Harvard Rules (36 page)

If he were aware of it, Larry Summers would have questioned the merits of Levin's temporal division. He didn't want his university more relaxed or introspective; he wanted to make it more “rigorous,” a word he used like a mantra. Just as globalization meant a quickening of the pace of economic competition and cultural integration, Summers wanted to eradicate from Harvard the old-fashioned, the venerable, and the traditional, replacing it with the faster and the tougher and the more competitive. “The greatest danger for a university is to be complacent and comfortable,” Summers explained. “I have tried to resist the idea that the fact we have done things in a certain way is the reason why we should continue to do things the same way.”

In practice, what Summers' credo usually meant was that if a thing had traditionally been done one way, Summers was instinctively hostile to it. To lead in the twenty-first century, Harvard would have to move more aggressively than it had in the past. Forget about “hanging out”—Summers already thought the students spent too much time engaged in extracurricular pursuits, like writing for the
Crimson,
or performing in dance and theater productions. He was not much interested in creating well-rounded graduates; he wanted students who excelled within specific fields, who would make new discoveries, reach new heights of accomplishment, and win the highest awards. He was convinced that many students put more effort into their extracurricular activities than into their classwork, and he was probably right—though not everyone would have said that these differing priorities were a bad thing.

Summers' argument was substantive and serious, but his way of expressing it was usually less than diplomatic. At a first-year meeting with house tutors—the administrative heads of the houses—Summers emphasized his desire for students to work harder by saying, “We don't want this place to be Camp Harvard.” Reported in the
Crimson,
the comment infuriated students, who spent long hours in libraries and slept less than they should have (another contributing factor to mental health problems). Perhaps the greatest insult one can deliver to Harvard students is to call them slackers. They pride themselves on their ability to balance academics and extracurriculars while doing both at a high level.

Although Summers never changed his mind about Camp Harvard, he did distance himself from the remark. In his second year, a
Crimson
columnist asked him about the incident. Summers equivocated, saying that he was “not aware of having used that phrase, [but] I did once use the phrase ‘camp counselor' to refer to some of the functions of House tutors.” Nonetheless, the memory of Camp Harvard lingered. In Summers' third year, a student asked him about the remark when the president visited Adams House for pizza and conversation. “I don't recall ever saying that,” Summers answered. “It's taken on elements of an urban myth.” Others disagree. “Larry denies it now, but I remember him saying that,” said one senior administrator who was in the room at the time.

About college athletics, Harvard's largest extracurricular pursuit, Summers was profoundly skeptical. Harvard has forty-one varsity teams, the greatest number of any NCAA Division I school in the country. Some of them are better than others. Men's crew and women's hockey are perennial national leaders, but the Harvard football and basketball teams aren't high-powered programs. Yet regardless of the teams' excellence relative to schools that devote more resources to athletics, Harvard has long considered sports a valuable part of a liberal education. Summers, however, thought that the breadth of Harvard athletics was a waste of money and a poor use of student time. Worse, he was convinced that highly intelligent students were being rejected from Harvard to make room for less smart athletes. In public, he talked up Harvard athletics because he knew that alumni who had played sports at Harvard were among the university's most consistent donors. But in private he pushed a plan ultimately adopted by the Ivy League that lowered the number of football recruits from thirty-five to thirty every year and instituted a mandatory seven-week break from training for all athletes during their off-seasons. Summers wouldn't have minded if the number of athletic recruits fell lower still. Even when he tried to look like he supported Harvard teams, he was less than convincing. When he attended a women's hockey game during the 2002–2003 season, he turned to someone on the bench and asked, “So, are we any good?” At the time, the team was ranked number one in the nation.

Summers preferred the sciences. At every opportunity, he talked about the need for Harvard students to be more scientifically literate. Harvard had missed out on the Internet gold rush, he said; this time around, it would not miss out on biomedicine. Again and again he spoke about the importance of the human genome and how critical it was that students understand it. For too long, Summers argued, a university graduate could be considered well-educated if he was fluent in a literary tradition, a foreign language, some history—but knew next to nothing about science. The current age of discovery was making such scientific illiteracy irresponsible. In just a few years, Summers predicted, every human being could have his or her genome sequenced for about two thousand dollars. “That has staggering potential for increasing our understanding of disease, for making it possible to find scientifically based cures for disease,” he said. “…And that is likely over the next quarter century to lead to profound progress. My guess is that the life expectancy of my daughters is probably one hundred, and it's going to keep rising.”

Two hundred years from now, Summers asked over and over, what would historians of the future consider most noteworthy about our time? His answer: the scientific revolution in the understanding of human biology. It was imperative, Summers insisted, “to create a culture in which it is as embarrassing to not know the difference between a gene and a chromosome as to not know the names of five plays by Shakespeare.”

Summers' passion for science was proportionate to his disinterest in the humanities. He had never studied literature, art, language, history, or philosophy; he admitted that he didn't read serious fiction. He was an applied economist whose litmus test for an academic field was the practical results that it could generate. He did not believe that things should be studied for their own sake, or to preserve and understand the past, and repeatedly questioned the need for the existence of certain small departments and areas of study. Why did there have to be a Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures? What about Sanskrit? Why were there so many German books in Widener Library when no one studied the language any more? Even some of the social sciences weren't exempt from his skepticism. Was there any question that sociology could answer, he wondered aloud, that economics couldn't answer better? His clash with Cornel West exemplified this pattern. Few believed that Summers would have lambasted West if the former had taken Afro-American studies seriously.

