Harvard Rules (29 page)

So, when he realized that Summers was not prepared to give him what he wanted, Gates readied himself to say good-bye to Harvard. Envisioning a move to Princeton or perhaps the up-and-coming New York University, he began house-hunting in Harlem. If Gates had to go, he wanted to relocate to a crucible of intellectual, corporate, and media life—which was, after all, exactly what he was in microcosm. He'd also been thinking more and more about the responsibility of educated, successful blacks to serve as role models to less fortunate African Americans, to re-immerse themselves in the black community. Buying real estate in Harlem would transform an idea that was increasingly important to him into physical reality.

In July, Gates was relaxing at his summer house in Oak Bluffs, a small, affluent African American community on the island of Martha's Vineyard, when he received a phone call from his summer neighbor, Vernon Jordan. Gates and Jordan, the Washington lawyer who had served as chairman of Bill Clinton's presidential transition team in 1992, had known each other for years. As two of the most prominent black men in the United States—men who between them knew just about everyone in the stratospheres of American intelligentsia, business, and politics—that was inevitable.

Jordan wasn't calling to talk about the summer weather. He'd been asked to make the call by Bob Rubin, who was acting with the knowledge of, and possibly at the request of, Larry Summers. Jordan wanted to know how Gates was feeling about Harvard. Would he stay or would he go?

Gates told him he was leaving. Summers didn't want him, he said. The president wasn't supporting the department, and he certainly wasn't making an effort to woo Gates.

Thinking about leaving sounded understandable, Jordan said, but maybe he shouldn't go. He needed to be careful about looking greedy. Any perception that Gates wanted to start a bidding war between Harvard and Princeton might damage his reputation. He did not want to be seen as mercenary.

Gates didn't think he would change his mind, but he agreed to think it over. Sure, he wanted more money. Given what Summers was putting him through, he thought he deserved it. But he certainly didn't want it to look like his motivation was pecuniary. Gates was genuinely angry about losing two colleagues who also happened to be his best friends. It had taken him ten years to put together that collection of scholars, and it seemed as though Summers was hell-bent on dismantling it.

About forty-eight hours later, Jordan called back with news: Summers wanted to talk to Gates. Badly enough that he was willing to come to the Vineyard to do it. Gates could hardly say no.

So, one morning in early August, Summers boarded a Cessna operated by Cape Air, a small airline that flies from Boston to Martha's Vineyard. Gates picked him up at the airport, and for the next three to four hours, the two men had an intense and emotional meeting at Gates' house. Summers said that Gates had the wrong impression, that Summers very much wanted him to stay. Referring to Summers' meeting with West, Gates told Summers that in forty-five minutes he had tried to destroy what Gates had spent over a decade building.

Both men had grievances. Summers had heard through the grapevine that Gates had repeatedly called him “an asshole,” and he asked him to stop—Gates' words carried weight around Harvard, and his unflattering comments were making Summers' job more difficult. Gates responded that
asshole
wasn't a word he would use. He would have called Summers a “motherfucker,” and, yes, he probably had. So what? Summers had played a part in Gates' two best friends leaving Harvard. He should have expected to be called some names. Gates was surprised that Summers was so thin-skinned.

Besides, Gates had his own reason to be annoyed at Summers. He believed that someone in Mass Hall had leaked to the
New York Times
a document about a job offer he'd received from Princeton. Because the document had contained a specific salary number, the leak appeared intended to make it look that Gates' talk about the damage done to Cornel West was merely a smoke screen for asking for more money. Although Gates suspected that Summers had been spinning reporters with background information, he didn't think Summers was the leaker—the president was too smart to be directly involved in such an act. But Gates also believed that whoever had leaked the document wouldn't have done so without Summers' consent.

Each man, however, knew that he needed the other. While Harvard could recover from the departure of Cornel West, losing Skip Gates would have caused Summers long-term damage; the establishment media embraced Gates in a way that it did not West. For his part, Gates knew that Harvard was still the academic world's greatest bully pulpit, and if he left now, the department he had worked so hard to build would slide downward. The conversation ended around noon in a mutual understanding: depending on the successful outcome of future negotiations, Gates would stay.

