The year ended with a bang for University President Lawrence H. Summers.

After six months of relatively peaceful adjustment and agenda–setting, the first-year president finds himself at the center of a full-blown crisis.

With a department teetering on the verge of revolt and national figures joining the fray, the controversy over Afro-American studies threatens to snowball into a more broadly based criticism of Summers’ tenure as president.

There are signs that Summers still has a chance to escape disaster. As time passes, rhetoric softens, and the odds that the Afro-American studies professors will actually leave dwindles. Less clear, though, are the lessons Summers takes away from this very public battle.

Though Summers won’t comment specifically on the source of ongoing conflict with Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 and other members of the Afro-American studies department, he continues to repeat its root is a “misunderstanding.”

But some who have worked closely with Summers say it was a misunderstanding waiting to happen.

Devil’s Advocate

Summers’ defenders call his style intellectually assertive. Overly aggressive, egotistical and bordering on disrespectful, however, is how Summers’ detractors characterize it.

Throughout his career, this style has been both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. A number of University and Faculty sources point to this personality as a key factor in triggering controversy once again.

In college, Summers was a star debater and developed an obsessive fondness for playing devil’s advocate. The style suited the young academic, who rose rapidly through the ranks of Harvard’s Faculty.

His startling ascent also won him accolades beyond Harvard. When he graduated into the world of Washington policy-making, his personality became more of a hindrance.

A firebrand at times, Summers didn’t hesitate to speak his mind—sometimes at the cost of alienating supporters. He had a reputation for being tactless. While his analysis was always prescient, colleagues say, it was often ruthless.

In considering Summers to be the University’s 27th president, Harvard’s search committee paid close attention to the question of his style. The powerful group was ultimately reassured on that point by Summers’ predecessor, former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin ’60, who told them that his protege was a mellowed man.

Many professors were excited to bring the young, assertive Summers back to Harvard.

But colleagues and friends admitted that he was likely to—in the words of one friend—“ruffle a few feathers.” Some warned that further refinement was probably in order.