Nor was another criterion. The committee wanted more than someone who knew Harvard’s issues (at least what they considered Harvard’s issues). It wanted someone who could restore the luster to the presidency, who could stand up straight and represent Harvard as Harvard saw itself—powerful, strong, sage, and fearless. In short, it wanted someone who was not Neil Rudenstine. “We agreed that we needed somebody more aggressive, more pushy, bolder,” Corporation fellow D. Ron Daniel later said.
The committee began by making token gestures of outreach. In September of 2000, it took out a concise ad in the New York Times’ “Week in Review” section. “President: Harvard University,” the want ad read. “Nominations and applications are invited for the presidency of Harvard University.” The ad fulfilled a legal requirement about equal opportunity hiring for non-profit institutions, but no one expected anything serious to come of it.
At about the same time, the committee sent a letter to all Harvard alumni, some three hundred thousand strong, requesting their “thoughts on the personal and professional qualities it will be most important to seek in a new president, as well as your observations on any individuals you believe are deserving of serious consideration.” The purpose was threefold. First, it gave alumni the impression that their opinions were valued, which helped create the sense of involvement that fostered alumni giving. Second, responses to the letter would give insight into alumni concerns. The third and ostensible purpose of the letter—to generate the names of viable candidates—was in reality its least important. Few believed that alumni would suggest a name that the committee would not otherwise have come up with on its own, or that the vast majority of the suggestions wouldn’t constitute a waste of time.
Because in truth, the pool of realistic candidates was minuscule. Harvard’s requirements knocked most people out of contention after quick and superficial consideration. Serious candidates had to be able to articulate a vision for the university that encompassed the Corporation’s agenda. They had to have a character and personality entirely unlike those of Neil Rudenstine. Finally, they needed a Harvard degree, high-level administrative experience, and, if not a doctorate, then at least a familiarity with academic issues.
Not many candidates fit the bill. “When you actually sit down and want to choose a president at Harvard, you assume that you probably have a long list of very good people,” said one person close to the search process. “You’d think people would be just lining up. And then you discover to your enormous surprise that maybe you can find two or three people and you don’t like two of them.”
In a few months, the search committee had compiled a list of four hundred names, but that number was wildly inflated. It included, for example, Al Gore and Bill and Hillary Clinton, though none of those three met the qualifications or had expressed any interest in the job. “I rather doubt [Gore] will get it,” Robert Stone said in a rare public statement intended to slap down the rumor. “He doesn’t have the academic and intellectual standing.” When Hillary Clinton’s name appeared in the press, outraged alums quickly contacted the university to let Harvard know that they’d stop giving if she became president. That was another criterion—the president couldn’t be a partisan figure, lest alumni vote with their wallets.
Still, when committee members spoke to Harvard faculty, the searchers made it clear that they wanted a star, a well-known figure who could comfortably master the bully pulpit of the Harvard presidency. Robert Stone stressed exactly that to Peter Gomes in a conversation about the presidency in the fall of 2000.
The teacher of a course in Harvard history, Gomes had strong feelings on the subject and no small expertise; he likes to say that he has known three Harvard presidents and buried two others. Born in 1942, Gomes has worked at Harvard for thirty-five years. A Baptist clergyman, he became minister of Memorial Church in 1970. But if Gomes were only the church pastor, his position at Harvard would be insecure. It is not. In 1974, Derek Bok appointed Gomes the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals. The tenured Divinity School professorship allows Gomes to speak his mind—and not just on issues related to the divine—without worrying about losing his job.
Within the Harvard community, Gomes is something of a celebrity. Balding and portly, nattily dressed when he is out of religious garb, he is an eloquent speaker with a booming bass voice; you could sell tickets to a Gomes recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. His volumes of sermons are frequent best sellers, and he was once profiled by 60 Minutes. He is a one-man band of diversity—a black, gay, piano-playing Anglophile minister who grew up in the blue-collar Massachusetts town of Plymouth (his father farmed the cranberry bogs there) but speaks with a noticeable British accent.
Another source of Gomes’ power at Harvard is his popularity with Harvard alumni, whom he frequently addresses at university functions and Harvard clubs around the world. They listen appreciatively to his thoughts on the state of their university and then contribute—or don’t—accordingly. At the massive, ornate banquet celebrating the successful end of Neil Rudenstine’s $2.6-billion fund drive in 2000, it was not Rudenstine but Gomes who delivered the keynote address. “No one can afford not to listen to me,” Gomes once said during an academic debate. “I have the alumni on my side.” That alumni constituency, even more than his church pulpit, his professorship, and the politics of his identity, make the Professor of Christian Morals something of a powerbroker, and the presidential search committee had to at least touch base with him.
“One of the questions Stone asked was, ‘Do you think the president of Harvard should have a national or international profile?’” Gomes remembered. “And I said, ‘Absolutely not. The president of Harvard, if he does his job well, will have a national and international profile. But you should not be looking for some colossus, some figure for worldwide education. That is not what makes a great presidency. A great Harvard president is made by doing the ordinary job of the president extraordinarily well. And my reading of history tells me that people are not brought in as great presidents. Harvard makes people a great president.’”
