Martian's Daughter: A Memoir

by Whitman, Marina von Neumann

  This gap in the lives of female undergraduates was filled by the creation of a unified house system for undergraduates. Women would be allowed to live in the Harvard freshman dorms and upper-class houses, and men could choose to live in the Radcliffe dormitory quadrangle, which gradually acquired many of the ancillary benefits enjoyed by the Harvard Houses. As a Radcliffe student twenty-five years earlier, I had been denied access to multiple Harvard facilities, including its undergraduate library and its MBA program. Now, as a member of Harvard's governing board, I felt a special thrill of satisfaction in helping to knock the last of these barriers down.

  The dramatic changes in the status of Radcliffe undergraduates were formalized in a 1977 agreement between the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the president of Radcliffe, which stated, “Undergraduates admitted to and subsequently enrolled in Radcliffe will thereby be enrolled…in Harvard College with all the rights and privileges accorded Harvard College enrollment.”5 No longer would women graduates have to be awarded Harvard degrees retroactively, as my generation was, in order to be able to vote in alumni elections and to serve on either of Harvard's two governing boards.

  The status of women faculty at Harvard has not been so easily resolved. The question of why there were so few female faculty members, especially at the senior level, came up again and again in meetings of the board and its committees. Harvard's president at the time, Derek Bok, repeatedly stated his commitment to the recruitment and advancement of women faculty, and I believe he was sincere. At the same time, he clearly believed that women's sense of obligation to family often prevented them from pursuing an academic career with the same single-minded intensity as men.

  Bok may have been influenced in this judgment by the experience of his wife, the influential philosopher and ethicist Sissela Bok who, despite her growing eminence, declined to fight her way up the tenure-track ladder. As someone who had only recently completed that climb while raising children, I felt that the president's view was rather patronizing and told him so, but I doubt that I had much effect on his outlook.

  Why, I wondered when I was elected to Harvard's Board of Overseers, are we called overseers rather than trustees? Whereas other universities have a single governing board, Harvard has two. The Harvard Corporation, known formally as the President and Fellows of Harvard College, is the university's executive board. This self-perpetuating body meets every other week and effectively runs the institution; in the words of the Harvard Guide, “[T]he seven-member board is responsible for the day-today management of the University's finances and business affairs.”6 The second governing board, the Board of Overseers, is a larger body elected by the alumni for six-year terms; its role is to “advise and consent.”

  It didn't take me long after I was elected to discover two things about the Board of Overseers, whose archaic title, the Reverend and Honorable Board of Overseers, goes back to the charter granted to Harvard by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1650. One was that the presence of women was as much of a novelty there as it was on corporate boards. The first one, Helen Gilbert, also chair of the separate Radcliffe Board of Trustees, had become an overseer only two years before Adele Simmons and I were elected. Because only Harvard alumni could vote for overseers, Radcliffe graduates had been awarded Harvard degrees retroactively so they could vote in these elections or serve as overseers.

  The male overseers had welcomed Helen Gilbert, a middle-aged Boston grande dame with strong aristocratic features, gray hair befitting her age, and impeccable social credentials, without difficulty; she actually headed the board during my first year there. Adele Simmons was another matter. A history professor at Tufts University and dean of its women's college at the time, she later became a Princeton professor and dean, president of Hampshire College, and president of the MacArthur Foundation. Adele was also beautiful, an outspoken blonde barely into her thirties. I shall never forget the faces of our male colleagues sitting in the basement bar of the Harvard Faculty Club as they watched Adele, earnestly discussing some fine point of Harvard governance as she simultaneously nursed her new baby and drank an old-fashioned through a straw.

  The other salient truth that struck me almost from my first moment was that Harvard's bicameral governance structure was a perpetual source of angst and soul-searching to the overseers. Since the Harvard Corporation made or approved all the important decisions, what was our function? As one member put it, the Board of Overseers was an impressive club to belong to, but she didn't see that it had any real responsibilities or influence over Harvard policies. The rationale for the bicameral structure, the functions of its two bodies, and the relationship between them, were the object of a major review as my term as an overseer was coming to an end. Some incremental changes were made in the interest of better defining their respective roles and increasing the interaction between them, but the bicameral structure itself—and the overseers' angst—remained. Not until 2010 was a more drastic overhaul of the composition, structure, and practices of the Harvard Corporation announced;7 it is too early to tell what effect that will have on the practice of governance of the university.

  The makeup of the Board of Overseers itself was also a cause for hand-wringing The 1970s was an era of social ferment and change, when antiestablishment views gained currency and the military-industrial establishment was widely regarded as the axis of evil. The Harvard alumni tended to reflect these views, and they expressed them in their votes for overseers. A candidate who was a woman, a minority, an environmentalist, or a public servant was virtually assured of election, while it was almost impossible for a businessman or banker to be among the chosen. But since one of the responsibilities of the board has traditionally been fund-raising for Harvard, the discovery that the current membership, however worthy, collectively had very shallow pockets and lacked a wide circle of deep-pocketed acquaintances was unsettling. As I quipped, “If you turned all the overseers upside down and shook them, a few nickels would roll out.”

