Harvard Rules (15 page)

About five weeks later, fifty students took over Massachusetts Hall.

On Wednesday, April 18, they gathered secretly in the basement of a nearby freshman dormitory. They carried backpacks containing toiletries, cell phones, and paperbacks of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr. Their leaders gave them last-minute pep talks on what to do if the police arrested them. A few minutes after five o'clock in the afternoon, they sprinted the one hundred feet or so from the dorm to the red-brick building that houses the Harvard president's office, flung open the green door at the front of the building, and rushed past an astonished secretary. Amid the chaos that ensued, Neil Rudenstine escaped out the back of the building. Provost Harvey Fineberg, whose office was next to Rudenstine's, did not. Fineberg refused to talk to the protesters, and the students refused to leave. It would be almost three weeks before they did so.

The occupation of Mass Hall, as the building is commonly known, was the most sustained piece of student activism at Harvard since the 1960s, and had been years in the making. It began with a small and seemingly innocuous act. In the early 1990s, Harvard, like numerous other universities, had copyrighted the name “Harvard,” so as to prevent other companies and organizations from profiting off it, even as the university itself explored money-making opportunities. Through its Trademark Licensing Office, Harvard vigorously enforced that copyright, threatening lawsuits against, for example, the brewer of Harvard Beer. At the same time, Harvard was licensing its name to sportswear companies such as Nike and Champion to produce collegiate-themed clothing—T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, and the like. Harvard was far from the only university to enter into such arrangements: By the late 1990s, college-affiliated clothing was producing about $3 billion a year in revenues for its manufacturers. But as American labor unions and campus activists discovered, one reason the business was lucrative was that some of the clothing was manufactured in Asian sweatshops. Outrage over universities' ties to the sweatshop trade inspired nationwide protests, such as the one that had resulted in the occupation of Lee Bollinger's Michigan office.

At Harvard, the anti-sweatshop drive led to the creation of a activist group called the Progressive Student Labor Movement. The members of PSLM soon came to feel that it wasn't just foreign workers who were being vastly underpaid, but Harvard employees as well. They had some justification for their belief. In May 1999, the Cambridge City Council had passed an ordinance requiring city contractors to pay what it considered a “living wage”—not just the minimum wage of $5.25 an hour, upon which it was impossible to support a family, but the more plausible amount of $10.00 an hour. Even that amounted only to an annual salary of about $21,000.

But according to the PSLM, thousands of Harvard workers—janitors, security guards, dining room workers—made considerably less than ten dollars an hour. (Harvard claimed that the number was in the hundreds.) In fact, throughout the 1990s, the wages of such workers had actually decreased, and many Harvard jobs had been outsourced to non-unionized workers, who didn't receive health or retirement benefits. As janitor Frank Morley put it, “You don't need a degree to know when you're getting screwed.” Over the course of 1999 and 2000, PSLM's attempts to meet with Rudenstine and the Harvard Corporation had been repeatedly denied.

It was hardly the first time that Harvard had been accused of exploiting its blue-collar workers. Back in 1930, President Abbott Lawrence Lowell had refused to pay a group of “scrubwomen” more than thirty-five cents an hour, even though a state labor commission had instructed the university to pay the women thirty-seven and a half cents hourly. Instead, Lowell offered the women a daily twenty-minute rest break. Not until a group of embarrassed alumni raised $3,000 in “back pay” did the university retreat from its hard line. Similar fights occurred periodically for the next seventy years, according to Morton and Phyllis Keller, authors of
Making Harvard Modern.
Harvard, write the Kellers, cultivated an “almost feudal relationship” with its staff.

But the living wage movement brought a new element to an ongoing fight—globalization. With Harvard's endowment approaching $20 billion, idealistic students saw similarities between a sportswear corporation that exploited workers and a Harvard Corporation apparently doing the same. That link between the anti-sweatshop struggle overseas and the living-wage fight at home galvanized students, and the Harvard administration's recalcitrance only energized them further. Instead of offering to negotiate wage increases, the administration boasted of the free classes it offered workers. Joe Wrinn, a Harvard spokesman, claimed that such courses were the best way “to raise people into better-paying jobs.” The workers pointed out that since they often had to work two jobs to support themselves, they really didn't have much time left over to take classes in English lit.

