Harvard Rules (39 page)

Before the beginning of each school year, Lewis sent a lengthy letter to every incoming freshman. Entitled “Slow Down—Getting More out of Harvard by Doing Less,” the letter encouraged the new students to consider carefully the pace of their lives at Harvard. Rather than trying to excel at everything, Lewis suggested, students ought to focus their choices. Certainly Harvard wanted them to maintain the excellence for which they had been selected. Nonetheless, “you may balance your life better if you participate in some activities purely for fun, rather than to achieve a leadership role that you hope might be a distinctive credential for postgraduate employment,” Lewis said. “College is a transition period; we will certainly give you grades and transcripts attesting to some of the things you have done here, but much of what you do, including many of the most important and rewarding and formative things you do, will be recorded on no piece of paper you take with you, but only as imprints on your mind and soul.” Lewis concluded with a simple admonition: “It's your life, even at Harvard,” he said. “Enjoy it.”

Larry Summers was not a big believer in slowing down, nor was he a big fan of “Slow Down.” Summers had always done everything fast—and young. None of his many achievements had come as a result of introspection, reflection, hanging out, slowing down, taking time to smell the roses. And, in thinly veiled autobiographical references, Summers didn't hesitate to point this out.

In his 2002 baccalaureate address to the seniors, given on the Tuesday before Thursday's commencement exercises, Summers gave the imminent graduates his view of life after graduation. Neither community nor self-examination were his emphasis.

“Think about this,” Summers encouraged the students. “Newton and Einstein did their main thinking about physics in their twenties, Alexander conquered most of the known world by the time he was thirty, and when he was your age, Mozart had composed all his violin concertos. Of course, when he was my age, he had been dead for fourteen years.

“So take it slowly from Dean Lewis,” Summers continued, “but from me: blow off the rest of this week, have a great commencement, and then on Friday, get cracking.” That meant the students should get to work the day after they graduated.

Three months later, Summers gave virtually the exact same instructions to the incoming class of 2006. Only the ending was slightly different. “Not to put too much pressure on you—enjoy the rest of Freshman Week and then get cracking,” Summers said.

This time, the reference to Harry Lewis was deleted.

 

Bill Kirby liked to start his speeches with anecdotes about Chinese history, and when he spoke at Morning Prayers in the fall of 2002, he began thusly: “In Chinese history—my area of study—autumn was the time for executions. For us, however, autumn is a time for renaissance.”

In Cambridge, apparently, spring was the time for executions.

On the afternoon of March 5, 2003, Kirby informed Harry Lewis that he wanted to make a change. Kirby was restructuring his administration, merging the office of dean of Harvard College with its academic counterpart, the dean of undergraduate education. Lewis was out. After eight years as dean—and with two more years left on his contract—he would have to leave the office by the end of the semester.

Lewis couldn't quite believe it. “Harry was stunned by the way his dismissal was handled,” said one administrator familiar with the details. Kirby informed him that his replacement would be the current dean of undergraduate education, a mathematician named Benedict Gross. Kirby had hired Gross at the beginning of the school year, primarily to oversee the upcoming curricular review. Dick Gross, who'd earned his B.A. from Harvard in 1971 and his Ph.D. in 1978, was well respected and well liked—“one of the few mathematicians with social skills,” said a math concentrator who took a course with him. And he was ambitious—”the most ambitious man I've ever met,” according to a classmate who knew him well.

But perhaps Gross' most important qualification was that he had a friend in a high place: Larry Summers, who had once wanted to be a mathematician himself, not only thought highly of Gross as an intellect, but also played tennis with Gross every couple of weeks. With Gross' appointment, Summers had not only an FAS dean who was under his thumb, but also a friend who was about to become the second most powerful person in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And then Summers wouldn't have to worry about Harry Lewis anymore.

For those who knew of Summers' record in Washington, the incident felt like déjà vu. In 1999, Treasury Secretary Larry Summers had apparently engineered the ouster of dissenting economist Joseph Stiglitz from the World Bank, but so skillfully that his fingerprints could never be found. Now it appeared that history had repeated itself. Summers wanted Lewis gone, but he would never admit it and would never take responsibility for it.

Kirby asked Lewis to say nothing until he was ready to announce the change, at which point he wanted to put out a statement saying that Lewis was “stepping down.” Lewis refused. Kirby had the right to fire him, but Lewis wouldn't pretend that he was leaving voluntarily. Though the news stayed secret for almost two weeks, administrators in other offices began to suspect that something was amiss when Lewis suddenly couldn't answer their questions and began referring them to Bill Kirby. Then, on March 17, Lewis held a staff meeting at which Kirby delivered the news. The FAS dean talked about how it had been his idea to restructure his administration, but no one believed him. “Bill gave the press release version,” said one person present. “But it was obvious that he had become the puppet for Larry. I wanted to ask him, ‘What do you
really
think about this?'”

