“He’s the kind of inspiring teacher that people have as a fantasy of the Ivy League,” said one Harvard professor. And in the fall of 2001, he was more popular than he had ever been. Af-Am 10 had some seven hundred students, making it the third most popular course at Harvard; in fact, West had clashed with university administrators who wanted him to cut the class size in half—they couldn’t seem to find a classroom big enough to hold all those students. West had refused, and wound up teaching in the basement of St. Paul’s, a local Catholic church.
Maybe, West thought later, that fight was a sign of things to come. Perhaps he was being paranoid, but it seemed that suddenly the powers-that-be wanted him to be a little less popular. He couldn’t help but think that this would never have happened when Neil Rudenstine was president, and he wondered if Larry Summers was trying to show that he would use his power very differently than Rudenstine had.
Among the ranks of people who might be considered for the job of a university president, the presidency of Harvard has long been seen as a structurally weak position. Harvard’s every-tub-on-its-own-bottom tradition makes its deans unusually powerful figures. But the powers of the presidency do create opportunities for a president with sufficient energy, determination, and diplomacy to change the institution in radical ways—especially if he focuses on Harvard College. After the Civil War, Charles William Eliot abolished the prescribed curriculum and introduced elective courses, probably the most crucial step in making Harvard a world-class university. In the 1910s and 1920s, Abbott Lawrence Lowell imposed a system of undergraduate concentrations and built the Harvard houses, which physically and psychologically transformed the campus by eliminating the “Gold Coast,” the luxurious private housing where rich students isolated themselves. And in the years before and during World War II, James Bryant Conant began the transformation of Harvard from a school for New England’s social elite to an undergraduate meritocracy, with students from private and public schools all over the country.
Some of the powers of the Harvard president are tangible. He has the power to appoint university vice-presidents, the administrators who perform the corporate functions of the university—finance, community relations, real estate planning, and the like. Those are relatively anonymous positions within the university, but they are powerful ones, and the larger a university becomes, the more power accrues to the people who know how to administer its bureaucracy.
The president also appoints new deans when the old ones step down, another method of solidifying his power. For many academics, deanships are desired positions. They bring larger salaries than professorships, higher profiles, and power of their own; the deans set salaries, allocate office space, approve sabbaticals, raise money, and shape the academic agenda for their schools. Sometimes deans are visionary figures with concrete agendas and administrative skills; other times they are academics who’ve wearied of the hard, lonely life of a scholar.
Not surprisingly, the president can compel promises of allegiance in exchange for appointments. His challenge is to find people who will submit to such quid pro quos, but are nonetheless able enough to run their schools. If he desired, the president could appoint an obeisant hack to head, say, the Kennedy School, but the coherence and morale of the school would inevitably suffer, especially if the dean lost the confidence of his faculty. So the power to appoint deans is a substantial one, yet must be carefully wielded.
The president also raises money from and fosters healthy relations with alumni. Although Harvard’s individual schools conduct their own fundraising campaigns, the president is expected to help. Of course, some schools need the president’s help more than others. “A responsible president will spend a certain amount of time helping the divinity school and the design school and the education school raise funds,” said Derek Bok. “But he wouldn’t walk across the street to help the business school raise funds. If the dean can’t raise funds with that constituency, you’d better get a new dean.”
The president also has a self-interest in fundraising. He has his own slice of the endowment at his disposal—it falls under the rubric of “central administration”—and although most Harvard alumni don’t realize this, about five percent of every dollar they give is tithed and redirected to the president’s monies. That way the president can support projects of particular importance to him, whether it be funding for a faculty endeavor or fellowships for scholars he wants to support. The money to initiate projects and reward the favored is another form of the president’s power.
The president also meets with the other Corporation members to discuss university priorities and—another tangible power—sign off on the budgets of the various schools. It’s rare for a president to intervene significantly in a school’s budget, because any self-respecting dean would probably quit after such an incursion upon his autonomy. But it does happen, especially if the school is in shaky financial shape.
