Harvard Rules (21 page)

Neither of them may have realized it, but the two men were similar in ways besides their experiences with cancer. Each was a charismatic figure who had attracted numerous admirers and a subset of equally fervent critics. Each was living through the pain of a failed marriage. And both were academics who may have compromised their intellectual potential for a career in the public eye. For all his gifts, Cornel West had never had “a single compelling idea of his own,” author Sam Tanenhaus would later write in
Vanity Fair
—the exact same criticism that many economists applied to Summers.

West was heartened by Summers' outreach for all of about twelve hours. The next morning, he picked up the
New York Times
and read an account of their meeting—an account that had not come from him. “Summers resolved the last issue with the Afro-American Studies department when he met with Dr. West and cleared the air, though he made no explicit apology,” the article said.
No explicit apology
? West couldn't believe it. He called Summers and demanded an explanation; Summers said that the
Times
must have misquoted him. West didn't buy it. He decided that Summers had lied to the
Times
and was now lying to him.

“That's when I decided to leave,” West said. “I can't deal with a place where people stab me in the back.” That apology had mattered to West. Everyone in the world, it seemed, knew what Summers had accused him of. It was only fair that they read that it wasn't true.

Three weeks later, on January 25, philosopher Anthony Appiah announced that he was leaving Harvard to teach at Princeton. The decision was made for personal reasons, he said—he wanted to be closer to his partner. But the West affair surely contributed to his decision. “I don't think Anthony would have left if all this hadn't happened,” said Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Appiah didn't want to break up the dream team, but “this opened a door that Anthony could go through.” Meanwhile, Ogletree announced that he was weighing a possible offer to be dean of the law school at Washington's Howard University. And one newspaper article after another suggested that Skip Gates had one foot out the door as well.

In some venues, though, Summers was winning the PR war. “In all politics, one needs an enemy, and preferably an incompetent, misguided, or socially adverse one,” Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote. Summers had chosen an enemy who could be easily caricatured. With his afro and black suits and street slang—indeed, by the very color of his skin—West hardly looked or sounded like the stereotype of a Harvard professor. Quoted out of context, his writings were easily lampooned. And then there was that “rap” CD.

And so cultural conservatives—both white and black—cheered Larry Summers. He wished only to restore “excellence,” they said, and Cornel West was, well, less than excellent. To them, West epitomized the kind of tenured radical who had torn apart universities in 1960s protests, then found sinecures drinking cappuccino and preaching revolution from within the security of ivy walls. The
Wall Street Journal,
the
National Review,
and the
New Republic
all praised Summers for calling West on the carpet. (As a general rule, the fewer the number of black staffers at a news organization, the greater was its hostility to West.)
Forbes
magazine suggested that if West left Harvard, he could be replaced by the rapper Eminem. In the
New York Times,
black academic John McWhorter criticized Harvard's Af-Am scholars for “shooting a gun at Larry Summers' feet and making him do the ‘I'm not a racist' dance.” Another black conservative, Shelby Steele, wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
that Summers' “rebuke [of West] for failing to deliver excellence was an act of social responsibility.” Since none of these critics appeared to know what had actually transpired between the two men, their conclusions seemed drawn from their own politics rather than from any fact-based interpretation of the situation.

On campus, students were dismayed and the professoriat divided. In early April, 1,200 students petitioned West not to leave. But few professors outside of Af-Am spoke on his behalf. Some agreed with Summers that West deserved to be criticized; others simply did not want to get involved. They didn't know exactly what had happened, and saw no gain in picking a fight with the new president. Every tub was indeed on its own bottom.

Meanwhile, Harvard alums—particularly those who had graduated before, say, the mid-1960s—rallied round their school's new president. “There's an enormous reservoir of goodwill out there” for any Harvard president, explained Derek Bok. “You can feel it when the alumni come back for reunions or when you go speak in different cities. These people want him to succeed, and they want to love and respect the institution, and to respect the president, simply because they assume that if he was chosen, he's the guy.”

When many Harvard alumni looked at the situation, they saw a white man who was the former secretary of the treasury, a man of Nobel-level intelligence—after all, Harvard had told them that—taking on a black professor who supported Al Sharpton and recorded rap CDs. Letters to the university ran three-to-one in Summers' favor. Still, staffers who worked in alumni affairs weren't entirely happy about the mail they were getting. A number of the letters—a substantial enough number that the staffers were genuinely disturbed—could only be described as racist.