For lame-duck president Rudenstine, the sit-in was agonizing. With only weeks to go before his retirement, he had little power to affect the situation. And he was genuinely torn. Though he considered the sit-in a threat to the sovereignty of the university, he was not entirely unsympathetic. His own mother had been a cafeteria worker who, he once blurted out in frustration, had never made ten dollars an hour in her life. So while Rudenstine refused to negotiate with the students, neither would he allow them to be evicted or arrested. “He made it very clear that he would not call the police,” said Everett Mendelsohn, who served as an informal liaison between Rudenstine and the protesters. “No matter how long it took, he would not call the police.” The students, who had expected the worst, were shocked. “We couldn't believe our luck,” said one.

Day after day, Rudenstine came to work, stepping over and around the increasingly smelly protesters. His own office had been locked when the students originally rushed in, apparently by an electric lock controlled by his secretary. So Rudenstine shifted to an office on the second floor. At one point he was joined for a meeting by president-elect Summers, who, according to sit-in participants, looked alternately annoyed at having to walk past the protesters and incredulous that they were still there. They didn't know yet just how strongly Larry Summers felt about student protest.

For the administration, the ties between the living wage movement and anti-globalization protests were clear and constituted an additional reason to take a hard line. When Bradley S. Epps, a professor of Romance languages and literature who supported the sit-in, asked if he could visit the protesters, Harvey Fineberg firmly said no. “They're involved with the anti-globalization protests in Seattle and elsewhere,” Epps remembered Fineberg warning him. “They're going to tear down the gates.”

Outside Massachusetts Hall, the campus was slowly being engaged by the sit-in. Cafeteria workers passed boxes of pizza through the windows of the building. Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson came to campus to protest, and the national media wrote stories and aired segments about the sit-in. Worried that their classmates couldn't actually see them except for brief glimpses through the windows, the protesters encouraged sympathizers to pitch tents in the yard around Mass Hall, and the early spring grass was soon decorated with a makeshift village of about seventy tents.

Harvard Yard is routinely described as a beautiful place, but that description is not quite accurate. A pigsty (literally) for much of the seventeenth century, the Yard is impressive, historic, and grand, but it falls short of beautiful. Perhaps it is the buildings—crammed together like hotels on a Monopoly board and radiating so much history that they celebrate the dead more than the living. Then there is the fact that the space is bisected by University Hall into the Old Yard (mostly dorms and Mass Hall) and the New Yard (mostly Tercentenary Theatre and its surrounding buildings).

Another dehumanizing element is the paved walking paths that crisscross the Yard like airport runways. The macadam stripes carve up the Yard's grass into small, asymetrical sections, and much of the year, the grass is either covered with snow or so muddy that it resembles the pigsty of yesteryear. When spring finally comes, usually not until May, the unpaved sections are cordoned off with ropes and coated with a green spray that improves the aesthetics until the real grass shoots up. The grassy chunks aren't big enough for the kind of athletic activity—touch football, Frisbee, hackysack—that you'd normally find on a freshman quad. And even if they were, Harvard rules ban such recreation in the Yard. They also ban parties in the Yard's freshman dorms (even without alcohol, which is, of course, illegal for freshmen to drink).

Such rules exist partly for the peace of mind of the tens of thousands of tourists who stroll through the Yard every year, invariably posing for pictures in front of an 1884 statue of John Harvard. But they also reflect a larger truth about the culture of the university: Harvard is not a place where students are encouraged to relax. The Yard is not tranquil; it is fragmentation and constant motion. Seen from above, it would look like a series of conveyor belts constituting a sophisticated assembly line, a metaphor reinforced by the fact that in all of the Yard's twenty-five acres, there is not a single bench, nowhere for students or passersby to sit, chat, and simply slow down for a while. That absence puzzled one student—Josiah Pertz, class of 2005—so much that he wrote a Mass Hall administrator about it. The aide wrote back, “The University has historically shied away from placing structures in the Yard. This may be due to the fact that the Yard is meant to be a thoroughfare, rather than a gathering place.” By “structures,” the administrator meant places to sit.

