Harvard Rules (9 page)

But what could he do? He couldn't return to economics, not after a decade away from his chosen field. Even if he could catch up with all the work he'd missed, how could he go back to writing theoretical, abstract papers about economic issues and crises when he'd just spent a decade living through and shaping the real thing? He'd become one of the people those papers were written
about
. He was the most successful academic to go into politics since Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Henry Kissinger—and if you considered that a lot of people regarded Kissinger as a war criminal, maybe Summers was the most successful since Woodrow Wilson.

So Summers weighed his next move, and he waited. And then Neil Rudenstine resigned, and Harvard came calling, and Summers realized that he didn't have to work in Washington to change the world.

O
n May 22, 2000, Harvard's twenty-sixth president, Neil Rudenstine, announced his retirement. He was tired. A young-looking fifty-six years old when he took the job a decade before, Rudenstine now looked like a man slipping into old age. His dark hair had become heavily streaked with gray, and his face had fallen around the edges, as though life had given it a gentle downward tug. “This has been a good run, and it's time for someone else,” he said. Few at Harvard would have disagreed, at least with the second part of that statement.

Neil Rudenstine became president of Harvard in the fall of 1991, succeeding the popular Derek Bok, the wealthy, patrician scholar of labor law who'd been at Harvard's helm for the preceding two decades. Early in his presidency, some saw the handsome Bok as too polished, too Californian. Before law school at Harvard, Bok had gone to college at Stanford, and there was something about him that always made one think he was just about to hit the tennis courts. He was tall, with thick, wavy gray hair and a craggy face that would have worked as well in Hollywood as at Harvard. He had a beautiful Swedish wife, Sissela Bok, an academic in her own right, and three attractive children. Derek Bok made everything look easy.

But Bok's good looks and good fortune belied a canniness about university politics, and over time he showed that his smoothness masked both diplomacy and depth. Perhaps only a man so secure in his own identity could have guided the university from the political and social turbulence of the 1960s into a period of healing, stability, and, ultimately, growth. “Derek took a university stuck for the same reasons America was stuck, and managed the aftermath,” said one Harvard professor. “He reminded Harvard of its mission: to train the leaders of a great nation that would navigate the shaping of the world.” Derek Bok, said Peter Gomes, the chaplain of Harvard's Memorial Church, “began his presidency like Cary Grant and ended up like Abe Lincoln.”

Neil Rudenstine at least looked a little like Abraham Lincoln. He was a slender man with an angular, sensitive face that could appear either thoughtful or anxious but that rarely suggested certitude. He had a floppy handshake and a reedy, singsong voice, and when he spoke he tended to stare at the ground. His body language radiated pliability rather than strength. “Neil Rudenstine looked delicate, like an orchid,” said one colleague who knew him well.

He was a surprising choice for president. Asked for their advice, Harvard alumni had suggested 763 candidates for the job, and it was never clear that Rudenstine was one of them. He was not a well-known figure. Unlike Bok, who'd come from an extremely wealthy and socially prominent Philadelphia family, Neil Rudenstine was the product of humble and diverse origins. His father was a Jewish prison guard, his mother a Catholic waitress. The first member of his family to graduate high school, Rudenstine went to Princeton and flourished there, falling in love with its intimate, communal atmosphere. In Princeton's peaceful, village-like world of dining clubs and libraries, Rudenstine found a calling. When he finished, he spent two years in England on a Rhodes Scholarship, then returned to the United States and enrolled in graduate school at Harvard to study poetry. Completing his degree in 1964, he taught in Harvard's English department for two years, then returned to Princeton, where he received tenure. His life was an American dream come true.

Neil Rudenstine was reputed to be an excellent teacher, passionate about his material and skilled at conveying its intricacies to his students. But no one would ever have called him a major scholar; other than his dissertation, Rudenstine never published a work of scholarship. So, like many professors who realize that they are unlikely to revolutionize their field and grow weary of the scholar's solitary life, Rudenstine moved into administration. He became the dean of students at Princeton, then was promoted to a bigger job, dean of the college, and then, in 1977, became Princeton's provost, a sort of right-hand man to the university president. He held that job for eleven years, and by all accounts excelled at it.

