Harvard Rules (49 page)

The combination of pressure and intimidation, as well as the chill on free speech and exclusion from decision-making, left professors and administrators disheartened and demoralized. “The first question people always ask when making a decision is, ‘How does this make Larry look?'” said one high-level administrator. From secretaries to deans, everyone knew that any decision that did not put Summers in a positive light put their jobs at risk: Rick Hunt, Harry Lewis, and others could testify to that. In the spring of 2004, Barry Bloom, dean of the School of Public Health, infuriated Summers by announcing that the school had received a $100-million grant from the federal government without first informing Summers or including the president's name in the relevant press release. According to several sources familiar with the incident, Summers was so enraged that, at a subsequent dinner attended by both Bloom and him, the president insisted on being seated somewhere he could not see the dean. (Asked for comment, Bloom said, “I have the greatest respect for President Summers.”)

“I've never been in a place with the combination of low morale and bunker mentality that now exists at Harvard,” said an administrator who has worked for several universities. And that included people who were members of Summers' inner circle. Even provost Steve Hyman and dean Bill Kirby engaged in half-serious discussions about who had the worse job. “There's a sense of insecurity” among nontenured employees, said one mid-level administrator. “You don't know what's coming next. People who you used to know would be loyal to you, you can't depend on anymore. Now people are only valued according to the success of the last project they did.”

Often it seemed that the only people free to speak their minds were those who were leaving, those with the least power at the university, or those who were both powerless and leaving. With little to lose, they could fight for their principles. One such person was a lecturer on the Committee on the Study of Religion named Brian Palmer. Perhaps no individual at Harvard represented the antithesis of everything that Larry Summers stood for more than Palmer did, and during the spring of 2004, Palmer and Summers would finally get to express their differences—in front of each other, and a crowd of six hundred people.

 

The first thing one noticed about thiry-nine-year-old Brian Palmer was his physical fragility. He was five foot eleven and weighed maybe a hundred forty pounds after a big meal. His skin was chalk white and he had inky black, spiky hair that often made him look as if he'd just pulled an all-nighter. He wore thick glasses and spoke in a breathy, hesitant voice that barely crossed the distance between two people. Even when Palmer used a microphone, such as when he spoke at the anti-war rally in the spring of 2003, his voice drifted gently across the crowd like a helium balloon losing its lift. Like a singer in a geek rock band, he was not charismatic, he was anti-charismatic. Clearly, it was not the projected force of Palmer's personality that made him a prominent figure at Harvard. It was instead the power of his ideas, the depth of his convictions, and his willingness to speak his mind that turned the lecturer into a nerd hero for hundreds of Harvard students.

Palmer grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where his father was a clinical psychologist and his mother a career counselor. His paternal grandparents had been Methodist schoolteachers in the Philippines, while his mother came from a Jewish family in Prague. During World War II, she was saved from the Holocaust by British Quakers, and later converted to Quakerism in gratitude; Palmer was raised with that sect's strong moral and pacifist sensibilities. He also had an activist bent. As a Harvard undergraduate from 1982 to 1986—smack in the middle of the Reagan years—he had helped found a muckraking magazine called the
Harvard Citizen.

During his summers, Palmer worked for Ralph Nader, and after completing his doctorate in anthropology and religious studies at Harvard in 2000, he landed a position as a lecturer there. He wanted to teach classes about ethics, globalization, and “the urgent problems of our time”—nuclear weapons, global warming, and the widening gap between rich and poor. There were, Palmer noticed, lots of courses at Harvard about race and gender, but very few about class. He'd read that at one point Microsoft executives Bill Gates and Steven Ballmer possessed more wealth than the entire population of Africa. So he proposed a course on capitalism as a religion, but the department rejected it.

Instead, Palmer taught a course called “Religion 1529: Personal Choice and Global Transformation.” But “taught” wasn't exactly what Palmer did—at least, not in the traditional sense of the word. “Hosted” would have been more accurate. Palmer rarely lectured to his classes. He thought that the large lecture format made students listless and passive recipients of “knowledge,” and he wanted his classes to be interactive. So he invited guests from the fields of academia, activism, and politics to visit his twice-weekly course meetings. And then, after a brief introduction, he simply opened the floor to questions. As Palmer scooted up and down the aisles of Science Center C with a microphone, the students would stand, introduce themselves, and ask their questions. The first ten questioners were preselected with only one criterion: that they would be of alternating gender, so that women, who often felt reluctant to speak out in large classrooms, were encouraged to do so.

Almost without exception, Palmer's guests were liberal. In 2002 and 2003, they included theologian Harvey Cox, philosopher Sissela Bok (Derek Bok's wife), and Adam Yauch, the Beastie Boys singer and pro-Tibet activist. Robert Reich was so fired up by his 2001 appearance at Palmer's class that he decided to run for governor of Massachusetts in 2002. “I just left that class thinking to myself, this state is a mess and I need to run for governor,” he said at the time.

Even if his students tended to agree with the questioners, Palmer wanted them to ask tough questions, to get in the habit of considering all authority figures with skepticism. “The students are not shy about questioning celebrity guests,” Palmer explained, “but they do have trouble questioning authority in general.” He believed that all scholarship was in some measure political and could not help but reflect the values and biases of its authors. (Which did not mean that Palmer considered “all ideas equally valid.”) As a result, he wanted his students to question everything, not just accept something as true because a professor with a microphone had told them it was.

