Harvard Rules (54 page)

Larry Summers had often spoken of wanting to create a curriculum that prepared students for the world of the twenty-first century. But behind his rhetoric had simmered a great impatience with the pace of change at Harvard and a burning desire to produce tangible achievements—to legacy-build, and to do so fast. In the 2004 Harvard College curricular review, that impatience seemed to have carried the day. And to the extent that the curricular review was a measure of Larry Summers' leadership style, it suggested that while being a bull in a china shop might be a great way to earn flattering press from critics outside Harvard, it was not the most effective way to build a better curriculum.

In theory, the Harvard faculty had to approve the new curriculum, and it would debate the review proposals in the 2004–2005 school year and beyond. (Indeed, throughout that school year the review committees would essentially re-do the work of the year before.) They would probably approve some ideas that were, while unremarkable, harmless or worthwhile; others they would surely dislike and reject. But their support or opposition mattered less than in past eras. It appeared that some parts of the report could be effected piecemeal through the fiat of Bill Kirby, who declined to detail which parts of the review the faculty would get to vote on.

Joe Green would not be there for much of that debate; he took the fall 2004 semester off to work for presidential candidate John Kerry. But Green and Undergraduate Council president Matt Mahan hadn't given up on getting students to fight for the future of a Harvard education. They were the main organizers of a group called Undergraduates Reclaiming Our Curriculum, which aspired to get students more involved in the review. “No matter how great the curriculum is,” Green said, “if the students aren't invested in it, it's going to fail.” The same, of course, was true of the faculty as well.

Summers had often spoken of the curricular review as a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and he was right. A successful curricular review could reinvigorate the university's intellectual life, reenergize the faculty, and excite the students, building a communal sense of academic purpose. By those measures, Larry Summers' curricular review was a failure.

The President on His Throne

A
s he looked out over another crowd of thirty thousand strong gathered for Harvard commencement, Larry Summers drummed his fingers on the arms of the centuries-old President's Chair in which he sat. Graduating senior Kate L. Rakoczy was giving the Undergraduate English Oration, a speech about the importance of pursuing your passions in life, but Summers did not appear to be paying attention—he already knew that there was nothing in the speech he needed concern himself with. Perched squarely in the middle of the stage at its highest point, he gazed out over the crowd and waited for his turn before the microphone. When the crowd applauded, he lifted up one hand and let it fall limply onto the other.

Thursday, June 10, 2004, had dawned wet and blustery, the third consecutive year it had rained on commencement, but the ceremonies were proceeding according to plan. After almost two years, Summers had replaced university marshal Rick Hunt with a woman named Jackie O'Neill, who had previously worked in Mass Hall, and O'Neill helped make sure that the student speeches were inoffensive. At Class Day on Wednesday, 2004, class marshal Shaka Bahadu had declared that “sitting amongst us are [future] candidates for president of the United States” and “now is the time to share our light with the rest of the world,” both of which were perfectly routine sentiments for Harvard commencement. Thursday morning, the processions of cap-and-gowned graduates had filed into the Yard in their traditional order, according to the year in which their school was founded. Following more modern tradition, the divinity school students had adorned their caps with halos; the Kennedy School students carried globes; and when the business school diplomas were conferred, the HBS graduates hurled dollar bills in the air.

Later that afternoon, UN head Kofi Annan would give an impassioned speech about the dangers of unilateralism in foreign relations. Speaking first, Summers would talk about economic inequities in higher education, a repetition of speeches he'd been giving for months. In the spring, Summers had announced a policy by which Harvard would abolish tuition for students from families with an income of less than $40,000 a year. Previously such students had had to pay only $1,000 per year, so the policy change wasn't actually costing Harvard much money, but the symbolically powerful move had garnered waves of publicity. It was only natural that the president would speak about the policy change on this day.

As he sat on the presidential throne, wearing long black robes and a scarlet sash, Summers might have been reflecting on the controversy of just two years before, when senior Zayed Yasin spoke of his “American jihad.” That talk had marked the end of Summers' first and most turbulent year. The president had come a long way since then. The university was firmly in his grasp. Except for the occasional and so-far ineffectual dissident, the faculty had been silenced. As Summers would explain to a British journalist who asked about his leadership style, “Sometimes fear does work of reason.” The students were learning to live with a new level of separation from the Harvard administration. The Board of Overseers was an emasculated body, while the Corporation was even more firmly on Summers' side than it had been when it chose him as the new president. Treasurer D. Ron Daniel was retiring after fifteen years in that position, and Summers and the rest of the Corporation had selected a new treasurer, James Rothenberg, the head of Capital Research and Management, a Los Angeles–based money management firm that oversaw $450 billion in mutual funds. It was unclear how strong a figure Rothenberg would be. Even as he joined the Corporation, his firm was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for potential violations of conflict-of-interest regulations.

