It was, by all accounts, an impressive presentation—lucid, wide-ranging, and backed by a broad sense of the world beyond Cambridge that Summers had developed over a decade of jet-setting around the globe. “What we saw was a powerful intellect and understanding of the university and a university’s mission and purpose, and a tremendous taste for excellence,” Hanna Gray said later.
Gray was Summers’ most ardent supporter, in large part because of her disappointment with Neil Rudenstine. Although she publicly praised Rudenstine, she was privately impatient with him, and his collapse in 1994 had offended her. In Gray’s eyes, not only had the episode embarrassed Harvard, but there was something damningly effete about the act. It represented the lack of toughness, the absence of rigor that she felt permeated academic culture in the 1990s. “Hanna didn’t like Neil at all,” said one professor who knew them both. “Like many successful women in our world, she didn’t like unmanliness, because she’s had to be pretty manly in her career. So, from her point of view, Neil’s breakdown was disaster.” Larry Summers, Gray was confident, would never pose such problems. He had been tested in the pressure-cooker worlds of Washington and international finance, and the tests only seemed to have made him stronger.
Robert Stone, though, was reputed to be leaning toward Bollinger. The Michigan president had the temperament and experience to step smoothly into the job. He was affable, likeable, a familiar type. Along with at least three other members of the search committee, Stone was worried about Summers’ reputation as hot-headed and haughty.
No one was asking the faculty’s opinion, but if they had, Bollinger would have been the likely favorite, a known quantity under whom the University of Michigan was prospering. Summers was obviously a man of enormous capability, but he had question marks. He hadn’t been a well-known figure when he was at Harvard; he’d hung around with other economists and hadn’t gotten involved in larger university issues. And he’d been away from academia for a decade.
“Bollinger was in many ways a much more intellectually appropriate figure” than Summers, said Everett Mendelsohn, a Harvard professor of the history of science since 1960. “He was someone who had dealt with issues of the university in the modern world in a way that Larry had not. Summers was known as someone with a hot temper, with strong ideas on some things but no reflections, as far as anyone knew, on what a university is or ought to be. Bollinger had dealt with issues of affirmative action, of student activism, of faculty salaries. Almost to a person, I don’t think anyone on the faculty would have been a strong supporter of Summers.”
That assertion may be too strong, but in any event, it was moot. In the committee’s eyes, faculty support might actually have been a negative for a candidate; the Corporation wanted to shake things up. And to some search committee members, Bollinger had his drawbacks. He had no Harvard degree—though his daughter had attended the college, Bollinger matriculated at the University of Oregon before Columbia Law School, and for some members of the Corporation, “UO” was not quite Harvard material. According to sources close to the search process, Treasurer D. Ron Daniel was adamantly opposed to putting the university in the hands of someone who hadn’t gone there. Plus, at fifty-four Bollinger was a little older than the committee would have preferred, almost as old as Rudenstine was when he took the job. That made it less likely that he’d serve the fifteen or twenty years the committee wanted.
In fact, there were hints that Bollinger was too much like Rudenstine in a number of ways, especially to Hanna Gray’s taste. Rudenstine had been known for his promotion of the arts and African American studies, along with his defense of affirmative action; Bollinger too was a patron of the arts, and was fighting two lawsuits on behalf of affirmative action that were attracting national attention even before the Supreme Court heard them. Some Harvard officials were already uncomfortable with the amount of attention the Af-Am department under Skip Gates was attracting. Would Lee Bollinger change that trend—or continue it?
Larry Summers was pulling ahead. Only the question of his disposition remained. Could the committee entrust Harvard to a man famous for his brilliance but notorious for his temper?
So Summers’ old mentor Bob Rubin stepped in. The widely respected former treasury secretary, Harvard class of ’60, had enormous credibility. He was judicious, discreet, thoughtful, and enormously wealthy—a thoroughly impressive combination of old-school values and new-world money. Rubin didn’t want to be president of Harvard, but if he had wanted the job, he probably could have had it. Instead, he wanted the job for Larry Summers.
