Harvard Rules (20 page)

The Harvard president must approve or reject every tenure recommendation for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. That enormous power gives the president the tangible authority to shape the intellectual composition of his university—and to slap down department heads making choices of which he disapproves. (Imagine if, say, Congress nominated Supreme Court justices, and the president had the power to veto them.)

Deciding upon tenure nominations is also an enormous burden. Every year, there are about twenty ad hoc meetings at Harvard College, each requiring hours of preparation on the part of the president, who must intimately familiarize himself with the candidate's work. The meetings themselves last about four hours. The president must weigh a decision which has required months of work by members of his faculty—or, in the case of the candidate, a life's work. Rejection is devastating. “From that point on, the scholar is marked with a scarlet letter, always having to explain the basis of a presumably mistaken negative judgment,” Rosovsky writes. “In every case with which I am familiar, the result is a scar that may not even be wiped out by the award of the highest professional honors.”

But the end result of this arduous gauntlet, Rosovsky argues, is that Harvard accumulates a remarkable group of scholars who have survived the most rigorous weeding-out process the university can devise.

And then, once someone is granted tenure, they are left alone to write and research as they see fit. This is the very point of tenure—to guarantee academic freedom; to protect professors from the Joe McCarthys of the world, whether inside or outside the university. True, once in a while, you get a dud. Maybe 3 percent of the people chosen turn out to disappoint, to be unproductive, never to write another book. But Harvard can live with 3 percent. The benefits of tenure more than justify a minuscule failure rate.

Besides, “failure” is hard to define. Scholars are human beings—sometimes quirky, often high-maintenance—who work on their own schedules. Rosovsky remembered one professor who didn't publish a thing for years and years. His colleagues began to whisper: What was with this guy? Yet Rosovsky never pressured the man, giving him his customary annual raise without question. In 1971, after almost two decades of virtually nothing, the professor, whose name was John Rawls, published a book. It was called
A Theory of Justice,
and it would be considered perhaps the most important work of political philosophy published in the last half-century. When Rawls died in 2002, he was remembered as one of Harvard's greatest professors. The fact that he'd gone some twenty years without publishing any major work was largely forgotten.

Tenure isn't just about giving people the freedom to publish what and when they want; it creates a secure environment in which professors can freely speak their minds, on any subject, so that they can push the envelope of thought without fear of penalty. Such freedom is the very heart of the university, and Harvard has a long tradition of defending it. “There is no middle ground,” Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who was president from 1909 to 1933, once said. “Either the university assumes full responsibility for permitting its professors to express certain opinions in public, or it assumes no responsibility whatever, and leaves them to be dealt with like other citizens by the public authorities according to the laws of the land.”

Derek Bok also wrote eloquently on the subject. “Brilliant and creative people are sometimes eccentric or even irresponsible…” he argued when he was president. “As a result, in institutions whose overriding purpose is to discover and transmit knowledge, it has often seemed best to tolerate unpopular opinions and questionable behavior for the sake of giving the most talented individuals the opportunity to publish and teach.”

In an interview with
Newsweek
about seven months before his meeting with West, Larry Summers himself endorsed the notion that professors' politics were their own business. Asked whether it was appropriate for a university president to take political stands, Summers responded, “Universities—
as distinct from the scholars who work in them—
have to be very careful about political involvement” (emphasis added).

Of course, the Harvard president has the authority to meet with University Professors. James Bryant Conant, who created the position, wanted University Professors to be answerable
only
to the president, as opposed to the FAS dean. That chain of command was not the issue in the case of Cornel West. The problem was that the concerns Summers raised with West seemed to undermine long-established ideas about the nature of tenure at Harvard. Criticizing a professor over the pace of his scholarship? His political opinions? It just wasn't done. For one thing, if you chastised every professor who went a few years without publishing a major book—or a minor one, for that matter—you'd run out of voice long before you ran out of professors.

And there was another problem. On the facts in question, Summers was simply wrong—and he had been warned that he was wrong. In the days before West's meeting, Skip Gates had written Summers a long memo in which he rebutted the allegations Summers had mentioned. West missed classes? Not true, Gates wrote. If Cornel West had missed three weeks of classes, you'd have read about that on page one of the
Harvard Crimson.
Grade inflation? That wasn't true either, and outside sources agreed. “Cornel was not the biggest offender,” one high-ranking Harvard administrator said. “If you went down the list of who was giving all As, Cornel would not be high on the list, and certainly no worse than a lot of people.” Even if the charge were accurate, grade inflation was clearly a systemic problem; you didn't address it by attacking one professor.

What, then, explained Summers' decision to lambaste one of Harvard's most esteemed professors?

 

After Cornel West left Mass Hall that afternoon, he called Skip Gates to tell him what had transpired. Gates couldn't believe it. “That man is going out of his way to demean you,” Gates said. Then West called his old friend, the writer Toni Morrison, who teaches creative writing at Princeton. “Summers has lost his mind,” Morrison said.

For the next two months, West would ponder his meeting with Summers, discussing it with only a few close friends. He couldn't make sense of it. Why would a new president make calling West on the carpet one of his first official acts? Why would he attack an African American professor to whom his predecessor awarded Harvard's highest honor, the title of University Professor, and a member of the department that Neil Rudenstine considered his most important legacy? Why would he embarrass West with allegations he had good reason to believe were untrue? And why would he instruct West to appear for mandatory intellectual check-ups when he must have known that no Harvard professor would accept such babysitting?

The more he thought about it, the harder it was for West to avoid the conclusion that Larry Summers wanted him gone. West had tenure; it was virtually impossible for Summers to fire him. But he could make Cornel West's life at Harvard so miserable that West would leave of his own volition.

