In the day following Larry Summers' resignation, The Crimson published two op-eds, one written by Professor of Economics Edward Glaeser, which was sympathetic to the president, and the other by Education School Prof. Howard Gardner entitled "Leaders Who Listen." Nothing could be more telling about the differences between the two sides than a comparison of these columns.

While Glaeser provided an itemized list of Summers' accomplishments, Gardner waxed poetic about how leaders ought to "listen charismatically" and "create a context for the institution to thrive." Glaeser praised Summers for "seeking truth in rigorous theory and empirics, not in fads and certainly not in popularity contests." Gardner, not to be outdone, obliquely criticized Summers for being a "judgmental analyst" (because surely analysis is not supposed to lead to judgment!) and scolded "increasingly malicious" publications (hint, hint). Incidentally, Gardner, despite never having actually held any leadership position even remotely comparable to, say, Treasury Secretary or the presidency of Harvard, boasted added expertise on this matter as a result of his having "studied leadership for many years." And the most effective leaders, he apparently concluded from this thoughtful, non-judgmental analysis, are not those who "rule by fist, fiat, furor, or fear," but rather those who "convey a powerful positive narrative about their organization and who can indicate how members of that organization can find meaning and fulfillment in working toward those goals." So at least, the reason behind the faculty's ire has finally been disclosed—Larry Summers' "narrative" was just not "positive" enough!

Indeed, an outsider reading these editorials would be thoroughly at a loss to explain both why such a large portion of the faculty harbored such venomous dislike for Summers and how a bunch of namby-pambies like Gardner could ever force out such a distinguished figure. To an observer of academia, however, Gardner's characteristically academic and slightly postmodernist prolixity make it all too clear.

To understand Gardner's drivel, it is necessary to examine the somewhat more substantive criticism of Summers that can be found in Prof. Judith Ryan's interview with FM Magazine. Asked to comment on the president's most annoying trait, the Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature responded, "His relatively narrow education which makes it hard for him to relate equally well to all the disciplines in the college and in the Faculty…I think if one speaks to President Summers at length about some areas he's not familiar with, he shows that he hasn't really had the same kind of liberal arts education as we are trying to provide you people." In other words, Summers did not equally appreciate all academic pursuits and often did not hesitate to tell people that he thought what they were doing was stupid. Former GSAS Dean Peter Ellison confirmed this in a particularly timely letter in which he denounced Summers' "intellectual arrogance."

Ultimately, then, and perhaps surprisingly, this issue really was about education all along, although Summers' Faculty opponents, as usual, generally obscured the essence of the matter with hazy rhetoric. The "fear" and "intimidation" that supposedly marked Summers' tenure as president were in fact, as Glaeser said, "by-products of his greatest strength: his ceaseless desire to learn and promulgate the truth." Summers made a genuine effort to improve education at Harvard, but he ran afoul of the faculty because such an effort required boldly pursuing truth and making judgments about it, exercises which are evidently not tolerated here or are at least considered to be unnecessarily "authoritarian."

Glaeser described Summers' goal as guiding Harvard by "enlightenment values," and perhaps no two words better explain the current situation. On the one hand, the modern university was shaped by the Enlightenment belief in progress through active, rational control of nature; on the other, those ideals produced their own relativization within the university and have been made equal with any other set of "values." Thus Law School professor Alan Dershowitz ascription of Summers' resignation to a coup by the "academic hard left." To be more precise, it was a coup by the postmodernist left against the Enlightenment left. The humanities faculty mostly consists of postmodernists of one stripe or another, or others who have been so influenced by the postmodernists that they are indistinguishable from them in effect, if not in intent. It is no coincidence that Summers' critics came primarily from the departments most steeped in postmodernism, including Anthropology, English Literature, and Women's Studies while he enjoyed the support of a larger number of scientists, as well as the faculties of the University's many professional schools. The appointment of Summers placed a product of the Enlightenment in a postmodernist world. And for the economist Summers, education must either be purposeful to society or meaningless; for the postmodernists, all of it must be purposeless and is, therefore, "meaningful." Conflict was inevitable.

It is only too obvious which side won, but the questions surrounding the nature of education have only been multiplied. The fact that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences cannot even criticize Summers without slipping into vapid rhetoric or ludicrous neologisms might suggest something—Summers was at least partially right. Much of the work done in the modern academy is poignantly clownish. Despite all our "broad education," to use Prof. Ryan's term, not only do we know more and more about less and less, but we say more and more about less and less. Is the goal of a lifetime of education really to coin phrases like "positive narratives"? Does a 900-page course book littered with monstrosities like "Media and Mediation: Anthropology of Communication Technologies" really represent progress over Plato's logos? Does the mass of works produced by modern academics, such as Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion, actually contribute to living an educated, cultivated life? In a word, does being "broadly-educated" today truly mean that we cannot discriminate between the path to wisdom and a path leading astray? Must every attempt at prioritizing disciplines, which can very well be a product of education, be dismissed as "intellectual arrogance"?

During the next few months, Harvard students will doubtless be subjected to more banalities about "consensus building" and whatnot. Yet one sentence from Rousseau—perhaps a unique sort of postmodernist himself—is worth more than the entire output of Gardner and his ilk combined: "Let students learn what they ought to do when they are men, not what they ought to forget."