries leave out, however, is the relatively anomalous position of the Harvard president. Due to the way Harvard governance is set up, the Harvard president has considerably less budgetary authority than possessed by many university presidents and this limits his or her power. Generalizing from Summers' experience at Harvard to all American universities is a bit risky.
What really brought Summers down was not his interactions with West or his remarks (largely wrong in my opinion) about women in science but the fact that he embodied a threat to the existing structure of governance at Harvard. Summers, unfortunately, displayed a real lack of political acumen. Given the relatively weak position of the Harvard president, effecting major changes called for a degree of political skill and charisma that Summers, despite his formidable intellect, lacked.
Finally, while the issue of tenure somehow always seems to come up in discussions like these, it is only tangential to this issue.

Summers was doing all the right things. In hindsight, he should have done all the right things, one by one, to allow Harvard time to adjust. Bringing relatively quick change in an old set in its way system needs solid institutional backing; Harvard Corporation clearly did not provide that kind of backing.
Finally, I don't agree that this sorry saga necessarily implies the next President of Harvard (after the interim President) would be weak. The next President could negotiate a 10-year fixed contract not subject to being revoked by Harvard Corporation.

It doesn't sound as though Roger Altman has even
read Summers' comments--a suspicion hard to shake, by the way, of most of those who have weighed in on them. Most of Summers' comments--as he repeatedly stressed--were descriptive, not normative, e.g., men fill the top ranks of the corporate world disproportionately, and males' cognitive abilities are more variable than womens'. He wrapped up by saying he hoped his talk would provoke thought and the marshalling of evidence. Is that a "comment" Mr. Altman or anyone else can "disagree" with? Could it be that part of the problem with many of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and their sympathizers in the media and elsewhere is that they are just plain ignorant of basic statistics, let alone the scientific method?

Kissinger's famous comment on why university faculty disputes are so bitter (because "there is so little at stake") seems particularly insightful in light of the Summers fiasco. I think Mssrs. Becker and Posner make reasonable suggestions for improving Harvard's governance structure, but I wonder if these changes would effectively address the disturbing ideological issues underlying the controversy over Summers.

I am not sure what sort of threat Summers posed to the faculty, but I believe this dispute was really about the fragile self-esteem of precious academics whose tenure and infrequently challenged opinions have insulated them from the harsher realities of the non-utopian world that most of us call home.

The fact the most influential faction of Harvard's faculty is apparently intolerant of diverse viewpoints and insistent on being mollycoddled seems to me an ominous signal of the direction of higher education in this country. Academics should encourage independent though, not squelch it. The faculty's reactionary behavior sends precisely the wrong message to its students, because in the so-called real world, opinions vary, and demands for mollycoddling are unlikely to be met.

I hope that the Harvard's trustees will recognize the larger implications of its decision to cut Summers loose, and exercise better judgment in the future.

A better analogy for board of trustees in a university is the board of directors/trustees of non-profit entities like museums, philanthropic organizations etc. Boards of directors of non-profits typically want a risk-averse management so that they can enjoy a quite life or at least a quite tenure on the board.

I meant quiet but did not quite convey it accurately.

Enronal said: "It doesn't sound as though Roger Altman has even read Summers' comments--a suspicion hard to shake, by the way, of most of those who have weighed in on them."

I think Roger Albin (who I don't know from Adam) meant that he does not agree with Summers' hypothesis. It could either be that Albin does not understand the scientific method or that Albin has good reasons for thinking Summer's hypothesis is not conducive to empirical testing. We should give him the benefit of doubt and not assume that a Professor at a major research university does not understand the scientific method of research.

PS. I think Summer's presented a controversial but empirically testable hypothesis in an academic research setting. So researchers can study the issue and either the data will reject or fail to reject the hypothesis. In any case, I think Summer's primary intent was to highlight lack of science and mathematics graduates which is eroding competitiveness of U.S. relative to other developed countries.

I think Summers's forced resignation is deplorable to the extent it was due to the crime of making controversial remarks.

However I have some more general comments on university governance.

The Corporation Metaphor

While the board of a corporation is theoretically responsible to shareholders, trustees select their own successors and are accountable to no one. Troublingly, trustees seem to have almost no incentives apart from altruism and self-approbation. Posner claims that the trustees have their reputation at stake, but I think this is hardly true, partly because few people know who the trustees are, and partly because their trusteeship is not likely a defining element of their professional reputation. (They will have a prestigious career in business, etc., apart from being a trustee.) In the extreme of embarrassment, a university trustee could quietly omit the fact from his curriculum vitae, and the subject might never come up again. Even mere alumni of the university have a greater reputational stake, since they cannot excise the university from their resumes.

Perhaps the university-as-corporation would work better if alumni (of whom Posner says little) were the shareholders, and if the president-CEO were made ultimately answerable to them. Harvard, by the way, does have an alumni-elected Board of Overseers, but that board's powers are only investigative and advisory.

The General Partnership Metaphor

Posner describes a self-governing faculty as a "workers' cooperative," conjuring up images of an inefficient Soviet-era enterprise. However, members of a research faculty are not like workers in a factory, cooperating to build a joint product. Rather, they work alone or in small groups to bring in funding for their own individual projects. A better metaphor might be to a partnership of professionals, such as a law firm or a physician's clinic. The tenured faculty are the partners who run the firm. Junior faculty, postdocs, and graduate students are like junior lawyers who hope to make partner one day.

Research grants are made to certain investigators, not to the university in the abstract. If an established professor decamps to another university, he will likely take a certain stream of funding with him. Therefore, established faculty are de facto owners of the research university, because they own an identifiable part of its income stream.

Admittedly, this metaphor is compelling only insofar as the university is a research business which survives by grants. It is less applicable to the other activities of the university which depend upon tuition, or upon the endowment.

In reply to Arun Khana's comment, Summers stated early in his remarks that "there are three broad hypotheses [not one] about the sources of the very substantial disparities...." One of them was based on the "clear evidence that whatever the difference in means... there is a difference in standard deviation," between men and women on various attributes, including cognitive ability. This "hypothesis" doesn't even need to be tested, it has been empirically verified beyond question. Yet it seems to be the basis for his critics' claim that he said women are cognitively inferior to men. I stand by my earlier point that much of the original criticism was based on willful misrepresentation of his remarks, and that unless you don't know what a standard deviation is, there's little to disagree with in what he actually said.

It seems to me that the flaw in Judge Posner's view is fundamental -- it is his characterization of faculty as "employees."