Neither man would speak of their agreement for months, and neither ever spoke of the specifics publicly. But signs of their rapprochement were evident in early November, when Gates held his annual party at his elegant home on Francis Street. After most of the guests had arrived, he announced that Summers would be attending. Several people booed. “Gates held up his hands and said, ‘No, no, we need to work with this guy; he's making an effort,'” said one guest. Soon after, Summers arrived—“without a tie and with his shirt untucked,” another partygoer noted. Gates escorted Summers around the party, introducing him to people, and Summers did, indeed, seem to be making an effort. More than one guest gave him credit for venturing into what he must have known would be an extremely hostile environment.

They gave Summers that credit in part because, as far as anyone knew, Gates had still not made up his mind. In hosting Summers at his party, Gates could simply have been paving the way for a graceful exit from Harvard. The students had started a petition drive urging him to stay, and the
Crimson
published an editorial in the form of a letter to him. “The
Crimson
staff hope that you stay at Harvard,” it said. “Our community would be much poorer without you.”

Before the school year began, there was one other notable personnel development. Richard Hunt, the university marshal, announced his retirement in the middle of August. “I did it a little bit quickly, but I've been thinking about retirement for some time,” Hunt told the
Crimson.
His departure meant the loss of a repository of institutional memory and Harvard tradition. Hunt had been at Harvard since 1956, earning his Ph.D. there in 1960, and working and teaching at the university for the next four decades. He had known or met every Harvard president since James Conant, and he was co-writing a encyclopedia-like book called
Harvard A to Z.

Most campus observers saw Hunt's departure as a direct consequence of Summers' anger over the Zayed Yasin affair. The president didn't fire Hunt, but he made his job so unpleasant that the university marshal had no desire to stay. “He just wanted to stand up for the values of freedom of speech and open expression that he believed the university stands for,” Zayed Yasin said. But Hunt was not a young man. He had been thinking about retirement anyway, and he lacked the will to fight the new president.

His departure would never make national news; Hunt was not important enough for such recognition. He was the type who knows he will never be a celebrity academic or a pathbreaking scholar, and perhaps because of his self-awareness, he appreciates the genius of the university all the more, and devotes himself to the institution. Every great university has and needs such figures. Though they are easily overlooked and often underappreciated, they provide continuity, humanity, and a stability in which greater minds can do their work and win their glory.

To many Harvardians, Hunt's retirement meant a loss not just of a colleague, but increasingly, of a sense of decorum and dignity on campus. “Rick represented a strain of graciousness and humanity that was important to the university,” said a Harvard professor who is friendly with Hunt. “He was deeply, deeply wounded by what happened during the Yasin affair.”

Supporters of Larry Summers were not sorry to see Hunt go; his exit marked a new era, one in which people fell into line behind the president or got out of the way. For Ruth Wisse, the professor of Yiddish literature, Hunt's defense of Zayed Yasin represented political correctness and moral relativism, and Summers was right not to have tolerated it. “The marshal was summarily gotten rid of,” she said, “and everyone understands that that was cause and effect.”

In an official statement, Summers said, “Rick has served Harvard with a combination of grace and sophistication that will be hard to replace.” He announced that Harvard would immediately start a search to find that replacement. But Summers would not fill the position for sixteen months, by which point it was clear that subsequent commencement orators would have to meet with the president's approval. With the possible exception of the Harvard-Yale football game, commencement was the university's largest public event, and now Summers picked the commencement speaker, monitored the student speeches, and mandated changes in the ritual. Summers was turning commencement into a bully pulpit for himself.

