Harvard Rules (53 page)

In the early spring, Summers invited the eight undergraduates on the review committees to Elmwood for dinner. As they sat around the dining room table talking about the review, Joe Green grew frustrated with the conversation—it was so specific, all about technicalities, with no sense of the underlying point of it all. “We're not asking the big questions,” he said to the president. Green thought that the Harvard curriculum needed more than tinkering to challenge and produce great thinkers. “I'm concerned Harvard could never produce another William James,” Green said.

Summers looked unhappy at the suggestion that Harvard couldn't generate another important philosopher—which was really a lament that the curricular review was insufficiently ambitious. “What about Michael Sandel?” Summers asked. (Sandel was a member of the review's Committee on General Education.) Green found it hard to take the remark seriously. Michael Sandel was a gifted lecturer and a smart, provocative thinker. But no one would have put him in a class with William James, and to do so suggested either an ignorance of the history of philosophy or a denial of reality. “I think Larry does care about undergraduate education,” Green said later. “He does care about Harvard College.” Nonetheless, he wasn't open to challenges to his curricular review.

By early March, the work of the curricular review committees was done, and the four groups gave their secret recommendations to Wolcowitz. Once so idealistic, Green had grown disillusioned. He realized that in the time allotted, the committees' couldn't possibly have undertaken any wide-ranging intellectual inquiry, and he believed that the aggressive schedule had been “a strategy designed to make sure that the administration got its agenda through.” He was so frustrated, he even met with Henry Rosovsky to ask his advice, but while Rosovsky was happy to discuss the history of the Core, he would not get involved in the current process—no one wanted the architect of the Core looking over their shoulder as they prepared to axe the old curriculum. “I don't think the committees got to the bottom of things, or even tried to,” Green said. “You couldn't have, in one year. As an intellectual exercise, it was pretty unimpressive.” After being asked to meet with a prominent alumni donor, Green even began to doubt the rationale for having students in the process. “The administration needed to have us there so they could say there was student involvement” in the review, he said. The alumni liked to hear that.

In mid-April, Jeffrey Wolcowitz shuttered himself in his basement office in University Hall to finish writing the curricular report in time for release on Monday, April 26. The pressure was on. According to University Hall sources,
New York Times
education reporter Sara Rimer had told Kirby's office that the paper planned a front-page story on the review, as long as she got it early enough. But there was plenty of pressure from a source closer to home: Larry Summers.

From the very beginning of his presidency, Summers had never shied away from stating what he hoped the curricular review would do. His 2003 commencement address was devoted to the topic. But during the course of the review, Summers played an even more hands-on role. At first, he acted through a surrogate. Apparently at Summers' urging, Wolcowitz had hired for his staff a woman named Inge-Lise Ameer. Ameer had a 2002 doctorate from the Harvard School of Education, but that wasn't her only qualification for the job. Also important was that she was friends with Summers' girlfriend, English professor Lisa New. When New was director of undergraduate studies in the English department, Ameer was her “undergraduate administrative coordinator”—essentially her right-hand woman. The two liked each other very much, and through New, Ameer had met and socialized with Summers. He liked her too—and in her new role working for Jeff Wolcowitz, he used her to transmit his opinions on the curricular review. “Larry would pick up the phone and call her,” said one source familiar with their working relationship. Explained another, “Through Inge-Lise Ameer, Larry was delivering messages to Jeff Wolcowitz over the course of the review,” circumventing Bill Kirby and Dick Gross. Ameer's presence irritated other University Hall staffers, who considered her Summers' surrogate. She was, according to a third source, “a big problem.” Some of her co-workers were reluctant to talk freely around her, lest their words be reported back to the president. (Ameer declined to comment.)

Ameer's presence in University Hall also showed the growth of Lisa New's power and influence. Though she could appear absentminded and even a little ditzy, New was neither, and she had strong opinions on issues such as undergraduate advising and teaching, and the merit (or lack thereof) of some undergraduate departments. And because Summers himself was not particularly familiar with issues in the humanities—and not always interested anyway—New filled a vacuum. The mild-mannered divorcée and poetry lover had become a major, if sub rosa, player in the direction of study of the humanities at Harvard. That her former aide was helping to shape the curricular review was evidence of that.

As Wolcowitz approached the home stretch, Summers' involvement became still more direct. According to several sources, he began simply calling Wolcowitz directly, telling him what to put in the final report regardless of whether the review committees had recommended it. “At the end,” said a University Hall source, “Larry was just dictating to Jeff, ‘These are the changes and they are going in.'” Wolcowitz, said another source familiar with the process, had become the “fall guy.” If the report bombed, then, at least internally, he would take the blame. Other sources said that Wolcowitz was “traumatized” and “depressed” by the experience. He would not get the chance to recover. In early September 2004, Bill Kirby summarily relieved Wolcowitz of his decanal duties, almost certainly ending the nontenured Wolcowitz's decades-long service at Harvard. Kirby gave no explanation; University Hall sources said that Wolcowitz had started to chafe at the untenable position he was in, and his resulting shows of independence had irritated Kirby. In any event, the publicly identified author of the curricular review would now have nothing further to do with it.

The end of the drafting process was not pretty. On the evening of Thursday, April 22, members of the review committees were e-mailed a password that granted them Internet access to a draft of the report. They had until Sunday to read it and make comments; their comments were expected to be minor, as there was no time for major changes; the report was to be released to the press on Monday. “We were supposed to see the draft report several weeks before it was released,” said Joe Green. He believed that Wolcowitz didn't want feedback from the committee members, but it seemed equally possible that Wolcowitz had simply run out of time.