So Rubin called three members of the search committee who had particular doubts: Stone, D. Ron Daniel, and James Richardson Houghton. It was true, Rubin admitted, that Summers had once had what Rubin would call a “rough-edges” issue. But he’d mellowed, Rubin insisted. This was a man who’d successfully negotiated with congressional leaders and foreign treasurers, who’d survived and prospered for a decade in a viciously partisan Washington environment. His temper existed more in legend than in reality.
Rubin’s seal of approval worked. “Rubin made us confident that we weren’t getting a bull,” one member of the committee later said.
On February 26, 2001, the search committee met in its Loeb House conference room and unanimously chose Larry Summers as Harvard’s next president. Robert Stone called Summers to ask if he would take the job, then flew to Washington, where Summers lived, to press the issue. Summers took a week to officially say yes. Then, on Sunday, March 11, he and the search committee met with the Board of Overseers on the sixty-fourth floor of 30 Rockefeller Center. The search committee members explained their reasons for choosing Summers, and then Summers gave a brief talk, laying out his vision for Harvard. As expected, the Overseers voted unanimously in favor of Summers.
After nine months of searching, Harvard had found a new president.
About five weeks later, fifty students took over Massachusetts Hall.
On Wednesday, April 18, they gathered secretly in the basement of a nearby freshman dormitory. They carried backpacks containing toiletries, cell phones, and paperbacks of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr. Their leaders gave them last-minute pep talks on what to do if the police arrested them. A few minutes after five o’clock in the afternoon, they sprinted the one hundred feet or so from the dorm to the red-brick building that houses the Harvard president’s office, flung open the green door at the front of the building, and rushed past an astonished secretary. Amid the chaos that ensued, Neil Rudenstine escaped out the back of the building. Provost Harvey Fineberg, whose office was next to Rudenstine’s, did not. Fineberg refused to talk to the protesters, and the students refused to leave. It would be almost three weeks before they did so.
The occupation of Mass Hall, as the building is commonly known, was the most sustained piece of student activism at Harvard since the 1960s, and had been years in the making. It began with a small and seemingly innocuous act. In the early 1990s, Harvard, like numerous other universities, had copyrighted the name “Harvard,” so as to prevent other companies and organizations from profiting off it, even as the university itself explored money-making opportunities. Through its Trademark Licensing Office, Harvard vigorously enforced that copyright, threatening lawsuits against, for example, the brewer of Harvard Beer. At the same time, Harvard was licensing its name to sportswear companies such as Nike and Champion to produce collegiate-themed clothing—T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, and the like. Harvard was far from the only university to enter into such arrangements: By the late 1990s, college-affiliated clothing was producing about $3 billion a year in revenues for its manufacturers. But as American labor unions and campus activists discovered, one reason the business was lucrative was that some of the clothing was manufactured in Asian sweatshops. Outrage over universities’ ties to the sweatshop trade inspired nationwide protests, such as the one that had resulted in the occupation of Lee Bollinger’s Michigan office.
At Harvard, the anti-sweatshop dr
ive led to the creation of a activist group called the Progressive Student Labor Movement. The members of PSLM soon came to feel that it wasn’t just foreign workers who were being vastly underpaid, but Harvard employees as well. They had some justification for their belief. In May 1999, the Cambridge City Council had passed an ordinance requiring city contractors to pay what it considered a “living wage”—not just the minimum wage of $5.25 an hour, upon which it was impossible to support a family, but the more plausible amount of $10.00 an hour. Even that amounted only to an annual salary of about $21,000.
But according to the PSLM, thousands of Harvard workers—janitors, security guards, dining room workers—made considerably less than ten dollars an hour. (Harvard claimed that the number was in the hundreds.) In fact, throughout the 1990s, the wages of such workers had actually decreased, and many Harvard jobs had been outsourced to non-unionized workers, who didn’t receive health or retirement benefits. As janitor Frank Morley put it, “You don’t need a degree to know when you’re getting screwed.” Over the course of 1999 and 2000, PSLM’s attempts to meet with Rudenstine and the Harvard Corporation had been repeatedly denied.
