Harvard Rules (23 page)

Nor did he have to worry about being drafted; he was a student throughout the entire 1960s and '70s. Even after graduation, Summers was not inclined to save the whales or freeze the nukes or end aid to the Contras (or continue it, for that matter). He was a scholar in a field not known for its radicalism. “The reason I decided…to become an economist is that I wanted to work on solving what felt to me the most important problems in the world: poverty, unemployment, helping poor people,” Summers said in a 2001 speech. “But I knew that I didn't want to just shout and rant about them…. I wanted to carefully study what worked and what didn't work.”

If anything, Summers had a visceral distaste for the actions of people just a few years older than he. His academic training instilled in him what he called an “economic rationalism,” and he looked upon activism as if it were something to scrape off his shoe. Sixties-style protest, whether it occurred at Harvard in 1969 or at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999, struck him as anti-intellectual and, therefore, of dubious value. At a meeting with students in October 2004, Summers said regarding the war in Iraq that “If this was the 1970s, [Harvard] students would be protesting the war every day, but as it is, youth apathy means they focus on the important things—their studies—and that can only be a good thing.” He disliked the way protesters simplified complex issues, turning them into chants or slogans to be scrawled on pieces of cardboard. And he thought that the emotion-fueled acts of protesters often worked
against
the causes they supported. The best example was their anger and dismay over globalization. Summers had no doubt that globalization would lead to higher living standards and greater longevity for people all around the world, as well as a cleaner global environment. If the anti-globalization protesters—the people who would never let him forget The Memo—couldn't see that, then it was an intellectual failure on their part, an argument for the primacy of logic over passion, data over faith. He referred to those people as “espresso-drinking Westerners.”

Same thing with sweatshops, the original source of 2001's living-wage protest. Liberals thought that sweatshops were bad. Summers thought that it was better to work in a sweatshop than, for example, to walk the streets as a prostitute. If sweatshop jobs were really so terrible, people wouldn't take them. Activists who tried to shut down sweatshops were hurting the very people they claimed they wanted to help. That might sound contrarian, but it was really just thinking with your head and not your heart.

Summers was not devoid of passion. During his years in Washington, he became increasingly patriotic and started referring to the 1990s as an “American decade.” But his patriotism took the form more of admiration for American capitalism more than, say, a lump in the throat upon hearing “America the Beautiful.” The more Summers traveled around the world during the 1990s, the more he appreciated the American economy and the political framework that allowed it to thrive. In the trouble spots he visited, he saw how corruption stymied economic development and lowered the quality of life for ordinary people. Conversely, the economic policies that he, Rubin, and Greenspan had crafted and implemented had helped “save the world,” as
Time
had declared. The anti-globalization protesters who listened to Rage Against the Machine and rioted in the streets may not have understood, but the wise men of Washington knew what they were doing.

When he returned to Harvard, however, Summers saw the flotsam and jetsam of the 1960s wherever he looked. He had to step over it on his way through the student-occupied Mass Hall in the spring of 2001. The incoming president was shocked that Rudenstine had allowed the occupation of the president's building. And when the sit-in was over and the students got off with punishments so light you could barely call them slaps on the wrist, Summers couldn't believe that either. He considered such timidity a direct and unfortunate result of the 1969 riot, and he didn't hesitate to make his feelings known.

In September 2001, a Harvard undergrad named David Jonathan Plunkett came to talk with Summers at the president's office hour, which Summers scheduled every month or so. Plunkett had been one of the living-wage activists involved in the 2001 occupation, and as he sat down in Summers' office, he said, “You know, I used to sleep outside this door.” Summers responded, “If I were president then, I'd have suspended you for at least a year.” Plunkett pressed on, raising the issue of Harvard's outsourcing of union jobs to non-union workers. “I don't feel any obligation to buy a union-made trash can,” Summers told him. “Why should I feel an obligation to hire union workers?” Plunkett couldn't tell if Summers was serious or just trying to start an argument, but either way, he found the comparison offensive.