Princeton is a small university. It has an undergraduate college and a graduate school for aspiring Ph.D.s, but it does not have the power-house professional schools that Harvard does—no law, medicine, or business schools, for example. Located in the affluent, leafy suburb of Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton feels like a school where, if it isn't possible to know everyone else, it may be possible at least to recognize them. Rudenstine liked that. The lover of poetry saw in Princeton an oasis where a scholar's values—tolerance, tranquility, reason—could be cherished and nurtured like a hothouse flower.

After more than a decade on the job, Rudenstine left Princeton in 1988 and became an executive vice-president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York City, where his job was to judge the appeals of the money-seeking. He was comfortable in that environment, too. For a man who had grown up poor, and a humanist who studied poetry, Rudenstine was strangely at ease among multimillionaires. “Derek Bok was always very uncomfortable around the very rich, whereas Neil loved it, just loved it,” said one member of the Harvard faculty. The very rich, in turn, charmed by Rudenstine's courteous, deferential manner and appreciative of his literary bent, delighted in his company.

In the hunt for a new Harvard president, Rudenstine was an intriguing dark horse; he had sufficient academic credentials and what appeared to be more than adequate administrative experience. The only problem was a rumor that he had once turned down the presidency of Princeton. Would he even be interested in the Harvard job? An offer couldn't be made if it might be rejected; word could get out, and that would be humiliating to Harvard. So an emissary from the Harvard Corporation sat down with Rudenstine and asked. And simple as that, Rudenstine said yes. He would certainly be interested.

Things fell into place quickly. Rudenstine was announced as the new president in March 1991. His installation occurred that October. The mood on campus was upbeat. A weekend celebration devoted to “Values of Education” featured educational symposia, lectures, concerts, and arts performances. Students spelled out “We Love Rudy” in pizza boxes in the Yard—which was a little odd, not just because no one called Neil Rudenstine “Rudy,” but also because few at Harvard really even knew Rudenstine, much less loved him.

From an outsider's perspective, Neil Rudenstine probably seemed an odd choice to run Harvard. He was a little-known academic with no national reputation, and he hadn't worked at Harvard in twenty-five years. But in less obvious ways, Rudenstine must have seemed like a promising choice for an immensely difficult job—a job that had changed over the past decades just as Harvard itself had changed.

At the beginning of World War II, Harvard was still what might be called a pre-modern university. All of its students were men. The vast majority of them, about 97 percent, were white, and most of them were Christian. The number of Jews was still small, between 10 and 20 percent—small at least compared with the number of Jews qualified to attend. Slowly, Harvard was opening its door to deserving candidates from both public and private schools, as well as from different regions of the country, but it was a tentative process. Most Harvard students still hailed from New England, largely from the elite private boarding schools of that region.

The wave of social change effected by World War II changed all that. In the war's aftermath, the federal GI Bill helped young men from all over the United States come to Cambridge—the sons of farmers from Kansas, ranchers from Texas, and fishermen from Washington. As the fullness of Hitler's atrocities sunk into the national consciousness, Jewish faculty and students suddenly found Harvard more welcoming also. Though it would never vanish completely, the influence of Andover, St. Paul's, Exeter, and the like began to wane. Harvard, for centuries a bastion of social privilege, was becoming more of a meritocracy—more, theoretically, like the country it predated.

And it wasn't just new blood that poured in, it was money. The postwar years witnessed the growth of the great American foundations—philanthropic, research-minded groups with names like Ford, Carnegie, and, yes, Mellon. Those foundations became an enormous source of revenue for American universities. The federal government would play an even more important role. The government had formed close relationships with university scientists during World War II, enlisting their help with everything from code-breaking to the design of nuclear weapons. Throughout the Cold War, that partnership would continue, as Washington funded hundreds of millions of dollars in scientific and medical research, and the universities built up their labs, departments, and scientific facilities. Both sides benefited. The government employed the nation's finest minds without having to underwrite the entire infrastructure in which they worked. And the universities grew bigger, stronger, and richer, attracting researchers who might otherwise have chosen the private sector and students excited to work with the big names in their field.

