“It’s not a movement that came from within the faculty,” Kishlansky says.

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN

Controversy has surrounded one noteworthy figure whose directives certainly provided an impetus for the report—President Summers.

Many of the broad themes for liberal education stressed in the report’s introduction—including internationalization and the sciences—were first outlined by Summers in a Commencement address last year. Summers told The Crimson last month that he was “pleased that many of the things that I have thought of as particularly important, [such as] broadening the expectation of science for non-scientists, internationalization, increasing faculty-student contact, having courses that survey broad[ly], having knowledge that represents knowing rather than ways of knowing, the emphasis and recognition of the importance of oral as well as written expression, the importance of interdisciplinary approaches...are addressed in one way or another in the review.”

But Summers may have more than just his philosophical imprint on the report—his red-ink may lie between the report’s lines.

One of his Mass. Hall aides, Associate Vice President for Higher Education Policy Clayton Spencer, and Summers himself attended some steering committee meetings, the FAS administrator says, adding that “Clayton saw everything.” Summers says he gave Spencer his suggestions for the report. That steering committee was composed of the three leaders of the review—Gross, Wolcowitz and Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby—the eight co-chairs of the working groups and Carol J. Thompson, an administrator at the Kennedy School of Government who used to serve as an FAS associate dean.

In a May interview, Summers told The Crimson that he saw a draft of the report on which he “made suggestions.”

“I didn’t edit,” he added. “I don’t know the details of the internal processes of the authors’ report.”

But another administrator close to the process says Summers was involved “a lot—either direct or indirect.” Summers’ staff, including Spencer, were “intimately involved” in the editing process, the administrator says, “even rewriting parts of the report.”

And as the deadline of the report approached, the administrator says, Summers began to worry about how the report would turn out.

“He seemed to pull back at one point maybe because he didn’t think it was coming out the way he wanted, and didn’t want to be identified with it,” the administrator says.

University Hall administrators deny that Summers had a heavy hand in the writing and constructing of the report. Kirby insists that Summers “did not play any role in the editing of the report.” Wolcowitz characterizes Summers’ edits of the draft as “not a major reshaping” of the document.

Sources say the tension between Mass. Hall and University Hall was resolved after the review received—to the surprise of Summers and his colleagues—positive press in the Boston Globe and The New York Times.

“A lot of people in Mass. Hall seemed to be surprised by how positive the coverage was,” the administrator familiar with the process says. “They were pleased but a bit puzzled about why the outside press was so favorable. The truth is that the proposal does not have any overall vision or bold new conception.”

The FAS administrator involved with the review agrees that Mass. Hall administrators were not very enthusiastic with the review until they read the coverage it received in national newspapers.