Harvard Rules (3 page)

That was why the Harvard Corporation had chosen Larry Summers: to take charge; to fix what was embarrassingly wrong and make sure that the gap between the public perception of the university and the reality of Harvard didn't grow so broad that it became a chasm; to revive the image of the Harvard president as a national leader, a figure who spoke out not just to ask for money, nor even to voice his thoughts on higher education, but also to deliver his opinions on issues of import to the nation and the world generally. Not so many years before, Harvard presidents had done that as a matter of routine, but recently, this was less and less the case. For the members of Harvard's governing body, this was unacceptable. If Harvard presidents weren't national leaders, how could Harvard be? Conversely, how could America be great if Harvard was not?

So perhaps it was understandable that Larry Summers looked a little nervous on the day of his installation, a little uncomfortable with all the trappings of history and ritual. Much was being asked of him. The expectations were high, the pressure immense. And Summers was instinctively more comfortable
doing
something than going through the motions of ritual.

Then again, the new president wasn't the only nervous one. Most Harvard professors and students knew very little about Larry Summers, only the bare bones of his biography, really. He hadn't been around campus for a decade. He hadn't even been in the world of academia. All they knew was what they had heard and read, and while some of that was encouraging, some of it was worrisome. Summers was famous not just for being brilliant, but also for being arrogant and hot-tempered. In the past, he'd led more by fiat than by suasion or example, while Harvard presidents traditionally had to rely on all their skills to head such a famously independent and self-assured community. How would Summers fit into a role where he couldn't simply order people to do what he wanted?

It was time for the new president to speak. Summers carefully rose from the ancient President's Chair and strode to the podium. “I accept!” he said. The words sounded slightly forced, but the audience cheered heartily.

Judging from the events of the months and years that were to follow, it is fair to say that neither Larry Summers nor Harvard had any idea what they were getting into.

F
rom
Love Story
to
Legally Blonde,
Harvard abounds in American popular culture. Partly this is because the university produces many creative, ambitious, and occasionally dysfunctional graduates whose Cambridge experience provides a natural subject for their work. It's also because the campus is so picturesque, so resplendent with timeless red brick, graceful bell towers, and sleek sculls gliding along a sparkling Charles River. This is cinematic stuff. Setting a story at Harvard conveys history, power, and tradition; Harvard raises the stakes. Little wonder that thriller writer Dan Brown, author of
The Da Vinci Code,
made his hero, symbologist Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor. The label gives Langdon instant credibility.

Nevertheless, much of the literature and film featuring Harvard casts the university in a critical light. Consider perhaps the most famous Harvard drama. In Erich Segal's 1970 novel
Love Story
(the film of which is screened for Harvard freshmen every fall), the university comes across as a cold and uncaring place, aesthetically impressive but officially hostile to the romance of Harvard man Oliver Barrett IV and Radcliffe student Jenny Cavilleri. They fall in love at Harvard, but certainly not because of it. Love distracts from work.

In
The Paper Chase,
the 1973 film about a law student who falls in love with his august professor's daughter, Harvard is a place where excellence takes root not because of its culture of competition, arrogance, and frosty interpersonal relations, but despite it. Then there's 1997's
Good Will Hunting,
the tale of a working-class math genius who falls for a Harvard undergrad. In that film, the typical Harvard student is presented as pompous, effete, and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Other, less good movies present Harvard still more cynically. In 1986's
Soul Man,
the only way a young man can afford Harvard is to pretend that he's black in order to win a scholarship. And in the 2002 comedy
Stealing Harvard,
a well-meaning uncle attempts to pilfer $30,000 so that his niece can pay Harvard's costs.

In the realm of nonfiction, there is a sizeable genre of “I spent a year at Harvard” books—memoirs of the law school, medical school, divinity school, and so on. In theme and structure, such chronicles—such as Scott Turow's
One L
—constitute survival narratives. A year at the Harvard Law School is the academic equivalent of surviving a plane crash in the Peruvian Andes or being stranded on a deserted island with only a beach ball for company. As in most Harvard-themed works of culture, individuality is in short supply, spontaneity prompts rebuke, and love is an endangered emotion.

Harvard's administration devotes enormous amounts of time, money, and energy to generating more positive media coverage. The university seems to have more press secretaries than Congress, and they spend as much time shooting stories down as helping them get written. Much of their job involves getting faculty members quoted in newspapers and magazines on issues related to their expertise, and at this they are remarkably successful—helped, no doubt, by the prevalence of Harvard grads in the press. Some years back, a writer working on a book about Harvard asked a group of researchers to count the number of instances in which the
New York Times
cited Harvard over a period of several months. They expected the number to be large, but even to their surprise, they found that the
Times
mentioned Harvard more than all other universities
combined
.

