arly last month Harvard University's President Lawrence Summers revealed his true feelings about the continued absence of a ROTC program on the campus. "I look forward to the day when it will be a matter of routine, and not a matter for comment when a president of an Ivy League university is a strong and active supporter of the ROTC program; that will be a great day for our universities and for our country." His remarks underscore a triple tragedy: that Summers could not come out of the closet on ROTC until after his "resignation" in February; that Summers was forced to "resign"; and that the Harvard University faculty refuse to permit an ROTC program. All three can be traced to one root cause—the absence of presidential leadership at America's premier colleges and universities.

Lawrence Summers was a throwback to a prior era of university presidents—men with big egos who had big ideas about the world and the appropriate roles of institutions of higher education within them. In an era when politically correct, genteel, and deferential college and university leaders live in big houses from which they beg for money, Summers was an intellectual and personal brawler.

Some might call Summers's ideas about higher education radical—he wanted to reintroduce rigor to the undergraduate curriculum, to the process of determining student grades, to how the place was run. He was aggressive too, firing deans he viewed as ineffective and chastising faculty who missed their classes. But Summers's most important initiative was to raise billions to integrate the famously decentralized units of the university—every tub of which stands on its own bottom—to form hands-on, interdisciplinary laboratories to help unlock the biggest scientific puzzle of the twenty-first century, medicine. It was also his biggest mistake. The grandees at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences gave him no-confidence votes because they feared that this initiative would draw support away from them to the biological and chemical sciences and Harvard's professional schools of business, law, and medicine. They wanted no part of a president who actually dared to lead.

Yet Summers's support for pragmatic education and research has characterized American higher education since the earliest days of our country. The grandiose name of the Philadelphia's Philosophers Society, founded in 1743, masked its practical goals: It was devoted to the applied sciences and their commercialization and the creation of a democratic society in which trade could flourish. Its earliest presidents were drawn from the ranks of botanists, engineers, and astronomers, not philosophers. The first was an engineer with a knack for words, Benjamin Franklin; the third an agronomist and architect, named Thomas Jefferson.

These men embodied the early American ideals of education. They applauded applied work as much as book learning. As Franklin put it, "the cat in gloves catches no mice." Like Summers, these guys were no angels. Franklin was an eighteenth century version of an aging hippie, replete with long, ungroomed hair, granny glasses, and home-spun clothing. Like the hippies, he hardly practiced the stoical way of life he preached--he slept late, squandered public funds, and fell prey to the flattery of unscrupulous men who served as British spies. Jefferson was secretive, manipulative, and hypocritical about the practice of slavery, whose horrors he acknowledged while he kept slaves.

Their greatness was partially manifested in their devotion to pragmatic education. When an elderly Jefferson created the University of Virginia, he required only study of the principles of democratic government, "so as to free [students] of the shackles of a domineering hierarchy and a bigoted adhesion to ancient habits." Emerson echoed the message when he preached a revolt against traditional education. "We are students of words: We are shut up in schools and colleges ... and recitation rooms ... and come out at last with a bag of wind ... and do not know a thing."

Charles Eliot, Harvard's president from 1869 to 1909, was as quintessentially politically incorrect in his day as Summers is today. He too championed tough grading. As a young professor of mathematics and chemistry, Eliot administered Harvard's first written examinations. Although his peers denied him tenure, a courageous board installed him as president. Eliot believed in an equality based on merit, not on birth characteristics—he introduced women's education. Elective courses and clinical and case-based pedagogy were among his many other radical reforms. None came easily: His move to rescind required attendance at the college chapel was adopted only after a decade of bitter debate.

But, with time, Eliot and his innovations were revered. Sadly, Summers, the current incarnation of a visionary college and university president, was not given the chance to work the same magic. The awkward, public nature of his "resignation" assures that he will be the last of his kind in the Ivy League.

Regina E. Herzlinger is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor at Harvard Business School, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and author of "Consumer-Driven Health Care" (Jossey Bass, 2004). Mr. Nerney is director of the Center for Self-Determination, at Ann Arbor.

©2007 The New Republic