Larry Summers apppears to be turning into quite possibly a good president of Harvard, and very certainly an influential one. The New York Time Magazine runs a piece on Summers that shows all the trappings of the Summers' PR machine.

Larry Summers is not just an economist but, as one of his critics put it, an economist economist. His friend Andrei Shleifer, also an economist, put it more diplomatically: ''It's fair to say that he's into facts.'' Almost all of Summers's friends are economists or policy types (though he is currently dating a Harvard English professor, Elisa New); he does not read serious fiction; he shows few signs of aesthetic sensitivity; he is a slovenly dresser and not a terribly tidy eater. Summers may well have the densest collection of economist genes of any man alive. Both of his parents are economists. And Paul Samuelson, his father's brother, and Kenneth Arrow, his mother's brother, each won a Nobel Prize for economics. In one of our earliest conversations, I asked Summers if he thought that his distinctive habits of mind came from his upbringing. Summers does not find his own background a terribly interesting subject, and the question struck him as overly deterministic, but he did recall that if the family -- he has two brothers -- was stuck in traffic, one of his parents might ask, ''If there was one more lane, would that eliminate the traffic jam or simply increase the number of drivers who used the road?''

First, note this description of Summers.

Even if Summers were a guileful and calculating figure with a hidden agenda of drastic change, he would have a tough row to hoe. But he's not: he's a blunt and overbearing figure with an overt agenda of drastic change.

Summers's testy exchange with the university's leading black scholars the previous summer constituted only one element of the background to l'affaire West. Neil Rudenstine had allowed the Afro-American studies department to live by its own rules and to practically formulate its own budget. Summers made it plain to Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman and builder of the Afro-American studies department, that henceforward the department would be subject to ''the same kind of standards and expectations,'' as he puts it, that applied to the rest of the university.

West appeared to be the living incarnation of those separate standards. He had been named one of Harvard's 17 ''university professors'' despite a modest record of academic achievement. More recently, he had become a political publicist, a media star, a professional spellbinder whose most recent ''work'' was a spoken-word CD. He was rumored to have missed classes to campaign for Bill Bradley and to have distributed A's with an abandon exceptional even at Harvard, where the average grade hovers between B+ and A-.

Please remember that Larry Summers was Treasury Secretary under Clinton. Since the coming political campaign will undoubtedly have a measure of "are you better off now" in it, and the NY Times is on the Clinton bandwagon, do you really think they're going to undercut Sec. Summers?

I've read some of Cornel West's stuff and I'm still wondering what his contribution is to the discussion is. It's sounds to me like a bunch of cant dressed in the worst kind of academic jargon you'll find this side of Derrida. Does race matter? In the case of West it undoubtedly does. Harvard and now even more so Princeton should be embarrassed.

For anyone interested Leon Wieseltier performed a total destruction job on West as "philosopher" a few years ago in the New Republic. Check it out.