A decade later, as Rudenstine was preparing his exit, Gates helped put on a farewell dinner for the outgoing president. Toasting Rudenstine, Gates called him “our president,” meaning the president of black people at Harvard. “Neil,” he said, his voice catching, “although you are far too modest to know this, you are, and shall always be, a hero to our people. And for us, your most loyal and dedicated constituency and your unshakably devoted friends, you should always be ‘the President.’ You shall always be the Man.”
Rudenstine felt equally fond of Gates. He’d given the professor a copy of his book of essays with a heartfelt inscription: “To Skip, I write very slowly, so this cannot possibly rival your own fertile, eloquent, and always grand stream of prose. But it’s all I have to offer, and it comes with a sense of deep gratitude, steady friendship and a rare feeling that does not come often in life—of having worked together to achieve something truly transcendent.”
For Henry Louis Gates, Jr., feeling the odd man out is an unusual situation; he lives to be in the mix. Gates is a networking master, particularly by the standards of academe, where, after too many hours in the library or laboratory, social graces are often neglected or just plain underdeveloped. But Gates, a light-skinned black man with an easy smile and a quick laugh, is comfortable, funny, self-deprecating, and charming. Even people who find him a bit of a rogue can’t help liking Skip Gates. Back when he was writing regularly for the New Yorker, editor Tina Brown threw a party with him at Harvard’s Eliot House packed with luminaries from Cambridge, Boston, and New York. When a friend asked Gates if he was enjoying himself, he threw back his head and laughed. “Man,” he said, “it’s like shittin’ in high cotton.”
When conservative columnist George Will visited Harvard, Gates threw a dinner party for him with guests that included former dean Henry Rosovsky, conservative political scientist Harvey Mansfield, and the liberal philosopher Cornel West. Normally, George Will and Cornel West wouldn’t have been found within one hundred yards of each other. But Gates is all about building bridges—between liberal and conservative, white and black, academics from different fields—so that everyone benefits.
Same thing with the bash he threw every fall at his house on Francis Avenue in Cambridge, an elegant home just down the street from that of legendary Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Gates had bought the home in 1995 for $890,000, then had it extensively renovated by the internationally famous architect Moshe Safdie, and he liked to show it off. There was great food, lots of booze, a band in the yard out back. This kind of thing wasn’t done at Harvard—throwing a big party for no particular reason. For one thing, the cost was prohibitive for most professors. A top salary for a tenured professor at Harvard is around $200,000, far from extravagant given the many years of training and the high cost of Cambridge-area living. And that comes only to a select few.
But money wasn’t the only obstacle; Harvard just isn’t the kind of community where people relax easily. “People at Harvard aren’t used to being treated like human beings,” said Peter Gomes. “A colleague is someone lashed to the same mast. We’re surrounded by subordinates whom we tell what to do, or superiors to whom we suck up.” Socializing usually has a purpose—something official and work-related, like a going-away banquet or an award ceremony. But Gates’ parties united people from all over the university. And, not coincidentally, there would just happen to be more African Americans present than at any other Harvard gathering one could think of. It was just like back in 1957, when seven-year-old Skip would watch Nat King Cole, the first black with his own TV show. Cole would have black guests on his program as well as white ones. That way, the black people could advance without threatening whites and prompting a backlash.
Skip Gates had come a long way since then. He was born on September 16, 1950, in Keyser, West Virginia, a small, rural town about two hours west of Washington, D.C. His father worked at the local paper mill in the first half of the day, then went to a second job as a janitor at the phone company. His mother raised Skip to speak English the way whites did and to dream of going to an Ivy League school. She wanted him out of Keyser, where racism was a fact of everyday life. “I was called ‘nigger’ so many times, I often thought I had a sign on my back,” Gates recalled. In high school, he broke his hip playing football. When he made the mistake of telling the white doctor that he too wanted to go into medicine, the doctor decided that young Skip was faking his injury and declined to treat it. As an adult, Gates would have seven operations on that hip, culminating in a replacement joint. He now walks with the help of a cane.
