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.
But Neil Rudenstine didn’t seem to mind asking for money. On the contrary, Rudenstine threw himself into fundraising with an enthusiasm that couldn’t have been faked. In May 1994, Harvard kicked off a massive capital campaign designed to raise $2.1 billion, an amount that would have increased the university’s endowment by about one-third of its value at the time. No other university had ever sought to raise anywhere near that amount. Back in 1979, Derek Bok had headed a fundraising drive that aimed to collect $350 million, and back then that had been considered enormous.
The timing, however, was fortuitous. The United States was entering a period of a growing economy and a booming stock market, and the wealthiest Americans were making money faster than they could spend it. Plus, Rudenstine, a genuinely gracious and thoughtful man, proved to be a master fundraiser, brilliant at the art of making personal connections. “He’d ask you about your daughter who was applying to college or your stepmother who was in the hospital,” said one Harvard professor who saw Rudenstine at work. And those he was soliciting could tell that he liked them. Rudenstine didn’t resent donors for being wealthy, or suggest in some oblique way that he found the indignity of their company distasteful. He enjoyed spending time with the rich. And with his passion for poetry and literature, Rudenstine could tell you in the most uplifting ways where your money would go. He would never blather on about a new heating system or a federally mandated ramp for the handicapped. Instead, he’d cite Winston Churchill and talk about how Harvard was “an empire of the mind.” It wasn’t just building a new dormitory that was at stake; it was building the future itself.
Rudenstine believed in that mission and subordinated himself to it. Because he felt such a commitment to the institution, he set aside his own ego. He never spoke about himself or his own accomplishments; he talked about Harvard. When reporters asked to profile him, he would defer. It was Harvard that mattered.
People often asked Rudenstine why they should give when Harvard was already so rich. That question was a constant irritant for Harvard fundraisers; Harvard always lagged behind schools like Dartmouth and Princeton—smaller schools with tight-knit student bodies—in the percentage of alumni who gave money. Dartmouth and Princeton alumni felt as if those schools truly needed their gifts. Moreover, Harvard rarely attracted the big donations, the $50 million or $100 million windfalls that could make a president’s job so much easier. (And as the 1990s went on, university fundraisers began to whisper about which institution would first land the new Holy Grail of fundraising, the $1 billion donation.) People with that kind of money wanted to give to a place where their generosity would have a huge impact, but wasn’t giving to Harvard like giving gold to Fort Knox?
Rudenstine had a ready answer. First, Harvard was always growing, he said. All those inquisitive minds at Harvard were constantly concocting new projects, new academic centers, new research. And it all required money, a lot of money. Like the people in the development office always said: “Grow or die.”
And it wasn’t as if the president of Harvard had $5 billion and a checkbook. Instead, that money was divvied up into numerous different endowments. The university ran on an age-old system of decentralization known as “every tub on its own bottom,” or ETOB, wherein each school was expected to float or sink on its own. At most American universities, tuition is deposited into a central account. But, at Harvard, each school, and each dean of that school, maintained control of its own tuition revenue. That system created an incentive to expand; the more students a school enrolled, the more money it earned. Thus, those schools in fields that could attract a lot of students—again, law, medicine, and business—became among the largest such professional schools at American private universities. The pedagogy was driven by the money, rather than the other way around. And in turn, the graduates of Harvard became more numerous, and gave more money, so that Harvard’s growth could continue.
Another aspect of ETOB was that each school at Harvard raised its own money, and only the deans of those schools could decide how to spend their individual endowments. Thus, those bodies with the richest and most generous alumni made up the lion’s share of the endowment. And because they essentially controlled the spending of their endowments, the deans of those schools were powerful figures indeed, veritable dukes in the Harvard kingdom.
Those schools whose graduates
went into less lucrative professions, however, had a harder time raising funds and possessed vastly smaller endowments. The John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the Harvard School of Public Health have always struggled to stay out of the red. Government service, architecture, and public health are no easy path to riches. At the very bottom of the heap are the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Divinity School. Their graduates go into low-paying careers and can give practically nothing—especially since they frequently finish their programs owing tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. It takes a long time to pay back that kind of money when you make $27,000 a year as a public school teacher or prison minister.