But, Gomes added, “I don’t think that argument was listened to. It was already settled in the minds of those who make these appointments that they wanted a completely different style. These were pro forma conversations. But they asked my opinion and that’s what I told them.”
By early December of 2000, the list of four hundred had been chopped down to forty. Eliminating people from consideration was almost too easy. “I look back ten years ago, and I don’t see as many really top candidates outside Harvard as I did then,” Stone said at the time. The credible candidates would get a phone call from Marc Goodheart, a 1981 graduate and the university secretary, who was helping the committee coordinate its work. Would they be willing to have a conversation about the future of Harvard?
Always, they would—even if they didn’t want the job, networking with members of the Harvard Corporation couldn’t be a bad thing. But the meetings were never called “interviews.” That was in keeping with the search committee’s style. Everything was informal, so that everything was deniable.
By January, four names began to crop up with increasing frequency. First was Amy Gutmann, a smart, ambitious political scientist who was the provost at Princeton. Gutmann had the requisite Harvard ties—she had attended Radcliffe and earned her Ph.D. at Harvard, she had taught at Harvard, and her daughter had attended Harvard as well. But her Princeton connections were a problem; Neil Rudenstine had also been provost at Princeton. In the eyes of his critics, he had failed to make the transition from Princeton to Harvard. Could Gutmann? Besides, how would it look if Harvard kept finding its presidents at Princeton? The truth, according to sources close to the search, was that Amy Gutmann was never seriously considered for the job. Instead, her name was floated to give the impression that a woman was a real contender for the Harvard presidency—when, in fact, the opposite was the case. In time, however, Gutmann would have her revenge.
Of the three remaining candidates,
only one worked at Harvard. He was Harvey Fineberg, and Harvard was practically in his blood; Fineberg had come to Harvard as an undergraduate in 1964 and never really left. After college, he attended the medical school, then earned a master’s degree at the Kennedy School and a Ph.D. at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Except for a brief stint as a practicing doctor, Fineberg had taught at Harvard ever since, serving most recently as Neil Rudenstine’s provost.
Fineberg was a generally popular and well-respected man who badly wanted the job. He was smooth, diplomatic, a gifted public speaker and a skilled fundraiser. But his candidacy suffered from the liabilities that dog any insider in an executive search. Over the years, he had made enemies on campus—that was inevitable. Moreover, Harvard’s familiarity with Fineberg had bred, if not contempt, then at least a certain limpness of enthusiasm. The Corporation wanted a president whose appointment would instantly signal that Harvard had made a daring pick, a choice that would make headlines and generate discussion. Choosing Harvey Fineberg would not have that effect.
And so the list was down to two: Lee Bollinger and Lawrence Henry Summers. They were successful, accomplished men at the top of their fields, and other than that they were different in every possible way.
A distinguished-looking man with a slim, runner’s build and salt-and-pepper hair, Bollinger was president of the University of Michigan. A 1971 graduate of Columbia Law School, he had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger in the early 1970s. Joining the University of Michigan Law School, Bollinger specialized in First Ammendment issues. But he first came to public attention when, in 1987, he testified against the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Named dean that same year, he banned the FBI and CIA from recruiting at the law school after courts ruled that the former discriminated against Hispanics and the latter against gays. After serving as dean for seven years, Bollinger left in 1994 to become the provost of Dartmouth. Just two years later, Michigan wooed him back to serve as its president.
Bollinger was a popular and effective president. He successfully launched Michigan’s Life Sciences Initiative, a several hundred million dollar plan to expand science facilities. In the arts, he brought England’s Royal Shakespeare Company to campus and helped found the six-hundred seat Arthur Miller Theater. Bollinger was passionate about the role of culture in university life. “This is vital to what we are as a community,” he said when proposing the theater. “No one can give me a reason not to do it. So let’s do it!”
Students loved Bollinger. When hundreds of excited revelers gathered outside the presidential mansion to celebrate the football team’s 1997 victory over Penn State, Bollinger simply invited them all inside. Posing as a distant, Olympian figure wasn’t his style. Lee Bollinger, said one student journalist, “is like a hyper-articulate version of your best friend’s father.” He certainly looked the part of a casual authority figure. Sitting for an interview in March 2003, Bollinger wore leather boots, wide-wale corduroys, a button-down shirt with a tie, and a fluffy down vest. About the only thing missing was a golden retriever at his feet.
Politically liberal, Bollinger reacted calmly when a 1960s-style protest broke out on the Michigan campus. In March 1999, thirty students took over his office to protest the use of sweatshops in making university-branded clothing. “They are terrific students,” Bollinger said. “They’re just the kind of students you want on your campus. They were interested in a serious problem, they were knowledgeable about the problem, and they really wanted to do something about it.” He didn’t appreciate them taking over his office, but he did respect their passion.