Limping or no, he did get out of Keyser. Gates went to Yale and graduated summa cum laude in 1973, just two years before Larry Summers graduated from MIT. There weren’t a lot of black students in New Haven then. But rather than feeling alienated, Gates wanted to make Yale his own. He read and appreciated Sam Greenlee’s 1969 novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, a satire about a black CIA agent. “We all wanted to be spooks who sat by the door,” Gates later remembered. “We all wanted to be inside the system, integrated into historically elite white institutions of America, transforming them from the inside.”
Gates earned his Ph.D. in English at Cambridge University, then returned to Yale to teach. But his route to professional stardom really began in 1981, when he won a MacArthur Award, the so-called “genius” grant given by the MacArthur Foundation. Even though Gates didn’t get tenure at Yale, the MacArthur, a $156,000, no-strings-attached prize, made him nationally known, and in 1985 Cornell University granted Gates tenure at age thirty-three—and for a humanist, whose research tends to take longer than that of scientists and economists, winning tenure at thirty-three is virtually unheard of. Gates spent five years at Cornell, until he was lured away by Duke University in 1990. But he wouldn’t stay long in North Carolina. Gates was then married to a white woman named Sharon Lynn Adams, a fact that seemed to make some North Carolinians uncomfortable, which, in turn, made Skip Gates very uncomfortable. So when Harvard’s Derek Bok and Henry Rosovsky let their interest be known in 1991, Gates was amenable to a move back north.
Gates began his career as a literary theorist aiming to show that black Americans had written books just as deserving of serious critical analysis as were books by white Americans. His best-known work of scholarship, The Signifying Monkey, argued convincingly for the existence of an independent black American literary tradition. But with the MacArthur and now Harvard, Gates became more than a mere scholar; he was an academic entepreneur. Gates was co-editor of the encyclopedia Africana; co-founder of a website called Africana.com; historical consultant to Steven Spielberg’s film Amistad; and star of print and television ads for IBM. He became a judge for various career-making awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. His list of publications—a growing number of which he edited or just introduced—was longer than some people’s dissertations. Skip Gates was a celebrity, a brand. And he was powerful. Gates could get people jobs—and keep people out of them. A phone call from him to a publisher could land a book contract for a young scholar; a blurb by Gates signified establishment approval; a Gates recommendation could mean the difference between winning a grant or changing careers.
Inevitably, his scholarship suffered. The wheeling and dealing kept him busy: he was always on the phone, constantly traveling, near impossible to schedule. Everyone who knows Gates can tell a story about his chronic tardiness or canceled appointments.
Also inevitably, he aroused skepticism and envy among both whites and blacks. Other academics resented the bidding wars that Duke and Harvard engaged in to lure him, reportedly paying him some $200,000 a year—a pittance by the standards of, say, Wall Street, but a lot for a professor of literature. And salary was just for starters; Gates got staff, prime office space, generous department budgets. Harvard, Duke, and Cornell had even hired his intellectual colleague and close friend, a Ghana-born philosopher named K. Anthony Appiah.
Some whites—some of the same people who didn’t much care f
or Neil Rudenstine—thought that Gates exploited white guilt, that he was a 1990s mau-mauer who solicited money not by threats of street protest but by playing the race card in subtler ways. Certainly for a small department, Afro-American studies seemed to get an inordinate amount of Neil Rudenstine’s attention, and Gates wasn’t shy about letting it be known that he had Rudenstine’s ear. Some blacks, on the other hand, argued that Gates was too accommodating, a modern-day Booker T. Washington, the black educator who thought that the only way for blacks to get ahead in late-nineteenth-century American society was to shun politics and learn a trade. For Washington, money had been foundational power, the basis of all other social gains, and Gates did seem to enjoy the fruits of his labors. Some African Americans wanted him to be more confrontational, more in-your-face—especially since he was now at the top of the world’s most powerful university. They thought that Skip Gates was enjoying his success just a little too much. His defenders responded that Gates’ rising tide was lifting a lot of boats.
