Professor Summers Thinks You Fail At Life
Seriously, Harvard? Seriously? You have this guy as a professor for six years and not one of you has anything to say about it on ratemyprofessors.com? My disappointment is only rivaled by Associate Professor Summers’ disappointment in the “post-pubescent children of notables� (i.e. bitterness toward his self-chosen path of academic poverty—the non-tenure track).
In a ridiculously self-masturbatory opinion piece for the Times Higher Education, John H. Summers, Harvard history professor, whines about how his wealthy students “worked exceptionally long hours, [and] were aggressive in exercising their talents.� Wait, there’s more! Summers moans, “I had to grade the students, and I had to grade them well. Everyone expected a recommendation letter.�
Wow, really? Hardworking and talented Harvard students expect good grades and recommendation letters? Madness, I tell you. Don’t do it, Professor Summers! Don’t give in to the temptation.
Well, he didn’t. Summers goes on to criticize Harvard’s grade inflation as taking away the “one instrument of power [he] wielded,� calling the “tacit� expectation that students earn no lower than a B “a sign of corruption� that “abridges the academic freedom of the teacher.�
Personally, I feel awful. I had no idea that expecting to continue doing well in school takes away a poor man’s freedom. Wait, it gets worse: Summers slips us a heartbreaking anecdote to drive home the point that he is but a victim of a corrupt system which “[wages] political reprisals against the B-minus grader.� Here’s what went down:
A judge and his wife went to my supervisor to complain about a grade I had assigned to their child in a senior oral examination. They rested their complaint on the fact that I was not yet in possession of the all-encompassing credential, the PhD. They pointed out that the second examiner in the room had assigned the exam a slightly higher grade, and that this second examiner was, in fact, a PhD. The judge and his wife did not know, nor did they care to discover, that I was by far the more experienced of the two graders.
Oh, snap! Had this couple troubled themselves to look into Prof. Summers’ street cred rather than academic credentials, they would have realized that of course their student deserved the grade he or she was given, what could they have possibly been thinking to question it?
Without a doubt, the most entertaining part of this article (and the part that Gawker picked up on) was Summers’ shock at the self-entitlement of capital-savvy, wealthy Ivy Leaguers. And, in case you were wondering, it gets personal. Jared Kushner, the 27-year-old Harvard grad who notoriously purchased the New York Observer for a cool $10 million, was a student of Summers’. In an interesting twist, when Kushner bought the Observer, he reduced the pay for book reviewers—reviewers who included poor, slighted Professor Summers. Get ready to feel pangs of sympathy: Summers had been writing reviews for the Observer in order to supplement his meager salary of $15k and pay off his debts.
Can’t a guy get a break around here? Apparently not, especially in an educational system where “the sedulous banality of the rich degrades teaching into a service-class preoccupation whose chief duty is preparing clients for monied careers.� Anyhow, if you’re a Summers fan, fear not: the guy has a book coming out next month called "Every Fury on Earth". Now who wants to make pennies reviewing it in the Observer?
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July 23rd, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Isn’t “self-masturbatory” redundant?
July 24th, 2008 at 3:51 am
Slightly redundant.
Masturbate can be an intransitive verb (”Joe masturbated”) or a transitive verb (”Tom Green masturbated a horse in ‘Freddy Got Fingered’”). When used as an intransitive verb, “self” is the assumed indirect object.
July 24th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Nicely put Harvard ‘09. I have masturbated many a gal.
July 24th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Hand-jobbing shemales in a back-alley is more like it.
August 5th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
oh, poor baby, you can’t take any well-deserved criticism and you have to resort to whining about (supposed) whining. maybe your buddies will buy you beer while you self-masturbate in the bathroom.
also - whoever’s trying to justify the use of self-masturbatory deserves an F minus in university writing.
August 5th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
So glad to stumble upon this post through Arts & Letters Daily. Refreshing to see such thoughtful reaction to a professor who’s citing Tocqueville and other great thinkers in his articles. Calling his thinking masturbatory, touche! Turning the reference into a grammatical issue, how droll!
Maybe this professor Summers has a point. Given this post and the subsequent comments, Ivy Leaguers seem pretty dimwitted and entitled to me. I guess things haven’t changed much since George W. Bush was snorting coke at Yale.
August 6th, 2008 at 12:15 am
Seriously, Robyn? Students at Harvard should “continue to get good grades” because they “expect” it? How about earning it? Putting in long hours is not good enough, you also have to produce correct and efficient work. To actually defend “mommy and daddy” coming to the school to talk about their “child’s” (read: full grown adult who should take care of his/her own damned self) grades is pathetic.
Honestly, IvyGate can do better than displaying the very sense of entitlement that people like Summers are laying up us Ivy alumni and students.
August 7th, 2008 at 12:50 am
I personally liked the turn-of-phrase “self-masturbatory.” I don’t care if it’s somewhat redundant; in my opinion it conveys point much better than “masturbatory.”
August 7th, 2008 at 9:12 am
This is all I’ve read about this case, and all I can say is that Robyn Schneider very efficiently makes the case of John H. Summers, who comes off rather heroic. Is there another side to this story?
August 7th, 2008 at 11:35 am
“Oh, snap! Had this couple troubled themselves to look into Prof. Summers’ street cred rather than academic credentials, they would have realized that of course their student deserved the grade he or she was given, what could they have possibly been thinking to question it?”
How revealing.
The problem obviously is that they thought it right to question the grading in the first place. In other words, that the traditional privilege of the professor to grade as he saw fit and obligation, absent any professorial abuse, of the student to defer to his judgment, didn’t apply in the case of this particular student. Which would be an example of a “sense of entitlement.” Which is what Summers accusing the average Harvard student of feeling. And which you appear to endorse as warranted. Which leads the reader to believe that you share, quite unconsciously, the same sense of entitlement. Which confirms Summers’s thesis.
Congratulations.
August 7th, 2008 at 11:40 am
It also, by the by, paints the picture of credentialist-obsessed Ivy leaguers and parents who believe rather superstitiously that having a PhD by itself makes one more able to judge undergraduate work than if one had completed only a masters and most PhD requirements.