Much of Palmer's more direct teaching took place outside the classroom, where he was constantly on call for his students. At least once a week, he hosted a dinner where students discussed the issues raised by that week's speakers. At Harvard, the term “office hours” is usually a misnomer for a single hour or perhaps ninety minutes of faculty availability, but Palmer's office hours did, in fact, last for hours, as long as there were students waiting to see him. He responded to every e-mail he received, and he received hundreds; in the spring of 2003, his course had some five hundred students. Correspondents frequently received return e-mails from Palmer at one, two, three o'clock in the morning.

And then there were activities not technically related to the course but that Palmer considered philosophically important, like serving as an advisor to any student organization that asked, or speaking out at a rally for laid-off janitors—the only faculty member to do so. It was, Palmer thought, part of the responsibility of being a member of a community. During the takeover of Massachusetts Hall, Palmer would look out his office window well after midnight and see the tents that had sprung up in the Yard, hear the sounds of students staying up late and talking. “There were people out there, undergraduates, graduate students, just enjoying the fact of being alive,” he said. It was amazing to him how little Harvard students enjoyed such simple but profound pleasures. Most of the time, they were too busy to appreciate life.

Palmer claimed that he invited conservative speakers to his class, but it was clear, his heart wasn't really in those invitations, and few recipients took him up on the offer. He thought that Harvard students were already surrounded by conservatism—that much of the faculty, most of the administration, and virtually all of the Harvard ethos were deeply conservative. Not in the sense that professors would vote for George W. Bush or opposed abortion; few Harvard professors, except maybe at the business school, were Republican. But they were conservative in that they embraced the status quo, taught their students to revere power, authority, and money, and rarely challenged students to question the values that Harvard transmitted to them. Palmer wanted his students to know that life contained options beyond what Harvard preached. It wasn't just about competition, fame, professional achievement, individualism, and material gain—the values, essentially, of American capitalism. Success could be defined differently. Harvard could, if it wanted to, prioritize family, community, friendship, social responsibility, the interdependence of the individual and the larger world. Imagine, Palmer thought, how different the world could be if Harvard graduates left Cambridge thus inspired—as opposed to, say, being urged by the university's president to follow the example of Alexander the Great.

As a lecturer, Palmer had a three-year contract that expired after the 2003–2004 school year. He knew that the provocative nature of his course, his own political activities, and the fact that he had spent far more time teaching than pursuing scholarship would doom his future at Harvard, no matter how popular his courses were. Certainly many professors looked down on Palmer's pedagogy. They were suspicious of a classroom in which there were not lectures, but conversations; in which the professor was not the traditional authority figure, but a sort of moderator, deferring to both students and invited guests; in which the subject was not the world of scholarship but the world
beyond
scholarship. Others speculated that the class was popular simply because it was considered a gut, an easy A, and although the grades in the course weren't actually higher than anywhere else in the Harvard humanities, it was probably true that some students took the class because they found it less demanding than the rest of their course load. It was also true that Palmer wasn't very interested in grades. He thought their primary function was to classify students for entry into the labor market, and that “if you grade someone for something, they'll stop loving the quality of the work and focus on the tangible reward.”

The idea, impossible to implement at Harvard, that students might actually learn more without grades was certainly unorthodox. That unorthodoxy, the very thing that students so appreciated about Palmer, was also what would ensure that he had no future at Harvard. “Sooner or later,” he said, “the university will spit me out like a used piece of chewing gum.” Palmer thought that might be good for him; he'd spent virtually his entire adult life at Harvard. But he knew that he would miss the place. You would never find smarter, nicer, more committed students. And since after graduation these students were likely to lead in everything they did, teaching them alternative ways of defining and valuing life seemed particularly urgent.

That spring, Palmer had one class meeting he was particularly looking forward to. In each of Larry Summers' first two years as president, Palmer had invited the president to address his class, and each time Summers had declined, citing scheduling conflicts. The third time, evidently, was the charm. Whether it was because Summers was more confident about confronting a potentially skeptical audience, or because he'd grown curious about what was now, with 613 students, the second most popular class in Harvard College, or just because Summers had a free hour, Palmer would never know. But Larry Summers agreed to be the guest speaker at Palmer's course at three o'clock on the afternoon of March 17, 2004.

Summers surely knew what he was getting into. The syllabus would have told him that “this is a course for students who seek to have an impact as ethically serious global citizens. How do personal choices about consumption, careers, and child-rearing affect a wider world? What are the possibilities for women and men to ‘make a difference?'” Listed speakers included Dan Matthews, the head of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (who never actually made it to the class because he had staged a nude protest in Harvard Square and been arrested); Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune and maker of
Born Rich,
a documentary exposing the shallow lives of the super wealthy; Ani Choying Drolma, a Tibetan Buddhist nun; and “Larry Summers, Economist.” Palmer himself was giving one lecture, entitled “Harvard and the Cult of the Winner.” If, as Summers had argued at Morning Prayers, economists like him really did analyze the world's problems from a moral perspective, this would be a perfect opportunity to elaborate.

On the prescribed day, Summers arrived only a few minutes late, which was early for him. He wore a dark suit, a light blue shirt, and a slightly darker blue tie. As the year had progressed, Summers had regained some of the weight he'd lost in the previous summer and fall, but he still looked thinner than in his early days as president. Standing on the stage before a packed room—the students were eagerly anticipating this class—he also looked supremely confident. Summers loved the question-and-answer format. Even more than prepared speaking, it was his strength, his virtuosity. Answering questions was like playing tennis; he could pick his shots, play the angles, run his opponents around a little. A game of strategy. Summers loved it.

Palmer briefly introduced Summers, and then the first student rose to question him. “What personal sacrifices have you made to become as successful and accomplished as much as you have, and do you have any regrets?”

Summers looked mildly surprised. He'd attended dozens of question-and-answer sessions at Harvard since becoming president, but this may have been the first time that he'd been asked to speak about the downside of success.