Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

  If, in the summer and fall of 2001, you had read the articles in Harvard publications and on Harvard websites about new president Larry Summers, you would have acquired a meticulously selected and oft-repeated set of facts about him. You would have known that Summers was energetic and “brilliant”—a word repeated so often to describe him that it became almost a third name. You would have known that Summers was an inspiring teacher, often mentioned as a likely winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. And that Summers had spent a successful decade in Washington, capped by his eighteen months as secretary of the treasury. From all the things written about him, you might have gotten the impression that Summers resembled TV’s West Wing’s President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen—only smarter.

  All the promotion paid off. Summers received glowing treatment in the non-Harvard media, which proclaimed that he was just the man to restore the role of university president to its pre-Rudenstine standing. Larry Summers, wrote one Boston Globe columnist, “has the potential to be the greatest president of Harvard since Charles W. Eliot,” the nineteenth-century figure generally considered to be Harvard’s greatest president, period.

  True, it was occasionally mentioned that Summers was a fierce competitor on the tennis court. But if he had other hobbies or interests outside the realm of economics, they went undiscovered. Nor was there mention of Summers’ personal life, certainly not of the fact that he was in the throes of a painful divorce. Nor was there discussion of the cancer he had overcome while in his twenties, and the effect that the disease had had on his attitude toward life and work. Also absent was the fact that he would be Harvard’s first Jewish president, a cultural milestone whose omission was hard to understand.

  In fact, for all the compliments that Harvard’s publicity paid him, the career and biography of Lawrence Henry Summers were more conflicted, more complicated, and, above all, more human than the university allowed. Lawrence Summers was not just an intellectual force of nature (though this was clearly an image with which he himself felt comfortable); he was also the product of an immigrant journey, a family crucible, and the classically American story of a man driven by ego and ambition on a ceaseless quest to climb to the pinnacle of American achievement—and beyond.

  That Harvard would present such a carefully massaged picture of its new president reflected the competing values within the university. While its scholars pursue the expansion of knowledge, its administrators work to preserve and extend the “brand.” And yet, all the flattering publicity about Larry Summers may have backfired. Had Harvard promoted a more balanced picture of him, the new president might have had a more forgiving first year and the university might have spared itself a great deal of shock and unhappiness. Or at least shock.

  Lawrence Henry Summers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 30, 1954. He was the first child of Robert and Anita Summers, a husband-and-wife team of economists then at Yale. His paternal grandfather, Frank Samuelson, had been a pharmacist at the Economical Drug Store in Gary, Indiana. His mother’s father was named Harry Arrow, and he was an office manager from New York City who struggled for work during the Great Depression.

  Robert and Anita Summers were both solid, capable economists, but neither was at the top of the field, and Yale did not offer them tenure. In 1959 they moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where both would teach for the rest of their careers. They raised Larry and his two younger brothers, Richard and John, in Lower Merion, a pretty, prosperous suburb on Philadelphia’s Main Line and perhaps best known as the hometown of the blue-blooded lawyer played by Tom Hanks in the film Philadelphia.

  Of the two parents, Anita was the stronger influence on Larry. Protective, proud, and demanding, she doted on her first son, who had an uncanny knack for absorbing numbers and interpreting information. As a two-year-old, riding in his parents’ car, he could identify the names of gas stations. By the time he was seven, he could recite the names of John F. Kennedy’s cabinet members. When JFK was assassinated, the nine-year-old spent the entire weekend watching news reports on television. He loved games, especially those that involved statistics and puzzles. “I was a curious kid, not especially outgoing,” Summers would remember. Curious—and precocious. At age ten, he appeared on a local sports radio quiz show and answered everything so quickly that the show ran out of questions for him. The next year he devised a logarithm to ascertain whether a baseball team’s standing on the Fourth of July could predict its finish at season’s end.

  Robert and Anita fashioned a domestic environment in which learning and problem-solving were the stuff of daily life, even inventing a system by which the family would vote on what television shows to watch, with votes weighted according to the intensity of one’s choices. Larry concocted a system by which he and his brothers could always win the television elections. “His parents deliberately taught the kids economics in family situations,” said Harvard historian Phyllis Keller, who knew the Summers family. If the Summers were driving in traffic, Robert and Anita might throw out intellectual puzzles such as, “If there were one more lane, would that eliminate the traffic jam or simply increase the number of drivers who used the road?” A childhood friend would later remember: “Every day [the Summers] would solve a different problem. I liked going over there. But I also liked leaving.”

  Richard and John were no dummies—they’d grow up to be a psychiatrist and a lawyer, respectively—but Larry was destined to be the standout. In Harriton High School, he focused on math, the subject for which he seemed to have a natural affinity. Outside of the classroom, he played tennis, and was intensely competitive. “He always worked to get the best partner in tennis tournaments, even if that meant dumping the partner he had already played with,” remembered Morton Keller, Phyllis’ husband and a historian in his own right. Anita Summers liked to tell the story of the time her twelve-year-old son was on his way to a tennis tournament. “Have fun,” she called out to him. “This is not about fun,” Larry responded. “This is about winning.”