“Lewis Forced Out,” read the
Crimson
's full-page headline on March 18. In a press release, Kirby said, “We will be consulting broadly with students, faculty and staff as we proceed.” Gross said that he didn't know if he would take over the newly merged position. Neither statement was true.

Over the next days, follow-up stories, editorials, and letters to the editor contained headlines such as “Colleagues Admire and Respect Dean Lewis,” “An Understanding Dean,” “[Undergraduate] Council Worries about Future without Dean Lewis,” and “Lewis Departure May Mean Shift in College Priorities.” Stephen M. Senter, a Harvard parent and alum of the class of '68, wrote, “I think [Lewis] has been an effective advocate for trying to keep student life relatively sane…. I am just a bit leery of the tone currently emanating from University Hall, which seems to be pushing for ever greater academic rigor while letting the emotional chips fall where they may.”

While Harvard students generally pay little attention to administrative reshufflings, they cared about this one; Harry Lewis was their advocate, and their near-universal reaction to his dismissal was dismay. Being dean of the college was a more than full-time job. To fold into it all the responsibilities of another deanship invariably meant that less attention would be paid to student life. Nor did anyone believe Kirby's claim that he was acting of his own volition. A
Crimson
cartoon showed Summers as a puppeteer, pulling strings attached to Bill Kirby as Kirby gave Harry Lewis a kick in the pants.

Kirby and Summers, meanwhile, were said to be furious that Lewis would not deny that he had been “forced out.” Certainly Summers' statement to the
Crimson
was underwhelming. “Dean Lewis has done a great deal for the College during his deanship,” Summers said. He did not amplify his remarks.

The president's anger manifested itself in more threatening ways. On Thursday, April 3, and Friday, April 4, the members of the Board of Overseers came to Harvard to fulfill an annual duty. Together with carefully selected alumni, the Overseers were supposed to write annual reports on the status of specific academic departments and the college itself. Though the process is part of their mandate under the Harvard Charter of 1650, it had in modern years become something of a farce. Members of the “visiting committees” were chosen by the development office and FAS deans with fundraising in mind, and the committees' real purpose was to make potential donors feel privy to the college's inner workings. From the administration's point of view, the trick was to make the Overseers feel as if they were involved—without actually having them
be
involved. Though the committee members did their best to write accurate and useful reports, their evaluations were, metaphorically if not literally, thrown into the circular file.

On April 3, several members of the Board of Oversees and the college Visiting Committee asked Harry Lewis about Bill Kirby's sudden reorganization of the college administration. The party line was that the fusion of the two deanships was in everyone's best interest, but as was his wont, Lewis told them his true opinion. The integration of the two deanships was a big deal, he said, and whether it would work was an open question. One inevitable consequence, he added, was that student concerns would receive less attention from the highest college officials than they had previously.

That Saturday night, the Board of Overseers had a joint dinner with the members of the Corporation, and some of them mentioned their concerns about the reorganization, based on Lewis' remarks. The next day, as was traditional, the Corporation met in Loeb House. And on Monday morning, two of its members, Corning Inc. chair James Houghton and university treasurer D. Ron Daniel, sent Harry Lewis a message: They wanted to meet with him as soon as possible.

That afternoon, Lewis walked from his office in University Hall to meet the two Corporation members in Loeb House. In a letter he later wrote to Houghton and Daniel and distributed to a small cc: list, Lewis described what happened next. “You both advised me to tone down my statements in light of your discomfort with the reports that had reached you from the Visiting Committee meeting,” he wrote. Daniel had urged Lewis to say that the reorganization was “something that would work out well in a couple of years.” Lewis responded that he found it bizarre that members of one Harvard board would urge him to, if not lie, then at least dissemble to members of another Harvard board. Then Houghton said bluntly that it was “not in [Lewis'] professional best interest” to keep making “noise” about his ouster—a statement Lewis interpreted as a threat. “As I am returning to teach full-time…” he wrote, “I remain puzzled as to what professional interests Jamie [Houghton] was hoping to help me protect with this advice.”

In addition to Houghton and Daniel, Lewis sent his letter to Larry Summers, because it seemed impossible that the Corporation members were acting of their own volition. Their summons had, after all, come one day after the Corporation meeting at which Summers would have been present, and it was well known that Summers was furious with Lewis for his refusal to get on message. Summers' desire to control the channels of information from the Harvard administration to the university governing boards was near-obsessive. But Lewis never received a response from any of the three men.