But the money did not help only the direct recipients of its grants. At Harvard, the university initiated a tithe on every grant its professors received, ostensibly to pay for overhead. But the tithe was the same regardless of whether you were a biophysicist who needed a multimillion-dollar lab or an English professor writing about John Donne—a little tax that disappeared into the university's gradually swelling coffers.

By the 1960s, in terms of the breadth and caliber of the research they produced, American universities were without question the world's finest, one of the great success stories of twentieth-century America. But that evolution had its downside. To manage such rapid growth, universities began to enlarge their administrations, hiring lawyers and accountants, personnel managers and health care administrators, retirement benefits experts and real estate managers, and public relations gurus and fundraisers galore. They tended to come from corporations and consulting firms, and their style of doing things reflected a corporate culture rather than an academic one. Before Vietnam, and even more so before World War II, Harvard's strongest constituency had been its faculty. But the growth of a central administration shifted power to the office of the president and the anonymous bureaucrats who answered to him. At Harvard, power began to flow away from the people who supposedly represented the purpose of the institution, toward the people who knew how to make it
work
—and, above all, to the people who controlled its money.

Moreover, the ties between the government and universities threatened the schools' independence from the pressures of politics and the marketplace. The richer the universities became, the more they grew entangled with issues of political and social justice that seemed either to coincide with their mission or to distract from it—depending, of course, on one's vision of just how engaged with society the university ought to be. During the tumultuous years of the 1960s the financial and personal connections that universities, and Harvard in particular, maintained with the military-industrial complex would become a major focus of student protest, an issue that has never been completely resolved.

The massive, decades-long cash infusion created another problem: even if the money was suddenly cut off, the infrastructure remained and had to be paid for. If you'd built a new laboratory with a government or foundation grant, you couldn't just shut it down if the grant wasn't renewed. And in the post-Vietnam years, that was exactly what happened at Harvard, as the government cut back its outlays to campuses that now seemed either ungrateful or outright hostile, and alienated alumni slashed their giving.

So when the university was looking for a replacement for Derek Bok, its financial position was less than ideal. On the one hand, it did have an endowment of $4.7 billion in 1991. But the endowment's value had actually dropped $52 million during the previous year, and in 1991 Harvard ran a deficit of about $40 million. Clearly, Harvard's next president would require two skills: management and fundraising ability. If he proved to be an academic leader, well, that would be an added bonus. And to avoid a prolonged learning curve, some institutional knowledge was necessary; if possible, the president should have attended Harvard College. If a College man wasn't available, a Harvard degree from somewhere would have to suffice. (Derek Bok had gone to Stanford, making him the first president since Charles Chauncey in 1654 who hadn't attended Harvard College. That Bok had only attended Harvard Law School caused some alums to wonder if he was really the right man for the job, a slight that rankled Bok even after he retired. “When they cashed my checks to go to the law school, nobody told me that wasn't part of Harvard,” he said.) This combination of attributes was not easily found, but Neil Rudenstine had it. And from the very beginning of his presidency, he was charged with the task of fundraising.

Asking for money is the bane of the university president's job. Fundraising means endless schmoozing, sucking up to fat-cat alumni, constantly courting, soliciting, wheedling and, above all,
asking
. No donor capable of writing a seven- or eight-figure check wants to deal with a mid-level flunkie from the fund-raising office. He wants face time with the president—one-on-one meetings, impromptu phone calls, dinner at the president's mansion, and
sotto voce
missives. He wants to hear the president say, “
I
need your help…” The gratification of giving money is not only in entering a building with your name carved into it or meeting a student who depends upon the scholarship money you have provided. It's the exhilarating combination of giving to a worthy cause while seeing the most powerful people at Harvard University dedicate themselves to winning your favor.

Not surprisingly, most university presidents want to play the part of a leader, not a petitioner. They like to give speeches, recruit topnotch faculty and students, attend football games, travel abroad, and host international visitors. They seek the collegial approval of the academics from whose ranks they have traditionally ascended. They don't want to be reminded of their dependence upon the business and law school graduates who are now corporate raiders, managing partners, and hedge fund whiz kids whose idea of poetry is the number of zeros in their annual bonuses.