During the occupation of Massachusetts Hall, however, the Yard did become a gathering place—the tent city made it one. It created a sense of community that many students said was as welcome at Harvard as it was rare. During the day, the colorful tents looked like the set for a piece of performance art. At night, students sat outside their tents and talked or played guitar, hanging out in a way that students don't do very much at Harvard. The tents were small, fragile, temporary shelters, yet, if only for a few days, they held their own against the silent disapproval of the historic buildings surrounding them.

After about two weeks of steadily building pressure, Neil Rudenstine still adamantly refused to talk to the protesters or soften the university's position. “I'll resign before I give in,” he said, a threat that, given that he already had resigned, was more rhetorical than suasive. Students who had never seen Rudenstine play the heavy—who had never seen Rudenstine, period—were surprised. It seemed so out of character; he must be parroting the Corporation's party line, they decided. If so, the Corporation wasn't saying.

One week after Rudenstine issued his threat, the Harvard administration announced that it would raise the minimum salary of its hourly employees to $10.83 an hour, with equal wages for outsourced workers, and create a commission to study its employment practices. After twenty-one days inside Massachusetts Hall, shortly after five
P
.
M
. on May 8, twenty-three jubilant protesters poured out of the building. Neil Rudenstine was nowhere to be seen.

It was Larry Summers' time now.

I
t was the summer of 2001, and Skip Gates was getting worried.

The fifty-year-old chairman of Harvard's department of Afro-American Studies had heard that the new president was making the rounds on campus, chatting with professors about their interests, their needs, their concerns. But Larry Summers hadn't called Gates or anyone else associated with Af-Am, and the department members were growing concerned. Afro-American Studies may have been a small department, but it was still the best-known, most respected African American studies department in the country. How could Summers not want to meet with them, and quickly?

Gates wasn't used to getting the cold shoulder. Back in 1991, when Neil Rudenstine was taking over, the incoming president sent Gates a handwritten note asking if they could meet, and in short order the two were having lunch in New York. Rudenstine asked Gates to jot down the scholars he wanted to hire. Then, over the next few years, the two men went out and hired them.

A decade later, as Rudenstine was preparing his exit, Gates helped put on a farewell dinner for the outgoing president. Toasting Rudenstine, Gates called him “our president,” meaning the president of black people at Harvard. “Neil,” he said, his voice catching, “although you are far too modest to know this, you are, and shall always be, a hero to our people. And for us, your most loyal and dedicated constituency and your unshakably devoted friends, you should always be ‘the President.' You shall always be the Man.”

Rudenstine felt equally fond of Gates. He'd given the professor a copy of his book of essays with a heartfelt inscription: “To Skip, I write very slowly, so this cannot possibly rival your own fertile, eloquent, and always grand stream of prose. But it's all I have to offer, and it comes with a sense of deep gratitude, steady friendship and a rare feeling that does not come often in life—of having worked together to achieve something truly transcendent.”

For Henry Louis Gates, Jr., feeling the odd man out is an unusual situation; he lives to be in the mix. Gates is a networking master, particularly by the standards of academe, where, after too many hours in the library or laboratory, social graces are often neglected or just plain underdeveloped. But Gates, a light-skinned black man with an easy smile and a quick laugh, is comfortable, funny, self-deprecating, and charming. Even people who find him a bit of a rogue can't help liking Skip Gates. Back when he was writing regularly for the
New Yorker,
editor Tina Brown threw a party with him at Harvard's Eliot House packed with luminaries from Cambridge, Boston, and New York. When a friend asked Gates if he was enjoying himself, he threw back his head and laughed. “Man,” he said, “it's like shittin' in high cotton.”

When conservative columnist George Will visited Harvard, Gates threw a dinner party for him with guests that included former dean Henry Rosovsky, conservative political scientist Harvey Mansfield, and the liberal philosopher Cornel West. Normally, George Will and Cornel West wouldn't have been found within one hundred yards of each other. But Gates is all about building bridges—between liberal and conservative, white and black, academics from different fields—so that everyone benefits.

Same thing with the bash he threw every fall at his house on Francis Avenue in Cambridge, an elegant home just down the street from that of legendary Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Gates had bought the home in 1995 for $890,000, then had it extensively renovated by the internationally famous architect Moshe Safdie, and he liked to show it off. There was great food, lots of booze, a band in the yard out back. This kind of thing wasn't done at Harvard—throwing a big party for no particular reason. For one thing, the cost was prohibitive for most professors. A top salary for a tenured professor at Harvard is around $200,000, far from extravagant given the many years of training and the high cost of Cambridge-area living. And that comes only to a select few.

