Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

  A year later, Rudenstine would move back to Princeton and a quieter life. Until then, Harvard would search for a replacement. Once again, the qualifications for the job were many and rigorous. The next president had to be bigger, better, bolder than Rudenstine. He had to combine an expertise with money and management with the ability to fix the university’s ailing undergraduate education, the toughness to take on the deans, and the drive to be a national leader. Harvard didn’t want another underwhelming president.

  But who could possibly meet all these requirements, and how would Harvard find him?

  3

  Searching for Mr. Summers

  To understand how Harvard chooses its presidents, you have to go all the way back to 1650, when the General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony established a legal structure for the university, and if you’re going back that far, you might as well push back another fourteen years, to Harvard’s very beginning.

  In 1636 the General Court, the governing council of the new Puritan outpost, appropriated the sum of £400 for “a schoale or colledge”—a substantial figure for an impecunious body. The promulgation of Puritanism was a priority second only to survival for the colonists, who aimed to found a school for ministers who would ensure the longevity and doctrinal purity of their faith. The new “schoale” would be in “Newtowne,” renamed Cambridge in 1638. That was also the year when a young Puritan named John Harvard died and left the princely sum of £780—and, almost as important, a library of 400 books—to the fledgling college. As a measure of its gratitude, and an incentive to subsequent donors, the General Court named its school after Harvard.

  Twelve years later, in 1650, the General Court issued a formal charter for Harvard College—the same charter whose replica would be handed to Larry Summers at his inauguration in 2001. That document established the university’s two governing bodies, the Board of Overseers and the Harvard Corporation. In a very crude way, the Overseers and the Corporation were like a bicameral legislature. The Overseers would be the larger of the two groups—the House of Representatives, as it were—whose consent was required for college statutes, appointments, and elections to the second group, the Corporation. That body would be like a senate, a small, exclusive panel whose job was to choose and advise the Harvard president. About one hundred and forty years before the United States did, Harvard had a constitution.

  Three and a half centuries later, the Harvard constitution has changed less than that of the United States. The university still has its Board of Overseers and its Corporation, and their roles are still more or less what they were in the mid–seventeenth century. The main difference is that the power of the Corporation has grown immense, while the Overseers, once the more powerful of the two, has become a largely ineffectual council. If the Overseers tripped and fell into another dimension, it would take some time for anyone at Harvard to actually notice.

  Thirty Harvard alumni sit on the Board of Overseers. Candidates run for office after collecting a certain number of alumni signatures, and winners serve six-year terms, with a 20 percent turnover every year. The Overseers approve presidential choices as well as nominations to the Corporation, which are potentially significant powers. But time and tradition have turned the Board into largely a rubber stamp. The Overseers also conduct fact-finding missions into the status of Harvard College’s academic departments, meeting with professors and writing well-meaning reports that are then generally ignored by the deans and president. “We’d write these reports and then never hear about them again,” remembered Terry Lenzner, Harvard class of 1961 and a former Overseer. “They just disappeared into a void.” However, since an unwritten role for the Overseers is to give and raise money, the task of report-writing creates a sense of involvement among them conducive to giving.

  The Corporation, the real power, consists of seven members, including the Harvard president, who are known as “fellows.” They meet about once a month, sitting in high-back leather chairs around a long mahogany table in Loeb House, a Georgian mansion on the east side of the Yard. The minutes of those meetings are recorded by a Harvard official known as the university secretary, but they are kept secret. The times of the meetings are also secret. There is no distributed agenda, nothing to inform the Harvard community of what is discussed by its own governing board.

  Most universities have an advisory council to assist and oversee the president, but no university has a group that is as powerful, unaccountable, and secretive as Harvard’s. (If a public company had a similar governing board, the shareholders would revolt.) Alumni or faculty cannot vote to choose the Corporation members; the fellows serve as long as they want to and choose their own successors. The Corporation’s job is to select the president, advise him, and, if necessary, rebuke him—although because they generally choose someone who reflects their values and pursues their agenda, it rarely comes to that. The Corporation also approves the budgets submitted by the deans of the Harvard schools, and that power is substantial. The Corporation doesn’t like to fire or scold deans, who often command the loyalty of faculty and alumni, and can cause a stink in the Boston Globe. But it can overrule the budget requests of a prodigal dean, making his life so frustrating and joyless that he opts to step down rather than fight, allowing the president to replace him with a more malleable figure.

  Partly because of the fellows’ life terms, and partly because the Corporation’s small size and penchant for secrecy isolate it from the social pressures that inform American society, the Corporation has never reflected the diversity Harvard advocates for its student body. Until 1985, when former FAS dean Henry Rososvky, who is Jewish, became a fellow, every Corporation member for 350 years had been a white, Christian male. The first woman—a lawyer named Judith Richards Hope—didn’t make the cut until 1989. The first person of color was Conrad K. Harper, an African American lawyer who joined the Corporation in the year 2000.

  The Corporation isn’t just ethnically homogeneous, it is professionally like-minded. Whatever their skin color or ethnicity, Corporation fellows almost always reflect the interests of the American business elite. The twentieth-century Corporation lacked a single fellow from the world of academia until Yale professor John Morton Blum joined in 1970.