  Summers’ parents were not the only influence on his intellectual life, however, and perhaps not even the strongest. For Summers was born into a truly remarkable intellectual family: two of his uncles ranked among the finest economic minds of the twentieth century.

  A graduate of the University of Chicago who earned his Harvard Ph.D. in 1941, Paul Samuelson is Robert Summers’ older brother. Samuelson’s interests range widely, but perhaps his greatest contribution to economics has been his emphasis on mathematics as the foundation of the discipline. Today’s economics students might take this for granted, but before Samuelson, economics was a field that, much like history or philosophy, was characterized by elegant theory and eloquent writing. Samuelson introduced another language. Without advanced mathematics as the basis for economics, he argued, economists were practicing “mental gymnastics of a peculiarly depraved type.” In 1948, at the age of thirty-three, Samuelson published Economics: An Introductory Analysis, which outlined his vision and became the largest-selling economics textbook ever.

  Samuelson helped economists communicate with one another in a way they previously could not. The incorporation of mathematics that he urged helped to establish economics as a powerful analytical discipline, separating it from “softer” academic fields and creating countless new areas to explore, new questions to ask, and new ways to answer those questions. In 1970, he would win the Nobel Prize. “More than any other contemporary economist,” the prize committee said, Samuelson “has contributed to raising the general analytical and methodological level in economic science.”

  Despite his faith in the language of mathematics, Paul Samuelson is very much a public economist who has always wanted his ideas to be accessible. As a younger man, he was deeply ambitious and enjoyed his status as a public figure. He wrote a column for Newsweek, consulted for the Treasury Department, and served as an advisor on economic policy to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In his spare time, he was a passionate tennis player.

 
Ken Arrow, however, is very different, and not simply because he preferred badminton. Anita Summers’ older brother is a quiet, gentle, and less outgoing figure whose work is even more theoretical than Samuelson’s. Born in 1921, Arrow grew up in New York City and attended City College—then a haven for Jewish intellectuals excluded from other universities due to anti-Semitism—before earning his doctorate at Columbia. In 1951, after spending four years in the Army during World War II, the thirty-year-old Arrow published his most famous work, Social Choice and Individual Values. The book’s thesis, also known as the “General Impossibility Theorem,” is not easily condensed, and it’s virtually impossible for a layman to read. Essentially, though, Arrow argued that societies cannot make rational decisions for the general welfare based on the aggregation of individual choices. Abstract though it may sound, the General Impossibility Theorem had enormous implications for public policymaking and helped to start an entire subfield known as “public choice economics.” Arrow, who spent his career as a professor at Harvard and Stanford, would win the Nobel Prize in 1972.

  Larry Summers was not particularly close to his two uncles, but they and their achievements pervaded the atmosphere around him like the oxygen he breathed. And because of their longevity—both Arrow and Samuelson are well past 80—their achievements were hardly part of a remote past. Samuelson won his Nobel while Summers was in high school; Arrow received his during Summers’ freshman year at college. Everybody who knew Larry Summers as a student knew who his uncles were, and because of their stature and his early promise, Larry was expected to do great things. That set the bar high, even for someone as intelligent and competitive as Summers. Within the same field, it would be an enormous challenge just to equal Samuelson’s and Arrow’s accomplishments, much less better them. Larry Summers’ version of teen rebellion may have been the fact that he took only one econ class in high school.

  But Larry was not the only member of his family influenced by his famous uncles. Their effect upon his father is an important part of Summers’ story. Robert Summers was originally named Robert Samuelson, but as a young adult he changed his surname to Summers. Among economists who know the family—and economics can feel like a very small field in which everyone knows all the rumors about everyone else—it is widely believed that Robert Summers changed his name from Samuelson to avoid constant and diminishing comparisons made between him and his more accomplished brother Paul.

  But there is another explanation for Robert Summers’ name change: the fear of anti-Semitism and the desire for ethnic assimilation. The Summers family was Jewish on both sides. The rapid rise of Ken Arrow, Paul Samuelson, and Robert and Anita Summers to stature and prominence in American life is a remarkable immigration success story. But, particularly for Paul Samuelson, anti-Semitism was an ugly part of that story.

  As a graduate student at Harvard in the 1930s, Samuelson was manifestly brilliant, and that brilliance led to an invitation to join Harvard’s Society of Fellows. Founded by President Abbott Lawrence Lowell in 1932, the Society of Fellows is a bit like the academic equivalent of the military’s Navy SEALs or basketball’s Dream Team—the elite of the elite. Fellows are chosen for one reason and one reason only: because they are astoundingly smart. They receive an annual stipend—currently around $50,000—but are not required to produce any work for it. (As the Harvard website puts it, they are “free from formal requirements.”) They are, basically, paid to sit around and think big thoughts.

  But though Samuelson’s genius could not be ignored, he was nonetheless denied prime teaching opportunities. Instead, as historians Morton and Phyllis Keller write in their book, Making Harvard Modern, “he was shunted off with other Jewish graduate students to statistics and/or accounting, generally thought of as ‘Jewish courses.’”