But Bollinger became best known for his handling of two lawsuits brought against the university and its law school, Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger. Targeting the university’s affirmative action program, both cases were brought by whites who’d been denied acceptance at Michigan. With the support and advice of his friend Neil Rudenstine, Bollinger vigorously fought the lawsuits, defending affirmative action as essential to diversity, which was, in turn, essential to the fullness of any student’s education. The Supreme Court had agreed to hear the cases in the spring of 2003.
At age forty-six, Larry Summers was eight years younger than Bollinger but already had a storied résumé of his own. Summers wasn’t a university president, but he brought plenty of relevant experience to the table. He certainly had management experience; the Treasury Department employed more than one hundred sixty thousand people. Summers knew Harvard well, having spent years there as both a student and a professor. And though fundraising would not be the next president’s priority, were Summers chosen he would instantly become the best-connected fundraiser in the university’s history—after all, who has more experience with big money than the head of the Treasury Department?
Summers had something else that was appealing—an intangible but definite aura of star quality. He was an unconventional man, a brilliant academic who’d quit the cloistered world of his profession to pursue public service in Washington. Along the way, he’d acquired power and fame. In the Internet-age jargon of the 1990s, choosing Larry Summers would constitute thinking outside the box. The genius economist and former Treasury secretary as president of Harvard? No question, that’d generate some press.
On Sunday, February 18, 2001, the search committee interviewed Bollinger at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, on East Sixty-fourth Street and Madison Avenue in New York City, a tony, discreet place where rooms start at $500 a night—the perfect locale for such a delicate mission. Things were long past the point of pretending that this was not an interview; it was Bollinger’s third meeting with Harvard officials. Eight members of the committee dined with him that Saturday night, and on Sunday morning they convened a meeting at a $3,600-a-night penthouse suite, ate lunch, then reconvened for another short session.
The committee, Bollinger recalled, “had a very strong concern with undergraduate education, with attention to undergraduates right down to advising policies. How do you make this undergraduate experience richer than it is, and more fulfilling?” The Harvard emissaries also wanted to talk to Bollinger about where he would invest in the sciences, the development of the Allston campus, and the globalization of Harvard.
The meetings went well. Bollinger was comfortable addressing the questions and impressed his audience with the breadth of his knowledge. Harvard needed to focus on its undergraduate life, he argued, making the student-professor relationship more relaxed and accessible. He spoke of the need for university presidents to be engaged in society, and argued that they could do so without risking alumni contributions. In his years fighting the affirmative action lawsuits, Bollinger said, he couldn’t remember a single instance in which an alum had refused to donate as a result. But after the interview was over, something happened. A small incident, but still, it said something about how Bollinger’s style and Harvard’s were different.
Two enterprising reporters from the Crimson, a junior named Garrett McCord Graff and a first-year named Catherine E. Shoichet, had tracked down the committee at the Plaza Athénée. The presidential search was the year’s biggest story for the Crimson, which was pulling out all the stops to scoop the national press, and several times did. Graff and Shoichet had been tipped off that the Corporation was meeting in New York; they just didn’t know where. So they showed up at the Manhattan offices of various Corporation members, doing their best to look youthful and innocent, whereupon they’d announce, “We’re from Harvard. We’re here for the Harvard meeting.” Eventually, they got lucky. An unwitting secretary said, “Oh, it’s not here,” and directed them to the Plaza Athénée.
When the reporters reached the hotel, they rode the elevator to the penthouse, where the committee was meeting. Almost immediately, Shoichet and Graff bumped into Marc Goodheart. “Who are you?” he asked. They told him. Goodheart, an important but little-recognized administration official, asked them to leave. Was he a hotel employee? the reporters asked. No? Well then, they weren’t about to le
ave. But, just in case, the students rented a room so that they couldn’t be thrown out of the hotel for loitering. (The Crimson, which has an endowment of its own, could afford it.) Then they staked out the lobby.
At the conclusion of its interview, the committee asked Bollinger to avoid the reporters by taking the freight elevator and exiting by the hotel’s back door. “I’ll leave by the front door, thank you,” he replied, bemused. Shoichet and Graff caught up to him just outside the hotel entrance. Bollinger wouldn’t answer their questions, but they took his picture, and two days later the Crimson broke the news of his meeting with the search committee.
The veil of secrecy was lifted, if only for a moment.
Six days later, the committee met with Larry Summers.
A chauffeured limousine whisked him from Logan Airport to the Boston Harbor Hotel, taking Summers through the underground garage so that he could ride the freight elevator up to the sixteenth-floor, $2,500-a-night presidential suite. Summers would spend the next five hours talking with the search committee, going over much the same issues that Bollinger had. He agreed that Harvard needed to hire more professors, in part by awarding tenure to junior professors who were coming into their own rather than to stars from other universities who might already have done their best work. And, because the committee didn’t want to have to go through this process again anytime soon, he vowed his devotion to Harvard. Even if Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan were to step down, Summers said, he wouldn’t leave Harvard to take the job.
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