Given an increasing reliance on science and scientific analysis, Summers said students will need to have real understanding a “working knowledge” of scientific method.

Likewise, Summers said, part of Harvard students’ education should involve a greater honing of oratorical skills and communication through speech.

“It is not as clear to me that we do enough to make sure that our students graduate with the ability to speak and present ideas orally in a cogent and concise fashion to persuade others of their points of view, to reason to an important decision with moral and ethical implications, to structure a complex decision-problem,” he told the audience. “And yet to succeed in the worlds that most will enter, our students will be expected to know how to collaborate with others on substantive problems and how to negotiate with others to reach effective outcomes.”

Summers also touched on the role of extracurriculars at the College, and the lessons those examining the curriculum should take from it.

According to Summers’ speech, surveys show that students at the College are more satisfied with their extracurricular activities than their academics.

While some have suggested that Summers wants to refocus students’ attention on their academic lives, he said in his speech that he hopes the curricular review recognizes “the importance of extracurricular activities for student life and learning.”

Echoing suggestions urged by outgoing Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68—an advocate of extracurriculars whose ouster has been cited as evidence of Summers’ desire to diminish their role—Summers said that the curriculum should seek to “incorporate aspects of our students’ extracurricular experience that make them so meaningful” and to “find more ways to let students work in groups, to set their own direction and to be guided by mentors in their areas of interest.”

A final nucleus of the address was Summers’ expressed hopes that Harvard equip students to tackle what he called the “defining challenge of our time,” specifically “the relationship between developing countries and the developed world.”

Describing successful outcomes in this area as on par with the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, Summers said it is essential that Harvard students “understand and think about parts of the world remote from themselves…meet people from other countries here and abroad, study texts from other civilizations and grapple with cultures and social structures different from their own.”

Connected to this goal, Summers hinted that he hopes to increase the number of international students at the College—a potentially controversial move—saying that the University should seek out “ever more actively students from disadvantaged backgrounds and top students from all over this world.”

“There is no question that Harvard is a distinctively American institution, and it will remain so,” Summers said. “But in this century more than ever, it must be an American institution open to the world.”

International Values

Following Summers’ address to the annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association, Zedillo took the podium to speak in defense of international organizations, cautioning the U.S. on the dangers of unilateralism.

Zedillo, who is now a professor of international economics and politics at Yale, praised the progress enabled by “the international system of rules and institutions that was developed in the period around the end of the Second World War.”

“International institutions have fostered a greater convergence of values than ever in human history. For the first time in history, most of the world’s governments are democratic,” Zedillo said. “A principal reason for this universality of rights and values is the wide array of United Nations documents that define and prescribe them.”