The Difference Principle

Elizabeth Anderson:

The current troubles of President Summers remind me of a conversation I had with my dissertation advisor, John Rawls, nearly 20 years ago. No two great Harvard scholars could be more opposite in intellectual temperament: Summers the supremely arrogant; Rawls, the supremely modest. (Whenever a student offered a misguided criticism of his work, Rawls would blame himself for not expressing himself clearly, rather than the student for failing to read him correctly.) Yet even Rawls had a blind spot for Harvard’s faults, which is shared by Summers today. In that conversation long ago, Rawls told me of his recent visit to Oxford University, warning me not to accept an offer to teach there until I was securely tenured somewhere in the U.S. Oxford was too obsessed with rank, he said, happy to treat the likes of him as royalty, but terribly snobby to not-yet-established scholars, who could expect to be treated shabbily. While I appreciated his kind advice, it was almost too much to keep from laughing. Here I was at Harvard, an institution that bent over backwards to make distinctions of rank invidious–even to the point, in those days, of putting their “folding chairs” (Assistant Professors on terminating 3-year appointments) on a common party line, instead of giving them the dignity of individual office phones! (When I arrived at the University of Michigan to take up a tenure-track position after graduating from Harvard, the atmosphere felt so egalitarian by comparison that I felt like Orwell arriving in Catalonia. My feeling didn’t last, but neither did Orwell’s.)
— Elizabeth Anderson, “What’s Troubling Harvard”