THE HARVARD FACULTY is beginning to realize that actions have consequences:

”I have been at two meetings so far today where all faculty are talking about is how it will be possible to get the business of the university done in this climate,” Mary Waters, who chairs the sociology department, wrote in an e-mail yesterday. ”We are all perceiving a slowdown in response time from the university, and we assume that this controversy is taking up a lot of energy that otherwise would go to moving forward things at the university.”

Harvard has done serious damage to its reputation — or, more accurately, a subset of the Harvard Arts & Sciences faculty has done serious damage to Harvard’s reputation. This was meant to be cost-free posturing, but it’s turned out to be a bit more than that — and if I were Larry Summers, I think I’d do my best to make sure that a lot of people felt the pain in as many ways as I could manage. It’s an educational experience that the Harvard faculty, apparently, needs.