Inside, the room was packed. Ellison, Gross, Summers, and Kirby sat at a round table on the stage.

All were silent when Matory, the first professor to speak, walked up to the microphone to introduce his motion: “Twenty years. Twenty years. That is the average length of a Harvard president’s tenure. And that is why our vote today matters.” Matory spoke slowly, deliberately, and confidently.

He finished by restating his motion: “I hereby move that the Faculty vote, by secret ballot, on the following resolution: ‘The Faculty lacks confidence in the leadership of Lawrence H. Summers.’”

A proposal by East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department Chair Philip A. Kuhn to postpone the vote failed, and at 5:12 p.m. professors began filling out the pre-distributed yellow ballots and dropping them into black boxes circulating around the room.

Phillips Professor of Early American History Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a member of the docket committee, announced the results of the vote about half an hour later. Defying everyone’s—including Matory’s—expectations, the no confidence motion passed, 218 to 185 with 18 abstentions.

Gasps and murmurs of shock resonated throughout the theater. At the front of the room, Summers and Kirby betrayed visible disbelief. When Ulrich had finished her statement—announcing that Skocpol’s more mild motion to censure the president had also passed—Summers covered his mouth with his hand.

Following the vote, faculty members filed out of the building, met by a swarm of journalists. “There is no noble alternative for him but resignation,” Matory proclaimed in an impromptu news conference.

A rowdy group of about 40 protesters, who marched from the Science Center to the Loeb, met Matory as he made his statement. When Summers left the building, their chants of “Na na na na, hey Larry, good bye” drowned out the president’s statement to the press.

The “crisis of confidence” that began exactly four weeks before had reached its climax.

THE DENOUEMENT

The crisis ended almost as abruptly as it began.

The next Faculty meeting, on April 12, became the first since January where discussion was not dominated by the controversy over Summers’ leadership. In fact, after Matory delivered a speech against Summers and called upon the Harvard Corporation to “rescue us from this crisis,” the harsh rhetoric of February and March began to fade further and further into the past.

Of the 200 professors in attendance, only one applauded, offering two brief claps after Matory’s speech. The faculty went on to discuss the curricular review, which they had been scheduled to take up two months earlier.

At the next meeting, on May 3, even Matory appeared to have tempered his rhetoric. He asked Summers how he planned to increase the number of non-white administrators and professors, and how he would try to bring former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 back to Harvard—but did not directly attack Summers’ leadership. And two weeks later, at the last Faculty meeting of the year, the 150 or so professors in attendance heard further presentations of the curricular review. There was no mention of the crisis that had defined the Faculty for the better part of a semester.

“What we had in the course of this was a very full discussion and a really full dialogue, a full airing of views in the Faculty with the president,” Kirby says of this year’s Faculty meetings.