Now that we've discussed the sex lives of Harvard students, it only seems fair to consider that of their teachers.

In the American Scholar, William Deresiewicz examines the image of the priapic professor in popular film.

The absentminded professor, that kindly old figure, is long gone....

Deresiewicz, an associate professor of English at Yale, writes that the new stereotype is of a bitter, frustrated, and disappointed professor who compensates for his lack of professional success by sleeping with students.

Why are so many of these failed professors also failed writers? Why is professional futility so often connected with sexual impropriety? (In both Terms of Endearment and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, “going to the library” becomes a euphemism for “going to sleep with a student.”) Why are these professors all men, and why are all the ones who are married such miserable husbands?

So many choices....

The first possibility is that today’s academics are portrayed as pompous, lecherous, alcoholic failures because that’s what they are....

But there's more to it than that, apparently..... Deresiewicz winds up suggesting some quite smart ideas about how the failure of teachers to teach has left them vulnerable to being portrayed as failures in everything save lechery.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Justin Murray and Sarah Kinsella talk about the Harvard-based, pro-abstinence group, True Love Revolution. (I know—sounds like a '70s disco orchestra, doesn't it?)

On a campus they describe as saturated with casual sex, Justin and Sarah have helped put abstinence on the map. As they prepare to take their commitment to chastity — and each other — off campus, they leave behind a handful of devotees of a countercultural movement that says abstinence is sexy.

Harvard? Saturated with casual sex?

Well, they seem like nice young people, so I wish them luck. But one day, will they grow up and join the next Bush-like administration and start telling the rest of us what we can and can't do?

That's always the concern, of course.

The Crimson has an interesting piece about the fact that Derek Bok and Drew Faust both dissed ROTC by not showing up at its graduation ceremony this year.

The absence of Bok and Faust from the commissioning ceremony has been criticized by some who fear that it could indicate a shift away from the support for the military shown by Summers.

Bok was chairing his final Corporation meeting; Faust was speaking to Radcliffe alumnae.

Is't it fascinating how each of those other commitments captures something about the priorities of those two people?

While Summers declined to comment on whether he believed Bok or Faust should have attended the ceremony, he wrote in an e-mailed statement that he made an effort to attend the ROTC commissioning ceremonies because he considered it "very important to show institutional support for the students who were entering the armed forces.”

Well. That of course is offering a comment on whether he believed Bok or Faust should have been there. Summers went because he thinks it's important; by implication, Bok and Faust don't.....

"Five years was enough"—that's how Dick Gross explains his resignation as Dean of Harvard College in an e-mail to the Crimson.

Throughout the spring, however, Gross, 56, gave no indication of planning to resign. He said, for instance, that he was considering launching a review of the College's Administrative Board in the fall.

So the discussion about this resignation seems to be centering on a few questions:

1) Did Gross jump or was he pushed, and if the latter, who was the pusher? 2) Who will be the next dean of the college? 3) Should the job again be split into two positions, dean of Harvard College and dean of undergraduate education.

The Wall Street Journal reports on the departure of Blair and Caroline Hoxby for Stanford.

Aside from a sunnier clime, Stanford offered Ms. Hoxby the attractive lure of a tenured position for her husband, Blair Hoxby – something that Harvard, where Mr. Hoxby taught history and literature, had failed to do.

....In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Ms. Hoxby, 41, said the tenure offer had helped clinch the deal. She said she and the Harvard economics department had made various attempts to give the university a chance to keep her, but that “there is a sense in which no one is in charge” at the venerable institution.

Here's the most relevant part of that interview:

Ms. Hoxby, who is 41, joined Harvard's economics department in 1994. Her chairman tried hard to keep her, she said, but she never heard from anyone in the administration. She even telephoned Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's incoming president, to let her know the couple was about to leave, but nothing happened, Ms. Hoxby said.

Hoxby's is a profound criticism: There is no one in charge at Harvard. Is it true? Is Harvard a little, well, adrift?

In the Globe, Steve Bailey tells the story of Stephen Wong, a former Harvard medical scientist who recently decamped to Houston because he got a "an offer he couldn't refuse."