“Economics is a hegemonic discipline,” said one law school professor who has interacted with Summers on a number of issues. “This informs his vision in a number of ways. He actually believes that there are right and wrong disciplines. So, to him, Cornel West was simply illegitimate.”

True, Harvard was not the only institution where humanists felt defensive. The power and status of the humanities had been declining at American universities since World War II showed not just the importance of scientific research, but also its potential for profit. That trend has only become more pronounced in recent years, as government aid has become more uncertain and the payoffs from science have grown. In 2004, for example, Stanford University stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars from the initial public offering of Internet search company Google, because much of the research that had led to Google's creation had taken place under Stanford's auspices. Science can bring not only big profits, but big donations. Wealthy benefactors give tens of millions for new science laboratories. In the humanities, even when a star like Skip Gates hauls in a grant from a massive corporation such as Time-Warner, the numbers are relatively small, maybe a few million dollars. Since the stock market collapse in 2001, talk of that legendary billion-dollar gift, the Holy Grail of university fundraising, had subsided. But someday, a billion-dollar donation
would
happen—and whether at Harvard or anywhere else, it wasn't likely to go to a history department.

Still, Summers' manifest disdain for the humanities unnerved their practitioners at Harvard. It was true that their work did not produce the tangible results that, say, chemistry and biology did. There were few eureka moments in literary criticism. But professors of history, literature, the arts, and the like did not believe that the value of a field was determined by the number of its practical applications. Few humanists thought—and many scientists agreed with them—that the point of a liberal arts education was so limited. Maybe studying the humanities couldn't help you live longer, the way that knowing the breakdown of your genome could, but it could uplift the character and quality of your life. It could add morality and wisdom, introspection and humility. And it could inform the way you approached other citizens of the world—whether you saw them with tolerance and understanding and curiosity, or whether you took a more competitive, hierarchical, imperialistic approach.

Indeed, the fact that Summers had no serious interest in the humanities made some professors question the breadth and nuance of his intelligence. “He is not an intellectual,” insisted professor of romance languages Bradley Epps. “He is a statistician; he is a powerbroker. But he is not an intellectual, because intellectuals know the power of doubt.” Though few others would say so in public, a great many of Harvard's humanists shared this conviction. Summers, they agreed, was clever, even brilliant in some ways. But he was not wise.

Summers would have responded that his vision merely corresponded with the true nature of the world, which was a tough place that needed real answers to life-threatening problems. He spoke frequently of the benefits of economic growth and scientific discovery. Science and economics could lift millions out of poverty, eradicate disease, and extend human longevity. Could anyone seriously argue that the study of the past mattered more than finding solutions to the problems of the present and future?

Those who considered Summers' vision of the future with skepticism made two recurring arguments. First, it seemed that he was simply imposing his own intellectual experience upon Harvard. He was promoting the sciences and downplaying the humanities because that equation reflected his intellectual interests rather than some more objective judgment. He was anti-athletics because he had never been a jock; he had been the kind of kid whom, in high school, the jocks picked on. He was opposed to extracurriculars because, except for his experience on the MIT debate team, he'd never been much for activities outside the classroom. “Larry wants to make Harvard into the kind of school that would have accepted him,” one faculty member said—a school where all that mattered was brainpower.

This charge led directly to a second critique, because a school where brainpower was all could already be found just a mile or so down the Charles. Harvard's new president, both faculty and students fretted, wanted to turn Harvard into MIT—a school where sports were insignificant, science and economics were the dominant disciplines, and extracurriculars were clearly subordinate to classwork.

A student named Noah McCormack advocated this point of view in the
Harvard Independent,
a campus weekly. “Harvard is not MIT,” McCormack wrote in April 2003. “We don't drink to get dead here. We're not monomaniacal math nerds…. We're Harvard. Larry Summers doesn't appear to understand that.”

What made Harvard special, McCormack continued, was the diversity of its students and their achievements, many of which occurred outside the classroom. It is those “that provide outlets for us and allow us to make friends (President Summers, largely friendless here at Harvard, should take note). If Larry wants to run a school for greasy-grinds without satisfying lives and/or souls, that's fine. Just walk down the river a little.”

In spite of the growing chorus of concern, Summers was growing steadily more powerful. One by one, he was outmaneuvering his opponents. Piece by piece, he was putting in place the foundations of long-term power.

One reason the Harvard presidency had historically been considered weak was that the office was relatively poor. The central administration's share of the endowment (of which the president controls only an undisclosed fraction) was about $2 billion at the end of 2002—less than one-quarter of the almost $9 billion controlled by FAS dean Bill Kirby. The president had less money because, traditionally, his fundraising role was to aid the various tubs; he was supposed to fundraise for the entire university and only rarely for his own discretionary funds. Moreover, each individual school controlled access to its alumni, but the central administration, of course, had no graduates from whom to solicit. So the president might meet with a wealthy alum of the college to land a contribution for FAS or with a business school graduate to seal a deal for the business school. With his limited ability to fundraise on his own behalf, his ability to fund his own priorities—scholarships, academic initiatives, interdisciplinary programs—was similarly constrained.

To compensate, Harvard tithes contributions. Depending on the school, and sometimes even the department, about three percent of every gift is redirected to the central administration—something alumni donors almost universally don't know. But that wasn't enough for Summers. He wanted more access to alumni money and more control over its disposition. So he convinced Bill Kirby to agree to a subtle but hugely important rule change that weakened the tight relationship between Harvard College and its donors.