Look at it this way: without administration, there is still a purpose for professors i.e. to teach students or to do research orto write books or to do whatever else they do.

But take away the professors -- leaving the administration only its property-management function (which is basically what it does and at which it doesn't even do such a great job, as an aside) -- and what do you have? A campus, a set of buildings, which could as easily be rented out to any knowledge-based company.

If -- for the sake of argument -- you had to do away with either administration or faculty, which one would leave some semblance of a university? Obviously the adminsiration would go as you can hire good property managers and fund-raisers out of the yellow pages.

Btw, I am not in academia, never have been, and have no professional loyalty to it.

I'm not sure it's accurate to say that high-handed CEOs face no danger of an employee revolt; that seems to be at least in part what happened at Morgan Stanley last year (granted, several employees voted with their feet, not with a resolution):

http://money.cnn.com/2005/06/13/news/fortune500/moragnstanley_ceo/index.htm

Corporate analysis doesn't pertain to the academy, which is patterned after feudal society, where every station had both duties and rights. What happened to Summers was more like an assertion of feudal rights than anything else. This is not to say it was justified, or that feudalism is the best paradigm for the academy, but it is the underlying dynamic.

University Goals, Centralization and Trustees

So I've been convinced by the conversation over at Volokh that the remarks on gender preferences weren't the major reason for the pressure on Summers to resign. However, they almost certainly turned some faculty members against him but for all I know they may have made other members more reluctant to vote him out. While Summers remarks were perfectly reasonable and shouldn't have resulted in any blowback this situation just illustrates a point I know all too well.  If you are going to push the boundaries of normal discourse or tweak unjustified assumptions in our society you better make sure that you are likable, pleasent and otherwise don't piss people off.  Gender is one hot button issue like this but Sex and Religion are even worse.  This sucks but it's life. 

The question of the best conception of a University president is far more interesting.  I know you got many comments last time on University government but some thoughts I had on your reposted argument.  In particular you argue for more centralized control like a corporation and suggest that the interests of the University in the long term align most closely with those of the board of Trustees.  I disagree on both counts and instead would suggest that the long term interest of the University are best servered by the effects of a mostly decentralized collection of professors each doing their own thing.  So while the individual faculty member's interest are not likely to track the universities ultimate goals neither is the Trustees and rather than competition between universities making sure quality is maintained it is standard academic competition for recognition and prestrige which will maintain quality.  Like the US Government university structure should be designed to make sure that executive power is limited by another branch.  Rather than  having a small group of people (trustees, the president etc..) have ultimate say so we want deciscions to be made by some combination of all branches of university governance (faculty, president trustees).  Also like the US government we expect the interests of the university to be best servered by the interplay of the different branches of government not identified with the interests of one branch.  You could argue rightly that the US president's interests are more closely aligned with that of the country at large than those of any individual congressmen but it doesn't follow that congress as a body doesn't serve the interests of the country as well as the president or that the presideny ought to be given more power.  So rather than seeing professors as either employees or owners I'm suggesting that they ought to be seen as something like representatives of their departments/academic communities and that all the arguments against concentrating (more) power in the US prez or the supreme court (okay it is a bit of a stretch to anaolgize them to the trustees) apply just as well in the university context.  To complete the analogy the various departments are like the states and something like a principle of federalism should apply.  In other words, like a governement, the principle task of a university is to protect freedoms (academic in this case) and just like western governments this is best accomplished by giving some legaslative body significant power. 

In practice this means a university should pay professors well, hire good people at the begining and then mostly leave professors and departments alone to do their thing, only overriding the deciscions of the departments when there is some compelling issue that faces the university as a whole and then the collective will of the departments should be consulted.  I think you actually make a strong point in favor of this position when you say:

The academy does not select for people who have interpersonal skills, because most academic research is either solitary or conducted in groups of two or three, though there are exceptions, primarily in the hard sciences.

This is a major difference from a corporation where the individuals at a corporation aspire (or at least the corporatation aspires) to work as a unified whole.  In other words a university is fundamentally more suited to a decentralized style of management.  Also unlike a corporation the work-place freedom of academics is of vital importance.  So like with the US government sacrifices in efficency must be made to protect that freedom.  While it would be silly to deny that there are some issues that the university needs to decide as a whole (expanding campus, tuition, undergrad admissions in some places) I would argue that departments function better as a loose federalist collection than as a top down corporate structure.

Also professors differ from regular employees.  Professors tend to be committed to certain sorts of academic ideals and the advancement of their discipline in a way which Joe Schmo in middle management isn't committed to the corporate bottom line.  Thus it isn't quite on target to compare a university to a worker owned collective.  Additionally I would argue that the trustees interests are not well aligned with the longterm goals of the university. At least no more so than those of the professors.  Trustees are not immersed in any particular academic discipline and while it is important to have this perspective it also means they are more likely to look at university issues in terms of general public relations than in terms of the principles of academic investigation in that discipline.  Also because a trustees life is short compared to the lifetime of the institution (and unfortunatly don't usually have enough young people who have longer time horizons) they are going to be more inclined to sacrifice the underlying principles of academic investigation in favor of immediate public relations gain.

More concretely I think Summers was an anomoly and in general we should expect presidents and trustees to be more willing than faculty to discourage research with uncomfortable implications.  As a trustee my only personal motivation is the effect of public perception of the university on my social status and unfortunatly public perception is more likely to be outraged by research whose results they don't like than abrogations of academic freedom.  I mean suppose the biology department at some famous university started turning out papers showing that black people lacked some genetic mutations that increased intelligence/reasoning ability (they could have other mutations that accomplish the same effect of course but the public at large won't understand this no matter how careful the scientific papers are).  I suspect the biologists in the department, and the professors at large who have significant personal interest in protecting academic freedom are going to be less inclined to discourage such research than the trustees whose social status is imperlied by an association with "that univeristy saying black people are inferior."

Finally I would point out that a university does not need to exercise as much quality control or oversight over faculty because the grant making agencies that supply a huge fraction of the money spent at any university perform this function.  As long as these bodies are working properly and universities tend to hire professors who get grants (as they do) then there is already an automatice quality control mechanism.  I suspect there are other external mechanisms present in controlling the selection of law professors and while such mechanisms might be lacking in the real humanities (not sociology) I'm not convinced that quality control is really that important in these areas.  It may be somehow important to have professors doing literary criticism but I'm not sure if it makes much of a difference how they do it.