West could not imagine a scenario in which he could remain at Harvard without seeming to endorse Summers' aspersions. And he didn't want to stay just to make things difficult for Summers. Life was too short for that. West wanted to be somewhere that wanted him.

On April 12, Skip Gates sent around a short e-mail to his colleagues in Af-Am and elsewhere. Cornel West would be joining Anthony Appiah at Princeton in the fall of 2002. If you had happened to walk into several departments around Harvard that day—Af-Am, history and literature, English—you would have seen people crying after they'd read that e-mail.

And that wasn't even the end of the matter. With West leaving, would Gates be next? If Skip Gates left, the whole thing—the department that Neil Rudenstine had cherished and built up for a decade—would implode. No one would stick around in a department that had lost Anthony Appiah, Cornel West, and Skip Gates. That'd be like buying a ticket for the Titanic
after
it hit the iceberg.

 

In the months and years following Cornel West's departure, Larry Summers would largely avoid the subject, refusing to get into the specifics of what had happened. When asked about it by the
Crimson
in October 2002, he said, “I have not talked about the content of that meeting and certainly do not intend to start now.”

But that wasn't quite true. At an off-the-record meeting with the editorial board of the
New York Times
that same fall, one
Times
editor asked Summers what had
really
happened with Cornel West. According to several people familiar with the exchange, Summers coolly replied, “What would you do if you had a professor with a sexual harassment problem?”

The remark, apparently an inaccurate reference to West's relationship with the visiting journalist, made its way back to several professors who were friendly with West. They did not mention it to him, and indeed, West did not learn about the comment until asked about it for this book. Those who heard of the accusation were stunned. It was one thing to confront a scholar face-to-face, but this rumor felt deliberately planted in the press, meant to be spread behind the scenes, without accountability. The new president was obviously versed in the ways of Washington. What did that bode for Harvard?

A
ccording to several people professionally close to him, Larry Summers little regretted the departure of Cornel West. True, the way that the drama played out wasn't entirely to his liking. The controversy had been embarrassingly public, and on campus, most student opinion ran against Summers. The president knew that he had overplayed his hand, and now he had to worry about the possible departure of Skip Gates, a man harder to caricature than West and impossible to replace.

On the whole, though, Summers considered West's exit a victory. The high-profile professor was gone, and that was good. Plus, much of the media coverage surrounding the fracas had lauded the new president. In general, the press had portrayed Summers as a take-charge, reform-minded newcomer who wasn't afraid to break a few eggs to make an omelet, and Summers knew that many Americans had a deep, almost primal affinity for such men of action—particularly when juxtaposed against hand-wringing, nervous-nellie egghead academics. “[Summers' critics] kept calling him ‘a bull in a china shop,'” James Traub, a
New York Times
reporter who wrote about Summers, said in a 2003 lecture to the Harvard Club of Westchester County, New York. “But who wants to work in a china shop?” Traub did not appear to realize that the Harvard faculty was not the origin of that simile; it was a Treasury Department aide who had first described Summers thusly, and the Treasury Department is not usually thought of as a haven for gentle souls.

No matter. Many outsiders and some campus conservatives saw West and his allies as defenders of the status quo, digging in their heels to fight a new president's desire to raise standards and impose accountability. Summers had immediately framed the debate in a way that put
them
on the defensive. Like the soundbite slogans of a political campaign: Change versus more of the same! Excellence versus mediocrity! Mainstream values versus tenured radicals! Such reductive dichotomies were standard operating procedure in Washington, and Summers knew how to exploit them far better than did the residents of Harvard.

Many members of the Harvard community—on both sides of the schism—were left wondering why Summers had picked such a risky fight so early in his tenure. The idea of singling out a popular black professor for criticism seemed so fraught with hazard, they found it hard to believe that Summers' stated reasons were his only motive—especially those who believed that the criticisms were of dubious merit. Instead, most people believed there was some other, deeper factor at work in Summers. An impulse to define himself in opposition to Neil Rudenstine? The alleged ear-whispering of Martin Peretz, Leon Wieseltier, and FAS dean Jeremy Knowles? Ethnic retribution for West's support of Al Sharpton?

Such theories are perhaps best left for psychiatrists to ponder—and Harvard's did—but there was one interpretation for which tangible proof did exist. Rebuking Cornel West was really only a microcosm of Summers' larger purpose: to prepare Harvard for an expansive future by eradicating what Summers perceived as the noxious remnants of an unhealthy past—the tumultuous, divisive, corrosive 1960s. Only by moving beyond the legacy of that decade, Summers felt, could the university embrace the magnificent future he envisioned for it.