A few weeks later, Bill Kirby attended a meeting of the Undergraduate Council. One student asked Kirby about the secrecy regarding his decision to eliminate Lewis' position. “There are certain announcements that have to be made in a certain way,” Kirby said. “This change was made possible in part because Dean Lewis had been so successful.” The student seemed unconvinced. “There are certain announcements that have to be made in a certain way”? Bill Kirby had picked up his boss' knack for political language.

Undergraduate Council chair Rohit Chopra then said to Kirby, “There's a general impression that there's a lack of independence of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from Mass Hall.”

“It was my decision [to fire Lewis],” Kirby insisted.

On April 4, the
Crimson
reported that Kirby had named Gross to the new position, which would be called the Dean of Harvard College. “The administration didn't even pretend to ask students,” Chopra said.

Throughout the episode, Kirby continued to argue that merging the two deanships would facilitate the curricular review. He claimed that the distinction between academic and non-academic life was illogical, and that it was important to merge the positions before commencing the review. Moreover, he said, the combined workload would not be excessive—students should not fear that they will get the short end of the stick.

On at least one of these questions, Kirby was wrong. Within months it was clear that Gross was overwhelmed by his new double duties. “I [have] to hire someone to help me divide up this job,” Gross admitted. A search was begun to fill a new and newly named post of “deputy dean,” which skeptical administrators quickly dubbed “deputy dawg.” The position appeared to have all the responsibilities of Harry Lewis' job, but with none of the authority or autonomy—not exactly an enticement for strong candidates. In June 2004, Gross announced that the deputy dean would be a woman named Patricia O'Brien. The dean of the business school at Simmons College, a small women's college in Boston, O'Brien was also the co-master of Currier House; the other co-master was her husband, Joseph Badaracco, Jr., a professor at the Harvard Business School. They had, ironically, been appointed house masters by Harry Lewis.

Kirby's office put out a press release saying that O'Brien would “oversee all aspects of College life.” O'Brien announced that she'd be working with associate deans, University Health Services, the registrar, the Freshman Dean's Office, and the Office of Career Services.

“And I hope to be working with students,” she added.

W
ith Harry Lewis gone, few people could directly challenge Larry Summers' muscular grip on Harvard. Certainly there was no one who had both the power and the inclination to confront the president. But there were still those who could challenge him through the example they set and the lessons they taught. One such person was a thirty-two-year-old lecturer on the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature named Timothy Patrick McCarthy.

In the spring of 2002, McCarthy was co-teaching English 176a, “American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac.” His classroom partner was a young associate professor named John Stauffer, a rising star in the English department who shares McCarthy's progressive politics. In Room 202 of Harvard Hall, a 1766 building parallel to Mass Hall, McCarthy and Stauffer lectured to almost two hundred students on what they had dubbed “protest literature.” Their syllabus included Tom Paine's
Common Sense,
Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Upton Sinclair's
The Jungle,
John Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath,
and yes, the music of murdered rapper Tupac Shakur. But at 2:00 in the afternoon of March 18, 2003, McCarthy and Stauffer were talking about current events. They did that sometimes, but at this class they had a special urgency. The day before, President George W. Bush had delivered an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein: leave Iraq within forty-eight hours, or war will come.

Stauffer began. “The lessons of the course can be applied to this situation,” he said. John Brown, Stowe, Martin Luther King, Jr.—all had tried to change the world without having any idea what the consequences of their work might be. Activism is not science, “and it's impossible to predict the results of protest.” But fear of the unknown—or of failure—should not stop anyone from acting on his or her conscience.

Stauffer and McCarthy stood on a slightly elevated stage in front of long rows of wooden chairs, most of them filled—the students liked these lectures and rarely skipped class. To the audience's left, Stauffer was standing almost completely still behind a podium. Dark-haired and bespectacled, he was McCarthy's physical opposite. McCarthy's energy overflowed in physical restlessness—at the moment, he was pacing back and forth, staring at the carpeted floor; Stauffer's intensity seemed self-consuming, like a slow-burning fire. His body was alarmingly thin and his cheeks had a gaunt, hollowed-out look, like the subject of his second book, abolitionist John Brown. It was a little hard to believe that, while a student at Duke University, Stauffer had been a nationally ranked tennis player. Larry Summers had asked him to play, but even though Stauffer would be considered for tenure in 2003, he had declined to play with the president. Something about the idea didn't sit right with him. Still, he felt more constrained than McCarthy in articulating his political opinions; young scholars known for their activism tended not to get tenure at Harvard.