  The Corporation is culturally homogeneous as well. For most of the past two hundred years, the Corporation represented a microcosm of the Protestant establishment, and even in the twenty-first century the résumés of its members read like entries from the Social Register: Commodore, New York Yacht Club…Member, Trilateral Commission…Trustee, Pierpont Morgan Library…Member, Council on Foreign Relations…Trustee, Metropolitan Museum of Art…Director, J. P. Morgan & Chase…Member, Augusta National Golf Club. Even within the elite world of Harvard alumni, the fellows of the Harvard Corporation are a breed apart.

  At the time of Neil Rudenstine’s resignation, the fellows included Harper, a 1965 graduate of Harvard Law School and a partner in the New York firm of Simpson, Thacher and Bartlett. Another recent addition was Herbert “Pug” Winokur, who graduated from Harvard in 1964 and three years later earned a Harvard doctorate in applied mathematics. Winokur was a director and chair of the finance committee at the Enron Corporation, and his presence on the Harvard Corporation represented the university’s attempt to recognize new energy in American capitalism, a transition from old money to new.

  Old money was represented by D. Ronald Daniel, a 1954 business school graduate, the university treasurer and a former managing partner at McKinsey & Co., a powerhouse consulting firm that serves as a repository for Harvard graduates. Another paradigm of establishment power and wealth was James Richardson Houghton, Harvard ’58, Harvard Business School ’62, the chief executive of Corning Incorporated, the manufacturing giant.

  But the Corporation was really dominated by two people, a businessman and an academic—the only academic on the board—both very different but each formidable in their own way. Robert G. Stone, Jr. was the Corporation’s longest-serving member, or senior fellow.
An economics concentrator and captain of the heavyweight crew team, Stone graduated from Harvard in 1947. He’d gone on to a career in transportation and finance, heading up shipping companies States Marine Lines and the Kirby Corporation, and serving on countless corporate boards. Stone made his money quietly, but he made a lot of it. A longtime Harvard fundraiser and donor—he’d endowed a scholarship program, the “Stone Scholars,” and the position of crew coach—Stone had been on the Corporation since 1975. A gregarious blue-blood unrivaled in his devotion to his alma mater, he epitomized the Harvard man of an earlier time.

  On the surface, he could not have been more different from the other power on the Corporation. Hanna Holborn Gray was born in Germany in 1930. Before the onset of war, her family fled that country for the United States. Gray eventually attended Bryn Mawr, a women’s college in Pennsylvania, and earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 1957. She became an assistant professor at Harvard at a time when women professors were an unwelcome novelty in Harvard Yard; the rules of the Faculty Club, for example, stipulated that women could not enter by the front door.

  Gray was unfazed by the discrimination—“some of it just seemed comical,” she once recalled—and progressed to a remarkable career, teaching at the University of Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern, and Yale. After a stint as Yale’s provost, second-in-charge to president Kingman Brewster, she served as Yale’s acting president in the late 1970s. She didn’t get the position—Yale English professor A. Bartlett Giamatti did—but instead became president of the University of Chicago, retiring in 1993, after fifteen years.

  Over the course of her career, Gray acquired a reputation as a disciplined, demanding teacher with high expectations of students and a hostility toward any suggestion that the university ought to be an engine of social progress, a “change agent.” The point of a university was not to reform the world, not to align itself with politics or social movements, Gray argued, but to transmit knowledge and train scholars. Arguing against affirmative action, she once told a friend, “You know, the University of Chicago has only one percent black students. We make no accommodation to anything.” Gray was tough; some would have called her cold. At Chicago, she was reputed to have coined the term “tuition-paying units” for students. “Hanna Gray is very impressive, straight off Mount Rushmore,” said one member of the Harvard Board of Overseers. “But you wouldn’t want to cross her.”

  In 1988 Gray joined the Board of Overseers, and when Henry Rosovsky stepped down from the Corporation in 1997, Gray stepped up. By 2000, she had garnered more than sixty honorary degrees. She had also been involved in four presidential searches in the previous four years. It was perhaps inevitable that she would dominate this one.

  The search for Neil Rudenstine’s successor began almost immediately after Rudenstine announced his resignation in March 2000. The Harvard Crimson would call it the hunt for “the nation’s second most highly contested presidency,” which is the kind of line that people at Harvard throw out in a way that at first sounds infuriatingly arrogant, on second thought comes across as at least plausible, and upon further reflection strikes one as the type of remark that, while possibly true, serves no easily identifiable purpose other than showing how seriously Harvard takes both itself and its president.

  The search committee consisted of nine people, six Corporation fellows (but not Rudenstine) along with three members of the Board of Overseers, brought on as a gesture of outreach to the lesser board. It would not, however, include any students or faculty, as most such presidential search committees do. Committee members insisted that it was impractical to pick representatives from among the thousands of students and faculty. That explanation didn’t convince many students, who noted that much of life at Harvard, starting with getting in, consisted of just such weeding-out processes. Others noted that the same argument could apply to the Corporation itself, yet that body seemed to have no theoretical objections to choosing its own members from the much larger pool of Harvard alumni.

