Harvard Rules (22 page)

Pusey had a sense that the students either weren't dealing with important issues or didn't understand the complexity of the matters they were going on about, and the events of the next years did nothing to dissuade him. In 1963 students protested a plan to cut down sycamore trees along Memorial Drive, the four-lane road that runs parallel to the Charles River. The protest succeeded; the trees were spared. A 1966 attempt to block the introduction of
WALK
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signs in Harvard Square did not. Trivial though these little flare-ups seemed, they had an underlying consistency—a reaction against the incursions of unwelcome “progress” into Harvard's tradition-minded community.

Nor was all the student activism at Harvard so slight, and Pusey failed to distinguish between jejune rebellion and genuine political anger, or to recognize how potent the two combined could be. In 1966 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a 1939 graduate of the business school to whom the university had awarded an honorary doctorate in 1962, was invited to speak on campus. He never got the chance to deliver his speech. A shouting mob of students corralled him outside Quincy House, on Plympton Street. McNamara responded with bravado—“I was tougher then, and I'm tougher now!” he shouted, referring to his own student days—but the situation verged on chaos. A young student (and future congressman) named Barney Frank hastily led McNamara to safety through a labyrinth of underground steam tunnels. The ugly incident only hardened Pusey's conviction that student protest subverted the sine qua non of the university, a respect for free speech and civil debate. The students argued that extraordinary times required exceptional behavior. Without concession, Pusey disagreed.

As the war in Vietnam escalated after 1965, the tension at Harvard also rose. Some students, perhaps the majority, were not particularly demonstrative. But others grew angrier and angrier—over the war, the draft, racial injustice, on-campus recruiting by military contractors such as Dow Chemical, and the campus presence of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps. The fact that Harvard had numerous connections to the Johnson administration—including the since-departed Bundy, now special assistant to the president for national security affairs—fueled many students' conviction that their university was complicit in the war.

Students weren't the only ones torn between their reasons for being at Harvard and the pull of social unrest outside the campus gates. A politicized faculty split into liberal and conservative caucuses (both tilted considerably more to the left than either term now connotes). So broad was the divide that members of the two groups stopped speaking to one another. At the Faculty Club, who ate lunch with whom was meticulously scrutinized. Professors aligned themselves with or against the students. When the radical group Students for a Democratic Society threatened to burn the Widener Library card catalogue, several members of the conservative caucus camped out in the library for months keeping watch.

The collegiality that bound Harvard together was crumbling under the combined assaults of war and protest, mistrust and incivility. Still, most professors thought that widespread civil disobedience was unlikely. Hundreds of demonstrators might have seized buildings at Columbia and Berkeley, yet the faculty firmly believed that Harvard was different; Harvard was too old, too venerable, too
good.
Harvard had always thought of itself as exceptional among universities, in both senses of the word—better than and apart from the mass. Student uprising could not, would not happen here.

It did. On the afternoon of April 9, 1969, some three hundred students and outside activists, angered by Pusey's refusal to evict ROTC from the campus, raced into University Hall, the administration building that sits between Memorial Church and Widener Library. Shouting, swearing, and ransacking file cabinets, the protesters infiltrated the offices of the college deans. The stunned administrators were pushed, threatened, and forced to leave, subject to a torrent of verbal abuse and the threat of worse. One, Archibald Epps, Harvard's first African American dean, refused to depart. The protesters carried him feet first out of the building, unceremoniously dumping him on the ground. Epps, who considered himself someone who could sympathize with the students because of his own groundbreaking position, would never quite recover from the sense of violation and betrayal he felt.

Over the course of the afternoon, shocked university officials debated how to respond. While they talked, two to three hundred more students, most more curious than committed, joined the original protesters in University Hall.

Pusey had no intention of waiting out the sit-in or negotiating with student leaders. Instead, he called the cops—and not just Harvard police, but Cambridge and Boston troopers as well. In the gray pre-dawn light of April 10, they took University Hall back. About four hundred masked policemen filled the building with tear gas and waded inside, liberally wielding their nightsticks against anyone who didn't get out of the way fast enough. Coughing, crying, and gasping for breath, the demonstrators rushed out doors and jumped out windows. Less than twenty-four hours after it began, the occupation was over.

The immediate consequences were a ten-day campus strike, vociferous denunciations of the president, and media portrayals of a bitterly divided university. Those would pass. But in the longer term, the assault on University Hall—both assaults on University Hall—scarred the campus for decades. The trust between students and faculty was shattered. Relationships between some professors would never fully heal. And no longer would the students see the Harvard president as an Olympian figure to whom they deferred, but as a flawed and fallible individual against whom they protested. After all, the students may have taken over a building, but Pusey unleashed armed outsiders upon them. Not all trespasses were equal.

Most seriously, perhaps, Harvard's self-confidence, that invisible armor that had cloaked the university since the seventeenth century, had been profoundly shaken. If its own students could hate Harvard so much—and could such a treason stem from anything other than hatred?—then what was the very point of the university?

Not everyone thought that this was an improper question to ask. The events of the 1960s prompted a still-ongoing debate about the role of universities in American society. How engaged should they be with the world beyond their walls? Given their status as redoubts against the increasing materialism and ever-growing competitiveness of American society, should they infuse their students with an idealistic enthusiasm for reforming American life? Or would doing so corrupt the integrity of universities' fundamental mission—to seek and impart knowledge?

Given Harvard's prestige, power, and wealth, these questions were all the more urgent in Cambridge. With the nation's eyes on Harvard, as was always the case, didn't Harvard have a responsibility to serve as a university on a hill? Harvard thought it was better than every other university, so shouldn't it set a standard of idealism to which other universities should aspire? After all, Harvard had so much money, how could anyone pretend that its decisions did not have profound social and political ramifications?