Ultimately the short version of my argument is this.  It seems all the arguments you make would equally well apply to the US government if we substitute POTUS for university president and SCOTUS for the trustees (both are unappointed and their rewards are mostly social/reputational).  Presumably you do not advocate making congress subservient to the president and supreme court (e.g. give them only minor influence over things like the appointment process to supreme court and give congress's normal power to the SCOTUS).  So what is the difference that justifies giving power to a diverse body whose members may be more concerned about their particular area than the health of the institution overall in the US government but doesn't apply to set of professors at a university.

My comments on Posner's recommendations follow:

1. The members of the Harvard Corporation should resign; their successors should rescind Summers' resignation.

PM. Utterly impossible, because it can safely be assumed that the members of the Corporation have egos! ;
My comments on Posner's recommendations follow:

1. The members of the Harvard Corporation should resign; their successors should rescind Summers' resignation.

PM. Utterly impossible, because it can safely be assumed that the members of the Corporation have egos! ;

2. The reconstituted Corporation should redefine the lines of command of the university, making clear that faculty are not the owners or "citizens" of Harvard, but rather are honored employees.

PM. I welcome this commonsense clarification of the governance structure. But implementing this will give rise to a power vacuum. And bureaucratic devils will gladly rush in where academic angels fear to tread. Any weakening of faculty governance could put intellectual seriousness and academic morale at risk, because universities employ all sorts of managerial types who privately hold intellectual values in contempt. If they are invited to run the show, all could be lost.

3. A purely consultative University Senate should be created so that the university administration can obtain reliable, representative expressions of faculty opinion.

PM. It is amazing that Harvard did not already have a Senate. Mind you, I have no respect for Faculty Senates; they are dominated by experts on parliamentary procedures and other middle aged bores whose time has little value. Universities should instead poll their academic staff regularly via web questionnaires, and host blogs with full freedom of expression.

4. The president of the university should be authorized to appoint the department chairmen.

PM. I am surprised that this was not already the case. A university administration should have the right to appoint a chair over the wishes of the members of the department, with the discretionary authority and budget to improve the department. Many academic departments do not hire the best possible people, but instead seek to fill themselves with complacent mediocrities. Academic life is easier and more pleasant when departments are, in effect, mutual admiration societies. Shattering this low level equilibrium requires a strong Chair fully supported by the Dean, Provost, and President.

5. The anachronistic institution of tenure should be reexamined and perhaps jettisoned. The market for university professors is highly competitive; a good person whose contract is not renewed can get a comparable job elsewhere. (See my post on tenured employment of January 15 of this year.)

PM. Tenure should be phased out for all new hires starting on some future date, but existing tenure arrangements should be respected. Tenure could be replaced with contracts renewable every 7 to 10 years. It is interesting to see whether the abolition of tenure would lead to a rise in pay. It would lead to a greater focus on those aspects of academic work that are easiest for the academic job market to evaluate, such as publications, and less focus on undergraduate teaching.

6. A generous buy-out program should be instituted in order to encourage early retirement and thus provide greater career opportunities for young academics.

PM. Congress should restore compulsory retirement for existing tenured academics, preferably in the year they turn 60. Retirement would not mean leaving the university; a university would be entirely free to keep people on after age 60, on any mutually agreeable terms.

If the suggested measures precipitated some, even many, resignations of faculty, the quitters could easily be replaced with individuals of equal or higher quality.
PM. I predict there would not be a single resignation.

What Summers set out to do would have required the interpersonal skills of FDR in the 1930s, or of Lyndon Johnson in the US Senate during the 1950s.

Elsewhere in this blog, Gary Becker argues that "American universities must be doing something right." It is the case that the research output of American universities is phenomenal, and that brilliant young minds from all over the world seek to do PhDs in the USA. Each year, the NSF and NIH channel several tens of billions of US$ in grant money to universities. American academics publishing in American journals dominate dozens of academic disciplines. In my experience, USA medical education and American MBAs are very good.

But all this is no reason for complacency. American undergraduate education suffers from serious weaknesses. While the quality of education is good at:
• Many small liberal arts colleges;
• Most institutions able to refuse entrance to students who do not meet a high standard;
• All institutions, when the discipline is a challenging one with small enrolments,
it is often not good in popular fields in large state universities. Here teaching by PhD students (often from the 3rd world) and multiple choice exams are the order of the day. University degrees are being granted to a mass of students who are barely literate and numerate, whose main memories of their student days are of drinking and pursuing the opposite sex.

It is ludicrous for English professors to think they have a useful contribution to make to decisions involving budgetary allocations . . . .

This little Posner chestnut reminds me of a scene in Remains of the Day. Lord Darlington's guest--a very proper gentleman who looks down on the unwashed--asks Stevens the butler various questions about foreign and monetary policy. Stevens can answer none of them. The guest's conclusion from this "experiment" is that it is absurd to seek approval from the public on important matters, since the public is largely ignorant of the intricacies of public affairs. I can hear Posner in the background applauding the gentleman's statement.

Of course, no American university is run on the model of American representative democracy. But the high-handedness of telling people (especially generally clever people who have tenure) that they're too incompetent to have a say in the governance of their own institution is amusing.

Even more silly is Posner's idea that profs have no useful expertise in resource allocation. The resource allocation in controversy appeared to turn on Summers's personal assessment of the relative worth of various established academic fields (i.e., economics is better than sociology), not green-eyeshade budgetary calculations. It's one thing to say that a Sociology prof has no expertise in how to invest the Harvard endowment to maximize returns. It is quite another to say that a Sociology prof has nothing useful to say about the value of Sociology as a field of academic inquiry that deserves a share of the university's resources. On *that* question, I'm sure she would have something meaningful to say.

For those people talking about the elimination of tenure, how on earth do you expect to get anybody to go into academia if not for the promise of tenure?

I don't know any Sociology profs but maybe they might have something to say about investments insofar as they are watching popular taste. Because when it comes to consumer brands, insights into pop culture might just have something to do with making money. For example, there are profs out there who predicted (as a general matter) the success of coffee chains like Starbucks et al (because of the lack of common social spaces in the USA.) So this idea that an academic can't have anything practicalto say is crazy.

Judge Posner is a smart guy but he also seems to be an academic and so himself not very practical?

Why would someone want to go into academia without tenure? I would think that the obvious reason is that it is for many a fairly easy existance with relatively high pay, esp. in comparison with what they would earn elsewhere and that it allows many with otherwise nonsalable skills to make a very good living doing what they like.