In a star economy, it is stars like Wong we are counting on to again reinvent New England's future. And now Wong is telling us that the old rules no longer apply, that Boston no longer has some inherent intellectual lock over places like Houston. Or two-score cities around the globe for that matter.

...Houston is very hot, Wong says. But it has its advantages. It is newer, he says, with more collaboration and fewer institutional barriers than Boston. "It seems they need me much more than Harvard did," he says.

More collaboration and fewer institutional barriers than Boston....

Drew Faust has spoken about the need for collaboration across boundaries at Harvard, and she's clearly right. This is a significant problem. What many folks at Harvard seem not to want to admit, though, is that the problem is not just structural, fixable with calendar reform and so on. It's cultural. Competition exists much more comfortably at Harvard than cooperation.

If Faust manages to diminish the culture of cutthroat competition and the death grip of secrecy that pervade Harvard, she will really have accomplished something.....

In the Boston Globe, Drake Bennett writes a long essay arguing that Drew Faust is a bold, revisionist historian.

Faust's distinguished career as a historian suggests a temperament quite different from that of her reputation as a consensus builder. Although as an administrator she has by all accounts been a smooth inside operator, as a thinker and writer Faust has displayed a taste for shaking things up.

As evidence, he cites Faust's claim at one academic conference that the real reason the South lost the Civil War was because white women abandoned the cause.

I'm not entirely convinced. Read between the lines, the description of that assertion makes it sound like, to put it crudely, a publicity stunt. (Although bold in that way.)

What seems more accurate is that Faust has been smart enough to look at neglected areas of Civil War historiography—intellectuals and women, primarily. At least in part, this must be a consequence of her own social origins. And her new book, on how the Civil War changed Americans' understanding of death, also seems well-timed.

Another conclusion one might draw is that Drew Faust has an exquisite sense of timing and an appreciation for the importance of filling a vacuum.....

In the Times magazine, David Leonhardt writes an interesting, generally glowing essay about Larry Summers and his intellectual, professional, and personal (not so much personal) evolutions. It's even illustrated with a portrait by fashion photographer Nigel Parry.

(Summers does not always photograph flatteringly, but he usually photographs interestingly, as this portrait shows.)

The piece reinforces the impression that Summers is a fascinating guy with enormous intellectual energy and a certain physical restlessness; I'd bet if you asked him to lay on the beach for two hours, he'd bolt after twenty minutes. He's now on the board of Teach for America, he's joined an advisory board of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and of course he's returning to Harvard. His Clinton era friends are ubiquitous. "In effect, Summers is assembling a virtual think tank," Leonhardt writes, though he strangely doesn't mention that Summers has already helped assemble a real thinktank, the Hamilton Project.

There are a couple of Harvard-related things that I think Leonhardt doesn't get quite right.

..The notion that Summers can be a bully misses one thing: he likes it when people fight back.

I know this is Summers' reputation, and it's surely true some of the time; but as many people told me while I was reporting Harvard Rules, it isn't always true, and there were plenty of occasions when people tried to argue with Summers and he did not respond well. This usually seemed to happen when a matter of policy was at question, rather than an intellectual issue. In other words, Summers was more comfortable having his intellect challenged than his authority or his decision-making.

Leonhardt also writes: But back in academia, where social skills are not a prerequisite for success, he seemed to forget that his new job had more in common with being a cabinet secretary than with being a professor.

Social skills are not a prerequisite for success in academia? Nonsense. If you're engaged in pure intellectual work, perhaps not. But if you have the slightest administrative authority, or wish to, social skills are absolutely vital. I would point you to Neil Rudenstine, Skip Gates, Derek Bok, and Drew Faust. Imagine a President Lawrence Summers with social skills—things could have been very different. Would have been very different.

That said, Leonhardt's piece does capture some of what makes Summers such a compelling figure, and you have to respect the way that he has rebounded from his fall last spring. In some ways, his current role as a sort of intellectual free radical almost seems to suit Summers better than his role as president of Harvard. He's become a kind of economic ombudsman, working on policy issues in numerous different contexts and fora.

Leonhardt's piece was written before Summers received an honorary degree, and I gather from posters below that he garnered a substantial ovation when his award was announced. The rehabilitation is virtually complete. I look forward to see what happens next.