If it took a little revolution to bring these issues to the fore, so be it. That, at least, is what many defenders of student protest believed. Many Harvard students and professors thought that the tangible consequences of the sixties were, on the whole, good ones. The concept of in loco parentis—that universities played the role of parents to the students they enrolled—was severely weakened, leading to greater student freedom and, theoretically, greater individual responsibility. Restrictive social mores were loosened. Men at Harvard were no longer compelled to wear coats and ties to dinner; women and men would live in the same dormitories. The faculty voted to banish ROTC from campus and created a committee on Afro-American studies, which would eventually become the department run by Skip Gates. Meanwhile, the college pushed to increase the diversity of its student body, using affirmative action to recruit African American students in particular. Cornel West, who came to Harvard in 1970, might have been a beneficiary of just this effort.

This emphasis on ethnic diversity and social justice also opened up enormous new fields of inquiry, particularly in the humanities. No longer were DWMs—dead white males—the sole legitimate area of interest. Scholars of history, literature, anthropology, sociology, and the like turned their attention to women, the poor and working class, blacks, native Americans, and other groups traditionally neglected by scholars. This was new and fertile material whose exploration helped detail a richer, more nuanced portrait of American history. It also brought new faces into the academy. Part of Skip Gates' reputation rested on the fact that he had unearthed the first novel ever written by an American black,
Our Nig,
by Harriet Wilson,
and
the first novel ever written by a female slave,
The Bondwoman's Narrative,
by Hannah Crafts.

Still, 1969 was a traumatic year for Harvard, and professors present at the time wince and sigh when they reflect upon it now. Nathan Pusey retired in 1971, widely seen as a casualty of the protest but insisting that his actions were proper. His successor was Derek Bok, the conciliator.

For the first years of his presidency, Bok aimed simply to keep the peace. One of the conditions for his taking the job was that he not have to live in Loeb House. Its location in the Yard made it vulnerable to further student turmoil, and Bok had young children. So the president's office bought the FAS dean's mansion on Elmwood Avenue from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Bok took the question of the university's role in society seriously, and over the course of his two-decade presidency, he struggled to define the appropriate political role for Harvard and its president. A university president, he argued, should address political issues only when they had direct relevance to the mission of the university—teaching and learning. In the 1980s, Bok employed that argument in rejecting student demands for the university to divest its investments in South Africa as a protest against apartheid.

Bok also moved to redress an institutional shortfall that some Harvardians felt contributed to the unrest of 1969: a paucity of administrators. Improbable though it may seem today, Nate Pusey primarily depended upon two secretaries to run his administration, and some members of the faculty and administration felt that the lack of a broader management structure contributed to his loss of control over the students. Bok agreed that the university needed more professional management, if only because it had grown so much in the boom years after World War II. Harvard needed more experts in law, finance, political affairs, public relations, real estate, and so on. Bok hired them.

“One of the things that I faced, which my predecessor deliberately left for me to do, was coming to terms with how we administered a much more complicated institution,” Bok said. “[Pusey] was old-fashioned in that respect…but we couldn't wait any longer. We had one vice-president for the whole institution, and we had massive complaints about the way in which buildings and grounds operated, the way the budget system worked, faculty pensions…. And so we entered a period that could be described as bureaucratization.”

“Bureaucratization” changed Harvard in profound and unexpected ways. The growth of a corporate infrastructure that reported to the president diminished the power of the faculty while boosting that of the central administration. The culture of the university changed as well. Harvard's dominant values had once been those of scholars, but increasingly the university was defined by the bottom-line standards of corporate lawyers and MBAs. At points in Harvard's history, the faculty had essentially run the institution. Now they became more and more like mere employees, with less and less of a sense of investment in the university as a whole. For many, their greatest allegiance to Harvard was due to the fact that it was lucrative to be affiliated with the best brand in higher education. Some might criticize people like Skip Gates for hopscotching from university to university, but the diminished stature of faculty at universities everywhere was partly to blame.

Along with their other demands, the student protesters had sought greater democracy in Harvard's governance. The growth of a management culture took the university in just the opposite direction. Bureaucratization created a corps of behind-the-scenes powerbrokers whose decisions had great impact on both the students and faculty—yet the students and faculty frequently didn't even know who those decision-makers were. Looking back at 1969, these administrators and the members of the Corporation saw ample cause to shut students out of decision-making. As was also the case at the World Bank during the 1990s, transparency was a concept praised in theory, but largely ignored in practice.

If the Bok years were considered an era of healing at a university burned by its engagement with the political world, the Rudenstine decade that followed saw what might be called the normalization of the sixties. With his commitment to the Af-Am department and affirmative action, Rudenstine endorsed some of that decade's inheritance. Another, perhaps less constructive consequence was the growth of identity politics, with students fighting turf battles over ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. The importance of the world outside campus had diminished; the canvas of activism had shrunk to the individual body.

None of this recent history appealed to Larry Summers. Both by training and by temperament, the economist felt a profound skepticism toward the youth movement of the sixties. He thought of himself not as a product of that decade, but a response to it. Born in 1954, he was a little too young to be swept up in the turmoil of the time. As something of a loner, he wasn't a movement type. He wasn't a cool kid, a rebel who'd feel comfortable smoking a joint and listening to Jimi Hendrix. He was too driven, too disciplined, and too ambitious for that. A physically ungainly young man, Summers relied on his strength—his enormously powerful intellect.