Perhaps the most important of the Harvard president’s powers is that he makes the final decision on candidates for tenure. Every professor up for tenure at Harvard College or at some of Harvard’s graduate schools—the school of education and the divinity school, for example—must be approved by the president. This gives him direct control over the makeup of a department and the intellectual direction of the university. Again, withholding approval is rarely done; a president who vetoed too many tenure nominations or who rejected them for dubious reasons would likely prompt faculty rebellion.
And then, of course, there are the intangible powers of the Harvard president, the ones that flow from his bully pulpit. An activist president can set the academic agenda of the university as a whole and Harvard College in particular. Since the college is Harvard’s crown jewel, by tradition the president gives it the lion’s share of his attention. He sets his agenda by garnering the support of the Corporation and the Board of Overseers, giving speeches, appointing committees, reaching out to the alumni, using the tangible powers of his office, and exploiting his unparalleled access to the press, granting interviews with favored publications and meeting with the editorial boards of newspapers and newsmagazines. The president of Harvard can make national and international headlines anytime he wants to—again, a power most effective when used judiciously. Even people with a bullhorn will eventually be ignored if they overuse it.
The success of a Harvard president depends not only on the powers he has but also his leadership style. He can try to impose his will upon the Harvard community, but if its members don’t accept the validity of his mandates, or the manner in which they are applied, the university will grind to a halt, sputtering with dissatisfaction and unrest. Faculty, students, alumni, and staff all place enormous weight on leadership style. They want their president to be eloquent and erudite, poised and polished, sophisticated and witty—for, more than anyone else, he personifies Harvard and communicates the character and values of the institution to the outside world.
At the same time, they want their leader to be personable, accessible, likable, and strong in a velvet-glove sort of way, a sage father figure who is also a man of the people—or, at least, of the people who study and work at Harvard. Many universities are now so concerned with the proper administration of their financial affairs that they hire business executives with no academic background to serve as presidents. At Harvard, such a move would be inconceivable (one reason why Robert Rubin, who had never been a professor, would have been a controversial choice). Harvard presidents are supposed to be scholars first and administrators second.
Since World War II, no man has filled that multiplicity of roles more successfully than Derek Bok. As law school dean from 1968 to 1971, Bok made a reputation for himself as a conciliator with a diplomatic touch. In the spring of 1968, a group of several dozen law students staged a sit-in at the law school library. Bok responded by bringing the students coffee and donuts. Standing on a table, he addressed their concerns and took their questions. But as Bok was clambering down from his podium, blood rushed to his
head and he fainted.
“When I woke up I was surrounded not by angry student radicals, but by anxious student radicals who thought they might have given me a heart attack or something,” Bok remembered. “They were very solicitous—eat this, eat that. They drove me home, and for the rest of the term, I got treated pretty well. Then, after the summer, they felt free to be cranky again.”
As president from 1971 to 1991, Bok maintained an image that was somehow both aristocratic and democratic. He was fit and handsome, with a rumpled, tweedy look. He drove a Volkswagen Beetle. He waited in line at the local Harvard Trust bank, listening to suggestions and complaints about Harvard from other customers even as he deposited his checks. He bought his lunch at the Au Bon Pain on Massachusetts Avenue, across Harvard Yard. With an equally attractive, accomplished wife—Swedish philosopher Sissela Bok—Bok appeared to have a charmed life. And yet he seemed such a fundamentally decent man that few could resent his good fortune.
Now seventy-five years old, Bok bears the title of president emeritus and retains an office in the Kennedy School, which he helped to create; he once dreamed of serving in the Kennedy administration and is a longtime advocate of public service who championed the cause of a school to train people for work in government. He spoke about the leadership role of the Harvard president on the condition that his remarks not be interpreted as bearing on any particular president.
