Harvard Rules (48 page)

Summers' position was “more than a little frustrating,” Goad said. “Harvard's involvement would have a huge impact; nothing gets press coverage like Harvard. It said to me that Harvard has lagged behind the other schools. It said that Harvard is not a progressive institution. That it is a follower rather than a leader.”

On January 12, 2004, HLS Lambda filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the FAIR lawsuit. The very next day, fifty-four law school professors, including Dean Elena Kagan, submitted an amicus curiae brief of their own. But the law students were still frustrated. It was possible, Goad said, that in the 2004–2005 school year they might file suit against the university itself. Incoming students, she argued, had come to Harvard with an implicit contractual understanding that they would not be discriminated against. If Harvard would not even try to preserve that right, those students might wind up taking the university to court.

Some months later, Summers showed that he was indeed willing to take on the White House. This time, however, it was regarding an issue he did care deeply about—science. In the spring of 2004, Summers announced that Harvard would create a multimillion dollar center, the Stem Cell Institute, to pursue the therapeutic applications of fetal stem cells. He made the announcement at the Harvard Club of New York on March 2. “There has been an abdication of national responsibility in this area,” Summers said.

Because foes of abortion charged that stem cell research would lead to an increase in abortions, politics had intruded on science: in 2001, President Bush announced that the federal government would fund only research into existing stem cell lines. But most scientists in the field considered those cell lines inadequate, and the restrictions were impeding research that could make a huge difference in the lives of adults suffering from diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, as well as children suffering from neurological damage such as cerebral palsy. “We have a set of policies in place that will not permit stem cell research to be carried on through the traditional channels,” Summers explained. “Given those policies, if this research is to be carried out, there is no alternative to strong and decisive efforts by institutions like Harvard.” The board of this new institute would include professor Michael Sandel, Summers' erstwhile critic, and Dr. David Scadden, who, twenty years before, had treated Larry Summers for cancer and very probably saved his life. For Summers, this was a very personal matter indeed.

The decision to open the Stem Cell Institute did not directly jeopardize federal money, and in fact it would bring new money into Harvard from private-sector donors. Nevertheless, it was a calculated and highly public rebuke of the Bush administration that entirely contradicted Summers' public rationale for not fighting the Solomon Amendment—that “the question is heavily a political one in terms of the Congress and executive branch.” As Summers himself said in a March 20 luncheon at the Harvard Club of New York, “By supporting stem cell research, we are going to take up the slack where our government decided—in my view, mistakenly—not to go.” (The line received a healthy round of applause, which may have suggested that, unlike with “don't ask–don't tell,” there was a growing and positive consensus regarding stem cell research.) Inevitably, though, the Stem Cell Institute risked angering conservatives in the White House and Congress, which could certainly have resulted in cutbacks in federal aid to Harvard. Summers was willing to take that chance.

It could not be said that Larry Summers would not fight for things he believed in. But there was ample evidence that he would not fight for things other members of the Harvard community believed in, principles to which the university had once been committed. If the president of Harvard was going to place his university in opposition to the government, it had to be for a purpose in which he himself had a personal stake. After all, he
was
Harvard.

 

Halfway through his third year as president, Summers had imposed an unprecedented level of control over the amount of information that flowed out of the university. Press releases from around Harvard had to be approved—and sometimes rewritten—by Mass Hall. Fewer and fewer members of the faculty spoke to the press about much of anything, because they did not consider it worth the risk of angering Summers. “There is a sense of resignation, of faculty passivity,” said professor Bradley Epps, who had already clashed with Summers and didn't much mind if he did it again. Only a few professors, such as history of science professor Everett Mendelsohn, dared to question Summers at faculty meetings, which had taken on a Soviet feel; deviations from the script were not allowed. As a young scholar, Mendelsohn had been accused of being a communist by Joseph McCarthy; having survived that, he was not afraid to dissent. “There is a feeling in the faculty that important decisions which may or may not be good are being made with insufficient consultation,” Mendelson said. The professor was a gentleman; he understated the problem.

Most professors, however, buttoned their lips and hunkered down. During the Cornel West affair, Summers had seemed vulnerable, his future uncertain. Now it was clear that not only was he not going anywhere, but that he would brook little dissent. If the professors were going to rise in opposition, they would have to wait for Summers to make a mistake. Until then, they held their tongues.

The university publications marched in lockstep with Summers' agenda.
Harvard Magazine,
once relatively independent by the standards of university alumni magazines, had taken a deep interest in all things scientific, and month after month ran cover articles on scientific issues that curiously paralleled Summers' own interests, while downplaying the abundant signs of campus discontent. Longtime readers of the
Harvard Gazette
noticed that the weekly bulletin had become increasingly
Pravda
-like, featuring a steady stream of flattering photographs of its new president. Summers had instituted an unwritten rule: he would allow his picture to be taken only by photographers of whom he approved. And he cooperated with print journalists only when he appeared to expect gentle treatment from them. As the year progressed, he granted interviews to John Cloud of
Time
and Daniel Goldin of the
Wall Street Journal.
Both were graduates of Harvard College—class of '93 and '78, respectively—though only Cloud disclosed that fact in his piece on Summers. The interviews contained less-than-formidable questioning, as when Goldin asked Summers, “What would you cite as your biggest successes at Harvard so far?”

In the meantime, Summers stiff-armed those journalists who followed his activities more closely, the reporters and editors of the
Harvard Crimson.
His obstructionist attitude toward the student newspaper was not justified by any irresponsible or confrontational reporting.
Crimson
writers and editors report on an institution of which they are a part, and so they err on the side of caution. Though Harvard administrators may sometimes consider the
Crimson
a thorn in their side, they generally concede its professionalism and value to the campus.