I think the reality is that in some disciplines, such as Electrical Engineering, faculty pay is often lower than industry pay, thus resulting in difficulty in retaining faculty, whereas in others, such as the humanities, faculty pay is far better than they can get elsewhere with their degrees, resulting in long lines waiting to get into what are now tenure track positions.

I would think that you would lose people much earlier in the pipeline. Graduate school is almost universally an awful experience. Being a postdoc or an adjunct isn't terribly much better. If there's no tenure waiting at the end, all of a sudden you could end up in your mid-40s with no marketable skills and not much chance in a relatively small academic job market which would much rather hire a young researcher.

Right now, that happens before the mid-30s which is awful enough. If you make it worse, you'll get a lot more people trying to get those marketable skills and not bothering with the whole suffering grad-school thing in the first place.

And the pay ain't that great.

Recently, I went back to grad school at the University of Chicago. It has been a tremendous exerience for me. Many of the professors I have been taught at were educated, or have taught at Harvard. They all say you do not want to go there.
While they respect the institution, they say there are better places out there, and U of C is one.

I have two kids that will be matriculating to college soon. I was always skeptical of sending them to Harvard, should they be fortunate enough to qualify. I have read many articles about academia in recent years, and the situation at Harvard reinforces what I have begun to believe.

Instead of freedom of expression and freedom of thought, schools are now censoring it. Paranoia
makes me think it is the left wing academia that is most responsible for this. If a college president at the supposed number one place of higher learning in the US is not able to freely express ideas and thoughts, what are students supposed to think? How are they being prepared for the world?

I appreciate the many thoughtful posts on this board. They make me think.

By the way, a lot of those tenured academics would be able to make it in the real world, it's just that they love teaching-and making a pile of money is not generally a part of being a professor.

I also think it is funny how the Harvard faculty is trying to paint Summers as a neocon! Only they could take a Clinton appointee and do that.

The amount of censorship and "PC" in academia is greatly exaggerated.

enronal,
I did read Summers' remarks and I'm sorry to point out, probably more carefully than you read my comment, as evidenced by your misspelling my name. I think a brief paraphrase of Summers' remarks is that he suggested that women were less likely to excel at the highest levels and he cited the greater variation in men as supporting data. I think this suggestion is likely to be wrong for a number of reasons. I've reviewed some of the literature on this subject and I find a lot of it unconvincing. I also happen to work in a field (neuroscience) which has an unusually large number of prominent women scientists and in which about 50% of the easily identifiable rising stars are women. In Neuroscience, which is generally acknowledged to be one of the most exciting areas of contemporary science, it appears that greater than 50% of the recent graduate student intakes are women. My prediction is that in a generation, greater than 50% of neuroscientists will be women.
I agree that many of the Harvard faculty at Arts and Sciences probably don't understand statistics and the scientific method but its worth recalling that some of the individuals offended by Summers remarks were prominent female scientists, including one whom I think is now a member of the National Academy. These individuals are at least as likely as Summers to understand scientific and statistical methods.
The issue isn't whether Summers was correct or not. The big problem with his remarks on this topic, and this was not described in the media, is that a large fraction of the disquiet engendered by the remarks occured because of the anomalous position of the Harvard president. Again, the Harvard presidency is a funny position, and it has less administrative and budgetary power than most university president positions. One of the Harvard president's primary levers of power is his/her say over faculty appointments and promotions. Because of this, Harvard presidents have historically been significantly more involved in faculty appointments and promotions than most university presidents. This is well known to the Harvard faculty and was known by the audience he addressed. Now, picture a situation in which a man and woman with similar qualifications come up for promotion or tenured appointment and there is only one slot. Based on my experience with promotions and recruiting faculty, this is not implausible. And once tenured, they could be there for 30 years. How to decide? All other things being equal, Summers' decision rule might be to pick the man. Could a decision rule like this work to the disadvantage of women candidates? It could.
Its simply foolish for someone intimately involved in faculty hiring and promotions to make remarks like these, unless they can be defended very, very well, and they can't.
It apparently never occurred to Summers that there are certain things that are impolitic for the Harvard president to say. He seems to have behaved like he was still a professor at MIT. This is a primary example of his self-defeating behavior.

"All other things being equal, Summers' decision rule might be to pick the man."

Uh...how do you get there? No one has accused Summers of bias. And you have just said that the two candidates are of equal professional qualifications. So why do you even hint that Summers would pick the man?

I don't thing Kissenger's aphorism applies in this case. Look at it this way:

Harvard is immensely valuable, with an endowment in the billions, an unparalleled reputation, a stupendous staff, etc. Yet, nobody really owns or fully controls Harvard. It's sensible for the faculty (or any other party) to put considerable effort into increasing their power over this valuable entity.

Aaron Bergman,

Graduate school is almost universally an awful experience. Being a postdoc or an adjunct isn't terribly much better. If there's no tenure waiting at the end... you'll get a lot more people ... not bothering with the whole suffering grad-school thing in the first place.

You almost make this sound like a bug instead of a feature. Surely you don't really think we're undersupplied with academics, do you?

Snowball,
If, hypothetically, a sociology department deserved to have its budget cut or even increased more slowly, what are the chances that you could find a sociology professor to make this judgment -- even the most astute sociology professor?

Kirk -- the number of academic jobs will remain the same. It's the quality of the people that you have to worry about.

And, given that our higher education system is one of the best things this country has, I'd sort of like to have a nice supply of quality people in there.

Bild: Of course a sociologist will defend his field. That's to be expected. But one of the reasons to *ask* before deciding that a particular department isn't worthy of support is that the department might, you know, change your mind. For example, someone in the department might have undertaken some particularly valuable or insightful research that helps explain a long-misunderstood phenomenon, or that helps give insight into a thorny policy problem. The decisionmaker deciding resource allocation might (gasp) actually learn something and shed unfounded preconceptions.

It seems that many members of the Arts and Sciences faculty came to believe that Summers was making such decisions based on his gut feeling about the relative worth of scholars in various fields. Given his comments (i.e., that economists are smarter than political scientists, who are in turn smarter than sociologists), that suspicion may have been correct.

In any event, Judge Posner's suggestion was that resource allocation is essentially a technical matter unfit for the non-technical types in academia. That is simply silly. Resource allocation, in this context, is not a technical decision. It represents a value judgment about which fields are essential to a research university, and also a strategic judgment about which fields may contribute to the long-term health of the university. I can't imagine why faculty members should be shut out of that conversation.

UChicago has wholeheartedly adopted the unitary executive/corporate governance form. Here its project seems to be export.

