---

Volume CCXXXII, Number 22    June, 2002       Worcester, Massachusetts        Since 1770

---

By A. Lawrence Lowell
Education Correspondent

A specter is haunting Harvard: the specter of inflation.

Once only seen in the President's office and among a few senior insufferable academics, ego inflation has exploded at Harvard, to the point where few if any adults on campus seem immune from its ill effects.

Unbearable Harvard egos have been spotted all across Cambridge, and Allston, for that matter. Veteran Harvard-gazers start in the President's office, newly occupied by one of the most obnoxious individuals to ever inhabit the ground floor of Massachusetts Hall (including yours truly).

In just a few short months, outrageously inflated Larry Summers has managed to alienate and polarize the entire community gratuitously. Summers decided it was up to him to discipline one particular peripatetic university professor – Cornel West – for supposedly spending too much time away from campus and on non-academic disputes. Old Harvard hands still remember the semesters Ken Galbraith spent in Gstaad (when not collecting a check from Uncle Sucker). Some have even questioned whether the stupendously inflated Alan Dershowitz's efforts on behalf of murderer O.J. Simpson and rapist Mike Tyson bristle with academic merit. But of course, Galbraith and Dershowitz were (and still are) white men.

Summers has been so busy hectoring Professor West that he hasn't had time to pay his janitors a magnificent $10 per hour. Hey, at that rate, Harvard will blow its entire $16,000,000,000 endowment on blue-collar salaries by the year 45,658.

Some on campus argue, however, that ego inflation isn't more serious now than in the past. They note that the grotesquely inflated Harvey Mansfield was peddling his grading crackdown in the supposedly halcyon 1970's. Now, of course, with Big Larry, he's found someone who, to the astonishment of the school and probably of ol' Harv himself, actually might be listening to him.

In his thirty-year crusade to saddle undergraduates with C's, Harvey hasn't shown much interest in being graded on the education of undergraduates, which some might argue is an important and useful role that Harvard College could, if it so chose, play. While the Harvard faculty gives itself an A, impartial outsiders (not to mention the students) give Harvard a C+ for its lecture-heavy professor-light undergraduate program. Talk about grade inflation.

To be fair, ego inflation is an equal-opportunity despoiler. Larry Summers could have kept his cakehole shut, but half an hour with the President of Harvard, even Larry, is probably not sufficient provocation to throw a hissy fit and stomp off to that racial utopia, Princeton, N.J. On the other hand, if you had to choose between Larry Summers snarling at you and Amy Gutmann whispering sweet apercus in your, um, ear, which would you choose?

But the greatest battle of the Harvard Zeppelins is hardly well begun. The majestic President Summers has decreed that one or more parts of the school will decamp dreary old Cambridge for the barren wasteland of -- Allston, Massachusetts? Summers and the faculty of arts and sciences gaze covetously across Cambridge Street at the convenient quadrangle now being occupied by some trade school or another.

The legendary flexibility, open-mindedness and humility of the alumni and the faculty of the Harvard Law School need not be recounted here, as they would say, in extenso. [That means BS, right? -- Ed.] There's a whole fleet of hydrogen-powered blimps up there, amply supplied by a network of rich, well-placed, stubborn and argumentative alumni, none of whom has happy memories of Torts in Allston. Not many have happy memories of Torts in Langdell, for that matter, but that's a story for another day.

Readers are invited to handicap Summers' chances of deracinating The School of Law and plunking it down somewhere behind the Allston tollbooths. The entertainment value of the coming battle of the Harvard gasbags should keep New England agog for years.

After all, the magnificent spectacle of pompous academics floating majestically in the Cambridge sky has attracted generations of onlookers, coatholders, and even students. Harvard legend has it that each time the President of Harvard or a University Professor speaks to an undergraduate, the statue of John Harvard leaps off his granite throne and dances the kazatsky to Mass. Hall and back. At last report, John was still seated comfortably.