“In government, people are more willing to sacrifice egos to do something right,” one friend said last spring. With his move to the administration of notoriously touchy faculty in already established fiefdoms, Summers was going to have to watch himself more closely, the friend predicted.

Since taking over in July, Summers has framed public statements cautiously.

But interviews with faculty members and administrators indicate, Summers has been far more aggressive in private.

Summers runs meetings like dissertation hearings, a dean said. Always playing the devil’s advocate, Summers challenges every statement whether he agrees with it or not, another administrator said. He is “blunt...less than diplomatic, especially in private,” another said.

The current controversy centers on a number of private meetings between Summers and members of the Afro-American studies department. Summers and West met. West came out of that meeting upset.

In the days since the story broke, senior black Faculty members have been quoted in the Boston Globe calling Summers a “bull in a china shop.”

Indeed, as one administrator said, Summers made his points with West “too clearly and heavily, as is his style.”

It was only the venue and the topic of this first fumble that several colleagues found surprising.

“In Washington, senators are barons, but here the barons are the faculty,” one colleague said.

Circumstances surrounding Summers’ dispute with the Afro-American Studies professors were only the proverbial straw on the camel’s back.

Not Neil

But whatever can be said about the president’s style, the natural contrast between Summers and his predecessor, the soft-spoken Neil L. Rudenstine, set up inevitable oppositions.

The nature of Rudenstine’s relationship with the Afro-American department meant that Summers started out on shaky ground.

When Rudenstine arrived at Harvard the Afro-American studies department had one white professor. Rudenstine is credited with building the department into a national powerhouse, and personally recruited many of the department’s senior Faculty.

The department is one of Rudenstine’s crowning achievements.