THE SECOND ACT

As faculty members poured into the lecture hall, overflowing the room’s 350 seats, Summers met with members of his staff and the docket committee in the basement and took a moment by himself in an empty classroom.

At the start of the meeting, Summers found his seat next to Kirby at a round table set up in the lecture hall.

Summers opened the meeting, asking Kirby to moderate and saying, “My desire is simply to listen.”

In the two hours that ensued, several Summers supporters—primarily fellow economics professors—emerged from the woodwork to rally to the side of the president.

While professors still leveled heavy criticism at Summers, his detractors took a more conciliatory tone than a week before.

But a key confrontation near the meeting’s end drew attention back to differences between the broader Faculty and its leadership, when former Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles proposed a three-person committee to mediate between the president and the Faculty.

In response to the proposal, Reid Professor of English and American Literature Philip J. Fisher took the microphone and called the idea undemocratic.

“I find myself in a meeting that has the slight feeling of an arranged outcome to it,” Fisher said to thunderous applause.

Knowles’ face betrayed shock, and Summers’ showed visible disappointment.

And although a vote of confidence had not been proposed—the rules stipulate that 80 percent of professors must approve calling a vote not placed on the agenda beforehand—Professor of Anthropology and of African and African American Studies J. Lorand Matory ’82 said after the meeting that he would put such a vote on the docket for the next meeting of the full Faculty in March.

THE FINAL ACT

By mid-March, news of Summers’ “crisis of confidence” had moved off the nation’s front pages and, to the casual observer, it seemed that Summers had weathered the storm.

But in the meantime, Matory had placed his motion on the docket, calling for an explicit up-or-down vote on Summers’ leadership. Most professors at the time believed it would not pass.

On Tuesday, March 15, the national spotlight turned to Harvard once again. The meeting had been moved to an even larger venue, the Loeb Drama Center, and by the time Summers arrived, the intersection of Brattle Street and Appian Way was teeming with journalists, protesters, and curious onlookers.