But money wasn't the only obstacle; Harvard just isn't the kind of community where people relax easily. “People at Harvard aren't used to being treated like human beings,” said Peter Gomes. “A colleague is someone lashed to the same mast. We're surrounded by subordinates whom we tell what to do, or superiors to whom we suck up.” Socializing usually has a purpose—something official and work-related, like a going-away banquet or an award ceremony. But Gates' parties united people from all over the university. And, not coincidentally, there would just happen to be more African Americans present than at any other Harvard gathering one could think of. It was just like back in 1957, when seven-year-old Skip would watch Nat King Cole, the first black with his own TV show. Cole would have black guests on his program as well as white ones. That way, the black people could advance without threatening whites and prompting a backlash.

Skip Gates had come a long way since then. He was born on September 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia, a small, rural town about two hours west of Washington, D.C. His father worked at the local paper mill in the first half of the day, then went to a second job as a janitor at the phone company. His mother raised Skip to speak English the way whites did and to dream of going to an Ivy League school. She wanted him out of Keyser, where racism was a fact of everyday life. “I was called ‘nigger' so many times, I often thought I had a sign on my back,” Gates recalled. In high school, he broke his hip playing football. When he made the mistake of telling the white doctor that he too wanted to go into medicine, the doctor decided that young Skip was faking his injury and declined to treat it. As an adult, Gates would have seven operations on that hip, culminating in a replacement joint. He now walks with the help of a cane.

Limping or no, he did get out of Keyser. Gates went to Yale and graduated summa cum laude in 1973, just two years before Larry Summers graduated from MIT. There weren't a lot of black students in New Haven then. But rather than feeling alienated, Gates wanted to make Yale his own. He read and appreciated Sam Greenlee's 1969 novel,
The Spook Who Sat by the Door,
a satire about a black CIA agent. “We all wanted to be spooks who sat by the door,” Gates later remembered. “We all wanted to be inside the system, integrated into historically elite white institutions of America, transforming them from the inside.”

Gates earned his Ph.D. in English at Cambridge University, then returned to Yale to teach. But his route to professional stardom really began in 1981, when he won a MacArthur Award, the so-called “genius” grant given by the MacArthur Foundation. Even though Gates didn't get tenure at Yale, the MacArthur, a $156,000, no-strings-attached prize, made him nationally known, and in 1985 Cornell University granted Gates tenure at age thirty-three—and for a humanist, whose research tends to take longer than that of scientists and economists, winning tenure at thirty-three is virtually unheard of. Gates spent five years at Cornell, until he was lured away by Duke University in 1990. But he wouldn't stay long in North Carolina. Gates was then married to a white woman named Sharon Lynn Adams, a fact that seemed to make some North Carolinians uncomfortable, which, in turn, made Skip Gates very uncomfortable. So when Harvard's Derek Bok and Henry Rosovsky let their interest be known in 1991, Gates was amenable to a move back north.

Gates began his career as a literary theorist aiming to show that black Americans had written books just as deserving of serious critical analysis as were books by white Americans. His best-known work of scholarship,
The Signifying Monkey,
argued convincingly for the existence of an independent black American literary tradition. But with the MacArthur and now Harvard, Gates became more than a mere scholar; he was an academic entepreneur. Gates was co-editor of the encyclopedia
Africana;
co-founder of a website called Africana.com; historical consultant to Steven Spielberg's film
Amistad
; and star of print and television ads for IBM. He became a judge for various career-making awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. His list of publications—a growing number of which he edited or just introduced—was longer than some people's dissertations. Skip Gates was a celebrity, a brand. And he was powerful. Gates could get people jobs—and keep people out of them. A phone call from him to a publisher could land a book contract for a young scholar; a blurb by Gates signified establishment approval; a Gates recommendation could mean the difference between winning a grant or changing careers.

Inevitably, his scholarship suffered. The wheeling and dealing kept him busy: he was always on the phone, constantly traveling, near impossible to schedule. Everyone who knows Gates can tell a story about his chronic tardiness or canceled appointments.