ETOB had forced the schools to compete to survive, and that wasn’t all bad. Rather than depending on the university for bail-outs, each school had to balance its budget. It was possible that this mandated self-sufficiency had forced them to become better schools—more aggressive, more innovative, forced to take responsibility for the decisions of their deans and faculty.
But ETOB also created an unhealthy imbalance. The rich schools got richer, and the poor struggled just to survive—with little debate about whether business was more important than education, law more important than divinity. Maybe that was the law of the marketplace, but some wondered if it wasn’t the duty of the university to redistribute its wealth so that it could produce more teachers and ministers and fewer lawyers and investment bankers. Weren’t universities supposed to counter the inequities of capitalism, not merely reflect them?
Part of Rudenstine’s mission was to break down the long-standing balkanization of the Harvard campus, which affected the university’s life in ways ranging from the minute to the fundamental. Every school had its own calendar, starting and ending semesters on different days. Even if a student got permission to take a course at another school, conflicting schedules made coordination next to impossible. And communication between the schools was minimal at best. Professors at the law school had no idea what was going on at the Kennedy School, even though their missions of training lawyers and developing experts in public policy surely overlapped. People at the business school didn’t know what was going on at the medical school, even though both could work together to market the medical discoveries Harvard researchers were constantly making. Another oddity: The presidency of Harvard doesn’t actually own Massachusetts Hall, the modest red-brick building that houses the president’s office. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences does, and so the Harvard president pays rent to the dean of the FAS.
The problem was the deans, especially the deans of the FAS and the big three graduate schools. As long as they maintained the independence of their schools—and their money—from Harvard’s central administration, they remained immensely powerful and largely autonomous figures. Though chosen by the president, once the deans were in power they could—and often did—frustrate his desires. But if the deans let the central administration start dictating policies at the graduate schools—whom they could hire, how to spend their money, or even how to raise it—the power of the president would grow and the deans’ status would diminish proportionally. And who gives up power voluntarily? Who was to say that the president even knew the needs of those schools well enough to make such decisions?
Rudenstine’s struggle to chip away at ETOB started slowly. He developed some interfaculty academic programs, and he made sure that that $2 billion fundraising drive would be a university-wide campaign, run out of the president’s office, rather than a series of individual fund drives by the different schools. Rudenstine would set the goals and priorities, and the deans would have to work together. To an outsider, that might have seemed a small and logical step. But never before at Harvard had it been taken.
Of course, Rudenstine’s job wasn’t exclusively about fundraising. In his first two years, he was a constant, energetic presence on campus. The peripatetic new president visited the houses to meet with students, walked the sideline at football games, dined at the Faculty Club, and popped in to lectures, banquets, and conferences. Rudenstine was ubiquitous.
So were his thank-you notes. Everybody who contacted Rudenstine would receive a response from the president himself—not just a token sentence or two, but whole paragraphs, sometimes pages, and always handwritten, because Rudenstine wouldn’t use a computer. Throughout his ten-year presidency, he didn’t send a single e-mail. The thank-you notes were courteous, thoughtful, and appreciated, but sometimes people wondered if they were really the best use of Rudenstine’s time. “You thought you were special for getting one, until you wandered around campus and saw that everyone else had received one, too,” said Peter Gomes. “They came down like snow in February.”
Rudenstine’s deferential style—his wet-noodle handshake, the ease of his bended knee—didn’t suit many at Harvard, who thought his conduct unbecoming for the president of a great institution. Rudenstine seemed too comfortable ingratiating himself with the wealthy, like a scholarship kid who becomes the most passionate pledge in the rich kids’ fraternity. “Neil Rudenstine was an aspiring socialite from the working classes,” said Martin Peretz, a prominent Harvard alum who is part owner of The New Republic magazine, and although the bluntness of that sentiment would have made many at Harvard wince, it was a rough approximation of what many felt.
