In Harvard Radical, JAMES TRAUB writes of Lawrence Summers:

He wants to change the undergraduate curriculum so that students focus less on "ways of knowing" and more on actual knowledge. He wants to raise quantitative kinds of knowledge to something like parity with traditionally humanistic kinds of knowledge....he wants to assert certain traditional verities, or rather open an intellectual space in which such verities can at least be posited. "The idea that we should be open to all ideas...is very different from the supposition that all ideas are equally valid."

The intellos look at each other in consternation. "On 'actual knowledge' instead of on 'ways of knowing'! Outrageous! And how dare he suggest that all ideas are not equally valid!Especially because this will probably influence other American universities":

by virtue of occupying the most commanding heights of the culture, Harvard has traditionally exercised enormous influence. If undergrad inorganic chemistry is now going to be taken to be as much a staple as political philosophy at Harvard, then your children may be more scientifically literate (and less philosophically literate) than you are.

The intellos look at each other in consternation. "Scientifically literate? That means no bullshit theorizing! Gack!"

Harvard's greatest presidents have been an exceptionally cold and nasty lot. One of them, Charles W. Eliot, once said that the most important attribute of a college president is the capacity to inflict pain.

Whoops, that's not so funny--except it's not exactly news that the faculty might not love the top adminstrator.

"It's fair to say that he's into facts." Almost all of Summers's friends are economists or policy types (though he is currently dating a Harvard English professor, Elisa New); he does not read serious fiction; he shows few signs of aesthetic sensitivity; he is a slovenly dresser and not a terribly tidy eater.

The intellos look at each other in consternation. "What? Not reading our unreadable novels?"

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks took place soon after Summers took office and inflected his presidency in ways that could scarcely have been anticipated. While much of the university world took the view that the United States must in some important way have been responsible for the attacks, Summers says that he felt called to speak up for patriotic values. At a speech at the Kennedy School in late October, he chided the school's dean for failing to include a uniformed officer among those the school was honoring for public service.

The intellos look at each other in disbelief. "Patriotism?"

the economist Dale Jorgenson, said that Summers "feels that universities in general have forgotten that they're part of the nation" and wants to restore a sense of "moral clarity" to campus discourse.

The intellos look at each other in consternation. "Whatever happened to moral relativism?"

In the spring of 2002, he attended a discussion about globalization with the faculty of the Graduate School of Education. "They were going in the direction that globalization pointed to the need for more education directed at multicultural understanding," he said. "And I said that I thought globalization meant global competition, and that it made the basic capacity to read and do arithmetic more important." I asked Summers what the response had been. "It was," he said dryly, "seen as a distinctive perspective."

The intellos look at each other in consternation. "Aw, gee! No blaming European and Western civilization for all the world's ills?"

in 1978, when Harvard adopted a "core" of courses in fields of inquiry that spanned domains, including historical study, moral reasoning, social analysis, science, music and art, literature and so on. These courses are designed to introduce "approaches to knowledge" rather than specific information and thus legitimized a trend throughout education toward ways of knowing rather than knowledge.

The intellos look at each other smugly. "Absolutely. Since there is no such thing as truth, there's no real knowledge, but simply ways of knowing."

The fundamental reason Summers wants to change the undergraduate curriculum is that, as he explains, the nature of knowledge has changed so radically. Summers often says that one of the two most important phenomena of the last quarter-century is the revolution in the biological sciences. And yet, as he also often says, while it is socially unacceptable at an elite university to admit that you haven't read a Shakespeare play, no stigma at all attaches to not knowing the difference between a gene and a chromosome or the meaning of exponential growth. Summers compares this ignorance to the provinciality of never having traveled abroad.

The intellos look at each other in consternation. "This is outrageous! No one should care about Shakespeare or about scientific literacy! It's all about race, class and gender!"

"More and more areas of thought have become susceptible to progress," he said, "susceptible to the posing of questions, the looking at the world and trying to find answers, the coming to views that represent closer approximations of the truth." Tools of measurement have become ubiquitous, as well as extraordinarily refined.

The intellos look at each other in consternation. "Finding anwsers? Truth? This is an outrage!"

He says he believes in what he calls "the aspiration of systematizing and presenting to students areas of human thought," which is more or less what Harvard's old general education system accomplished until it was replaced by the core. He said, with a nervous laugh -- he knew he was treading on thin ice -- "It is more important for students to have a basic understanding of literature than of the current fashions in literary theory." All things considered, he said, "I'd like to see us emphasize more knowing."

The intellos look at each other in consternation. Their heads explode.