Gates may have picked his battles carefully, but he did pick them. In 1991 he testified in defense of 2 Live Crew when the rap band went on trial for violating Florida’s obscenity laws. Yet Gates was no apologist for all of black culture. In 1992 he wrote a famous New York Times editorial, “Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars,” in which he attacked black anti-Semitism and decried the deteriorating relationship between blacks and Jews.
Anyway, no matter how much Gates had become accepted by whites, he never forgot where he came from or that, to some whites, it didn’t matter how light his skin color was. When Gates first came to Harvard, he and Sharon lived in the suburb of Lexington, a few miles northwest of Cambridge. Shortly after moving in, Gates paid a visit to the local police department. I travel a lot, he told an officer, and my wife will be alone. Are there any special security measures I should take?
Truth was, Gates wasn’t particularly worried about his wife’s safety in the tranquil suburb. He just wanted to introduce himself to the local police—because, otherwise, he suspected, a black man driving a Mercedes in Lexington, Massachusetts, was going to see a lot of flashing blue-and-white in his rearview mirror.
Gates took enormous pride in the department that he, Anthony Appiah, and Neil Rudenstine had built. They’d recruited scholars such as the eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson; jurisprudent Leon Higginbotham and his wife, historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham; legal scholar Lani Guinier; and Cornel West. Gates himself had raised an astonishing $40 million for the department’s endowment, tapping his network of friends and business partners. Who else but Skip Gates could have convinced Time-Warner CEO Gerald Levin to donate $3 million of his company’s money to endow the “Quincy Jones Professorship of African-American Music”? Outside his office, Gates had hung a framed note that Jones had written during a “celebration of African-Americans in Paris.” It read: “A Skip Gates, le meilleur professeur du monde, et mon cher bon ami et frère. Avec toute ma gratitude et mon coeur. Je t’aime, inconditionnellement. Quincy Jones, July 4, 2000.”
Gates knew that by building this department at Harvard, he’d achieved something historic. He had taken something that was historically white—profoundly white, in its composition, its outlook, and culture—and had made it, in a small but significant way, black. And because this was Harvard, you could see the ripple effects at the nation’s finest universities—at Princeton, Columbia, Yale—the awareness that if Harvard was making African American studies a priority, they had to compete. It gave Gates a deep appreciation of Harvard’s power; the university was like an enormous megaphone.
So when Larry Summers didn’t call, Skip Gates, not a man to sit and wait, decided he’d better do something. In late June, he was in his sunny office on the second floor of the Barker Center, home of several humanities departments, meeting with Corporation member Herbert “Pug” Winokur. The two men were discussing the creation of fellowships for minority graduate students in honor of Neil Rudenstine. Attracting black students to graduate school in the humanities was a chronic struggle. If you were a black kid from a poor background, with the brains and education to attend grad school at Harvard, wouldn’t you want to go to the business school or the law school and make some real money? Spending six or seven years working on a doctoral dissertation was an uncertain road to success, especially for someone whose modest origins made financial security that much more appealing.
In the midst of that conversation, Gates let slip that he hadn’t heard anything from Larry Summers, but he was uncomfortable saying anything to the new president—after all, the president called you to say he wanted to meet, not the other way around. Could Winokur mention to Summers that Gates would be interested in a meet-and-greet? Winokur could mention it, and did. Before long, Summers was on the phone.
Why didn’t you call me before? Gates asked. I could have helped introduce you around. Gates was taken aback by what Summers said in response.
“Because,” Summers answered, “everyone told me to.”
Soon enough, Gates would get his face time with the president. But it wouldn’t turn out exactly as he’d hoped.
