Harvard Rules (12 page)

Teaching at Harvard enabled you to do other things: write op-eds for the
New York Times,
get grants from friends in high places, testify before Congress, and land a job in the White House. It was all too easy to view teaching as a nagging obligation. “The nemesis of Harvard is its reputation,” lamented Michael Ignatieff, a professor of international affairs at the Kennedy School. “We're much too grand to do what we're supposed to do—teach.”

That lack of passion for teaching on the part of many Harvard professors is a chronic problem for the university. The culture of Harvard College in particular reflects this pedagogical ennui. At many of Harvard's competitors, such as Yale and Princeton, professors who teach a lecture course must also teach a discussion section, a smaller weekly meeting with ten or fifteen students instead of the dozens or hundreds enrolled for the twice-weekly lecture. At Harvard, graduate students do most of the hands-on teaching, leading sections and grading papers and exams. Many of those graduate students, known as teaching fellows, are committed, excellent teachers. Many, however, are not, with their skills in English fluctuating as widely as their knowledge of their subjects. But good or bad, the chance to interact with graduate students is not why so many high school students apply to Harvard every year. The lack of contact with their professors is a shock to many entering students and a constant complaint of the rest. In fact, a late-1990s survey of Ivy League newspapers found that Harvard students had the highest level of dissatisfaction with their education of any Ivy League students.

Student dissatisfaction contributed to the gnawing concern that, although Harvard's fame was unequalled, other schools offered an education as good or better. Princeton, Yale, and New York University were all doing an excellent job of teaching undergrads. But perhaps most worrisome was Stanford. The Palo Alto, California, university was younger than Harvard and seemed to be riding the wave of American culture. It had close connections to the entrepreneurs and billionaires of nearby Silicon Valley, creating a steady back-and-forth of energy, ideas, and money. In 2001, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave Stanford $400 million, the largest gift ever given to higher education. Stanford was using its new money to pursue cutting-edge scientific research that would in turn earn still more cash for the university. The affirmation of Stanford's cultural arrival came when Chelsea Clinton rejected the Ivy League for Palo Alto. In the past, a president's child would surely have stayed east, but Clinton's decision to head to the West Coast reflected a new sense of cultural liberation. To join the elite, you didn't
have
to go to Harvard anymore.

Little of this was the fault of Neil Rudenstine, or at least his fault alone; the crisis in Harvard's undergraduate education had been a long time in the making. Nevertheless, Rudenstine was the man in charge, and rather than attend to these increasingly urgent questions, he was off raising money. The students barely saw their president. “Rudenstine knows more about the interests of Harvard's top donors than about the needs of the Harvard undergraduates,” editorialized the
Harvard Crimson,
the campus daily. On the announcement of his resignation in May 2000, the
Crimson
declared that “Rudenstine's tenure has stripped Harvard of strong leadership in the presidency and equipped the University with a far quieter voice in American society than his predecessors enjoyed…. The University has receded to the shadows of ivy tower and Ivy League obscurity.”

Over the course of the twentieth century, Harvard presidents served an average of about twenty years. Neil Rudenstine would serve the shortest stint of any Harvard president since before the Civil War. Some said that that was because of his apparently gentle constitution; others argued that the president's job had simply become too grueling for anyone to hold it for very long—or even want to. In any event, Rudenstine had told Harvard that he wanted to leave, and Harvard didn't exactly put up a fight.

A year later, Rudenstine would move back to Princeton and a quieter life. Until then, Harvard would search for a replacement. Once again, the qualifications for the job were many and rigorous. The next president had to be bigger, better, bolder than Rudenstine. He had to combine an expertise with money and management with the ability to fix the university's ailing undergraduate education, the toughness to take on the deans, and the drive to be a national leader. Harvard didn't want another underwhelming president.

But who could possibly meet all these requirements, and how would Harvard find him?