  The problem was resolved by Andrew Heiskell, himself a successful and wealthy alumnus, when he became the board's president. A man with an overbearing personality to match his towering physical presence, he prevailed upon the Harvard Alumni Association, which was responsible for selecting the slate of nominees, to designate a slate so heavily loaded with CEOs and bankers that some of them would have to be elected.

  Because of their restricted role in making policy for the university as a whole, the overseers' most hands-on involvement occurred through their leadership of the visiting committees to each of the university's many schools and departments. The charge of these committees was both to evaluate the effectiveness of the university's schools and institutions and to provide them with encouragement and advice.8 I chaired two of them, and they stand out in my mind as much for what they were unable to accomplish as for what they did.

  The graduate students in the department of economics poured out a litany of complaints to its visiting committee: graduate courses were too large, often they were not well taught, and the senior faculty paid little attention to the students, their concerns, and their progress. Two years later their view was that “Substantial steps have been made towards increasing faculty-student interaction…But much more needs to be done.”9 And student complaints about the aloofness of the Harvard faculty, and its members' frequent absences from the campus, have persisted down through the years.

  The main recommendation of the visiting committee to the statistics department was to urge greater communication and coordination among statisticians throughout Harvard, many of whom were outside that department and had little or no contact with it. Our committee reported substantial improvement in the two years between reports, but we still expressed frustration at the bureaucratic obstacles to giving statisticians joint appointments in more than one school or department.

  This inability to coordinate expertise scattered throughout the university is just one example of the limitations created by Harvard's tradition of depart
mental autonomy. “Every tub on its own bottom” is not just a motto but a key operating principle, and more than one commentator has observed wryly that the president of the university has less effective decision-making power than the dean of arts and sciences. Twenty years after I served on the Board of Overseers, I was a member of the committee visiting the Kennedy School of Government. At one of our meetings the dean, Joe Nye, commented that both the Kennedy school and the business school were in the process of establishing programs in public management. “Why on earth couldn't the two schools join forces and establish a strong joint program in this new area?” I asked. Joe's only response was to shake his head and say, “Marina, you know Harvard better than that.” And I did.

  My term as a Harvard overseer had barely ended when Bill Bowen, my late-night library companion in graduate student days, asked me to become a trustee of Princeton, where he was now president. I knew I would like working with Bill, whose crinkly-eyed smile and midwestern twang camouflaged the most intense workaholic I've ever known—I used to tease him that he wrote books faster than I could read them, all the while heading Princeton and, later, the Mellon Foundation. Along with all the positive reasons for saying yes, I felt a touch of sweet revenge at the chance to be at the top of the power structure of an institution that had once refused to admit me.

  Some of Princeton's trustees were elected and some appointed by the board itself, which avoided the difficulties Harvard had faced in getting on its board people who had reached the pinnacle of business or financial success and were therefore a promising potential source of gifts to the university. Princeton had also come up with an innovative response to the pressures that had built during the activist 1970s to add students to the board. Each year a graduating senior was elected by the votes of juniors, seniors, and the two most recent classes of alumni to a four-year term on the board. These young alumni trustees could bring the perspective of their age group to bear on the deliberations of a body whose college days were long behind them, without being subject to political pressures from their on-campus peers.

  It took only a couple of meetings of the trustees for me to see how sharply decision making at Princeton differed from what I had become used to at Harvard. Whereas Harvard was a decentralized collection of feudal fiefdoms, held together loosely by a lord who depended heavily on persuasion and negotiation to make his limited powers effective, Princeton was a benevolent monarchy, with important decisions centralized in Nassau Hall.

  Two of the major changes that marked my term as a Princeton trustee held a special importance for me because of events in the lives of our own two children. When our son, Malcolm, was finishing high school in the late 1970s, Bob and I took him on the obligatory tour of potential colleges. At my urging, he somewhat reluctantly included Princeton. After his visit, I asked him what he thought. He replied that, because he was already committed to a career in the biological sciences, he couldn't possibly consider Princeton, whose biology department wasn't good enough to prepare him for a first-rate PhD program.

  Bill Bowen clearly agreed with Malcolm's evaluation, and he was determined to change it. Soon after I joined the board, he began a decade-long discussion with the trustees about making Princeton one of the nation's leading universities in the biological sciences. Starting basically from zero, but with our strong support, he set about raising money for a building with the most modern laboratories and equipment and assembling a world-class faculty. By 1986, the Lewis Thomas Laboratory building was dedicated and two of the country's leading molecular biologists had been recruited to form the core of the faculty that populated it. By the time I left the board in 1990, Princeton was becoming recognized as one of the nation's top-tier institutions in the field. If Malcolm were choosing a college today, Princeton would have to be high on his list.