The meeting between Larry Summers and African American faculty members took place in early July, in the Alain Locke seminar room in the Af-Am department at the elegant new Robert and Elizabeth Barker Center, just across Quincy Street from the Yard. Af-Am used to be tucked away in a slightly decrepit house on a small side street a few blocks away, but Neil Rudenstine had helped raise $25 million to transform what had been the freshman dining hall into a stunning humanities complex. Afro-American Studies was a proud resident, along with the English department, the Committee on the History of American Civilization, the Committee on the Study of Religion, and others. The symbolism was important: Just as the proximity of federal agencies to the White House reflects their importance (or lack thereof), Harvard departments want to be as close as possible to the Yard. After being stuck on the outskirts of town, Af-Am had been integrated into prime real estate on campus.
It was about a month after graduation, and Harvard had settled into the rhythm of summer, when the campus feels considerably more easygoing than it does the rest of the year. Perhaps a dozen African American faculty and staff members had come to this meeting, including Gates, Anthony Appiah, law school professor Charles Ogletree, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, William Julius Wilson, and Charles Willie, a professor at the Graduate School of Education. They had gathered in the seminar room, a small but cozy space with room for about twenty and a blackboard at one end.
When Summers arrived, Gates gave him a tour of the department and presented him with a gift, a CD-ROM of Encarta Africana, the Microsoft-published encyclopedia that he and Appiah had edited. Higginbotham, a soft-spoken, dignified scholar of black religion and history, gave Summers a copy of The Harvard Guide to African-American History, for which she had served as editor-in-chief. Summers himself arrived bearing a gift of sorts. As he had wandered around campus, he said, he’d noticed the prevalence of academic centers devoted to the study of specific subjects—the Ukrainian Research Institute, for example. It seemed odd that there was no African studies center.
For the professors sitting around the seminar table, this was a welcome sign. Gates in particular had long wanted to expand the focus of his department to include Africa. How could you study African American history without studying Africa? But that would require more faculty, more staff, a travel budget—it was a major commitment.
The good start did not last long. Charles Ogletree, a law school professor known for his civil rights activism, asked Summers where he stood on the issue of affirmative action. Harvard had a tradition of supporting affirmative action, Ogletree said. The university had written an amicus curae brief in the fabled 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in which a white man named Allan Bakke sued after being rejected by the medical school at the University of California at Davis. Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., the critical swing vote in the decision t
o uphold affirmative action, had singled out Harvard as a practitioner of constructive and legal affirmative action. Now two more cases attacking affirmative action were headed to the Supreme Court, the ones involving Lee Bollinger and the University of Michigan. Would Summers align Harvard with the defense of affirmative action once more? And would he appoint blacks to top positions in the lily-white Harvard administration?
Until this point Summers had been civil, if not exactly warm. But he looked prickly at the questions, as if surprised that the subject had come up. “That’s one of the things that I need to think about,” he said. “I need to look at all the relevant data and decide what position Harvard will take, and that is something I plan to do in time.”
This was not the answer those assembled were expecting to hear. “I thought that, whatever your views, you should have not have allowed yourself to become president of a major university and not have made up your mind on affirmative action,” said one participant later. “It was very odd.”
Ogletree, a handsome, elegantly dressed man who can be as intense as he is smooth, did not look happy. Affirmative action was essentially a settled matter at Harvard, he continued. Former president Derek Bok had co-written an entire book articulating the need for affirmative action. How could Summers not have a position on it?
“I’ve read parts of that book, and I didn’t find it convincing,” Summers said. He wanted to look at more data before making up his mind.
“Come on, Larry,” Gates said, “that sounds like something you’d hear at a Washington press conference. I don’t think I heard you make a commitment to diversity.”
It was meant to be a joke to cut the tension, but Summers didn’t laugh. “He was coming to tell us that we weren’t going to get special treatment anymore, and he was upset by Ogletree’s style,” said one person present.
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