T
o understand how Harvard chooses its presidents, you have to go all the way back to 1650, when the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony established a legal structure for the university, and if you're going back that far, you might as well push back another fourteen years, to Harvard's very beginning.

In 1636 the General Court, the governing council of the new Puritan outpost, appropriated the sum of £400 for “a schoale or colledge”—a substantial figure for an impecunious body. The promulgation of Puritanism was a priority second only to survival for the colonists, who aimed to found a school for ministers who would ensure the longevity and doctrinal purity of their faith. The new “schoale” would be in “Newtowne,” renamed Cambridge in 1638. That was also the year when a young Puritan named John Harvard died and left the princely sum of £780—and, almost as important, a library of 400 books—to the fledgling college. As a measure of its gratitude, and an incentive to subsequent donors, the General Court named its school after Harvard.

Twelve years later, in 1650, the General Court issued a formal charter for Harvard College—the same charter whose replica would be handed to Larry Summers at his inauguration in 2001. That document established the university's two governing bodies, the Board of Overseers and the Harvard Corporation. In a very crude way, the Overseers and the Corporation were like a bicameral legislature. The Overseers would be the larger of the two groups—the House of Representatives, as it were—whose consent was required for college statutes, appointments, and elections to the second group, the Corporation. That body would be like a senate, a small, exclusive panel whose job was to choose and advise the Harvard president. About one hundred and forty years before the United States did, Harvard had a constitution.

Three and a half centuries later, the Harvard constitution has changed less than that of the United States. The university still has its Board of Overseers and its Corporation, and their roles are still more or less what they were in the mid–seventeenth century. The main difference is that the power of the Corporation has grown immense, while the Overseers, once the more powerful of the two, has become a largely ineffectual council. If the Overseers tripped and fell into another dimension, it would take some time for anyone at Harvard to actually notice.

Thirty Harvard alumni sit on the Board of Overseers. Candidates run for office after collecting a certain number of alumni signatures, and winners serve six-year terms, with a 20 percent turnover every year. The Overseers approve presidential choices as well as nominations to the Corporation, which are potentially significant powers. But time and tradition have turned the Board into largely a rubber stamp. The Overseers also conduct fact-finding missions into the status of Harvard College's academic departments, meeting with professors and writing well-meaning reports that are then generally ignored by the deans and president. “We'd write these reports and then never hear about them again,” remembered Terry Lenzner, Harvard class of 1961 and a former Overseer. “They just disappeared into a void.” However, since an unwritten role for the Overseers is to give and raise money, the task of report-writing creates a sense of involvement among them conducive to giving.

The Corporation, the real power, consists of seven members, including the Harvard president, who are known as “fellows.” They meet about once a month, sitting in high-back leather chairs around a long mahogany table in Loeb House, a Georgian mansion on the east side of the Yard. The minutes of those meetings are recorded by a Harvard official known as the university secretary, but they are kept secret. The times of the meetings are also secret. There is no distributed agenda, nothing to inform the Harvard community of what is discussed by its own governing board.

Most universities have an advisory council to assist and oversee the president, but no university has a group that is as powerful, unaccountable, and secretive as Harvard's. (If a public company had a similar governing board, the shareholders would revolt.) Alumni or faculty cannot vote to choose the Corporation members; the fellows serve as long as they want to and choose their own successors. The Corporation's job is to select the president, advise him, and, if necessary, rebuke him—although because they generally choose someone who reflects their values and pursues their agenda, it rarely comes to that. The Corporation also approves the budgets submitted by the deans of the Harvard schools, and that power is substantial. The Corporation doesn't like to fire or scold deans, who often command the loyalty of faculty and alumni, and can cause a stink in the
Boston Globe.
But it can overrule the budget requests of a prodigal dean, making his life so frustrating and joyless that he opts to step down rather than fight, allowing the president to replace him with a more malleable figure.