Over the next days and weeks, rumors began to fly, first within the Af-Am department and then beyond. West's colleagues knew that something bad had happened between the professor and the president, but they didn't know exactly what—except that whatever had gone on, it was upsetting enough that West was thinking of quitting. Soon a reporter from the
Boston Globe
showed up outside West's office door. West wouldn't talk to him. The rumors were also circulating down south, at Princeton. And when Princeton provost Amy Gutmann—whose name had been leaked as a candidate for the Harvard presidency to make it seem that the Corporation was seriously considering a woman—called West to see if he would consider returning, West took that call.

There are academic departments at Harvard whose members are competitive with one another, don't like one another, and don't trust one another. In recent times, for example, the Department of History has been so bitterly divided that it couldn't agree on tenure candidates, and the senior professors grew older and older until the department fell into decline. The Departments of Government and Economics, two of the more powerful groupings of faculty, are also known for their internecine tensions.

But Afro American Studies is a small department whose members care about one another, take an interest in one another's work, and socialize with one another outside of their official duties. “I have been in lots of departments” at other schools, said Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. “I have been in history departments, I have been in other African American departments. I have never been in a department where people like each other so much. It is truly a community.”

For months, this community tried to persuade Cornel West that he should not head to Princeton. What had happened with Summers could be patched up, Gates and others insisted. And if it couldn't, West should stay to act as a thorn in Summers' side. “Don't break up the team,” Gates urged West.

But West was pessimistic. Not once after their meeting had he heard from Summers. The president must have known that West hadn't scheduled another appointment, but he didn't seem to care—which only reinforced West's conviction that Summers wanted him out.

West was also distracted by tensions in his personal life. Recently diagnosed with prostate cancer, he would soon undergo an operation to remove the tumor. He was also going through a difficult divorce. As his marriage had begun to fall apart, he'd become romantically involved with a thirty-eight-year-old woman who was studying at the Kennedy School on a journalism fellowship. The woman had become pregnant and would decide to keep the baby. Although she and West would not stay together, West was determined to be a good father to his new daughter. Still, it was a messy, painful situation, and the tongues of campus gossips were wagging. “There was a rumor that the mother of my precious daughter was a twenty-one-year-old junior,” West said. “I heard it from friends—even Skip and others were saying, ‘Corn, I don't know what the heck is going on, but there's this thing…' I said, wait a minute, I haven't touched an undergraduate in twenty-seven years of teaching.”

On December 22, a
Boston Globe
reporter named David Abel—the one who'd shown up at West's office—broke the story: Skip Gates' Dream Team was in turmoil because of tensions with new president Larry Summers. West was thinking of heading to Princeton. So was Anthony Appiah, whose significant other lived in New York City. If West and Appiah left, could Gates be far behind? Charles Ogletree spoke on West's behalf, saying that it would be “a miscarriage of justice if for any reason Cornel were no longer at Harvard.” Summers, meanwhile, explained that he had not meant to offend West. “It's a very unfortunate misunderstanding,” he said. Just to reaffirm the point, an anonymous Harvard official called the situation “a huge misunderstanding.” Summers and his aides would use that term again and again over the next weeks, months, and years. West thought that was kind of funny. There was no misunderstanding; Summers had made himself perfectly clear.

One week later, the story of the president and the professor appeared on the front page of the
New York Times,
and after that in newspapers across the country and the world. The
Times
account enlarged the issues at stake. West and Gates, wrote reporter Jacques Steinberg, were considering leaving because “Mr. Summers…has yet to speak out forcefully enough in favor of affirmative action and diversity.”

That wasn't quite true. Summers' disastrous meeting with West was by far the most pressing issue at hand, and people on both sides of the matter suspected that Charles Ogletree had just piggybacked on the West controversy to pressure Summers on affirmative action. If that was his intention, it worked. On January 1, Jesse Jackson arrived in Cambridge to proclaim that “Harvard must be a beacon of light for the nation, not a shadow of doubt.” Al Sharpton announced that he, too, would be paying a visit.

This was not the kind of attention that the Harvard Corporation hoped for when it hired Summers. Though Bob Rubin had assured them that Summers was a changed man, this was just the kind of ugly episode others had warned of. And so Corporation member Conrad Harper, the only black on the Corporation, called Summers and strongly urged him to defuse the crisis.

On January 2, Larry Summers released a public statement reaffirming his commitment to a diverse campus. “I take pride in Harvard's long-standing commitment to diversity,” his statement said. “I believe it essential for us to maintain that commitment…” But privately, Summers was furious. He had never expressed doubts about the value of diversity; he'd only questioned the merits of affirmative action as a means to that end. Summers had never anticipated that chastising West could lead to such an uproar and leave him exposed to charges of racism.

On January 3, Summers and West finally met again in Mass Hall, this time an evening meeting, at Summers' request. At first they spoke of personal matters; Summers asked about West's illness, and shared his own experience with cancer. West appreciated the concern, and he was impressed with the strength that Summers had shown during his treatment. Summers then thanked West for not having made their disagreement a racial issue, which startled West a little, because he believed that, at least in part, it
was
a racial issue.

Over the course of the meeting, Summers repeatedly apologized to West. He cited Richard Posner's recent book,
Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline,
which called West one of the most often-cited scholars in the country. As the rest of Harvard would learn soon enough, with Summers, it was all about the data. Arguments from the heart didn't move him; he wanted to see numbers. And he hadn't seen these numbers before his and West's first conversation. He confessed that he wished that he had; he would have reconsidered some of his earlier remarks.