 

Meanwhile, in the heated political climate of post-9/11 America, a new college cause had flickered into life: the idea that universities should divest from Israel. On campuses such as Yale, Princeton, and Columbia, the organizers of these fledgling divestment movements argued that Israel's treatment of Palestinians constituted gross violations of human rights. While numerous governments violate the human rights of people under their domain, Israel, they said, is a special case. Because the United States has such a close relationship with Israel, and because it sends Israel billions of dollars a year in aid, that country “is practically the fifty-first state,” explained J. Lorand Matory, a Harvard professor of anthropology who supported the divestment movement. “We have to criticize them more because they're us.”

The professors and students who felt this way argued that, as was said of South Africa in the 1980s, universities could play a constructive role by pulling their money out of Israel, making a moral statement by the act of disassociation. If the trend caught on and actually inflicted economic damage to the country, fine—that might pressure Israel to change its policies regarding the Palestinians. But even if it didn't, at least the universities that divested could claim that they had done their part in fighting a political evil.

In Cambridge, the divestment movement—more a flutter than a movement, really—began in the spring of 2002 with a website, www.HarvardMITdivest.org, and an online petition launched by a handful of professors from Harvard and MIT. The petition called for divestment and said, “As members of the MIT and Harvard University communities, we believe that our universities ought to use their influence—political and financial—to encourage the United States government and government of Israel to respect the human rights of the Palestinians.”

The divestment drive did not exactly take Cambridge by storm. By June, some five hundred people had signed the petition, including about a hundred faculty members from the two universities. Many of the signatories were of Middle Eastern and South Asian descent and/or Muslim, but a significant number of Jews signed as well. Still, the push to divest had little chance of reaching a critical mass. A counter-petition opposing divestment was signed by about ten times as many people, including more than four hundred Harvard faculty members. The onset of summer vacation diminished any momentum the divestment petition might have had.

Weak though it was, the push to divest concerned Larry Summers. He worried that it was part of a surge in anti-Israeli sentiment that was circling the globe, and wanted to make sure that neither he nor Harvard had anything to do with it. In late August, he called Kennedy School professor Michael Ignatieff, the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights, to do a background check on Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Summers was slated to introduce Robinson at a Kennedy School event in September. But in September 2001, Robinson had headed the United Nations World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, an event widely seen to have been overwhelmed by campaigns to denounce Zionism as racism. Summers wanted to know whether Robinson was complicit in the conference's anti-Semitic elements.

“Summers asked me if Robinson was associated with the ‘Zionism is racism' resolutions at the Durban conference that she organized, because if so he didn't really want to have much to do with her,” Ignatieff said. “I said she wasn't, but I thought that was appropriate for the president to ask.” Summers did introduce Robinson.

Summers had never felt particularly anxious about anti-Semitism before, nor had he ever had a podium from which it was appropriate to speak on the subject. But he felt intellectually and morally engaged by September 11 and its aftermath. It frustrated him not to be in Washington at such an important moment in history. Anti-Semitism, he thought, was not just something taking place overseas. You could find it even at Harvard.

He may also have been thinking about the issue because he had a new girlfriend who was deeply engaged with her Jewish heritage. Pretty and warm, with curly black hair and a quick, slightly nervous smile, Elisa New (known as Lisa) had been dating Summers for a little under a year. A professor of English and American literature, New was very much a product of post–World War II, Jewish-American culture. As a child in Washington, D.C., she had attended Hebrew school, and later described herself as “one of those tormented Jewish girls…that loves the tradition but hates the rules.” She attended college at Brandeis University, which bills itself as “the only non-sectarian Jewish-sponsored college or university in the country.” Graduating in 1980, New earned her doctorate at Columbia in 1988 and taught at the University of Pennsylvania for ten years before coming to Harvard in 1999. She was a potent mix of sensuality and rigor. Describing her approach to poetry, the
Harvard Gazette
called her “a rule-breaker…who reveres the idea of discipline,” but “also a seeker of pleasure.” New could come across as absent-minded, sometimes breathy. When she spoke of poems, she often struck a rapturous tone, as if she were reciting them by herself on a mountain top. But she was tougher than she looked, highly opinionated on academic matters, and very much interested in the operation of the university. Though some on campus saw only differences between her and Summers, the two had more in common than was immediately visible.