  Another major change that occurred during Bill Bowen's presidency and my time on the board was the creation of residential colleges for freshmen and sophomores. The upperclassmen had their eating clubs to provide a social framework for their lives, but the underclassmen, perhaps the most in need of some community smaller than the university as a whole, had only the beds and desks in their dormitory rooms to call home.

  Our daughter Laura had found a similar situation less than a month after she started at Duke as a freshman. The absence of any kind of community living structure became critical for her when her freshman roommate, rendered half unconscious by her first encounter with alcohol, was gang-raped by the pledge class of a fraternity. Because there were no adults to turn to for help, Laura found herself coping alone with the fallout from this tragedy: escorting her roommate to the hospital and the police and searching all over the campus for her when she left notes in their room hinting at suicide.

  The first residential colleges at Princeton were simply groupings of existing dormitories, but as they acquired faculty associates who often dined with the residents and participated in house-centered cultural and social activities, a sense of community developed. Later, generous gifts from two billionaire alumni enabled the university to purchase the sprawling Princeton Inn on the edge of campus and convert it into Forbes College, and then to have a building specially designed and built as Whitman College. (Meg Whitman, a Princeton alumna and the former CEO of eBay, is a distant relative of my husband.) Princeton's underclassmen would now have the kind of supportive housing environment that Laura and her roommate had so painfully lacked.

  These two transformative changes at Princeton might not have occurred without the conjunction of Bill Bowen's strong personality, his ability to articulate and raise funds for a compelling vision, and a centralized, unicameral governance structure that enabled him to work closely with a supportive Board of Trustees. Such advances had been harder to come by during my term as an overseer at Harvard, where the leadership was less persuasive, responsibility for governance was divided between two bodies, and decision making on academic issues was famously decentralized.

  When Bowen told the trustees that he intended to step down from his fifteen-year term as president, I was appointed to the search committee whose task it was to identify the man best suited to replace him. (The notion that a woman might be eligible to become Princeton's president had to wait until 2001, when the university's own renowned molecular biologist Shirley Tilghman was appointed.) The unanimous choice of my search committee, enthusiastically supported by an advisory committee of faculty, staff, and students and approved by the full board, was Harold T. Shapiro, then president of the University of Michigan. I was living in Ann Arbor at the time, and the community was volubly upset when they learned that I was party to luring away their wildly popular president to a much smaller school “out East.” “I wonder,” I mused to Bob, “whether I'll need a bodyguard to protect me from all of Shapiro's angry admirers.”

  Shapiro, a noted economist, was one of identical twin sons born to a couple in Montreal who had never graduated from high school but owned and ran the largest kosher Chinese restaurant in Canada. When their father died suddenly during their senior year in college, the twins managed the restaurant successfully for five years before resuming their education. Each went on to earn a PhD and, eventually, to head a major research university, Michigan and then Princeton in Harold's case, McGill in his brother Bernard's.

  Shapiro's popularity at Michigan did not immediately carry over to Princeton. Bill Bowen and his provost and close confidante, Neil Rudenstine (who later became the president of Harvard), had run the university like a mom-and-pop shop, involving a lot of personal interaction with the campus community, particularly the faculty. Theirs was an extremely effective partnership, one that shepherded the important advances I've described, along with many others.

  When it was time to search for a new president, the trustees recognized that, partly as a result of those successes, Princeton had grown large and complex enough to require a different management style, and we discussed this requirement with the candidates for the presidency. But neither the search commi
ttee nor the campus advisory committee that worked with us conveyed the need for such a change to the faculty. The names of candidates had been a carefully guarded secret to avoid embarrassing the ones who weren't chosen. But a more open process would have had the advantage of raising the issue for discussion and understanding by this crucially important constituency.

  Harold Shapiro, coming from a university many times the size of Princeton, brought a style of leadership that involved a more complex administrative structure and more delegation of authority than the faculty was used to. Resenting the absence of the hands-on relationship they had had with Bowen and Rudenstine, the professors gave Shapiro a very tough first year. But they gradually recognized that he had his own ways of paying attention and showing respect. Whenever a member of the faculty sent a copy of his or her newly published book to the president, a thank-you note from Bill Bowen had been immediately forthcoming. A response from Harold Shapiro involved a delay of weeks or even months, but when it came, it included detailed comments showing that he had actually read the book, even if it was in a field totally unfamiliar to him.

  The faculty eventually came to appreciate Shapiro's more formal, scholarly style, and with their strong support, his was an extremely successful and innovative presidency. Among other achievements, he raised more endowment money than any president before him. Nonetheless, I have always felt a bit guilty that Harold's difficult introduction to Princeton might have been avoided if we trustees had been more effective in conveying our vision for Princeton's future leadership, and the reasons for it, to the campus community. The experience taught me that when decisions are made in secret to ensure timeliness and effectiveness, the decision makers have a special responsibility to explain honestly and persuasively the reasons why they decided as they did.