Also inevitably, he aroused skepticism and envy among both whites and blacks. Other academics resented the bidding wars that Duke and Harvard engaged in to lure him, reportedly paying him some $200,000 a year—a pittance by the standards of, say, Wall Street, but a lot for a professor of literature. And salary was just for starters; Gates got staff, prime office space, generous department budgets. Harvard, Duke, and Cornell had even hired his intellectual colleague and close friend, a Ghana-born philosopher named K. Anthony Appiah.

Some whites—some of the same people who didn't much care for Neil Rudenstine—thought that Gates exploited white guilt, that he was a 1990s mau-mauer who solicited money not by threats of street protest but by playing the race card in subtler ways. Certainly for a small department, Afro-American studies seemed to get an inordinate amount of Neil Rudenstine's attention, and Gates wasn't shy about letting it be known that he had Rudenstine's ear. Some blacks, on the other hand, argued that Gates was too accommodating, a modern-day Booker T. Washington, the black educator who thought that the only way for blacks to get ahead in late-nineteenth-century American society was to shun politics and learn a trade. For Washington, money had been foundational power, the basis of all other social gains, and Gates did seem to enjoy the fruits of his labors. Some African Americans wanted him to be more confrontational, more in-your-face—especially since he was now at the top of the world's most powerful university. They thought that Skip Gates was enjoying his success just a little too much. His defenders responded that Gates' rising tide was lifting a lot of boats.

Gates may have picked his battles carefully, but he did pick them. In 1991 he testified in defense of 2 Live Crew when the rap band went on trial for violating Florida's obscenity laws. Yet Gates was no apologist for all of black culture. In 1992 he wrote a famous
New York Times
editorial, “Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars,” in which he attacked black anti-Semitism and decried the deteriorating relationship between blacks and Jews.

Anyway, no matter how much Gates had become accepted by whites, he never forgot where he came from or that, to some whites, it didn't matter how light his skin color was. When Gates first came to Harvard, he and Sharon lived in the suburb of Lexington, a few miles northwest of Cambridge. Shortly after moving in, Gates paid a visit to the local police department. I travel a lot, he told an officer, and my wife will be alone. Are there any special security measures I should take?

Truth was, Gates wasn't particularly worried about his wife's safety in the tranquil suburb. He just wanted to introduce himself to the local police—because, otherwise, he suspected, a black man driving a Mercedes in Lexington, Massachusetts, was going to see a lot of flashing blue-and-white in his rearview mirror.

Gates took enormous pride in the department that he, Anthony Appiah, and Neil Rudenstine had built. They'd recruited scholars such as the eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson; jurisprudent Leon Higginbotham and his wife, historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham; legal scholar Lani Guinier; and Cornel West. Gates himself had raised an astonishing $40 million for the department's endowment, tapping his network of friends and business partners. Who else but Skip Gates could have convinced Time-Warner CEO Gerald Levin to donate $3 million of his company's money to endow the “Quincy Jones Professorship of African-American Music”? Outside his office, Gates had hung a framed note that Jones had written during a “celebration of African-Americans in Paris.” It read:
“A Skip Gates, le meilleur professeur du monde, et mon cher bon ami et frère. Avec toute ma gratitude et mon coeur. Je t'aime, inconditionnellement. Quincy Jones, July 4, 2000.”

Gates knew that by building this department at Harvard, he'd achieved something historic. He had taken something that was historically white—
profoundly
white, in its composition, its outlook, and culture—and had made it, in a small but significant way, black. And because this was Harvard, you could see the ripple effects at the nation's finest universities—at Princeton, Columbia, Yale—the awareness that if Harvard was making African American studies a priority, they had to compete. It gave Gates a deep appreciation of Harvard's power; the university was like an enormous megaphone.

So when Larry Summers didn't call, Skip Gates, not a man to sit and wait, decided he'd better do something. In late June, he was in his sunny office on the second floor of the Barker Center, home of several humanities departments, meeting with Corporation member Herbert “Pug” Winokur. The two men were discussing the creation of fellowships for minority graduate students in honor of Neil Rudenstine. Attracting black students to graduate school in the humanities was a chronic struggle. If you were a black kid from a poor background, with the brains and education to attend grad school at Harvard, wouldn't you want to go to the business school or the law school and make some real money? Spending six or seven years working on a doctoral dissertation was an uncertain road to success, especially for someone whose modest origins made financial security that much more appealing.