Rudenstine did have his defenders, who thought that he was guilty only of doing the job he was hired to do “Neil was a man of deep principle,” said law school professor Alan Dershowitz. “He didn’t really care what people thought, he wanted to do the right thing and be respectful of everybody. You couldn’t not like him—you wanted your kids to be like him.” Some thought that Rudenstine was smarter, more cunning than his critics gave him credit for. All that hand-wringing, said one supporter, was “a shtick” that masked an underlying toughness. “There’s a kind of gentleness about Neil,” said another defender. “But it’s an illusion. He was perfectly willing to be ruthless. If there was somebody he had to fire, he would fire him. He wouldn’t enjoy it, but he would do it.”
Perhaps so. But the job took a toll on Rudenstine. He found it lonely and isolating—that was perhaps his biggest surprise, the isolation. Princeton had been smaller, cozier. “He came to Massachusetts Hall and opened for business, and nobody came,” said one professor, “and that’s when he knew that things were different at Harvard.” With about six thousand five hundred undergraduate students, almost nineteen thousand students all told, and, fifteen thousand employees, Harvard was so big that the president couldn’t possibly survey all that was happening around him, and so decentralized that many of its deans and professors didn’t much care what the president wanted. Then there were the hundreds of thousands of alums, each of whom seemed to want something from him. By the fall of 1994, Rudenstine was working one hundred twenty hours a week.
And then he collapsed. In late November, Rudenstine overslept, missing a meeting with a fundraiser, and realized that something was very wrong. Not only had he missed the meeting; he didn’t want to get out of bed at all.
For the next three months or so, Neil Rudenstine simply disappeared, telling only his closest aides how to find him. Where he went, what he did, and what exactly was wrong were all very hush-hush. His aides announced that Rudenstine had suffered a physical breakdown due to overwork and exhaustion. Word was put out that he’d gone to the Caribbean with his wife, Angelica, where he was listening to classical music and reading essays to relax. But inevitably rumors flew that Harvard’s president had suffered a nervous breakdown. Rudenstine insisted that he was only physically ill. “I see in retrospect that I still thought I was thirty-five years old and could go three or four years without a vacation,” he would explain. “I’ve realized I’m no longer thirty-five years old.” His doubters suggested that the problem may have been more with Rudenstine’s head than with his body.
Whichever the case, the breakdown was big news. The media couldn’t help but see a larger meaning in Ru
denstine’s crisis. Referring to him as “the frail Renaissance scholar,” Newsweek put Rudenstine on its cover for a lifestyle story about Americans collapsing from stress and overwork. Other writers used Rudenstine as a synecdoche for all that had come to plague university presidents, the endless demands that the “multiversity” imposed on them. Education writers suggested that Harvard had grown so big as to be unmanageable. For the university, it was all deeply embarrassing.
When Rudenstine returned in March 1995, he was a changed man—or, at least, a changed president. He delegated responsibilities and cut back on almost all his campus activities. He abandoned his attempts to chip away at ETOB. Instead, he devoted himself almost solely to the primary task for which he had been hired: raising money. By his estimation, he had to raise one million dollars every day to meet the university’s target. Who could blame him for deciding that raking in seven figures a day was a task that deserved most of his time?
Some people could, and did. As the years passed and the money in the bank mounted, Rudenstine came to symbolize the decline of an American icon—the university president. And not just at Harvard, but all over the United States. “Who’s a university president?” asked the new joke. “A man who lives in a mansion and begs for money.” Critics noted that Rudenstine was failing to deliver the kinds of high-minded educational and political pronouncements that a university president—a Harvard president, especially—was expected to make. “University presidents today are eunuchs, shuffling paper by day, grubbing for money by night, and never, never speaking a word about issues of the day for fear of offending donors or alumni or faculty or students,” wrote one commentator. Neil Rudenstine, said another, had become “the incredible shrinking college president.”
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