  Samuelson accepted a professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940. Seven years later, with his remarkable textbook on the verge of publication, a tenured position opened up at Harvard, and Samuelson was an obvious candidate. Strangely, he did not get the job—and anti-Semitism may have been why. Six decades later, whether prejudice was truly behind the rejection continues to be argued at Harvard, but the advantage in the debate seems to fall on the side of those who think it was. For the Kellers, there was no doubt. “The failure to appoint Samuelson became legendary as the most destructive consequence of Harvard anti-Semitism,” they write. Certainly Larry Summers was struck by the incident. At a lunch at the Harvard Club of New York in 2004, he would declare that “an uncle of mine lost the opportunity to be a professor at Harvard because he was Jewish.” Samuelson would stay at MIT, which was, ironically, one reason why the Institute’s economics department would rank above Harvard’s for decades to come.

  Robert Samuelson, Paul’s younger brother, was surely aware of his brother’s struggle. Who could blame him for believing that, if anti-Semitism could divert his brother’s career, he, a lesser mind, couldn’t afford to take a chance? And so, according to an article in Slate magazine by Paul’s grandson, Couper Samuelson, both Robert and Paul’s other brother, Harold Samuelson, “changed their surnames to Summers for fear that their respective careers might be marred by the anti-Semitism that their birth name engendered.”

  Judaism was a part of Larry’s youth, but intellectual life was consistently more important to the Summers family than their religious or cultural heritage. Larry Summers wasn’t ashamed of or embarrassed about being Jewish, but he grew up in a safe, genteel world far away from his grandfather’s drugstore—even if it was only one generation removed. His was a comfortable and prosperous childhood, insulated from the kind of anti-Semitism his uncle Paul had faced. “There were country clubs where I grew up that had few if any Jewish members, but not ones that included people I knew,” Summers would say. “My experience in college and graduate school, as a faculty member, as a government official—all involved little notice of my religion.”

  In 1971, when Summers was in eleventh grade, he applied to colleges a year early. The result was unexpected: Harvard turned him down. Summers has never conceded this awkward fact in print, and the Harvard admissions office will not confirm it, but the question would later provoke so much speculation after Summers became Harvard president that, at a spring 2002 banquet for student fundraisers, one senior woman stood to ask Summers why he hadn’t attended Harvard College. “Because I didn’t get in,” Summers replied in front of a startled crowd. It was, said one person who was present, “an astonishing thing.”

  So Summers went to MIT, geographically close to Harvard but culturally remote. The Institute is primarily a school for mathematics and the sciences; students who choose MIT tend to have graduate school already in mind. It’s a rigorous place filled with hard-working, career-oriented students and a high-pressure atmosphere. One would not attend MIT for the study of the humanities, the social life, or because of its teams’ athletic prowess. MIT students are stereotyped as geeks and nerds, and to a certain extent they revel in that identity: An MIT tradition is to play high-tech pranks during the annual Harvard-Yale football game, such as inflating a massive canvas balloon buried underneath the field. (It looked like a whale breaching.) More recently, a group of students built a model plane with a forty-five-foot wingspan and landed it on top of MIT’s Great Dome, which is a hundred and fifty feet high. Their intention was to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight. As the MIT news office succinctly reported, “The model was dismantled by…the Institute’s hack evaluation and technology team.”

  Larry Summers thrived at MIT. He grew a heavy beard, more a sign of math-geek nerdiness than hippie rebellion. He joined the debate team and would become a national champion. “I traveled all over the country, attending debate tournaments and debating issues ranging from gun control to national health insurance to control of energy prices,” Summers would remember. According to one family friend, Summers wanted not just to travel domestically, but to study abroad; his mother, however, discour
aged it, arguing that MIT was too good a place to leave for a semester. That was one of the few arguments Summers lost. Steeped in the intellectual jousting of his home life, he was never afraid to speak his mind or question others, whatever the context. “Larry is in permanent argument mode,” said a longtime colleague. “If you say, ‘Hello,’ Larry will say, ‘Why?’ For a lot of people, that’s very unnerving. But if you say, ‘Why not?’ he’ll come right back at you and engage.”

  And Summers switched his course of study from mathematics to economics. He realized, he would explain later, that he could not compete with the astonishing students he encountered studying math at MIT. And if he couldn’t be the best at something, he didn’t want to do it.

  As an MIT sophomore, Summers worked as an assistant to economist Martin Feldstein, then a thirty-four-year-old professor at Harvard. Feldstein was politically conservative, but other than that he represented a standard type in the Harvard economics department. He was an impressive, powerhouse figure who was deeply immersed in worldly matters and rather less interested in undergraduates. In later years, he would serve in the Reagan administration, become a director for several corporations, and contribute regular op-ed pieces to the Wall Street Journal. Though he was widely considered a soporific lecturer, his introductory economics class—popularly known as “Ec 10”—would become one of Harvard’s most widely taken courses, with several hundred students a year enrolled. Students don’t take Feldstein’s course for his charismatic personality or scintillating presentation, but because they understand that high-paying jobs often require knowledge of economics. One-on-one, however, was a different experience, and Feldstein—so politically unlike Summers’ parents and uncles—would become an intellectual mentor to the MIT undergrad.