Of course, Harvard doesn't rely on outside press organizations to advertise itself. It publishes dozens of reports, bulletins, journals, and magazines lauding the accomplishments of members of the Harvard community. There's nothing sinister about this—all universities do it—but Harvard does it bigger and better. Among numerous examples, the
Harvard University Gazette,
a weekly newspaper during the school year, profiles Harvard faculty and lists the remarkable number of lectures, exhibits, and performances happening on campus in any given week.
Harvard Magazine
is a slick, professional magazine sent to all Harvard alums six times yearly. The university web page, a more recent innovation, projects a harmonious image of Harvard across the world, twenty-four hours a day.

If, in the summer and fall of 2001, you had read the articles in Harvard publications and on Harvard websites about new president Larry Summers, you would have acquired a meticulously selected and oft-repeated set of facts about him. You would have known that Summers was energetic and “brilliant”—a word repeated so often to describe him that it became almost a third name. You would have known that Summers was an inspiring teacher, often mentioned as a likely winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. And that Summers had spent a successful decade in Washington, capped by his eighteen months as secretary of the treasury. From all the things written about him, you might have gotten the impression that Summers resembled TV's
West Wing
's President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen—only smarter.

All the promotion paid off. Summers received glowing treatment in the non-Harvard media, which proclaimed that he was just the man to restore the role of university president to its pre-Rudenstine standing. Larry Summers, wrote one
Boston Globe
columnist, “has the potential to be the greatest president of Harvard since Charles W. Eliot,” the nineteenth-century figure generally considered to be Harvard's greatest president, period.

True, it was occasionally mentioned that Summers was a fierce competitor on the tennis court. But if he had other hobbies or interests outside the realm of economics, they went undiscovered. Nor was there mention of Summers' personal life, certainly not of the fact that he was in the throes of a painful divorce. Nor was there discussion of the cancer he had overcome while in his twenties, and the effect that the disease had had on his attitude toward life and work. Also absent was the fact that he would be Harvard's first Jewish president, a cultural milestone whose omission was hard to understand.

In fact, for all the compliments that Harvard's publicity paid him, the career and biography of Lawrence Henry Summers were more conflicted, more complicated, and, above all, more human than the university allowed. Lawrence Summers was not just an intellectual force of nature (though this was clearly an image with which he himself felt comfortable); he was also the product of an immigrant journey, a family crucible, and the classically American story of a man driven by ego and ambition on a ceaseless quest to climb to the pinnacle of American achievement—and beyond.

That Harvard would present such a carefully massaged picture of its new president reflected the competing values within the university. While its scholars pursue the expansion of knowledge, its administrators work to preserve and extend the “brand.” And yet, all the flattering publicity about Larry Summers may have backfired. Had Harvard promoted a more balanced picture of him, the new president might have had a more forgiving first year and the university might have spared itself a great deal of shock and unhappiness. Or at least shock.

 

Lawrence Henry Summers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 30, 1954. He was the first child of Robert and Anita Summers, a husband-and-wife team of economists then at Yale. His paternal grandfather, Frank Samuelson, had been a pharmacist at the Economical Drug Store in Gary, Indiana. His mother's father was named Harry Arrow, and he was an office manager from New York City who struggled for work during the Great Depression.

Robert and Anita Summers were both solid, capable economists, but neither was at the top of the field, and Yale did not offer them tenure. In 1959 they moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where both would teach for the rest of their careers. They raised Larry and his two younger brothers, Richard and John, in Lower Merion, a pretty, prosperous suburb on Philadelphia's Main Line and perhaps best known as the hometown of the blue-blooded lawyer played by Tom Hanks in the film
Philadelphia.

Of the two parents, Anita was the stronger influence on Larry. Protective, proud, and demanding, she doted on her first son, who had an uncanny knack for absorbing numbers and interpreting information. As a two-year-old, riding in his parents' car, he could identify the names of gas stations. By the time he was seven, he could recite the names of John F. Kennedy's cabinet members. When JFK was assassinated, the nine-year-old spent the entire weekend watching news reports on television. He loved games, especially those that involved statistics and puzzles. “I was a curious kid, not especially outgoing,” Summers would remember. Curious—and precocious. At age ten, he appeared on a local sports radio quiz show and answered everything so quickly that the show ran out of questions for him. The next year he devised a logarithm to ascertain whether a baseball team's standing on the Fourth of July could predict its finish at season's end.