McCarthy moved behind his own podium, in the center of the stage. He took over from Stauffer like a football player taking a handoff. “One of the themes of this course is passion,” he said. “Another is faith. Another is courage. The people who wrote the texts we read in the course had courage.”

If war with Iraq breaks out, Stauffer announced, there will be a campus-wide walkout. Students could leave their classes and gather at a protest in front of the statue of John Harvard. He and McCarthy would not teach that day. They'd make up the material later. But it was important to show how they felt.

With war coming, McCarthy said, it was time for students to have the courage of their convictions. “Once we start bombing Baghdad, the world will change and people will die,” he said, pacing back and forth across the stage while Stauffer leaned on his podium. “We have to figure out if we are okay with that. I'm not going to tell you what to do. You're all individuals. You are all children of God.”

McCarthy paused a moment, as if he wasn't sure that he should say what he was about to say. Then he began to tell a story. He and some friends had been out at a bar the night before, he said, when he had been accosted by a nasty drunk. “You're a faggot, aren't you?” the man said—which was a little weird, because McCarthy didn't fit any physical stereotypes of a gay man. He was big and strong and dressed like a preppy college student, with inexpensive clothing from the Gap and Banana Republic. He kept his brown hair cut short like a young Mickey Mantle. But somehow the drunk knew. “I want to kill you, you faggot,” the guy said to McCarthy. “Just like we're going to kill those motherfuckers in Iraq.”

McCarthy told the students that he'd tried to talk to the guy, to calm him down. But the man kept saying it—that word.
Faggot. Faggot. Faggot.
He must have said it forty times. McCarthy and his friends left the bar, and the man followed them outside, taunting McCarthy and getting in his face. “I'm not going to fight you because your blood will give me AIDS,” he said.

“I wanted to fight him,” McCarthy said, “but that would only continue the cycle of violence.” There was so much violence in the world, he continued. From an incident at a bar to imminent slaughter in Iraq. What was the point of it all? What was it accomplishing?

“I just wanted to share that today because I'm not doing well,” McCarthy said, his face grim. “Today I'm not doing well at all.”

There was dead silence in the lecture hall. It lasted for ten or maybe fifteen seconds, which felt like a long time after what McCarthy had confessed. Then a young woman in the middle of the room called out, “We love you, Tim,” and someone started to clap, and then everyone was clapping—a long, cathartic burst of applause that was consolation to McCarthy but also something more, a wave of emotion that said,
We're in this together.

“Thank you,” McCarthy said, choking up. “I love you, too.”

And without further ado, he and John Stauffer began their lecture on James Agee and Walker Evans' classic work,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
That was how it worked in their classroom. You taught the past and you taught the present, because to believe that the two could be separated—well, that was a fallacy. To think that you could ever keep politics out of the classroom was a politics of its own.

 

Tim McCarthy is a student of the past with a very modern personal history. The adopted son of middle-class parents, he is a Harvard graduate, class of 1993, with a doctorate in American history from Columbia. A former high school jock, at 6'4" and two hundred–plus pounds, he now struggles slightly with his weight. He dated women in high school, college, and after, but came out of the closet during graduate school. He has the clean-cut look of a Little Leaguer, but he likes to smoke Parliament Lights when he's writing, drinking, or driving long distances. An intensely serious man, McCarthy is passionate about civil rights and social justice, yet he loves to laugh and does so loudly and often—a deep, joyous yelp that rises up from his stomach. And he is the kind of teacher who—for better or worse, and there are people on both sides of the question—is rare at Harvard. Intense, committed, learned, and yet vulnerable, McCarthy never hesitates to connect the past and the present. In his classroom, the lines between the intellectual, the personal, and the political are frequently blurred. Intellectual purists—scholars who feel that their emotions and political opinions don't belong in the classroom—did not approve of his style, but many students did. They loved McCarthy. During his time at Harvard, he won four college prizes for teaching and advising. Walking across the Yard with him was not unlike walking with Cornel West; a five-minute jaunt could take half an hour, so many students called out to McCarthy.

He was, he will admit, a troublemaker from an early age.

McCarthy grew up near Albany, New York, the adopted son of Tom and Michelle McCarthy, a basketball coach and a public school teacher. He never knew his biological parents and never wanted to; Tom and Michelle loved Tim as if he were their own, and that was good enough for him. Still, McCarthy's conception of family was shaped by his early awareness that he was adopted. Once, in kindergarten, he and his classmates were asked to draw a picture of their birthday party. “I basically drew a picture of everybody I knew,” McCarthy said. “Of this woman in a car bringing me to my parents, the guy at the candy store, my teacher, friends, grandparents. My dog and cat.” Even then, McCarthy said, his conception of family wasn't about biology, but about community.