As Summers' grip on Harvard had tightened, the level of public controversy at the university had dissipated. Cornel West's portrait may still have been hanging on the wall of the African and African American Studies Department, but West himself was long gone. Poet Tom Paulin would never try to reschedule his unpopular speaking appointment. The first phase of the war in Iraq hadn't lasted long enough to prompt many anti-war demonstrations in Harvard Yard, and the protests over the Solomon Amendment had fizzled out with the onset of summer vacation. Even the uproar over Sheik Zayed's donation to the divinity school had died down. About six weeks after this commencement, the United Arab Emirates government would quietly withdraw its $2.5-million gift, saying that discussions with Harvard had dragged on too long. The university released this information the day before the Democratic National Convention began in Boston, burying the story underneath an avalanche of convention-related news.

Not only were most of the protests gone, so were most of the protesters. The last of the students who had taken over Massachusetts Hall in the spring of 2001 were now getting their diplomas and leaving town. Cornel West was at Princeton; Harry Lewis was on sabbatical at MIT; Tim McCarthy was in North Carolina writing his book on church-burnings; Rachel Fish had gone to Manhattan to run a group called the David Project, which promotes peace in the Middle East; Brian Palmer was headed to Sweden to teach at a university there.

Meanwhile, one of Summers' former critics, Skip Gates, was coming back in the fall for at least one more year. In the spring of 2004, Gates had come to Summers and asked for more money, telling the president that he'd gotten an offer from another university. (Gates denies this.) Summers turned him down. “Larry did not raise the ante,” said one source familiar with the meeting. “He had come to terms with the prospect of Skip leaving, and that was his strongest hand. Larry is feeling very confident.” If Gates left now, Summers had concluded, it would reflect worse on Gates than on him. Summers had done much to court the black community, and with his public praise for Summers, Gates had unintentionally given the president cover. Summers knew that he could spin Gates' departure as a law of nature; every so often, Skip Gates just had to move on.

Inevitably, there were rumors—very quiet this time—that Gates' return would not last long. “He went in to talk to Summers and Summers said he wasn't giving him a penny. Skip basically said, ‘I've said good things about you and I'm covering for your ass, you've got to be kidding,'” according to one professor who knows both men. “Skip said [to himself], ‘This man is not playing the game. If you're going to be a power player, play the game.'”

Gates had always worked on the presumption that there was plenty of power to go around, and that if you had it, you shared it. He was reluctant to stay in a place where the president appeared to believe that every drop of power possessed by someone else was power taken away from him. One more year at Harvard, and then it seemed very likely that Skip Gates would head elsewhere—probably either Princeton or Columbia. Months later, that outcome seemed even more likely when a husband-and-wife team of scholars in Af-Am, Lawrence Bobo and Marcyliena Morgan, announced that they would be leaving Harvard for tenured professorships at Stanford at the end of the 2004–2005 school year. Summers had declined to offer tenure to Morgan; Stanford did not hesitate.

Three years is not enough time to judge a university presidency, but in that short period Summers had clearly changed life at Harvard. He had promoted science initiatives, prodded a curricular review into life, and directed more money to the graduate schools that needed it the most. The outcomes of these projects was uncertain, but Summers could take credit for having started them. He had also helped elevate the urgent subject of economic class and access to higher education into the national conversation. And there was no question that, on issues ranging from anti-Semitism to Harvard's relationship with the military, he had once again made the Harvard president a figure who commanded national attention. Underlying all these things was the most important change—a massive centralization of power at the university and, more specifically, the power of the president, at the expense of the governing boards, the deans, the faculty, and the students.