Apparently (based on Becker's post and reports from students) Chicago is a contentious, harsh, and competitive academic environment. Most if not all of the scholarship and blogging from UChicago supports the unitary executive and corporate governance form. These generalizations are linked.

Harvard faculty have successfully resisted a transition to this model. I have no love for Harvard, but I celebrate this as a victory. I suggest we let UChicago have its cold-hearted competitive model. I further suggest we let Harvard attempt to rebuild its Afro-American Studies Department and proceed in all departments to provide a valuable cooperative counter-discourse.

What happens if every University adopts the corporate governance model? Well, then the corporate governance model is the only model that can be conceived. All else becomes crime-think.

The only idea that the marketplace of ideas can't admit is the idea that something exists beyond the marketplace. You cannot sell continental critique at UChicago. If you don't believe me, try comparing Law Reviews. Everything is alienable once corporate governance rules the day. Summer's admitted project was rationalization of the curricula. As Adorno and Horkheimer said: "Enlightenment is Totalitarian"

"If the suggested measures precipitated some, even many, resignations of faculty, the quitters could easily be replaced with individuals of equal or higher quality."

Quality eh? What an objective sounding word. I bet we could even come up with a ranking of quality and publish it in USNews. Perhaps we could supplement the rankings with opinions on individual quality from intellectual luminaries like Posner and Summers.

Oh and of course quality would have nothing to do with the degree to which the professor's scholarship reaffirmed the status quo, right? And of course sarcasm is intended.

I think that Cornel West was an individual of the highest quality. I do not think that he, or Appiah, can or will be replaced. Perhaps Afro-American studies is one of the "weak disciplines" that Posner refers too, it is not clear from his post. I think it is a vital and exciting department, importantly located in an elite institution with a history of excluding such things. Was it harmed by Harvard's experiment with corporate governance? Was the entire school harmed by Summers' experiment with sexism?

The supposition that tenure is a major factor in the recruitment of faculty perhaps misses the reality of real-world decision-making. I would submit that those interested in a cushy, well-paid situation with a high level of job security would opt for federal and state bureaucracy or the like. In the social sciences, public school teaching offers similar pay, easier tenure, and no research requirement.

My experience is that academics choose the academy not because of dollars or security, but because they enjoy the life of the mind. This is not easily quantifiable, but ask your neighbor the academic why they suffered through grad school and I doubt they will respond by gleefully proclaiming "tenure!"

Assume that the hypothesis of tenure being a motivation is correct. The current job market, especially for humanities PhDs, is dismal. There simply aren't as many tenure track positions around, due to existing tenured professors' delaying retirement and institutions' financial calculus. One would expect that the decreased chance of landing a tenure-track position would be reflected in a paucity of applicants for graduate programs. Has this been the case? If not, perhaps we should re-evaluate the tenure hypothesis.

One issue that doesn't seem to be getting much attention in the discussion--the impact of large government subsidies on university governance. Won't the size and structure of these subsidies slow down much-needed reform?

Posner: "The economic literature on worker cooperatives identifies decisive objections to that form of organization that are fully applicable to university governance. The workers have a shorter horizon than the institution. Their interest is in getting as much from the institution as they can before they retire ...."

This attempt at a nutshell summary of a brief against worker co-operatives seems to commit a serious economic fallacy.

It's true that workers (industrial, professional, or otherwise) generally have "a shorter horizon" than the "institution" that they work for. But that's true of all mortal human beings, not just employees, and the "institution" makes no decisions and takes no actions independently of the decisions and actions of mortal human beings.

So the proper comparison here is not between the horizons and incentives of workers as against the horizons and incentives of the institution, but rather the horizons and incentives of shareholding workers as against the horizons and incentives of shareholders not working for the institution (henceforward: absentee shareholders), and if your concern is for the long-term flourishing of the institution, the questions at hand become (1) whether absentee shareholders have longer "horizons" than shareholding workers, or vice versa; (2) whether absentee shareholders are less likely than shareholding workers to milk the institution for personal gain within the "horizon" of their own relationship to the institution at the expense of the long-term flourishing of the institution, or vice versa; (3) whether absentee shareholders are more willing and/or better able than shareholding workers to discover the best means of serving the interests of the institution within their short-term horizons, or vice versa; and (4) whether absentee shareholders are more willing and/or better able than shareholding workers to discover the best means of serving the interests of the institution beyond the short-term horizons of their personal relationship to the University.

These questions are important, and I think not obviously to be answered in favor of control by absentee shareholders, at least not in every imaginable case. (And since the structure and goals of the University make it an atypical case compared to factories, restaurant chains, shipping companies, and other for-profit enterprises, it seems like special caution is needed here.)

But they remain unasked as long as we pretend that the mystical body of The Institution will somehow be making decisions once mortal workers are no longer playing a substantive role in decision-making.

You're going to need a much stronger case before you can justify such a radical set of policy proposals as the "accountable to none save the Board" platform for University CEOs that you've outlined here.

An observation: Summers headstone should read-
"Here lies Larry Summers,
Victim of Political Correctness"
The only trusim in this entire sordid chapter is that placating the P.C. beasts only whets their respective appetites for greater concessions. Churchill's description of appeasement, i.e., the belief that if you feed the crocodile he will eat you last, is entirley applicable. Summers' mistake was in groveling to the P.C. crowd in the wake of his controversial--and yet highly defensible--comments concerning the number of women in the sciences. Rather than sate the appetities of those who were offended, such acts and statements only signaled weakness and invited greater boldness on the part of his opponents. The eventual result was the end of Summers' presidency at Harvard (and proof that the inmates are running the asylum?). Do we dare take this lesson as proof of how we, as a country, must act in light of a world filled with terrorists and their P.C. apologists/defenders?

This is not easily quantifiable, but ask your neighbor the academic why they suffered through grad school and I doubt they will respond by gleefully proclaiming "tenure!"

I would. I know plenty of other who would, too. So, maybe I'm overgeneralizing from my own experience (in the sciences), but I can't imagine going through all this crap without the hope for tenure down the line.

One would expect that the decreased chance of landing a tenure-track position would be reflected in a paucity of applicants for graduate programs. Has this been the case?

As usual with economic arguments, this neglects the fact that people aren't rational decision makers. Most of the peopel I knew in grad school knew that the number of jobs were small, but had large enough egos to think that it would be the other person who wouldn't get the job.

