Harvard Rules (33 page)

No, the faculty conversations that imagined Summers losing his job were based on wishful thinking. But there were other conversations among people who thought that Summers himself might
want
to leave—that he could not long tolerate the culture of the university. He was so impatient! In conversation and demeanor, Summers repeatedly made it clear that he thought the pace of change at Harvard was glacial. He seemed bored by some aspects of his job, the way people felt free to ask him about the pettiest details of student life, as if the president didn't have better things to do with his time. When one student told Summers that he thought Harvard should have the world's largest bell, Summers told him to go raise the money for it and then they'd talk. On several occasions he voiced his frustration that no one seemed to want his opinion on the looming war with Iraq.

Plus, Summers seemed so concerned with his image, it was easy to think that he was grooming himself for another job. That fall he hired his own press secretary, Englishwoman Lucie McNeil, an attractive, twenty-something-year-old woman with virtually no knowledge of Harvard. Her job was to promote Larry Summers. It was not always easy. When Summers visited the
Boston Globe
editorial board in the fall, he instructed reporter Patrick Healy, who covered Harvard, to fetch him a Diet Coke. Then Summers said, “It's a pleasure to be here, but I wish that your reporters would pay less attention to me and your editors would pay more attention to your reporters.” That wasn't the smoothest way to meet the press.

On McNeil's advice, Summers agreed to cooperate with the
New York Times Magazine
and
60 Minutes
for profile interviews. Some of his advisers thought that talking to an investigative news program was a bad idea, but ultimately it was decided that the profile segments on
60 Minutes
were puff pieces, sure to be flattering. Meanwhile, members of the community wondered just what was the point of all this publicity. Did Summers want to run for senator from Massachusetts if the Senate seats held by John Kerry or Ted Kennedy opened up? Or maybe he was angling for the position of Federal Reserve chairman, should Alan Greenspan leave the job?

The rumors spread over cappuccino at Au Bon Pain in the Square…among professors who bumped into each other in the Yard…between administrators zipping e-mails across campus…students hanging out in their rooms. The gossip about Summers was incessant. There was something about his remoteness—even when he was in the same room with you, even when he was
talking
to you, he seemed far away—that made people obsessed with figuring the man out. And even though the rumors were based on mere impressions, insinuations, and inferences, they rankled. Because people who worked for Harvard thought that being its president was just about the best job in the world, and now they had a president who sometimes seemed as if he couldn't wait to leave it.

People wondered if he was happy. For one thing, he never looked relaxed. Even when playing tennis, he radiated intensity; he was not a good loser. And though he had allies, supporters—usually men, often other economists, sometimes professors he had courted, plus the young people on his staff—it was hard to name people whom Summers would consider his friends. Most people didn't want to socialize with him, and in one embarrassing episode, Summers “had an elevator shut in his face by a group of people who were going to an event he should have been invited to,” said someone familiar with the incident. “They just didn't want him to come.”

Maybe he was lonely. Many weekends, he left campus to visit his children in Washington. (Harvard paid for his travel expenses and a Washington apartment so he could see the kids.) Sometimes the children would come up to Cambridge; once Summers brought them to a lecture he gave at the business school.

In the spring, Summers went out to dinner with a group of economics grad students at a local restaurant called Grafton Street. The students had been asking Summers to dinner for a year, and he'd finally found the time to get it on his schedule. They decided to start with a little joke; they told Summers that they really wanted to talk about how the best printer in the econ department had disappeared. The president looked suddenly weary. “Okay, tell me about it,” he said. Seeing his expression, they hastened to assure him that they were kidding. What they were really interested in was economics, so they asked him what economic questions he thought would be interesting to work on.

Summers thought for a few moments and then started talking about the processes of micro-decision-making. Like, for example, why he had decided to go to dinner with them. It was a small decision, yet it had required multiple calculations. Was it worth the time? Did he want to do it? What would he gain from it? What might he lose? So much involved over a simple matter of whether to have dinner with some grad students. Still, the process was important. Summers often talked about the fact that people tended to spend as much time trying to save money when buying a book as they did when buying a car—even though the potential savings on a car purchase were much greater than when buying a book. If those processes of micro-decision-making could be broken down and analyzed, people might learn to use their time much more productively.

Summers recalled that when he was at Treasury, he used to ask Bob Rubin why Rubin had made a particular decision or acted in a particular way. And Rubin would say, I don't know, it just seemed the right thing to do. Invariably it was—but Rubin didn't even have to think about it. His knack for doing the right thing was either instinct or second nature. How did he acquire that gift?

Some people might have been put off by their guest's clinical dissection of his decision to join them for dinner, but these economics students were accustomed to such dispassionate language, and they enjoyed seeing Summers' mind at work. They talked for several hours, and the econ students enjoyed every minute. Summers seemed smart, thoughtful, interested in what they had to say, and, surprisingly, a little vulnerable. He said that he wished he were able to have more conversations like this one, and the students quickly answered, okay, let's do another dinner. Summers laughed glumly. Maybe next fall, he said. Maybe next spring. He might not have a free night for another year.

To be sure, Lisa New helped make the president's job less lonely. Summers took her to faculty parties, cultural events, and Red Sox games—he got terrific seats—and the two looked happy together. When New was with Summers, there was at least one person capable of making small talk, of performing the little rituals that facilitate pleasant social interaction. New seemed to humanize her boyfriend. But people still frequently received e-mail from Summers late at night—eleven o'clock, midnight—and that didn't seem so romantic. Victoria Perry had complained of just such workaholic tendencies when she was married to Summers.

