Former Harvard president Lawrence Summers delivered his views on reshaping undergraduate education without mishap in this semester's Snyder Presidential Lecture.
"The mission of undergraduate education is the most important for universities," Summers said.
While some in the Tufts community bristled at Summers' invitation, the speech itself took place with no setbacks or protest action.
Summers made headlines last year with a remark that questioned women's scientific ability, a gaffe that provoked a national media firestorm. He stepped down as Harvard's president shortly afterwards.
"Most of you know Larry Summers as the outspoken, provocative, maybe even controversial figure," University President Lawrence Bacow said. "But to his students Larry is known as a brilliant teacher."
In addition to his role as educator, Summers is also an award-winning economist who served as secretary of the treasury from 1999 to 2001.
"To the current generation of Harvard students, Larry was a beloved president [who] quadrupled the number of freshman seminars [and] helped to make Harvard accessible to the neediest students .... He challenged Harvard to think about how it could be better," Bacow said.
Springing out of his chair with a grin to take the podium, Summers argued for the reinvention of U.S. undergraduate education from admissions to professor-student interactions.
He first discussed universities' importance to American society and politics. Institutional influence can impact the direction of the country, he said.
Summers described how President John F. Kennedy's Harvard senior thesis on England's entry into World War II informed his foreign policy, and in turn U.S. foreign policy, for nearly a decade.
The educator then turned back to direct challenges for higher education. "Every institution is different," he said. "The needs of student bodies differ. But experience suggests a variety of areas in which American colleges and universities can do better."
Summers outlined seven specific facets of undergraduate education in need of improvement: student body composition; the quality of instruction; "active learning"; the teaching of science; "global understanding"; ethics; and how well universities encourage debate.
He found some mores of faculty recruitment problematic, arguing that professors are usually sought after and rewarded more for research and less for their teaching reputation.
While Harvard president, Summers worked to focus faculty more on teaching undergraduates, he said.
He also argued that university teaching should become more personal and active.
"The worst way to convey information so that it will be remembered and acted on is the ... 'large-podium, small-chair method'," he said.
"We know that the way people develop skills is through doing things that are active," Summers said. But most elite universities employ a "much more passive process" involving too little student-teacher interaction, he said.
Summers also said colleges should ensure students are taught a firm grounding in science, particularly biology.
While it's unacceptable today not to know the titles of five Shakespeare plays, it's normal to know nothing about the human genome, he argued, a state he found problematic.
On student body composition, Summers said universities had opened greatly to minority students but lagged on progress with low-income students. Only 10 percent of students at elite universities come from the poorer 50 percent of Americans, he said.
He suggested that admissions departments should work harder on access for the poor, not just racial minorities. This prompted a student to ask Summers whether he opposed affirmative action, but Summers said that his statements were not meant as an attack on affirmative action.
He also emphasized international experience as necessary to prepare for today's globalized society.
No one, he said, "should graduate from an elite university without having had a meaningful international experience." While at Harvard, he worked on - but did not succeed at - making study abroad a graduation requirement.
The lecture was part of the Richard E. Snyder Presidential Lecture series, supported by Richard Snyder (A '55) and designed to raise thought-provoking and perhaps controversial questions.
Audience members agreed that Summers had indeed presented original ideas.
"He raised some interesting points," sophomore Laura Burnham said. "He made me re-evaluate some of my opinions about my higher education. [I liked] his points about going abroad."
"It's a testament to the school that we were able to bring in a figure that's controversial and we were able to have a substantial dialogue," Tufts Community Union (TCU) President Mitch Robinson said after the speech. "If we get to the point were we're afraid to bring speakers [like Summers] onto the campus, we're limiting ourselves more than helping ourselves."
Some faculty and students had called Summers' speech ill-timed, following the tension surrounding the Primary Source's mock Christmas carol.
Associate Professor John McDonald, who in February told the Daily he was planning a boycott of Summers' lecture, declined to comment further.
When asked via e-mail whether he had followed through with his planned protest, McDonald responded, "I have nothing to add to my previous statements about Summers."
Bacow reported little community backlash, citing objections from three faculty members.
"I heard from virtually no students, [and] everybody else was supportive," he told the Daily after Summers' lecture. "The campus voted with its feet. They came, they listened. As Professor Summers said, we learn from our differences."