Larry Summers may have left the Treasury Department, but he had no intention of disappearing from the circles of the world's power elite. He no longer had hundreds of billions of dollars at his disposal to promote American influence and his own power, but Harvard had its own distinctive assets. Summers was presiding over probably the greatest collection of brainpower anywhere, backed by one of the world's most powerful brands. Like a corporation with foreign subsidiaries, the university had outposts all over the globe—offices and partnerships with other universities in Asia, Europe, South America, and the Middle East. Summers knew that by further extending Harvard's influence around the world—and by shaping the content of that influence—he could extend his status as one of the globe's most influential citizens.

He would never say so explicitly. Unlike Neil Rudenstine, Summers would not talk about Harvard's destiny as an empire of the mind. But that was partly because the two men approached public speaking very differently. Rudenstine slaved over his writings and struggled to make each new speech clear and meaningful. “Neil doesn't delegate,” said one man who knew him well. “If Neil was giving a speech to his three nieces, he'd stay up the night before to write it.” Rudenstine thought that serious, painstaking writing was part of the job of university president. He believed in leaving a paper trail.

Plus, Rudenstine could get away with calling Harvard an empire. He was so mild-mannered, so self-effacing, no one would suspect him of grand personal ambitions. Summers did not have that luxury. He'd already been accused of exactly that. Nor could Summers forget “The Memo” from his days at the World Bank. To him, leaving a written record of his actions and ideas, whether they dealt with toxic waste or anything else, entailed more risk than benefit. As a result, the speeches that he did give were circumspect, containing rhetorically powerful lines but a notable lack of specifics—more the speeches of a cabinet secretary than a university president. It was no coincidence that Summers enlisted David Gergen, a Kennedy School professor who had served both political parties as a communications adviser in four White Houses, to help write them.

But in more intimate settings—in question-and-answer sessions, dinner parties, meetings with alumni, and talks with colleagues and aides—Summers made clear that a Harvard stretching out across the globe was exactly his intention. He did not want to rule the world, of course. But he did want to guide it, to shape it, to influence its development, just as he had during the 1990s. Harvard would be his power base, a knowledge factory exporting hundreds of soon-to-be leaders every year. And he would run the factory.

“You know,” he said in more than one speech, “I was overwhelmed during the time that I was at the treasury by the fact that I would travel all over the world and I would meet the deputy finance minister of this country or the foreign minister of that country, and half the time his reaction would be, ‘Well, it's nice you're here from the U.S. Treasury Department, Mr. Summers, but you were a professor at Harvard, weren't you?' And I'd say, ‘Yes, I was.' And then the person would say, ‘In 1977 I spent a year as a fellow at Harvard University and it was the most important year of my life, because of what I learned, the connections I made, the experience that I had.'

“…The network of people who have been through our campus and have become leaders around the world is something that I could not have conceived of when I was a professor here, and would not have believed if I had not met these people through my travels.

“What will shape this world is the people who come forth to lead it,” Summers said on another occasion. “And the group of 1,650 people [in every freshman class] from every state, from dozens of countries, from every possible background…is every year the most remarkably talented group of young people that has ever been assembled in the history of the world.

“The years in which students are here at Harvard College are the years of tremendous malleability in their lives,” he said. “We have such a wonderful opportunity to shape and prepare what these students do.”

Again and again Summers returned to the idea that, more than any other place, Harvard created the earth's leadership class “The world is really shaped by what its leaders think,” he said on another occasion. “What they think…depends on what happens in the years in which they are being formed. Harvard College will do its part.”

And Summers explicitly linked the future of the United States in its fight against terrorism with the success of Harvard. As he said to students at a Florida high school, “There is…nothing that would give greater support in the long run to countries that are adversaries of the United States, than for us to have the situation where members of every group don't feel like they have a chance to be at places like Harvard.”

Of course, all teachers hope that they will have a lasting influence on their students; on a much larger scale, the same was true for Summers. During his time in Washington, he had become convinced that the single most important factor in how politicians made decisions was their education. Now Summers ran an institution containing the world's best and brightest students, and he was determined to teach them how to lead. “Harvard exists for only one reason—the future of the world depends more than anything else on what young people learn and go forth and do,” he said.

