Harvard Rules (13 page)

A second priority for the search committee was a heightened emphasis on the sciences, especially the life sciences such as biology, biochemistry, and genetics. Since World War II, the sciences had become the engine of economic growth and prestige at research universities—and the area of the most cutthroat competition. The amount of money flowing to university science departments from the government, foundations, and private donors had soared during the 1990s, the decade of biotechnology and the Internet. In 1996, for example, Microsoft heads Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had given Harvard $25 million to build a new computer science and engineering building, a drop in the bucket compared with the money available. To get that money—to compete with Stanford and all the other universities busily blurring the lines between academia and the private sector—Harvard needed to invest more in its sciences, build more buildings and laboratories, and recruit more top-notch scientists.

Another priority was expanding the campus into Allston, a gritty Boston neighborhood just across the Charles. For decades Harvard has been pushing the limits of development in Cambridge, and local residents have grown increasingly resistant to further incursions; Harvard's buildings have a way of raising real estate values, forcing out blue-collar locals while corroding the sense of neighborhood and community. By the end of Neil Rudenstine's era, there wasn't much land left to build on in Cambridge, and every time Harvard proposed new construction on what little land there was, community activists roared into action, slashing those plans that they didn't kill outright.

During the Bok presidency, Harvard secretly began to buy land across the river, using a front company to prevent the price gouging that would inevitably follow the disclosure of the buying spree. Allston is a working-class neighborhood, industrial, congested and haphazardly developed, carved up by a train yard and the six-lane Massachusetts Turnpike. Outsiders would call Allston dreary, and so would some of the locals. Unlike Cambridge citizens, Allston residents would happily sell, and did so without ever knowing that the deep-pocketed purchaser was Harvard. By the late 1990s, Harvard owned as much land across the Charles as it did in Cambridge. The question was what to do with it.

Harvard wanted to expand not just across the Charles River, but across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Twenty-five years before, Derek Bok spoke of “internationalizing” the university, launching efforts to recruit more foreign students. As the eighties became the nineties and globalization became all the rage, the idea came to mean more than simply recruiting students from England and France. For Harvard, globalization meant transforming a quintessentially American university into a world institution with overseas campuses, Harvard students coming from and traveling to every continent, and a curriculum that trained students to be citizens of the globe. When Winston Churchill and Neil Rudenstine had spoken of Harvard as an “empire of the mind,” they'd spoken metaphorically; now Harvard wanted to make that slogan literal. The university had always trained the leaders of the United States. Who was to say it couldn't train the leaders of the entire world?

Rebuilding undergraduate education, pumping up the sciences, developing Allston, and globalizing the university—those were the official tasks for Harvard's twenty-seventh president. Perhaps equally telling were the subjects that the Corporation did not consider priorities—the effect of the university's great wealth on its self-image, its mission, and its integrity. The fellows of the Corporation were not particularly interested in that wealth's potentially adverse and unintended consequences; most of them were more interested in accruing money than in critiquing it. Instead of considering a president who might present a moral or philosophical counterweight to the economic trends of the 1990s, the search committee wanted someone who could exploit them. That, however, was something they would not say in public.

Nor was another criterion. The committee wanted more than someone who knew Harvard's issues (at least what they considered Harvard's issues). It wanted someone who could restore the luster to the presidency, who could stand up straight and represent Harvard as Harvard saw itself—powerful, strong, sage, and fearless. In short, it wanted someone who was not Neil Rudenstine. “We agreed that we needed somebody more aggressive, more pushy, bolder,” Corporation fellow D. Ron Daniel later said.

The committee began by making token gestures of outreach. In September of 2000, it took out a concise ad in the
New York Times'
“Week in Review” section. “President: Harvard University,” the want ad read. “Nominations and applications are invited for the presidency of Harvard University.” The ad fulfilled a legal requirement about equal opportunity hiring for non-profit institutions, but no one expected anything serious to come of it.