Partly because of the fellows' life terms, and partly because the Corporation's small size and penchant for secrecy isolate it from the social pressures that inform American society, the Corporation has never reflected the diversity Harvard advocates for its student body. Until 1985, when former FAS dean Henry Rososvky, who is Jewish, became a fellow, every Corporation member for 350 years had been a white, Christian male. The first woman—a lawyer named Judith Richards Hope—didn't make the cut until 1989. The first person of color was Conrad K. Harper, an African American lawyer who joined the Corporation in the year 2000.

The Corporation isn't just ethnically homogeneous, it is professionally like-minded. Whatever their skin color or ethnicity, Corporation fellows almost always reflect the interests of the American business elite. The twentieth-century Corporation lacked a single fellow from the world of academia until Yale professor John Morton Blum joined in 1970.

The Corporation is culturally homogeneous as well. For most of the past two hundred years, the Corporation represented a microcosm of the Protestant establishment, and even in the twenty-first century the résumés of its members read like entries from the Social Register:
Commodore, New York Yacht Club…Member, Trilateral Commission…Trustee, Pierpont Morgan Library…Member, Council on Foreign Relations…Trustee, Metropolitan Museum of Art…Director, J. P. Morgan
& Chase…Member, Augusta National Golf Club.
Even within the elite world of Harvard alumni, the fellows of the Harvard Corporation are a breed apart.

At the time of Neil Rudenstine's resignation, the fellows included Harper, a 1965 graduate of Harvard Law School and a partner in the New York firm of Simpson, Thacher and Bartlett. Another recent addition was Herbert “Pug” Winokur, who graduated from Harvard in 1964 and three years later earned a Harvard doctorate in applied mathematics. Winokur was a director and chair of the finance committee at the Enron Corporation, and his presence on the Harvard Corporation represented the university's attempt to recognize new energy in American capitalism, a transition from old money to new.

Old money was represented by D. Ronald Daniel, a 1954 business school graduate, the university treasurer and a former managing partner at McKinsey & Co., a powerhouse consulting firm that serves as a repository for Harvard graduates. Another paradigm of establishment power and wealth was James Richardson Houghton, Harvard '58, Harvard Business School '62, the chief executive of Corning Incorporated, the manufacturing giant.

But the Corporation was really dominated by two people, a businessman and an academic—the only academic on the board—both very different but each formidable in their own way. Robert G. Stone, Jr. was the Corporation's longest-serving member, or senior fellow. An economics concentrator and captain of the heavyweight crew team, Stone graduated from Harvard in 1947. He'd gone on to a career in transportation and finance, heading up shipping companies States Marine Lines and the Kirby Corporation, and serving on countless corporate boards. Stone made his money quietly, but he made a lot of it. A longtime Harvard fundraiser and donor—he'd endowed a scholarship program, the “Stone Scholars,” and the position of crew coach—Stone had been on the Corporation since 1975. A gregarious blue-blood unrivaled in his devotion to his alma mater, he epitomized the Harvard man of an earlier time.

On the surface, he could not have been more different from the other power on the Corporation. Hanna Holborn Gray was born in Germany in 1930. Before the onset of war, her family fled that country for the United States. Gray eventually attended Bryn Mawr, a women's college in Pennsylvania, and earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 1957. She became an assistant professor at Harvard at a time when women professors were an unwelcome novelty in Harvard Yard; the rules of the Faculty Club, for example, stipulated that women could not enter by the front door.

Gray was unfazed by the discrimination—“some of it just seemed comical,” she once recalled—and progressed to a remarkable career, teaching at the University of Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern, and Yale. After a stint as Yale's provost, second-in-charge to president Kingman Brewster, she served as Yale's acting president in the late 1970s. She didn't get the position—Yale English professor A. Bartlett Giamatti did—but instead became president of the University of Chicago, retiring in 1993, after fifteen years.