It was hardly the first time that Harvard had been accused of exploiting its blue-collar workers. Back in 1930, President Abbott Lawrence Lowell had refused to pay a group of “scrubwomen” more than thirty-five cents an hour, even though a state labor commission had instructed the university to pay the women thirty-seven and a half cents hourly. Instead, Lowell offered the women a daily twenty-minute rest break. Not until a group of embarrassed alumni raised $3,000 in “back pay” did the university retreat from its hard line. Similar fights occurred periodically for the next seventy years, according to Morton and Phyllis Keller, authors of Making Harvard Modern. Harvard, write the Kellers, cultivated an “almost feudal relationship” with its staff.
But the living wage movement brought a new element to an ongoing fight—globalization. With Harvard’s endowment approaching $20 billion, idealistic students saw similarities between a sportswear corporation that exploited workers and a Harvard Corporation apparently doing the same. That link between the anti-sweatshop struggle overseas and the living-wage fight at home galvanized students, and the Harvard administration’s recalcitrance only energized them further. Instead of offering to negotiate wage increases, the administration boasted of the free classes it offered workers. Joe Wrinn, a Harvard spokesman, claimed that such courses were the best way “to raise people into better-paying jobs.” The workers pointed out that since they often had to work two jobs to support themselves, they really didn’t have much time left over to take classes in English lit.
For lame-duck president Rudenstine, the sit-in was agonizing. With only weeks to go before his retirement, he had little power to affect the situation. And he was genuinely torn. Though he considered the sit-in a threat to the sovereignty of the university, he was not entirely unsympathetic. His own mother had been a cafeteria worker who, he once blurted out in frustration, had never made ten dollars an hour in her life. So while Rudenstine refused to negotiate with the students, neither would he allow them to be evicted or arrested. “He made it very clear that he would not call the police,” said Everett Mendelsohn, who served as an informal liaison between Rudenstine and the protesters. “No matter how long it took, he would not call the police.” The students, who had expected the worst, were shocked. “We couldn’t believe our luck,” said one.
Day after day, Rudenstine came to work, stepping over and around the increasingly smelly protesters. His own office had been locked when the students originally rushed in, apparently by an electric lock controlled by his secretary. So Rudenstine shifted to an office on the second floor. At one point he was joined for a meeting by president-elect Summers, who, according to sit-in participants, looked alternately annoyed at having to walk past the protesters and incredulous that they were still there. They didn’t know yet just how strongly Larry Summers felt about student protest.
For the administration, the ties between the living wage movement and anti-globalization protests were clear and constituted an additional reason to take a hard line. When Bradley S. Epps, a professor of Romance languages and literature who supported the sit-in, asked if he could visit the protesters, Harvey Fineberg firmly said no. “They’re involved with the anti-globalization protests in Seattle and elsewhere,” Epps remembered Fineberg warning him. “They’re going to tear down the gates.”
Outside Massachusetts Hall, the campus was slowly being engaged by the sit-in. Cafeteria workers passed boxes of pizza through the windows of the building. Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson came to campus to protest, and the national media wrote stories and aired segments about the sit-in. Worried that their classmates couldn’t actually see them except for brief glimpses through the windows, the protesters encouraged sympathizers to pitch tents in the yard around Mass Hall, and the early spring grass was soon decorated with a makeshift village of about seventy tents.
Harvard Yard is routinely described as a beautiful place, but that description is not quite accurate. A pigsty (literally) for much of the seventeenth century, the Yard is impressive, historic, and grand, but it falls short of beautiful. Perhaps it is the buildings—crammed together like hotels on a Monopoly board and radiating so much history that they celebrate the dead more than the living. Then there is the fact that the space is bisected by University Hall into the Old Yard (mostly dorms and Mass Hall) and the New Yard (mostly Tercentenary Theatre and its surrounding buildings).