Summers was not only surprised that the occupiers hadn't been punished, he also believed that they felt they
shouldn't
have been punished. What gave him that idea was unclear. The protesters had fully expected to be disciplined and probably arrested, and were happily surprised when their assumptions proved wrong. But because they had anticipated being hauled out of Mass Hall, most of them hadn't even brought changes of clothes, sleeping bags, and the textbooks they needed to keep up with their course work.

Still, Summers was convinced that the living-wage activists wanted the moral high of protest without the morning-after hangover of punishment. “The living-wage campaign and the way it was carried on did not engage me as a step toward social justice,” he told one student who asked him about the Mass Hall sit-in. “If you read Gandhi or Martin Luther King or any other thoughtful proponents of civil disobedience…they will all tell you that the punishment of the civil disobedient is integral to the concept of civil disobedience. So the position that's been taken by some in this community that civil disobedience is so noble that it shouldn't be punished seems to me a misleading proposition.”

In February 2002, Summers announced a new “Interpretation” of an existing rule, the “University-Wide Statement on Rights and Reponsibilities.” Passed after the takeover of University Hall, the 1970 statement said that a member of the Harvard community enjoyed “free expression, free inquiry, intellectual honesty, respect for the dignity of others, and openness to constructive change.” Interfering with these freedoms was a “serious violation of the personal rights upon which the community is based.” The Orwellian-sounding “Interpretation” that Summers instigated added that “any unauthorized occupation of a University building, or any part of it…constitutes unacceptable conduct…and is subject to appropriate discipline.”

The Interpretation didn't actually change anything; it only emphasized extant policy. But it was widely seen as a sign of Summers' determination to break the spirit of campus activism. Students got the point. First Larry Summers had called Cornel West on the carpet—a warning to the faculty that Summers would not hesitate to castigate them. Now he was sending the students a similar warning: Neil Rudenstine might have tolerated protest. Larry Summers will not.

Summers not only disagreed with Rudenstine's decision not to have the Mass Hall occupiers arrested, he also found it hard to respect. In his opinion, Rudenstine's restraint reflected a post-sixties crisis of confidence that had weakened the presidency and degraded Harvard's intellectual life. Summers believed that the sixties had promoted what he called an “identity-based politics” in which the ideas people advocated were inextricably linked to their own cultural identities—the color of their skin, their religious belief, what social class they belonged to. He felt that scholars and students were afraid to say that one idea was better than another, lest they be accused of cultural insensitivity. Someone who criticized the value of African American studies, for example, risked being dubbed a racist. This way of thinking was so different from Summers' experiences in graduate-level economics seminars, where every idea was fair game and the thin-skinned did not fare well.

Summers blamed the professors more than the students. In the 1960s, he believed, the average Harvard student was to the political left of the faculty. Today it was the professors who were the knee-jerk liberals. He estimated that in 2000, 85 percent of the Harvard faculty voted for Al Gore, while the rest split their votes between Ralph Nader and George W. Bush. Perhaps 70 percent of the students voted for Gore, 25 percent for Bush, and 5 percent for Nader. Granted, both groups were more liberal than Americans generally, but the faculty was more monolithic and less open-minded than the students. If, as Summers believed, the decisions of adults were fundamentally the result of their education as young people, then Harvard students were too often being shaped by tenured professors infused with the anti-intellectual, counterculture spirit of the 1960s.

Summers was more hopeful about the undergraduates. They were, as he put it, malleable. Most of the freshmen during his first year as president had been born in or around 1983. Because they were some years removed from the sixties, they were less instinctively hostile to authority. Summers was particularly interested in those who wanted to enroll in ROTC, but were unable to do so at Harvard. The university's original ban on the officer training program had been extended in 1994, to emphasize the faculty's opposition to the military's discrimination against homosexuals. Now Harvard students wishing to participate in ROTC had to take the subway to MIT, which did conduct an on-campus program. The cost of training Harvard cadets, about $135,000, was picked up by anonymous alumni donors. Summers disapproved of that state of affairs, and he called for the return of ROTC to Harvard Yard and a reconsideration of Harvard's relationship to uniformed authority in general.

