Lawrence Summers
PER
Summers Lawrence Summers
Lawrence Summers was ostensibly in charge of Harvard, but he had little power to fire or hire anyone. Summers could veto new hires and try to push departments in new directions. We'd be as genuinely puzzled as the Harvard professors who wrote to me after I mentioned an issue that arose under Summers: the complaint that the history department didn't offer a traditional survey course on the American Revolution and the writing of the Constitution. Lawrence Summers was ostensibly in charge of Harvard, but he had little power to fire or hire anyone. Summers could veto new hires and try to push departments in new directions -- but once the faculty got annoyed, he was out of a job.