You need to echo these sentiments in an op-ed in either the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. It is important that people hear what you have to say, Judge. I am genuinely worried about the state of our great American universities. The larger they become, the more I worry that their quality might falter for organizational reasons. Please contact one of the papers. It is important.

At the Macro level, the Summers/Harvard issue is somewhat akin to the Napoleon/Europe analogy. Here is a strong willed and perceptive indvidual who dragged Europe into the modern age Kicking and Screaming. And for his efforts was sent to Elba and St. Helena. Same with Summers, on only a much smaller metaphorical scale.

Where as, on the Micro Level, it's an interesting study in group dynamics and interpersonal relationships and organizational behaivor. Perhaps the University and the Board will learn something from it and move into the twenty first century. But, I kind of doubt it.

Enron Ali said: This "hypothesis" doesn't even need to be tested, it has been empirically verified beyond question.

This is rich coming from the person who is telling others they don't understand the scientific research method.

Enron Ali goes on to say: Yet it seems to be the basis for his critics' claim that he said women are cognitively inferior to men. I stand by my earlier point that much of the original criticism was based on willful misrepresentation of his remarks, and that unless you don't know what a standard deviation is, there's little to disagree with in what he actually said.

If one wants to test Summers' hypothesis, they would look at skewness and higher moments, not standard deviation. Which reminds me that Enron Ali also doubted other people's knowledge of statistics.

In sum I hope Enron Ali realizes that he is commenting on the Becker-Posner blog.

On a different note, perhaps Enronal's disquiet holds a lesson. Given the actions of Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences, people may not give benefit of doubt to Professors in even major research universities. Perhaps besides Harvard, academic associations in arts and sciences should re-examine this issue [Neither is going to happen but...].

I agree with Judge Posner that professors are not the appropriate persons to run the institution, but for slightly different reasons. Professors' perspectives, like those of employees of any institution, will always be biased towards their own (or their department's) needs, rather than the good of the institution as a whole. That is one of the primary benefits of hierarchical management such that ultimate decision-making authority is vested in a decision-maker whose success is measured by overall performance rather than of a part of the system.

Professors are tasked with producing distinct "products" (i.e. informative classes, research, etc.) just as the workers at GM's plants are charged with making automobiles. That is the fallacy in the argument that professors should run the show because removing them would remove the core of the university. In any enterprise, removing those persons who make the product would undermine its existence, but that does not mean the producers should therefore run the show.

Who should run the institution and for whose benefit? In the corporate model the answer is simpler, but I am surprised at Judge Posner's characterization thereof. It is my understanding that the ultimate authority of a corporation lies not with the president/CEO, but with the Board of Directors. (Isn't that the thrust of Sarbanes-Oxley, not to mention common-law fiduciary duties of directors?) Why? Because directors are (at least in theory, notwithstanding a trend toward relaxing their duties) supposed to serve as fiduciaries managing the assets (i.e. the corporation) of owners (i.e. shareholders) because the shareholders cannot do so themselves due to their numbers, and lack of incentives and skills. Corporation management is, at least in theory, accountable to the Board, and the CEO serves at the Board's pleasure. Thus, a CEO is incentivized to make the corporation successful because his or her job depends on running the corporation in accordance with the shareholders' interests (as determined by the Board, their fiduciaries).

That brings us to University trustees, who under the corporate model should run the institution in the sense of holding ultimate decision-making power. The problem, as identified, is for whom are they "trustees"? To whom do they owe fiduciary duties and to whom should they be accountable?

The best answer may be to alumni. Alumni have a strong interest in upholding the long term academic quality of their universities because the value of their degrees, and resulting effects on their own careers, reputations, etc. is dependent on the continuing reputation of their schools. A school's reputation for academic quality might be called the value of alumni's interest in the university.

Alumni are also entitled to some sort of "ownership rights" because they have generally contributed "capital", both real, in the form of their tuition dollars, and intangible, in the form of their participation in the school and their effects on the university during their academic career, as well as their effects on its reputation by virtue of their post-graduation career. Alumni are also the main target of universities' fund raising drives, as we all know ;), which in itself provides an incentive to run universities in accordance with alumni's interests.

I suspect many academics would find this model alarming, but I believe it is, at least in part, part of the current approach, and perhaps a desirable part of it. More focus on it could also lead to accountability for professors, with the desirable result that "research" would mean searching for truth and new ideas, rather than confirmation of existing dogmas; and that universities would be forced to create a marketplace of ideas, valuing diversity of thought just as alumni in the real world have diverse views, rather than the groupthink, ivory-tower isolationism that prevails too often in universities today.

As I am not a Harvard alum, I find it a bit amusing how deeply so many people seem to care about the fate of Larry Summers. It seems that his resignation embodies, to many, either all that is wrong with academia or all that is right with it. May I be politically incorrect for a moment and submit that perhaps it is neither? By most press accounts that I have read, Larry Summers appears to have been the victim of his own rough demeanor rather than of some great political struggle. He simply ticked off a few too many people over the last five years to remain an effective leader of the country's most famous (as opposed to "best") academic institution. We have all seen well-meaning people lose everything by putting their feet in their mouths one too many times. I submit that the lesson to be learned from Summers' departure runs no deeper.

The Posner comment does not evaluate Summers� role in the ousting of the Dean of Arts and Sciences. Maybe his organizational theory does not have anything to say about the role of such a �division head� in the corporate enterprise that is higher education, but if it does have something to say it would be nice to know what.

Generally, Posner seems sympathetic to the political institutions of a public corporation. But most people would not defend them as political institutions for a state. Indeed they are often criticized as illiberal or worse. So much more argument is needed as to why they suit a university, even if we were to take for granted that they are optimal for whatever it is that we expect public corporations to do. (I do not take this for granted.)

Posner�s points about employee loyalties may be well taken and yet still amount to a (partial) indictment rather than defense of the form of organization he favors. If the politics of corporations (or universities or, for that matter, countries) are such that employees or citizens are uninterested in the enterprise beyond what they can personally get from it, then that fact (on its own) speaks badly of the form of organization. It seems reasonable to expect that an optimal form of organization would be one in which the participants have something at stake besides their own narrowly defined self-interest. This is likely true, on the one hand, because there is some intrinsic good being a part of a project that you support instead of merely treating as a necessary means to your earning a living, teaching the subject you love, etc. It�s also likely true because commitment to the goals of an organization is prima facie conducive to furthering those goals better.

As for shareholders, they face well known collective problems that prevent them from disciplining management. The trustees are, Posner says, analogous to the board. But there are no shareholders in a public corporation such as Harvard (as Posner acknowledges). So the analogy breaks down or is complicated in a way that requires further explanation.

