Consulting faculty at all the schools may mean it will take longer to undertake large University-wide projects, but Summers must do it to salvage his presidency, Lorsch says.

“It’s an academic tradition that goes way, way back and I think you change it at your peril,” he said.

But Chait argues that a university should be less concerned with its leadership structure than with its academic ideals.

“Is the goal of any university to keep power in any particular place or is it to advance the state of knowledge?” Chait asks. “What would one rather have? A decentralized institute that’s falling behind or a centralized institute that is at the cutting edge of knowledge? The structure should be secondary to achieving other objectives.”

ETOB or no ETOB, Summers seems to agree.

—Staff writer May Habib can be reached at habib@fas.harvard.edu.