For someone who had thought as long and hard about globalization as Summers had, the opportunity was inescapable and inevitable—not just for Harvard, but for himself. Once he had been able to prod, cajole, and sometimes even bully world leaders using billions of dollars in IMF loans and “conditionality,” the implementation of specific, pro-American policies attached to all those loans. Now he could shape the world in a different way—by training its elite. Through his paradigmatic textbook, Paul Samuelson had influenced generations of economists; Larry Summers wanted to influence generations, period. He had called the students of Harvard “the most remarkably talented group of young people in the history of the world.”
In the history of the world.
And every year another group, equally or more impressive. And he was now the president of this, the elite of all elites.

First, though, he had to wipe the slate clean. To purge Harvard of the bonds that kept it from realizing its enormous potential and seeing itself in a new way—
his
new way. And that meant eradicating the influence of the 1960s.

What was that influence? Larry Summers had one decidedly negative view. In the years to follow, those who held a different perspective would become Summers' most ardent critics. They did not disagree that Harvard should shape the world's future leaders. But on the question of how those leaders should be shaped, what they should be taught, what their
values
were, they could not have disagreed with Larry Summers more. As Summers moved to remake Harvard in his own image, these people would become his most passionate opposition.

 

The man who had been president of Harvard during the decade of Vietnam, civil rights, student protest, and political assassination had been tragically out of sync with his era. Nathan Marsh Pusey was a classics scholar who'd graduated from the college in 1928 before earning his Harvard Ph.D. in 1935. (He enjoyed, according to one report, a “passion for Athenian law.”) Pusey was a deeply pious man, a regular attendee at Memorial Church who was committed to improving the lot of the chronically impoverished divinity school. Minister Peter Gomes called Pusey “the last Christian,” by which Gomes meant the last Harvard president profoundly infused with and motivated by faith. (“It's a problematic title, but one that I can get away with,” Gomes joked.) Pusey's conviction showed in his broad, resolute face, which never looked creased by doubt—or, for that matter, flexibility.

When James Bryant Conant announced in the spring of 1953 that he would leave his office to become the U.S. high commissioner to Germany, no one at Harvard expected Pusey to succeed him. How could they? Few even knew who Pusey was. The leading candidates were McGeorge Bundy, then a thirty-three-year-old associate professor of government, strikingly young but manifestly brilliant, and John Houston Finley, a professor of Greek literature who had helped author the famous “Harvard Red Book,” a blueprint for education in postwar America. In different ways, both were men of gravitas and stature.

Pusey, who had in the interim become president of Lawrence College, a small liberal arts school in Appleton, Wisconsin, was not—at least, not to many Harvardians. A native of Iowa, he would be the first Harvard president born west of the Hudson. Unlike Abbot Lawrence Lowell, he didn't have family money. Unlike James Bryant Conant, he wasn't married to a Harvard professor's daughter. Pusey had never even been a member of the Harvard faculty. He was so anonymous around campus that, after the choice was announced, a joking refrain sprang up: “Pusey? Who's he?” Once the students and alums answered that question, they concocted another rhyme: “We couldn't be choosy, so we took Pusey.”

But for most of his presidency, Pusey confounded his skeptics. He smartly appointed Bundy dean of the FAS, bringing into the fold a man of enormous intelligence and energy who also possessed the disposition of a potential rival. Pusey also proved to be a master fundraiser, leading what was then the largest capital campaign in the history of higher education—$82 million. And he wasn't afraid to use his bully pulpit to rebuke an American bully. During his time at Lawrence College, Pusey had been a fearless critic of the increasingly dangerous Joe McCarthy—on Pusey's appointment, McCarthy remarked that “Harvard's loss is Wisconsin's gain”—and he would play the same role at Harvard. “Someday I am sure we shall all look back on the hateful irrationality of the present with incredulity,” he told one journalist. A 1954 faculty citation said that Pusey confronted McCarthy “with a serene and quiet courage,” and called Pusey “the president of Harvard both in name and deed.”

But the moral certitude that served Pusey so well in the 1950s proved less suited to the 1960s, when the greatest threat to Harvard came from within. As student protest began to embroil campuses nationwide, Pusey refused to believe that Harvard might become infected by the unrest. Why attack the university for problems that were so clearly the result of external forces? “The number of undergraduates who get excited about political problems is not large,” he declared. “Most of them are above that sort of thing.”

As it turned out, they weren't—though at first the students' protests seemed more hormonal than political. In 1960 the faculty voted to publish Harvard diplomas in English rather than the traditional Latin, and a horde of some two thousand cranky undergraduates marched on Loeb House, then the president's residence. “Latin Si, Pusey No,” the students chanted. The president came out of his house and addressed the crowd—in Latin. Since virtually none of the students had any idea what he was saying, the protest quickly fizzled.