Another dehumanizing element is the paved walking paths that crisscross the Yard like airport runways. The macadam stripes carve up the Yard’s grass into small, asymetrical sections, and much of the year, the grass is either covered with snow or so muddy that it resembles the pigsty of yesteryear. When spring finally comes, usually not until May, the unpaved sections are cordoned off with ropes and coated with a green spray that improves the aesthetics until the real grass shoots up. The grassy chunks aren’t big enough for the kind of athletic activity—touch football, Frisbee, hackysack—that you’d normally find on a freshman quad. And even if they were, Harvard rules ban such recreation in the Yard. They also ban parties in the Yard’s freshman dorms (even without alcohol, which is, of course, illegal for freshmen to drink).
Such rules exist partly for the peace of mind of the tens of thousands of tourists who stroll through the Yard every year, invariably posing for pictures in front of an 1884 statue of John Harvard. But they also reflect a larger truth about the culture of the university: Harvard is not a place where students are encouraged to relax. The Yard is not tranquil; it is fragmentation and constant motion. Seen from above, it would look like a series of conveyor belts constituting a sophisticated assembly line, a metaphor reinforced by the fact that in all of the Yard’s twenty-five acres, there is not a single bench, nowhere for students or passersby to sit, chat, and simply slow down for a while. That absence puzzled one student—Josiah Pertz, class of 2005—so much that he wrote a Mass Hall administrator about it. The aide wrote back, “The University has historically shied away from placing structures in the Yard. This may be due to the fact that the Yard is meant to be a thoroughfare, rather than a gathering place.” By “structures,” the administrator meant places to sit.
During the occupation of Massachusetts Hall, however, the Yard did become a gathering place—the tent city made it one. It created a sense of community that many students said was as welcome at Harvard as it was rare. During the day, the colorful tents looked like the set for a piece of performance art. At night, students sat outside their tents and talked or played guitar, hanging out in a way that students don’t do very much at Harvard. The tents were small, fragile, temporary shelters, yet, if only for a few days, they held their own against the silent disapproval of the historic buildings surrounding them.
After about two weeks of steadily building pressure, Neil Rudenstine still adamantly refused to talk to the protesters or soften the university’s position. “I�
��ll resign before I give in,” he said, a threat that, given that he already had resigned, was more rhetorical than suasive. Students who had never seen Rudenstine play the heavy—who had never seen Rudenstine, period—were surprised. It seemed so out of character; he must be parroting the Corporation’s party line, they decided. If so, the Corporation wasn’t saying.
One week after Rudenstine issued his threat, the Harvard administration announced that it would raise the minimum salary of its hourly employees to $10.83 an hour, with equal wages for outsourced workers, and create a commission to study its employment practices. After twenty-one days inside Massachusetts Hall, shortly after five P.M. on May 8, twenty-three jubilant protesters poured out of the building. Neil Rudenstine was nowhere to be seen.
It was Larry Summers’ time now.
4
The President versus the Professor
It was the summer of 2001, and Skip Gates was getting worried.
The fifty-year-old chairman of Harvard’s department of Afro-American Studies had heard that the new president was making the rounds on campus, chatting with professors about their interests, their needs, their concerns. But Larry Summers hadn’t called Gates or anyone else associated with Af-Am, and the department members were growing concerned. Afro-American Studies may have been a small department, but it was still the best-known, most respected African American studies department in the country. How could Summers not want to meet with them, and quickly?
Gates wasn’t used to getting the cold shoulder. Back in 1991, when Neil Rudenstine was taking over, the incoming president sent Gates a handwritten note asking if they could meet, and in short order the two were having lunch in New York. Rudenstine asked Gates to jot down the scholars he wanted to hire. Then, over the next few years, the two men went out and hired them.
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