Posner refers to the supposed incapacity of university faculties for collective action. But this also might be an apt criticism that cuts against rather than supporting his point. Perhaps other faculties should be engaged in cooperative research to the extent that (Posner says) hard science faculties are. Perhaps there are defects in the organization of universities that are preventing this. Also, why should we believe that academics supposed incapacity for working together on research implies that they cannot effectively participate in university governance? No arguments were offered there.

Also, West�s absenteeism was not Summer�s only beef with him. It may not have been the most important factor in his criticism of West. Nor, if accurate, was it as controversial a criticism as Summers� disapproval of West�s extracurricular activities.

I reluctantly agree that Summers� ousting was unfortunate. Not that I share his attitude toward West or women in science. I share neither. But I think that universities do need to have difficult conversations and that certain orthodoxies are, in fact, functioning as band-aids that cover up issues in great need of discussion.

As to the arguments with pay and tenure I think the idea that English profs would be just as good if we significantly reduced compensation (i.e. tenure) is greatly mistaken.

Yes as an english prof they might not have skills that are in high demand outside of academia. However, I would argue that the abilities that make one a good professor in anything have a high correlation with general intelligence, and in the humanities perhaps skills at speaking or presentation/writing. In other words if you didn't make academica an attractive option these people might very well go become succesfull buisnessmen.

Also I'm sure someone else has pointed out the importance of tenure in academic freedom/unpopular research.

Also I think posner's comment that English profs have nothing to contribute to financial deciscions should be read as saying English profs in general have nothing to add not that intelligent ideas/comments by english profs couldn't happen occasionally. However, it does seem right that insofar as one is concerned with how to handle the money (what sorts of investments to make) consulting the english profs (or math profs, or cs profs) doesn't really make too much sense. But if one is concerned with the values that underly those choices (should we favor research or education) they have just as much expertise as anyone (at basic value judgements not derived ones).

However, the fact that english profs aren't experts really has nothing to do with how much power should rest in the faculty body. As posner seems to understand in the rest of his post the question of whom should ultimately have the power through the indirect means of elected officials is not about expertise but motivations. It makes sense to give the US citizen the ultimate power in the US because it is the interests of the country as a whole that the government is supposed to serve. As I argued above I think that the professors as a whole have motivations most closely parrallel to those of the university as a whole so it also makes sense for ultimate power to rest in them.

Addendum to my previous post: to make the model
consistent with the corporate one, trustees' duties
run to the institution, not directly to shareholders
(in my model alumni), but alumni could exercise
control through voting trustees in and out. And
alumni could always have shareholders' derivative
rights... but my point is the "executive" should be
accountable to some one, the trustees, and they
should also be accountable to some stakeholder,
in my model, alumni.

An interesting debate on this board is the argument as to whether governance based on our federal government model or the corporate model is superior. Does it depend on whether one sees a university as essentially a producer or rather a mini nation-state? IMHO, a university's purpose is more akin to a corporation, the purpose of which is to produce something for its products' purchasers (students), for the benefit of its owners, than a nation-state, the purpose of which is to perpetuate the good of its citizens.

The governing of corporations has at times left much to be desired, but so too has our democratic republican form of government. Problems in both systems generally arise from the same source-- a lack of accountability of elected officials. Such failures are not indictments of the governing structures so much as a result of institutionalized tolerance of non-accountability.

In previous comments, I have compared tenure to the stock option packages received by executives in a corporation, and to shares of a general partnership.

The more I consider it, the more it seems to me that tenure is effectively a way to give a profitable ownership share of a non-profit organization.

If universities were actually for-profit corporations, then they could compensate their employees with grants of shares or stock options. Like tenure, grants of stock options would (a) not be an immediate cash expense for the corporation; (b) have a true cost which was hard to measure; (c) be thought to encourage employee loyalty and align the employee's interest with the corporation's interest, although as we know, neither tenure nor stock options function perfectly in this regard.

However since universities are non-profit organizations, they are stuck with tenure as an ownership-stake-like form of compensation. Giving out shares of trusteeship of the university would be problematic, since the shares could not be sold and members of a non-profit corporation cannot financially benefit from their membership.

Perhaps some market-minded university should create a market in "tenure shares"! Of course, I suppose this is what Posner means by a "buy-out program": the university will buy back tenure shares from some professors, at the market price.

DAB: The default assumption should be that different institutions need different governance structures appropriate to their particular purposes. Posner would like us to adopt the working hypothesis that public corporations' governance institutions would be a good model for universities. I responded skeptically, by pointing out that virtually everyone agrees that the corporate model is not for EVERYTHING (in particular it is not for government). So we need an argument why universities and corporations have so much in common.

One response to this is indeed that corps and universities have or should have profit making in common (unlike government).

But the distinction between for-profit and non-profit is way to thin a distinction on which to base a choice between corporate-like and democratic government-like institutions. Posner's argument is painting with way to broad a brush in my opinion.

Lots of straw man arguments here.

Larry Summers failed to be an effective president because he tried to bully the faculty at FAS the same way economic professors bully students and lower rank professors.

And this is not just an interpersonal skills issue, it makes me wonder who rises to the top of academia, the most brilliant or the biggest bullies.

No mention of the "tawdry" Shleifer affair here either and their consequences for Russia's people.

After reading the Institutional Investor article why should I believe top economists are really concerned about poverty, development or welfare?

This is a bit of a digression, but I had an acquaintance who taught at both the University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law. She told me that she was surprised how well the faculty at the University of Chicago worked together. People with very different world views were able to work side by side.

She claimed that at Harvard, she felt, the different sides often acted as if they were at war with each other. Some camps really hated each other.

I have no idea if that is because of the structure of the schools, the personalities involved, or how close you might be to New York. I would assume that a few can set the tone, and a generation can pass before the echoes stop.

Perhaps the Arts and Sciences faculty at Harvard is more interested in winning minor battles rather then having real academic debates that lead to meaningful insight and knowledge.

logicnazi:

"If we try and connect non-discrimination with equality of group ability we are going to get fucked if one day we ever do discover a correlation between ethnicity, gender, or whatever and ability in some area."

Oh, you mean like how the gay rights movement got fucked a few decades ago, when its radical element had to abandon tabula rasa Marxist heterosexuality-as-grand-historical-conspiracy arguments? Nope, instead it latched onto the improved lay view of human nature, swapping out huge chunks of ethical reasoning, and it kept its momentum.