Robert and Anita fashioned a domestic environment in which learning and problem-solving were the stuff of daily life, even inventing a system by which the family would vote on what television shows to watch, with votes weighted according to the intensity of one's choices. Larry concocted a system by which he and his brothers could always win the television elections. “His parents deliberately taught the kids economics in family situations,” said Harvard historian Phyllis Keller, who knew the Summers family. If the Summers were driving in traffic, Robert and Anita might throw out intellectual puzzles such as, “If there were one more lane, would that eliminate the traffic jam or simply increase the number of drivers who used the road?” A childhood friend would later remember: “Every day [the Summers] would solve a different problem. I liked going over there. But I also liked leaving.”

Richard and John were no dummies—they'd grow up to be a psychiatrist and a lawyer, respectively—but Larry was destined to be the standout. In Harriton High School, he focused on math, the subject for which he seemed to have a natural affinity. Outside of the classroom, he played tennis, and was intensely competitive. “He always worked to get the best partner in tennis tournaments, even if that meant dumping the partner he had already played with,” remembered Morton Keller, Phyllis' husband and a historian in his own right. Anita Summers liked to tell the story of the time her twelve-year-old son was on his way to a tennis tournament. “Have fun,” she called out to him. “This is not about fun,” Larry responded. “This is about winning.”

Summers' parents were not the only influence on his intellectual life, however, and perhaps not even the strongest. For Summers was born into a truly remarkable intellectual family: two of his uncles ranked among the finest economic minds of the twentieth century.

A graduate of the University of Chicago who earned his Harvard Ph.D. in 1941, Paul Samuelson is Robert Summers' older brother. Samuelson's interests range widely, but perhaps his greatest contribution to economics has been his emphasis on mathematics as the foundation of the discipline. Today's economics students might take this for granted, but before Samuelson, economics was a field that, much like history or philosophy, was characterized by elegant theory and eloquent writing. Samuelson introduced another language. Without advanced mathematics as the basis for economics, he argued, economists were practicing “mental gymnastics of a peculiarly depraved type.” In 1948, at the age of thirty-three, Samuelson published
Economics: An Introductory Analysis,
which outlined his vision and became the largest-selling economics textbook ever.

Samuelson helped economists communicate with one another in a way they previously could not. The incorporation of mathematics that he urged helped to establish economics as a powerful analytical discipline, separating it from “softer” academic fields and creating countless new areas to explore, new questions to ask, and new ways to answer those questions. In 1970, he would win the Nobel Prize. “More than any other contemporary economist,” the prize committee said, Samuelson “has contributed to raising the general analytical and methodological level in economic science.”

Despite his faith in the language of mathematics, Paul Samuelson is very much a public economist who has always wanted his ideas to be accessible. As a younger man, he was deeply ambitious and enjoyed his status as a public figure. He wrote a column for
Newsweek,
consulted for the Treasury Department, and served as an advisor on economic policy to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In his spare time, he was a passionate tennis player.

Ken Arrow, however, is very different, and not simply because he preferred badminton. Anita Summers' older brother is a quiet, gentle, and less outgoing figure whose work is even more theoretical than Samuelson's. Born in 1921, Arrow grew up in New York City and attended City College—then a haven for Jewish intellectuals excluded from other universities due to anti-Semitism—before earning his doctorate at Columbia. In 1951, after spending four years in the Army during World War II, the thirty-year-old Arrow published his most famous work,
Social Choice and Individual Values.
The book's thesis, also known as the “General Impossibility Theorem,” is not easily condensed, and it's virtually impossible for a layman to read. Essentially, though, Arrow argued that societies cannot make rational decisions for the general welfare based on the aggregation of individual choices. Abstract though it may sound, the General Impossibility Theorem had enormous implications for public policymaking and helped to start an entire subfield known as “public choice economics.” Arrow, who spent his career as a professor at Harvard and Stanford, would win the Nobel Prize in 1972.

Larry Summers was not particularly close to his two uncles, but they and their achievements pervaded the atmosphere around him like the oxygen he breathed. And because of their longevity—both Arrow and Samuelson are well past 80—their achievements were hardly part of a remote past. Samuelson won his Nobel while Summers was in high school; Arrow received his during Summers' freshman year at college. Everybody who knew Larry Summers as a student knew who his uncles were, and because of their stature and his early promise, Larry was expected to do great things. That set the bar high, even for someone as intelligent and competitive as Summers. Within the same field, it would be an enormous challenge just to equal Samuelson's and Arrow's accomplishments, much less better them. Larry Summers' version of teen rebellion may have been the fact that he took only one econ class in high school.