But there was still unfinished business. It is human nature that we tend to remember leaders by their most tangible accomplishments—What did they discover? What battles did they win? What works of art did they create?—and in Summers' case, his most tangible legacy would surely be the design and construction of a new campus across the Charles River, in Allston. In the previous months, Summers had begun to release bits and pieces of information about the planned campus, and its broad outlines were taking shape. He had hired the celebrity architect Frank Gehry to oversee the planning process; Gehry had just completed the Ray and Maria Stata Center at MIT, a $300–$400 million building devoted largely to computer science and engineering. The president wanted to move much of Harvard's sciences into Allston, creating a complex that, Summers said, would lead to “a critical mass of scientific laboratories.” He would also move the School of Public Health and the School of Education from their respective locations in downtown Boston and Harvard Square, where both were boxed in by development. And he would put from four to eight undergraduate houses in Allston, physically splitting the college housing in half. People involved with the Allston planning committees believed that, though he didn't come out and say so, Summers wanted to expand the undergraduate population from its current level of around 6,400 to perhaps 10,000. Many more of these students would come from overseas than Harvard currently accepted. “Summers wants people to no longer think of Harvard as being in Cambridge or Boston or Massachusetts or even the United States, but a place that's a
center,
a place that is everywhere but isn't really anywhere,” said Matt Mahan, the 2004–2005 Undergraduate Council president.

If true, that plan would prompt a huge fight—such growth would not only place profound economic stresses on the university and its faculty, but it would also transform Harvard student life, making the possibility of a cohesive community even more remote than it is currently. At the very least, students worried, it would make less plausible Summers' rhetoric about increasing contact between students and faculty. If undergrads didn't see much of their professors now, what would happen if they were joined by another 3,600 students? On the flip side, if Harvard became a larger university under Summers, a place so big and so international that it truly became a global institution, Larry Summers would sit at the helm of the first world university. Anyone who knew Summers knew that this was a proposition he would find attractive.

Inevitably, the Allston proposals had both supporters and detractors. (Although, there was a general feeling that the School of Education was so chronically overlooked that
any
attention paid to it was a good thing.) But most of the people who would be affected by the changes didn't have strong opinions, simply because they lacked enough information. The president would never forget The Memo; he knew that thinking out loud only provided a rallying point for potential foes. By the time his planning became public, it would have acquired so much momentum that stopping it would be harder than going along with it.

In the meantime, the Allston project was adding to Summers' power because it was adding to the wealth of his office. In mid-January 2004, the Corporation extended for twenty-five years something called the Allston Infrastructure Fund, a tax of .5 percent on the endowment allocated toward Allston planning. If the endowment stood at $23 billion, that was over $100 million a year. Neil Rudenstine had been the fund's first advocate (proof that he was not always the milquetoast some considered him). Over the vehement objections of then-dean Jeremy Knowles—the tax would hurt FAS the most—the Corporation approved it for five years. If Bill Kirby opposed the fund's twenty-five-year renewal, his protest went unnoticed. It probably wouldn't have mattered anyway; Summers wanted this money. In theory, the hundreds of millions of dollars that would accumulate would be overseen by a committee headed by provost Steven Hyman. In reality, since Hyman worked directly under Summers (and physically just feet away from him), that money would be controlled by the president.

And there would be still more money pouring into Harvard, and the president's office, in the years to come. Even that commencement afternoon, as former Corporation fellow Roger Stone announced the year's fund-raising totals—the law school, $196 million! the business school, $450 million!—other Harvard fundraisers were working on a new capital campaign, sure to be the largest in the history of education. Neil Rudenstine aimed to raise $2.1 billion and wound up with $2.5 billion. Now people were whispering about an unprecedented number: $10 billion. During the Rudenstine campaign, 12.5 percent of the proceeds were automatically diverted to the central administration. One could be sure the Larry Summers administration would receive a similar or larger take.

Underneath—far, far underneath—the pomp and glitter of commencement, currents of unhappiness were making their way through the university. The president's critics would have said that it was his intangible changes that mattered the most. That he was corrupting the university with values and priorities better suited to the world of politics and commerce. That, instead of free speech and vigorous debate—instead of
veritas
—the president of Harvard cared only about image, public relations, spin control. And that the thing they cherished most about Harvard—that in a world of never-ending competition and conflict, the university aspired to something higher, something more timeless—was rapidly vanishing. Like an extinct species, once gone, that precious quality would probably be gone forever. Those professors would either have to live in a world of Larry Summers' creation, or go elsewhere. But if Harvard couldn't remain an ivory tower, in the best, most optimistic sense of that phrase, what university could?

It is possible that, sooner or later, Summers' critics will rise to fight for the Harvard they believe in. Maybe if he makes a misstep, gives them an opening. But it is also possible that the moment to fight, the window of opportunity, has passed, and that their cause is already lost.