Anyway, Tom and Michelle were all the parents anyone could ask for. Tom came from Irish stock, and Michelle was of Italian descent. Politically they were FDR and JFK people—bread-and-butter, middle-class Democrats. Both were devout Catholics but low-key about their faith, more prone to doing good works than talking about them. They never liked ostentatious public displays of piety, such as when a football player on TV thanked Jesus for a touchdown. Michelle was a third-grade teacher, quiet and patient; she spent the last fifteen years of her career in the same classroom where Tim had attended third grade. Tom was a basketball coach and athletic director at Guilderland High School. Tim went to Guilderland and played basketball for his father, and “there would be teammates who couldn't afford shoes or basketball camp, but they'd always seem to have shoes or go to camp,” McCarthy said. “I learned later that my father was taking care of those things.” Every Christmas, Tom McCarthy drove to the local liquor store and bought a bottle for the school custodians and bus drivers, because he thought those were the guys who really kept the school going. “And at my high school graduation party,” Tim said, “there were all these janitors and school bus drivers.”

The McCarthys took so many people into their home—foreign exchange students, foster children from China, a friend who'd lost his job—that Tim's classmates dubbed his house “Hotel McCarthy.” But for Tim, the most important visitor was John Cottingham, an African American kid from a tough section of Brooklyn, New York. John had come to the McCarthys through the Fresh Air Fund, the charity that arranges for inner-city kids to spend time with host families in rural areas. “I was six when he first started coming, for a week or two at first and then a month, and for a long time John was my best friend,” McCarthy remembered. “John would tell me stories about New York, and he was a Yankees fan, and he told me when he lost his virginity—I was about twelve.” There weren't many black kids in Duanesburg, New York—“the middle of nowhere,” McCarthy calls it—or many people of color, period. Its population of about 5,800 is now 97.2 percent white, 1 percent American Indian, 0.8 of a percent Hispanic, and 1 percent “mixed race.” But McCarthy never felt that John's presence was unusual. “My parents had invited him into our home, which made our relationship seem normal for me. It was only in retrospect that I realized how extraordinary this was,” he said.

Young Tim was a troublemaker both in and out of class. “There were constant parent-teacher conferences,” he said. “I was rebellious. I wanted attention. If I was in trouble, it meant I was relevant.” In second grade, McCarthy got all As on his report card, but his teacher wrote in the comment section that “Timothy talks too much.” His father wrote back, “You're telling us.” Tom liked to joke that Tim was vaccinated with a phonograph needle. At age nine, shortly after his class had practiced a nuclear fallout drill, Tim wrote a letter to President Reagan advocating a nuclear freeze. Someone at the White House sent him a letter back, with the president's signature on it and an autographed photo attached. It didn't make much difference. A few days later, McCarthy's school held a mock presidential election and young Tim organized the students to vote against Reagan.

It was around then that McCarthy's teacher came up with the idea of pairing Tim with Shawn Page. Shawn was a boy with Down's syndrome, a chromosomal irregularity that impedes physical and intellectual development, but because of the way the schools worked back then, he and Tim were in the same class. Tim agreed to hang out with Shawn, helping him with his homework and looking out for him whenever possible. McCarthy didn't have any brothers or sisters, but he would have Shawn.

The assignment gave McCarthy a sense of purpose that the other kids didn't, and he rose to the responsibility. He tried to help Shawn learn to read; he always picked Shawn for his kickball team; he went to Shawn's birthday party, noticing that there weren't many other kids there, that it was mostly parents in attendance. Shawn's mother thanked Tim effusively for coming, but McCarthy didn't think he deserved any special thanks. He may have been helping Shawn, but Shawn was also helping him. Working with Shawn calmed him down.

In junior high, Shawn was placed in a special education classroom, and the two boys lost touch. McCarthy went on to be a top-notch student and one of the most popular kids at Guilderland. He was also an athlete whose skills at basketball, football, and track had led Dartmouth and Harvard to express interest in him. Even though McCarthy never expected it, Harvard accepted him. He started there in the fall of 1989.

In one sense, everything seemed perfect for Tim McCarthy. He was succeeding in high school by every standard measure. He was smart and popular and had a girlfriend, and in their senior year she was voted Classiest and Best-looking and he was voted Most School Spirit and Most Likely to Succeed. But McCarthy's life was not as simple as appearances suggested. Back in ninth grade, he'd had a homosexual encounter with one of his best friends. Neither spoke about it much; both were popular athletes whose social personae conflicted with their real identities. But their sexual relationship would continue on and off for almost a decade, during which time McCarthy would continue to date women yet occasionally have clandestine flings with men.