“There are still many people who, when they think of police, think too quickly of Chicago in 1968, and too slowly of the people who risk their lives every day to keep streets safe in America's major cities,” Summers said at a Kennedy School dinner in October 2001. “It is all too common for us to underestimate the importance of clearly expressing our respect and support for the military and individuals who choose to serve in the armed forces of the United States.” Perhaps, he suggested, the terrorist attacks of the previous month could have a silver lining. “If these terrible events and the struggle that we are now engaged in once again re-ignite our sense of patriotism—re-ignite our respect for those who wear uniforms and bring us together as a country in that way—it will be no small thing,” Summers concluded.

In February 2002, Summers made a cameo appearance in an Army recruitment video. Standing in front of the Yard's famous statue of John Harvard, which tour guides describe as “the third most widely visited statue in the country after the Statue of Liberty and the Washington Monument,” he announced, “I am proud of the Harvard ROTC students who participate in the ROTC program…. Their work is America's work.”

Eradicating the corrosive legacy of the 1960s also meant re-building the trust between the president and students. One undergraduate who asked Summers' opinion of the 1960s got this response: “As you and I meet today,” Summers said, “I think there is a kind of mutual respect between us. I talk with the assumption that you're not going to turn around and write an editorial in the
Crimson
tomorrow saying that Larry Summers is an asshole for [espousing] the following ideas, and you hold the assumption that I'm listening carefully to you and responding thoughtfully. Those assumptions would have been the exact opposite in the 1960s.” Just in case, Summers always had an aide sitting in on his meetings with students, partly so that he could keep track of their concerns, but partly so that if they did talk to the
Crimson,
he could ensure the veracity of their memories.

Summers wanted students and faculty to know that he could listen to them. But during his first year as president of Harvard, many students and faculty members began to wonder if he really
was
listening. Judging from his actions, it certainly didn't look that way.

 

Part of the problem—a large part—was stylistic. Summers had come to Cambridge after a decade in Washington, and he carried the culture of his former city with him. At Treasury, Summers had enjoyed the trappings of power, and at Harvard he replicated as many of those perks as possible. When star-struck students approached him bearing dollar bills for him to autograph—bills that already bore his signature from his time as treasury secretary—the new president was delighted to oblige. Image was important. He hired a decorator to redo the president's mansion, Elmwood, and printed up elegant stationery with “Elmwood” written on it. The stationery looked like “a wedding invitation,” said one of its recipients. He replaced the aging Lincoln Neil Rudenstine had used with a brand-new Town Car. That shiny black sedan was all over campus—outside the Faculty Club, the Kennedy School, Loeb House, with Summers' driver waiting patiently inside, often for hours at a time. Though cars are generally banned from Harvard Yard, Summers' Lincoln was constantly idling on the macadam in front of Mass Hall, a charging cell phone and a can of Diet Coke—a Summers addiction—perched in the rear-seat cup holders. Its license plate read simply “1636,” the year of Harvard's founding.

Summers quickly surrounded himself with Washington veterans, including several who had lost their jobs when George W. Bush took office. Familiar though they were with Washington's corridors of power, they had little or no Harvard experience. For his chief of staff, Summers hired a thirty-year-old former Treasury staffer named Marne Levine, a graduate of Miami University, in Ohio. A former Hillary Clinton aide, Sharon Kennedy, was hired as an event planner and alumni liaison. Alan Stone, once a speechwriter for President Clinton, became the vice-president for government, community, and public affairs. An aide to senator Ted Kennedy, Colleen Richards Powell, became another Summers staffer. For his “special assistant to the president”—no such position existed under Rudenstine—Summers brought in Michael O'Mary, a 2000 Harvard graduate who'd been an advance man for Al Gore. Lucie McNeil, a young press aide to British prime minister Tony Blair, would later sign on as Summers' personal press secretary. Her title was Senior Communications Director, Office of News and Public Affairs, but McNeil really had only one job: to promote Larry Summers in the media. This too was a position that had not existed in the Rudenstine administration.