It is clear from David's comment that I did not make my point clearly enough. First, note Judge Posners comment that "Summers' resignation should, but will not, precipitate serious thinking at Harvard about transformative change." Kissinger's remarks are appropos to the situation at Harvard because this dispute was not about the future of the university. Let's not be distracted by the faculty cabal's disingenuous argument about Summers' ineffectiveness as a leader; this was about executing a vendetta. It was petty. And there was little at stake for the faculty because they aren't putting their jobs on the line, nor are they apt to change the direction of the university by removing the president. On the contrary, the faculty has effectively voted in favor of organizational inertia.

If I understand Judge Posner's argument, Harvard would be better off if the role of the faculty more closely resembled an employee model rather than a worker cooperative model. I agree with him. I understand that this might have negative implications for "academic freedom," but does such a thing even exist at Harvard anymore? I think the Harvard faculty has made it pretty clear that it will not tolerate provocative questions, so perhaps it is time for the faculty to explain why it deserves the privilege of academic freedom in the first place.

I logged onto this site because I was doing some research on Posner's writings and saw a link on a list of publications. What a disappointment--I expected more intellegent entries than Mr. Posner's unbridled indignation.
Mr. Posner, your article on the resignation of Mr. Summers is just plain silly. In the world of business and institutions (financial, academic or otherwise) CEOs,presidents, managers,etc. get booted out of their jobs all the time (at higher levels they resign). Why? Because they fail to lead and keep together a relatively conflict-free team. The level of conflict wasn't good for Harvard and I imagine that even Mr. Summers would agree to that. I don't have enough reliable information to know if Summer's ideas for the university were good or not, but to give him the benefit of the doubt, let us agree that his ideas were wonderful.However, good ideas are not what make a good leader or Harvard president--a necessary but not sufficient condition you might say.It seems to me that Mr. Summers would do well to take a few courses in leadership skills.
Or was it that he was expecting tenure as president?

"he had the temerity to challenge the absenteeism of a prominent faculty member, Cornel West, who as a result resigned in a huff"

it happens all the time. certain groups (eg, women) that were truly oppressed 20-30 years ago get away with murder today. okay, not "murder", but absenteeism, questionable work ethic, not acessible, etc. this is a very hard issue for a high-performing, diverse organization that offers opportunity to a wide variety of people.

If I understand Judge Posner's argument, Harvard would be better off if the role of the faculty more closely resembled an employee model rather than a worker cooperative model. I agree with him. I understand that this might have negative implications for "academic freedom," but does such a thing even exist at Harvard anymore? I think the Harvard faculty has made it pretty clear that it will not tolerate provocative questions, so perhaps it is time for the faculty to explain why it deserves the privilege of academic freedom in the first place.

"Faculty pay is far better than they can get elsewhere with their degrees."

I have a law degree and am working very hard to break $120,000.00. My brother has a M.A. in history, runs his own business and made a pre-tax income of $750,000.00. He thinks that his study of history gives him an advantage over his competitors. He owns a Jeep dealership and is of the opinion that the communication skills he learned in school prepared him for business. He thinks that in his course of study he was required to read critically and because all his tests were in essay form, he is light years ahead of students from business school. Bill says there are no multiple choice questions in real life. Had he stayed for his Ph.D would they pay him $750,000.00 a year to teach?

"it happens all the time. certain groups (eg, women) that were truly oppressed 20-30 years ago get away with murder today. okay, not "murder", but absenteeism, questionable work ethic, not acessible, etc."

I have some news for you. The competence of members of "certain groups" who rise to positions of power and respect in elite institutions is more easily and more often brought into question by members of the privileged majority.

Here at Indiana, our own University president has been facing severe criticism almost since his first day as the first african-american president the university has ever seen. (This criticism waned when he landed two of the largest donations the school had ever seen right at the height of the attacks, but it has not stopped.) Black Professors at this school are faced with a non-rebuttable presumption by students that they were Affirmative Action hires and are somehow less competent. (Ironically, the few black professors here are among the most independently brilliant.)

Do you believe that Cornel West was the only professor at Harvard who engaged in outside research or pushed the boundaries of traditional academic practice? Do you think he was even the most prominent professor to do so? I see Tribe and Dershowitz on TV so often I wonder if they even have time to teach a seminar.

The same can be said for women in sciences. Against the historical background of overt racism and sexism, minorities and women enter fields where their presense is still unique enough to be a topic of conversation. They perform under greater scrutiny that is inevitable when a field has not moved beyond token participation rates. People have not stopped presuming that women and minorities are somehow inferior, they have simply stopped talking about it. True oppression does not disappear within a generation.

If you find that statement controversial, think about Summers' choice of targets. (Women in science, West.) Think about women or blacks in academia that have been first introduced to you in a context of a referendum on their competence.

Those who find political correctness to be a limiting concept should look critically at the contents of the statements that they would want to make if sensitivity to oppressed groups was not the norm.

Corey

you make interesting points.

i realize that some groups of people face hostile and uncomfortable environments, and that this can affect performance and outcomes. I also realize white males occassionally have to miss work, and people may not instantly jump to stereotypical conclusions. i also realize there are gains from building inclusive environments and giving people opportunity, including protection from sabotagers.

the flip side: people have had anecdotal experiences. people pay a lot of money to go to fancy private schools. some can compare fancy private school to state university.

Judge Posner: "The result is a faculty many of whose members are both smug and superannuated."

I cannot agree more with Judge Posner. I would add that this in part explains why a typical university faculty today has so few minority members - women, people not of the white race. Hiring and promotion decisions/recommendations are made by the current tenured members of the faculty. Being perceived as one of the same type, as a conforming colleague, as sharing the same values, is critical to a favorable hiring decision for a university faculty, much more so than most of the for-profit organizations.

The summers resignation bodes ill for the fate of university presidents everywhere. Every university president is now fully cognizant of the dire consequences of deviating from the liberal agenda. Presidents are now enslaved by the predominantly liberal faculty. Im reminded of Hayeks eternal words of how we're now on "the road to serfdom".

Here is perhaps something interesting:

What is the impact on profits from women at legacy organizations who take many maternity leaves?

How does this compare to a single person (no kids, not married) who works diligently at a corporation or organization?

How much does maternity insurance cost?

How many maternity leaves does a typical large employer fund during a year? Do or can corporations manage this expense? (similar to any other expense)

Is it possible: from Friedan to bankruptcy? What is "privilege" today vs. 30 years ago?

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