But unlike the West debacle, both the anti-Semitism and Paulin debates faded into the background as the year progressed, allowing Summers to turn his attention to other areas.

“I think he’s toned down his rhetoric the second year,” said Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, a staunch Summers supporter.

Professor of Psychology Patrick Cavanagh, who wrote of “Ayatollah Summers” in a November letter to the editor in The Crimson about Paulin, has since eased his public criticism.

“I think he’s learning,” Cavanagh said last week. “I think he will lead Harvard into a great new era.”

Also in terms of the year’s internal turmoil, Summers managed to emerge with his hands relatively clean.

Though Summers was a strong supporter of course preregistration—defending it before undergraduates and telling them it was a done deal at House study breaks—he said its ultimate failure did not reflect on his year.

“Preregistration was FAS’s thing,” Summers said in an interview last month.

Indeed, little backlash was directed at Summers.

And though some College administrators said they saw Summers “pulling the strings” from the top, Kirby took full responsibility—and criticism—for the firing of Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 announced in March.

The result—a relatively smooth sail for Summers—allowed him to turn his focus to consolidating his power at the University.

King of the Jungle

Though his interactions with professors and students have resulted in the most public scrutiny, Summers’ chief policy initiatives have been designed within Mass. Hall and haven’t required much in the way of faculty support.

Picking four deans over the past two years, Summers has placed people who share his visions at the top of Harvard’s schools and in doing so has prescribed a direction for their future.

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, who took the helm at the Graduate School of Education (GSE) last July, began a curricular review aimed at refocusing the mission of the school on K-12 education. While that review will require faculty mobilization, Summers’ contribution was in setting the school’s central priority.

In August, William A. Graham was promoted from acting dean to dean of Divinity School, and he too began a curricular review shaped by Summers’ call for more scholarly work.