At about the same time, the committee sent a letter to all Harvard alumni, some three hundred thousand strong, requesting their “thoughts on the personal and professional qualities it will be most important to seek in a new president, as well as your observations on any individuals you believe are deserving of serious consideration.” The purpose was threefold. First, it gave alumni the impression that their opinions were valued, which helped create the sense of involvement that fostered alumni giving. Second, responses to the letter would give insight into alumni concerns. The third and ostensible purpose of the letter—to generate the names of viable candidates—was in reality its least important. Few believed that alumni would suggest a name that the committee would not otherwise have come up with on its own, or that the vast majority of the suggestions wouldn't constitute a waste of time.

Because in truth, the pool of realistic candidates was minuscule. Harvard's requirements knocked most people out of contention after quick and superficial consideration. Serious candidates had to be able to articulate a vision for the university that encompassed the Corporation's agenda. They had to have a character and personality entirely unlike those of Neil Rudenstine. Finally, they needed a Harvard degree, high-level administrative experience, and, if not a doctorate, then at least a familiarity with academic issues.

Not many candidates fit the bill. “When you actually sit down and want to choose a president at Harvard, you assume that you probably have a long list of very good people,” said one person close to the search process. “You'd think people would be just lining up. And then you discover to your enormous surprise that maybe you can find two or three people and you don't like two of them.”

In a few months, the search committee had compiled a list of four hundred names, but that number was wildly inflated. It included, for example, Al Gore and Bill and Hillary Clinton, though none of those three met the qualifications or had expressed any interest in the job. “I rather doubt [Gore] will get it,” Robert Stone said in a rare public statement intended to slap down the rumor. “He doesn't have the academic and intellectual standing.” When Hillary Clinton's name appeared in the press, outraged alums quickly contacted the university to let Harvard know that they'd stop giving if she became president. That was another criterion—the president couldn't be a partisan figure, lest alumni vote with their wallets.

Still, when committee members spoke to Harvard faculty, the searchers made it clear that they wanted a star, a well-known figure who could comfortably master the bully pulpit of the Harvard presidency. Robert Stone stressed exactly that to Peter Gomes in a conversation about the presidency in the fall of 2000.

The teacher of a course in Harvard history, Gomes had strong feelings on the subject and no small expertise; he likes to say that he has known three Harvard presidents and buried two others. Born in 1942, Gomes has worked at Harvard for thirty-five years. A Baptist clergyman, he became minister of Memorial Church in 1970. But if Gomes were only the church pastor, his position at Harvard would be insecure. It is not. In 1974, Derek Bok appointed Gomes the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals. The tenured Divinity School professorship allows Gomes to speak his mind—and not just on issues related to the divine—without worrying about losing his job.

Within the Harvard community, Gomes is something of a celebrity. Balding and portly, nattily dressed when he is out of religious garb, he is an eloquent speaker with a booming bass voice; you could sell tickets to a Gomes recitation of the Lord's Prayer. His volumes of sermons are frequent best sellers, and he was once profiled by
60 Minutes.
He is a one-man band of diversity—a black, gay, piano-playing Anglophile minister who grew up in the blue-collar Massachusetts town of Plymouth (his father farmed the cranberry bogs there) but speaks with a noticeable British accent.

Another source of Gomes' power at Harvard is his popularity with Harvard alumni, whom he frequently addresses at university functions and Harvard clubs around the world. They listen appreciatively to his thoughts on the state of their university and then contribute—or don't—accordingly. At the massive, ornate banquet celebrating the successful end of Neil Rudenstine's $2.6-billion fund drive in 2000, it was not Rudenstine but Gomes who delivered the keynote address. “No one can afford not to listen to me,” Gomes once said during an academic debate. “I have the alumni on my side.” That alumni constituency, even more than his church pulpit, his professorship, and the politics of his identity, make the Professor of Christian Morals something of a powerbroker, and the presidential search committee had to at least touch base with him.