On February 20, 2004, however, the
Crimson
ran an astonishing editorial that reflected its frustration with Summers' hostility to the open flow of information. “Ask undergraduates what they think of University President Lawrence H. Summers, and their replies will range from unfettered vitriol to fawning praise, with all possible stops in between,” the editorial said. “Still, though every student can be counted on to have an opinion of our University's head, many of them would be at a loss to back up their judgments with specifics—for as Summers has consolidated his hold on Harvard, his administration has demonstrated an unsettling penchant for secrecy and centralized decision-making rather than the proper level of transparency and consultation.

“Summers' tactics…hint at contempt for students and faculty,” the editorial concluded. “Why does the ivory tower seem to have been occupied by sentries?”

The answer was that Summers did not want to involve the community in his decision-making. That had never been his style. At the World Bank and Treasury, Summers hadn't been a consensus-builder; he made decisions by consulting with a small, select group of wise men, then imposed those decisions on people, even nations, who weren't in a position to protest. (And if they did, he took steps to squelch that protest.) Convinced of the superiority of his own ideas, Summers placed small value on democratic processes, and his leadership style made little accommodation to them. In his favorite story of his past career, the Mexico bailout, he repeatedly emphasized how a majority of Americans opposed the bailout, and members of Congress lacked the spine to do the right thing. He implied that the Harvard community could not help solve problems because the community
was
the problem. Sure that the solutions he advocated were correct, he had little patience for those who disagreed. To palliate them, he went through the motions of process, appointing committees and soliciting advice that, for the most part, he then ignored. “The theater of democracy,” one professor called it. Summers didn't need the student press—he had an in-house press and friendly national journalists to promote his agenda, stroke alumni, and raise his national and international profile. And he made sure that those who worked for him—and wanted to keep working for him—employed the same tactics.

None did so better or more faithfully than Bill Kirby.

Two weeks before, the
Crimson
had run another editorial decrying the level of secrecy in Kirby's University Hall. “No journalist is ever satisfied with the level of access and information provided to him or her…” wrote outgoing editors David H. Gellis and Kate L. Rakoczy. “Yet over the course of the last year…we saw a level of secrecy enshroud the governance process of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences like none we had witnessed before. Information control has become a preoccupation within the Harvard administration, one that threatens to seriously stifle meaningful discussion and debate over the policy decisions that shape this university.”
Crimson
reporters were denied routine information they had once been given as a matter of course, such as a list of tenure appointments in the 2002–2003 academic year. Where previously reporters could simply call members of the administration for comment, now they had to go through press secretaries, who stonewalled. Attempts to schedule interviews with members of the FAS administration were either rejected or simply ignored. More and more, the only person permitted to speak to the
Crimson
was FAS press secretary Robert Mitchell, who would provide the students with background briefings that were less than helpful. It was, the
Crimson
warned, “a climate of secrecy being imposed from the top down” that has “made it seem like the administration is trying to control information for the sake of control alone.” Perhaps most unnerving were the anxious reactions the reporters received if they did get through to a potential source. “It used to be that you'd call anyone you wanted to,” explained editor Kate Rakoczy in a subsequent interview. “Now the people who work with Larry are scared to death” when the
Crimson
calls.

It wasn't only the
Crimson
that noticed the information crackdown. In a Morning Prayers talk on February 13, outgoing Undergraduate Council president Rohit Chopra lamented the university's increasing preference for public relations over honest debate. “Never before has Harvard seen so many communications directors, spokespersons, and other public relations experts to lend a helping hand,” Chopra said. “…Instead of quietly announcing bad news, too often it is wrapped in a beautiful package with the hope that we will think it is a gift. But a wise friend once said to me, ‘Don't eat moldy cheese even if it's on a silver plate, because it will make you sick.'”

One small but symptomatic example was the case of the Korean prostitutes. In talking about the positive effects of globalization and economic growth, Summers often cited an astonishing statistic. In 1970, he liked to say, there were one million child prostitutes in Seoul, South Korea—a horrific number. But today, after decades of economic growth, there are “almost none.” He'd been using the anecdote with audiences to great effect since at least the summer of 2003. But in July of 2004, Summers used the line in a speech with a group of summer students, one of whom, apparently, was from South Korea and knew better. It turned out that in 1970 the
total
population of girls between the ages of ten and nineteen in Seoul was about 680,000—or about 320,000 fewer than Summers' number of child prostitutes alone. South Koreans were understandably miffed; the gaffe was reported in several South Korean papers and the country's minister of health publicly criticized Summers, saying that the comment was “regrettable and, frankly speaking, displeasing.”

It was an honest mistake, employed in an argument to show that South Korea had undergone impressive economic expansion and that such growth had invariably improved social conditions. More telling was Summers' reaction after his misstatement was pointed out. “Head of Harvard apologizes to Korea,” read the headline in
Joong Ang Daily,
an English-language Korean paper. But that was not quite true. Summers had a spokesperson write and release a three-sentence statement that said in part, “President Summers acknowledges that he misremembered a statistic outlining the number of child prostitutes in Seoul in 1970…. He would like to apologize for any offense caused.” Never using the first person—as in “
I
apologize…”—this was an apology via proxy. For Summers, even a simple, clearly deserved apology had first to be neutered and then transmitted by a press secretary. This may have been standard operating procedure in Washington, designed to minimize embarrassment to the person at fault. But at Harvard, people expected precision and honesty in language, which, after all, was critical to how many of them made their living.