Academic Responsibilities

Stanley Fish, in his NYTs blog, says that recent commentary about whether Barack Obama should include Larry Summers, lately fired as Harvard's president for controversial remarks about women scientists among other things, in his cabinet is wrong-headed. Most commentaries, he says, deal quickly with the question of WHY he was fired, claiming that it was because he was trying to shake things up.

Fish claims that a university professor should be one who is trying to wake people out of complacency, but not university presidents. That's the real issue about whether he should be in the cabinet: does he have people skills? Fish writes, "It is not a question of intelligence and competence -– everyone agrees that Summers is very smart and very accomplished as an economist; it is a question of tact, patience, poise, self-restraint, deference, courtesy and other interpersonal virtues." The more general point is that teachers have a whole different set of ethical and professional responsibilities than principals (or professors and university presidents). An academic is not an academic. Nor is it true that presidents just have MORE responsibilities -- they are qualitatively different.