“One of the questions Stone asked was, ‘Do you think the president of Harvard should have a national or international profile?'” Gomes remembered. “And I said, ‘Absolutely not. The president of Harvard, if he does his job well,
will
have a national and international profile. But you should not be looking for some colossus, some figure for worldwide education. That is not what makes a great presidency. A great Harvard president is made by doing the ordinary job of the president extraordinarily well. And my reading of history tells me that people are not brought in as great presidents. Harvard
makes
people a great president.'”

But, Gomes added, “I don't think that argument was listened to. It was already settled in the minds of those who make these appointments that they wanted a completely different style. These were pro forma conversations. But they asked my opinion and that's what I told them.”

By early December of 2000, the list of four hundred had been chopped down to forty. Eliminating people from consideration was almost too easy. “I look back ten years ago, and I don't see as many really top candidates outside Harvard as I did then,” Stone said at the time. The credible candidates would get a phone call from Marc Goodheart, a 1981 graduate and the university secretary, who was helping the committee coordinate its work. Would they be willing to have a conversation about the future of Harvard?

Always, they would—even if they didn't want the job, networking with members of the Harvard Corporation couldn't be a bad thing. But the meetings were never called “interviews.” That was in keeping with the search committee's style. Everything was informal, so that everything was deniable.

By January, four names began to crop up with increasing frequency. First was Amy Gutmann, a smart, ambitious political scientist who was the provost at Princeton. Gutmann had the requisite Harvard ties—she had attended Radcliffe and earned her Ph.D. at Harvard, she had taught at Harvard, and her daughter had attended Harvard as well. But her Princeton connections were a problem; Neil Rudenstine had also been provost at Princeton. In the eyes of his critics, he had failed to make the transition from Princeton to Harvard. Could Gutmann? Besides, how would it look if Harvard kept finding its presidents at Princeton? The truth, according to sources close to the search, was that Amy Gutmann was never seriously considered for the job. Instead, her name was floated to give the impression that a woman was a real contender for the Harvard presidency—when, in fact, the opposite was the case. In time, however, Gutmann would have her revenge.

Of the three remaining candidates, only one worked at Harvard. He was Harvey Fineberg, and Harvard was practically in his blood; Fineberg had come to Harvard as an undergraduate in 1964 and never really left. After college, he attended the medical school, then earned a master's degree at the Kennedy School and a Ph.D. at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Except for a brief stint as a practicing doctor, Fineberg had taught at Harvard ever since, serving most recently as Neil Rudenstine's provost.

Fineberg was a generally popular and well-respected man who badly wanted the job. He was smooth, diplomatic, a gifted public speaker and a skilled fundraiser. But his candidacy suffered from the liabilities that dog any insider in an executive search. Over the years, he had made enemies on campus—that was inevitable. Moreover, Harvard's familiarity with Fineberg had bred, if not contempt, then at least a certain limpness of enthusiasm. The Corporation wanted a president whose appointment would instantly signal that Harvard had made a daring pick, a choice that would make headlines and generate discussion. Choosing Harvey Fineberg would not have that effect.

And so the list was down to two: Lee Bollinger and Lawrence Henry Summers. They were successful, accomplished men at the top of their fields, and other than that they were different in every possible way.

A distinguished-looking man with a slim, runner's build and salt-and-pepper hair, Bollinger was president of the University of Michigan. A 1971 graduate of Columbia Law School, he had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger in the early 1970s. Joining the University of Michigan Law School, Bollinger specialized in First Ammendment issues. But he first came to public attention when, in 1987, he testified against the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Named dean that same year, he banned the FBI and CIA from recruiting at the law school after courts ruled that the former discriminated against Hispanics and the latter against gays. After serving as dean for seven years, Bollinger left in 1994 to become the provost of Dartmouth. Just two years later, Michigan wooed him back to serve as its president.