Larry needs a field staff
that’s what Noam Schreiber is implying over on his blog at the New Republic:
“According to The New York Times, Summers lost by a 218 to 185 margin, with 18 abstentions. The Times also notes that there are just over 800 voting members of the arts and sciences faculty. Since a faculty member had to attend yesterday’s meeting in order to cast a vote, the outcome suggests to me that Summers’s problem was more about turnout and intensity than a lack of support per se. That is, a relatively small number of strong detractors were motivated to show up and vote against him; almost everyone else (save an even smaller number of Summers partisans) stayed home.”
So basically if Larry had a field director he’d be fine. Hell, I could have told him that.
Comments
The fact that almost half of the faculty didn’t come to the vote is disappointing, but it also doesn’t signal that they have a huge amount of confidence in Summers. If they don’t believe in him enough to even show up, they probably don’t really feel like he’s doing such a wonderful job. Also, there’s no guarantee that some people who didn’t come wouldn’t have supported the no confidence vote. This doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with the vote, I’m just not convinced that the demographics of the vote make it less significant.
true true. Someone else made the point that part of the reason that there was a low turnout is because many younger professors, especially those without tenure, choose not to get involved in internal politics. That’s an interesting thing itself if you think about it.
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