And a final note: The timing of the piece is interesting indeed, hitting the stands just in time for the Harvard reunions. Leonhardt writes that Summers has the reputation of considering himself the smartest guy in every room that he's in. Maybe, maybe not. What I think more true is that Summers can not help but upstage everyone else in every room he's in. Which surely will make life interesting for his successor.

I'm still catching up after vacation on all the Harvard news, but I did want to post this short Bloomberg profile of Drew Faust.

``Harvard needs to be far more one university than it ever has before,'' Faust said. Science ``is an area in which structures need to catch up with realities of knowledge and how knowledge is unfolding.''

I know that President-elect Faust wants to be cautious, and understandably so, in her public rhetoric. She did learn something from her predecessor. And yet, she is getting so good at saying nothing that she runs the risk of adopting boilerplate as her native tongue. If Larry Summers defined one rhetorical extreme, Drew Faust seems to be staking out the other.

In the midst of all the catching-up, I didn't have the chance to watch much of Commencement. I know there was a lot of star power there, but it sounds like the new president was still a relatively low-key presence. I would have thought that the university would have taken the occasion to help elevate her profile, but apparently not....

Harvard is giving Larry Summers and Conrad Harper honorary degrees today.

What an odd decision! Summers, of course, was more or less fired as Harvard president in 2006. Harper, meanwhile, resigned from the Harvard Corporation to protest various things about Larry Summers in the summer of 2005.

Likely this is an attempt to make them both feel better about the university that, for various reasons, each felt forced to leave, even if only temporarily. An act of healing. And, of course, the better Summers and Harper feel about Harvard, the more likely they are to keep quiet about what really happened during the Summers' years.

Think I'm being too cynical? Surely it can't be coincidence that Harper and Summers are getting honorary degrees the same year.... Wouldn't you have loved to have been a fly on the wall for those meetings?

Lots of questions surround this one. What exactly will that honorary degree commendation to Larry Summers say? How do you finesse the fact that you're giving an honorary degree to a man who was forced to resign from the presidency of the university? And why not wait a little longer to do it?

One thing's for sure: This is a political act that shows how honorary degrees are used for various things that have nothing to do with simply applauding the accomplishments of their recipients. Not a huge shock there, but this does make it more obvious than usual.

...and his name is Michael Smith. He's an associate dean for computer science and engineering, and by all accounts he's a very nice guy.

Also, his name first surfaced as a decanal candidate on this blog on March 30http://richardbradley.net/2007/03/two-more-decanal-candidates.html....

Smith is not a well-known figure on campus, and hthe Crimson suggests that administrative experience is a question mark.

Though the chairman of a private software company and former swim coach has a wide range of leadership experience outside of the academy, his administrative experience at Harvard is limited when compared to the three deans who preceded him.

In the Globe, the M-Bomb suggests that the choice of Smith is something of a surprise.

However, Smith, associate dean for computer science and engineering, was a surprising choice to many professors because he is not widely known outside [his] scientific areas.

But in both the Globe and the Crimson, Harry Lewis is quoted as being highly supportive of Smith, calling him "a wonderful person."

Your thoughts?

It's the end of my vacation, and I'll be getting on a plane in a few hours. Now it's time for a relaxed breakfast—no need to get ready for going out on the water today—a little last-minute shopping, and packing up the gear for the flight home. I may try to develop the film I shot on our final dive yesterday. If it comes out, I took some photos that could be terrific: spotted trunkfish, angel fish, toad fish, a flounder, and much more. But that's a big if.

Meanwhile, I see that Drew Faust still hasn't chosen a dean. In the long run, this delay probably won't matter. In the short run, it's not making her look strong. Perhaps she has a sense of timing and will release her choice moments before Commencement

I also see that Derek Bok has announced that he is close to making a decision on calendar reform. Curious. It's a big decision to make when your predecessor has been named for, what, almost four months now? Presumably this is something they would do in sync, but you never know...

Bok may be doing something so that Faust doesn't have to, but this act of unilateral authority, it seems to me, also has the effect of making Faust look less than strong....