Harvard loses another faculty member
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- Another member of Harvard University's African-American studies department said on Tuesday he will leave the school in what one critic called the latest sign of discontent with President Lawrence Summers.
Michael Dawson will be the third professor to leave the department this academic year and the fifth since 2002, when Professor Cornel West -- known for his book "Race Matters" on race relations in America -- decamped for Princeton University following a well-publicized dispute with Summers.
News of the departure dealt a setback both to efforts to rebuild Harvard's once-vaunted Department of African and African American Studies and to Summers, who has struggled to defuse a controversy sparked by his remarks on women.
Summers lost an extraordinary but nonbinding faculty vote of confidence last month as Harvard's undergraduate professors registered their discontent with his general management style and his comment that inherent differences between the sexes may explain why so few women work in the academic sciences.
Dawson, 53, said he will return to the University of Chicago, the school he left three years ago to take a tenured position at Harvard.
In an interview with Reuters, he attributed his decision to leave partly to personal reasons and also to the exodus of talent from the department. "Several of the people I thought I'd be interacting with when I accepted this position are no longer at the university," he said.
Following West's departure in 2002, K. Anthony Appiah also left for Ivy League rival Princeton. In October, Lawrence Bobo and Marcyliena Morgan, who are married, said they would leave for Stanford University.
Exodus continues
"The fact that Bobo and Morgan left directly influenced my decision to leave," Dawson said.
The departures of Bobo and Morgan came after Summers denied Morgan tenure, overturning what had been a unanimous backing of her request for tenure by department members.
A Harvard University spokesman confirmed that four senior and one junior faculty members have left the department in the last four years, but that a "very active effort" is under way to identify and recruit new professors.
One of Dawson's colleagues in the department, J. Lorand Matory, said the scholar's departure is symptomatic of the faculty's lack of confidence in Summers.
"It's more or less obvious that under Larry Summers things are falling apart," Matory, one of Summers's fiercest faculty critics, told Reuters. "Universally his leadership is disliked."
Asked if he planned to leave too, Matory said: "We'll see."
William Kirby, dean of Harvard's undergraduate college, said he was saddened to lose Dawson but wished him the best.
"He is an eminent political scientist and he has played an important role in two Harvard departments," Kirby said in a statement. "We hate to lose him to another great university."
When asked about Matory's specific comments on Summers's leadership, a spokesman for the president declined immediate comment.
Matory authored the resolution saying Harvard's undergraduate professors lack confidence in Summers. The measure was approved last month at a faculty meeting by a vote of 218-185 with 18 abstentions.
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