But not many Harvardians got the chance to see Summers in his less formidable moments, and their predominant attitude toward him was a mixture of dislike and distrust. Though few felt comfortable openly expressing their dislike, discontent surfaced in odd and indirect ways. Someone wrote an allegoric letter to “Ask Dog Lady,” a pet-advice column in the
Cambridge Chronicle,
a local weekly. “Dear Dog Lady,” the letter began. “Our rottweiler, Larry, has been very confrontational since we moved him to Cambridge from Washington a few summers ago. He's not nice around the kids, and even worse with the staff. He attacks anything that comes near him…. He's also developed some bad manners: He slobbers all over the place, and he's messy when he eats. Would castration help?” The letter was signed “Carl.”

Columnist Monica Collins responded, “Carl, it sounds like your dog must be a Democrat because his agitation started when he was ousted from Washington. Merely assure him that better things may come in 2004. And yes, Dog Lady heartily recommends castration….Larry is in a chaotic hormonal state and neutering him will surely calm him down.” When the apparent meaning of the letter was pointed out to her, Collins insisted that she hadn't picked up on the joke.

Summers may have been in control, but he was inspiring a well of resentment that could rise up against him should he make a misstep. He needed a break, and he got one from an unexpected source—the department of Afro-American studies.

 

On December 4, 2002, Skip Gates announced that he had turned down a job offer from Princeton and would be staying at Harvard. He explained that rather than leave and see Af-Am crumble, he wanted to stay and rebuild. “This was a gut-wrenching decision for me because of my dear friendship with Anthony Appiah and Cornel West, and never about any financial support for me or the department,” Gates said in the
Boston Globe.
He told the
Times
that “any raise in salary would be based on merit and in line with his previous raises.”

Gates' answers may have been technically accurate, but they didn't tell the whole truth: He was well rewarded for his decision to stay at Harvard, and his decision to stay was partly contingent upon that reward. It came in the form of a million-dollar donation to the W. E. B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, a Harvard scholarly center of which Gates is the director.

The donor was a Harvard alumnus—one of the university's wealthiest—named Glenn Hutchins. He was a graduate of Harvard College, class of '77, and in 1983 had earned simultaneous degrees from the Harvard business and law schools. After graduation, Hutchins would recount in an essay for his 25th college reunion, “I resisted Wall Street's siren call and set out to be an entrepreneur. Eventually I signed on to help another Harvard grad…to build a firm in a neglected backwater of finance known as LBOs,” or leveraged buyouts. “Since the underlying math of the profession has prevented me from doing more harm than good, I am still at it nearly twenty years later,” as cofounder of an investment firm called Silver Lake Partners.

Hutchins was unduly modest; he was hugely successful in his field, and by 2002 his personal fortune was estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. He was also politically active and had served a brief stint as an aide in the Clinton White House in the early 1990s, during which time he'd met Larry Summers. He was also, by several accounts, a good man with a strong social conscience. Hutchins served as a director of CARE, the international relief and development organization, and gave away large sums of money to organizations he considered worthwhile.

One of them was Harvard, and as Hutchins' 25th reunion in June of 2002 approached, he decided that he wanted to pay back the university for all it had done for him with a class gift of one million dollars (one reason why Hutchins was promptly awarded Harvard's “Richard T. Flood '27 Award” for his “exemplary leadership and singular achievements” as a fundraiser).

Sometime after that gift was made, according to sources familiar with it, Larry Summers asked Glenn Hutchins for help. Summers was in a tight spot with Skip Gates. He wanted to do everything he could to keep Gates from leaving, and he knew that Gates was negotiating with Princeton. If Gates left, his departure would be deeply embarrassing to Summers and at least as damaging to the Af-Am department. Would Hutchins mind if Summers directed his generous gift to the DuBois Institute, which Gates essentially ran?

After some consideration, Hutchins decided that he did not mind. If this was what Harvard needed, he was happy to help. Plus, partly through his work with CARE, he had an interest in African-American studies, and wanted to see the department succeed. “Glenn is a very reasonable man,” said one Harvardian who knows him. “He gave the million dollars just to Harvard, so it wasn't a big stretch if Larry says to him, ‘Do you mind if I apply it here…?'”

And so in the fall of 2002, the DuBois Institute received from Glenn Hutchins a million dollars. The money was earmarked for Skip Gates, along with the already-departed Anthony Appiah, to use to underwrite the costs of editing
Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience,
a multivolume work to be published by Oxford University Press in the spring of 2004. It certainly wasn't cash that Gates could use to buy a sports car or travel to Paris, but it was money that Gates could use with some leeway in the context of editing an encyclopedia.

Skip Gates denies this account, saying that Hutchins had intended to give his gift to the institute before Larry Summers even became president, and that his decision to stay at Harvard was solely a renewed commitment to his department. “I stayed at Harvard because I had a choice between going to Princeton to work with my two closest friends”—Appiah and Cornel West—“or staying at Harvard to protect this great department that my friends and I have built, particularly at a time of its greatest vulnerability,” he said. “And I decided that it mattered that I stay, because I felt that all the work that I had done there could be dismantled, and I'm absolutely convinced that I made the right decision to stay.”

Others disagree. “This grant was made in the context of trying to keep Skip at Harvard,” said one colleague of Gates'. “There is no question.”

More than a year before, Larry Summers had begun his presidency by dressing down of one of Harvard's highest-profile professors. The incident led to that professor's departure and left Summers vulnerable to charges of racism. Skip Gates, who knew something about power himself, had exploited Summers' vulnerability to improve his own professional situation. In the months to come, he fulfilled his part of the bargain by repeatedly and publicly praising Larry Summers, saying that Summers was going to be a great president of Harvard. No one could quite figure out why Gates was saying such nice things about Summers. But the very fact that he was often made people stop and, sometimes, reconsider. Completing the circle, Summers repeatedly and publicly declared how happy he was that Skip Gates had decided to remain at Harvard.