Over the course of her career, Gray acquired a reputation as a disciplined, demanding teacher with high expectations of students and a hostility toward any suggestion that the university ought to be an engine of social progress, a “change agent.” The point of a university was not to reform the world, not to align itself with politics or social movements, Gray argued, but to transmit knowledge and train scholars. Arguing against affirmative action, she once told a friend, “You know, the University of Chicago has only one percent black students. We make no accommodation to anything.” Gray was tough; some would have called her cold. At Chicago, she was reputed to have coined the term “tuition-paying units” for students. “Hanna Gray is very impressive, straight off Mount Rushmore,” said one member of the Harvard Board of Overseers. “But you wouldn't want to cross her.”

In 1988 Gray joined the Board of Overseers, and when Henry Rosovsky stepped down from the Corporation in 1997, Gray stepped up. By 2000, she had garnered more than sixty honorary degrees. She had also been involved in four presidential searches in the previous four years. It was perhaps inevitable that she would dominate this one.

 

The search for Neil Rudenstine's successor began almost immediately after Rudenstine announced his resignation in March 2000. The
Harvard Crimson
would call it the hunt for “the nation's second most highly contested presidency,” which is the kind of line that people at Harvard throw out in a way that at first sounds infuriatingly arrogant, on second thought comes across as at least plausible, and upon further reflection strikes one as the type of remark that, while possibly true, serves no easily identifiable purpose other than showing how seriously Harvard takes both itself and its president.

The search committee consisted of nine people, six Corporation fellows (but not Rudenstine) along with three members of the Board of Overseers, brought on as a gesture of outreach to the lesser board. It would not, however, include any students or faculty, as most such presidential search committees do. Committee members insisted that it was impractical to pick representatives from among the thousands of students and faculty. That explanation didn't convince many students, who noted that much of life at Harvard, starting with getting in, consisted of just such weeding-out processes. Others noted that the same argument could apply to the Corporation itself, yet that body seemed to have no theoretical objections to choosing its own members from the much larger pool of Harvard alumni.

The real reason may have been a fear that students could not be trusted to keep their mouths shut. Because, with the exception of intermittent progress reports—intermittently scheduled but consistently vague—the search would be conducted with the utmost secrecy. And once it was done, its records would be sealed and stashed in the basement of a Harvard library for the next eighty years, until long after everyone involved was dead. University administrators explained that potential candidates for the job would be scared away if the press were involved.

There was some truth to that, but the level of secrecy went far beyond protecting the names of candidates. It seemed equally plausible that this was a group that, having grown accustomed to operating in secrecy, simply preferred it that way. So sure was the Corporation of its ability to pick the right person that no public vetting was believed necessary; so confident was the Corporation in its judgment that it didn't feel the need for outsiders to critique its process.

Rudenstine would stay until the commencement ceremonies of 2001, because choosing a university president takes time. Before the search committee could even begin considering candidates, it had to consider its priorities. Rudenstine's job had been to raise money. What should be the agenda of his successor?

Clearly, the first challenge was reinvigorating Harvard College. Undergrads weren't getting the education that they, and the general public, expected of Harvard. Many students and applicants already knew that, and some didn't much care, because a Harvard diploma was still money in the bank. But sooner or later the gap between perception and reality had to narrow lest a Harvard diploma become like an inflated stock price, dangerously vulnerable to a plunge in investor confidence.

Such a correction would affect more than just Harvard College. Even though undergraduates constitute a minority of the university's students, the college is the bedrock of the university's image. The freshman dorms in the Yard, the stately undergraduate houses along the Charles, the football team taking on Yale in century-old Harvard Stadium—the college is the heart and soul of the university. No graduate gets warm and fuzzy remembering his years at the law school, but Harvard College grads tend to be the university's most loyal alumni and most consistent donors, and they want Harvard to be at least as strong for their children as it was for them. If attending Harvard is part of the American dream, the dream of many Harvard graduates is to have their sons and daughters attend a Harvard that's
better
than the one they knew.