Summers was so concerned about the report's status, he insisted that Kirby intervene. On Sunday, April 25, according to two sources familiar with the incident, Kirby “literally took the report out of Wolcowitz's hands.” There followed a late-night editing session in order to finish it and deliver it to Sara Rimer, the
Times'
education reporter. It was, however, too late; Rimer's story ran on A19—still impressive for a report whose import had yet to be determined—but not page one. The president was not happy. Rumors began to circulate around University Hall that he was so displeased with his dean, and so anxious that the report would get ripped in the media, that he had lost confidence in Kirby.

Bill Kirby, some thought, had done everything Summers had wanted him to. Just to prepare a publishable report in a year's time was a considerable feat. But now some of his colleagues began to suspect that Kirby's future as dean was in doubt. Replacing an FAS dean so early in his tenure would once have been considered unthinkable except in the most extreme circumstances. But Summers had shown that the traditional way of doing business mattered little. All that mattered was results.

 

The final document, sixty-seven pages in length, was called “A Report on the Harvard College Curricular Review,” and in essence, it transcribed everything that Larry Summers had been evangelizing about since the fall of 2001. The proposed new curriculum would replace the Core with a distributional requirement. Students would still be required to take courses in a few broad categories. Gone, however, was the idea that students should study “ways of thinking.” The new curriculum would try to ensure that students learned specific facts, although it did not say which ones. There was no mention, for example, of a mandatory Western civilization course, often a central thrust of general education programs in American universities. Instead, “a central component” of the distributional requirement would be the creation of a new set of courses, to be called “Harvard College Courses.” Though study abroad would not be required, it was strongly recommended, and student transcripts would show whether they had undergone a “significant” international experience. (What
significant
meant was undefined, but apparently the term was intended to exclude spending a night walking the Seine with a Parisian art student or discovering an Eden-like beach in Thailand.) As Kirby would say in press accounts, “If you're going to come to Harvard College, it would be very good to have a passport.” In addition, there were proposals for fewer concentration requirements, mandatory freshman seminars, and a four-week January term in which students could take intensive courses, write a research paper, or perhaps study abroad. Students would have to study more science and international affairs, and possibly science courses ought to be more “interdisciplinary,” although what exactly this meant also went unspecified. Perhaps the last significant recommendation was that the system of assigning students to houses at the end of their freshman years be changed to what critics would angrily call a “Yale-style” housing system, in which students received house assignments as incoming freshmen.

And that was pretty much it. (There was a lot of padding.)

In the national press, the report garnered some early good buzz. The
Times
declared that it “is likely to have an impact on universities across the nation.” In an editorial called “Rethinking at Harvard,” the
Boston Globe
assured readers that the review “promises to be a bold step forward.”

As it turned out, though, those two newspapers were pretty much the only ones to feel that way. The highly respected
Chronicle of Higher Education
noted that “the last time Harvard reviewed its undergraduate curriculum…the results influenced colleges across the country.” This time, according to Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, many of the report's recommendations simply mirrored what a number of other colleges already have in place. The
Crimson
added that “university administrators across the country say they are not expecting anything as radical or as influential from the current curricular review” as the Core had been. The promotion of study abroad, for example, was new to Harvard, but it was certainly not new at many other colleges around the country. The proposal for Yale-style housing, to build a stronger bond between freshmen and the houses, came, of course, from Yale. The idea for a January term seemed to come from MIT, which included a “J-term” in its calendar. This was one reason why the
Crimson'
s J. Hale Russell, a consistent critic of the review process, called the report “60 pages of stunningly bland and half-baked recommendations” and “the rather unsurprising product of a one-year process conducted behind closed doors and largely driven by the narrow-minded agenda of a university president who…seems intent on turning Harvard into his alma mater, MIT.”

There was perhaps only one item in the report that felt unique to Harvard, and that was the so-called “Harvard College Courses.” The oddly generic name was followed by an equally generic description. The Harvard College Courses were “to be foundational…to cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and to define the basis of an educated citizenry.” But apparently they also were to teach something that sounded very much like the Core's ways of thinking. “Faculty in related areas would come together across disciplinary boundaries…to speak with one another and with students in a common language and to define the most important concepts and approaches that students should know about their fields.” If the reader was not clear as to what exactly that meant, the report attempted to get more specific. “A world literature course might look at cultural representation in different places and periods, and cultural flows across traditional national boundaries and among hierarchies of culture.” The description was still less than clear.

The vagueness may have been intentional; two lines in the report hinted at the real reason for Harvard College Courses. They were to be “flagship courses, listed at the front of the course catalog. They should develop distinctive course materials for use in, and potentially beyond, Harvard College.” Those lines sounded innocuous enough, but as the
Crimson
would later report, they had a deeper meaning than appeared upon first reading. The key words were “for use in,
and potentially beyond,
Harvard College.” At some point, Larry Summers wanted to market those courses to students around the world, to use the Harvard brand name to teach “foundational knowledge” to students whether they went to Harvard College or not. The Harvard College Courses were created both for profit and, as Michael Sandel might once have put it, for intellectual hegemony. To further stamp Harvard's imprint on the world's education; to promote an empire of the mind.

The most oft-heard criticism of the review was that it lacked any guiding philosophy or unifying vision. It was as if the chairman of Ford Motors had spent years promising the introduction of an all-new Mustang—but when the curtain came up on the car, it had only a few new bells and whistles, and even they were appropriated from the competitors' models. The faculty was underwhelmed. The report landed on their desks like a scoop of lukewarm mashed potatoes, and in faculty meetings and published comments, many turned up their noses at it. Put bluntly, said one esteemed professor, “people think the report is a joke.”