  The real reason may have been a fear that students could not be trusted to keep their mouths shut. Because, with the exception of intermittent progress reports—intermittently scheduled but consistently vague—the search would be conducted with the utmost secrecy. And once it was done, its records would be sealed and stashed in the basement of a Harvard library for the next eighty years, until long after everyone involved was dead. University administrators explained that potential candidates for the job would be scared away if the press were involved.

  There was some truth to that, but the level of secrecy went far beyond protecting the names of candidates. It seemed equally plausible that this was a group that, having grown accustomed to operating in secrecy, simply preferred it that way. So sure was the Corporation of its ability to pick the right person that no public vetting was believed necessary; so confident was the Corporation in its judgment that it didn’t feel the need for outsiders to critique its process.

  Rudenstine would stay until the commencement ceremonies of 2001, because choosing a university president takes time. Before the search committee could even begin considering candidates, it had to consider its priorities. Rudenstine’s job had been to raise money. What should be the agenda of his successor?

  Clearly, the first challenge was reinvigorating Harvard College. Undergrads weren’t getting the education that they, and the general public, expected of Harvard. Many students and applicants already knew that, and some didn’t much care, because a Harvard diploma was still money in the bank. But sooner or later the gap between perception and reality had to narrow lest a Harvard diploma become like an inflated stock price, dangerously vulnerable to a plunge in investor confidence.

  Such a correction would affect more than just Harvard College. Even though undergraduates constitute a minority of the university’s students, the college is the bedrock of the university’s image. The freshman dorms in the Yard, the stately undergraduate houses along the Charles, the football team taking on Yale in century-old Harvard Stadium—the college is the heart and soul of the university. No graduate gets warm and fuzzy remembering his years at the law school, but Harvard College grads tend to be the university’s most loyal alumni and most consistent donors, and they want Harvard to be at least as strong for their children as it was for them. If attending Harvard is part of the American dream, the dream of many Harvard graduates is to have their sons and daughters attend a Harvard that’s better than the one they knew.

  A second priority for the search committee was a heightened emphasis on the sciences, especially the life sciences such as biology, biochemistry, and genetics. Since World War II, the sciences had become the engine of economic growth and prestige at research universities—and the area of the most cutthroat competition. The amount of money flowing to university science departments from the government, foundations, and private donors had soared during the 1990s, the decade of biotechnology and the Internet. In 1996, for example, Microsoft heads Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had given Harvard $25 million to build a new computer science and engineering building, a drop in the bucket compared with the money available. To get that money—to compete with Stanford and all the other universities busily blurring the lines between academia and the private sector—Harvard needed to invest more in its sciences, build more buildings and laboratories, and recruit more top-notch scientists.

  Another priority was expanding the campus into Allston, a gritty Boston neighborhood just across the Charles. For decades Harvard has been pushing the limits of development in Cambridge, and local residents have grown increasingly resistant to further incursions; Harvard’s buildings have a way of raising real estate values, forcing out blue-collar locals while corroding the sense of neighborhood and community. By the end of Neil Rudenstine’s era, there wasn’t much land left to build on in Cambridge, and every time Harvard proposed new construction on what little land there was, community activists roared into action, slashing those plans that they didn’t kill outright.

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p; During the Bok presidency, Harvard secretly began to buy land across the river, using a front company to prevent the price gouging that would inevitably follow the disclosure of the buying spree. Allston is a working-class neighborhood, industrial, congested and haphazardly developed, carved up by a train yard and the six-lane Massachusetts Turnpike. Outsiders would call Allston dreary, and so would some of the locals. Unlike Cambridge citizens, Allston residents would happily sell, and did so without ever knowing that the deep-pocketed purchaser was Harvard. By the late 1990s, Harvard owned as much land across the Charles as it did in Cambridge. The question was what to do with it.

  Harvard wanted to expand not just across the Charles River, but across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Twenty-five years before, Derek Bok spoke of “internationalizing” the university, launching efforts to recruit more foreign students. As the eighties became the nineties and globalization became all the rage, the idea came to mean more than simply recruiting students from England and France. For Harvard, globalization meant transforming a quintessentially American university into a world institution with overseas campuses, Harvard students coming from and traveling to every continent, and a curriculum that trained students to be citizens of the globe. When Winston Churchill and Neil Rudenstine had spoken of Harvard as an “empire of the mind,” they’d spoken metaphorically; now Harvard wanted to make that slogan literal. The university had always trained the leaders of the United States. Who was to say it couldn’t train the leaders of the entire world?

  Rebuilding undergraduate education, pumping up the sciences, developing Allston, and globalizing the university—those were the official tasks for Harvard’s twenty-seventh president. Perhaps equally telling were the subjects that the Corporation did not consider priorities—the effect of the university’s great wealth on its self-image, its mission, and its integrity. The fellows of the Corporation were not particularly interested in that wealth’s potentially adverse and unintended consequences; most of them were more interested in accruing money than in critiquing it. Instead of considering a president who might present a moral or philosophical counterweight to the economic trends of the 1990s, the search committee wanted someone who could exploit them. That, however, was something they would not say in public.