“You can’t get good books written and classes taught well by issuing orders,” Bok explained. “Even if, theoretically, you have the power to do that. But you can influence the agenda, get people to focus on your issues. You can try to exhort, teach, persuade. It’s all those gentle arts.
“There are presidents who try to lead with fear,” Bok continued. “They are very tough and they push their powers to the limit. And there are presidents who try to lead in other ways, by winning the respect or even the affection of the faculty.
“A lot depends on this intangible relationship you have with the faculty. If you can’t at least persuade yourself that you have some reasonable amount of respectful attention from them, the job for anybody—any satisfaction they get from the job—is seriously impaired. Of course, you’re the president for all the constituencies of the university, but especially for the faculty. You’re one of them. You’re killing yourself to make this a better place for them. And then they turn around and say, ‘You’re a trivial person. I don’t believe what you say. That windbag.’ It just takes the guts out of you. If they don’t have respect for you, if they don’t trust you, that’s fatal.
“It’s not every bit of faculty opposition that should discourage you. If they don’t like the fact that you’ve taken a position that makes them uncomfortable or challenges their authority in some way, it may be very important to stand your ground.
“You have to be very discriminating about when you get disheartened and when you don’t,” Bok concluded. “It can feel the same. But some of these occasions are the mark of a really distinguished presidency, and others are the mark of a hopeless presidency.”
In September and October 2001, Larry Summers was wasting no time in showing Harvard that he had a very different agenda and style than his predecessor—than any of his predecessors, in fact. Perhaps the first public sign of this came when he addressed the incoming freshmen on September 2 and warned them not to be intimidated by their new surroundings. “Harry Truman said of the United States Senate that ‘the first six months, I wondered why I was there. And ever after, I wondered why all my colleagues were there.’”
Summers’ remark struck an odd note, and was interpreted by some campus observers as a shot across the bow, a sign that he would not be daunted by his return to a place where continuity and tradition were venerated. Some listeners heard a hint of skepticism, if not disrespect, for the Harvard faculty in Summers’ words. Possibly they were reading too much into it—but then, for scholars, this is an occupational hazard.
Just nine days later, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington occurred, and on September 21 Summers delivered a somber address in Memorial Church. Peter Gomes’ church has a long-standing tradition of a brief morning service known as Morning Prayers, which is characterized by a hymn, a prayer, and a short talk by any member of the community on a matter of moral and spiritual concern. The Morning Prayers service is normally held in Appleton Chapel, a small sanctuary at the very front of the church separated from the main nave by a wooden partition. It contains merely a pulpit and about six rows of pews on each side. But in the days after September 11, people at Harvard, like people all over America, were seeking solace, and so Summers delivered his Morning Prayers talk to a church filled to overflowing.
“I expected, in the first month of the term, to visit many parts of this university,” Summers began. “This pulpit was not one of them.”
For Peter Gomes, who was sitting near Summers in the church that day, this seemed an odd remark. Gomes believed that, even in a secular university—perhaps especially in a secular university—a spiritual haven was essential. Faith, whatever form it took, infused the work of Harvard with morality and conscience. Not to mention humility. Having a church in the middle of Harvard Yard reminded Harvardians not to get too cocky. So at a time when thousands of community members were seeking the solace of Memorial Church, Summers’ remark struck Gomes as gratuitous.
Summers spoke then of the difficulty of grieving and the importance of moving on. He reminded his audience that “the time we spend with our loved ones is most precious,” and he emphasized that Harvard had its own distinctive role to play in the fight against terrorism. “With what’s going on in the world, does it matter if I do my calculus homework or go to field hockey practice? With all that is going on in the world, is it right to carry on with my work of managing accounts or teaching my small class?”
His answer was, it mattered more than ever. In a time of war, the work of a university—the daily rituals of teaching and learning—might seem less urgent. But over the long run it constituted the road to peace. “We will not succumb to the temptation of nihilism,” Summers said. “We will carry on our work.” From his own experience with cancer, Summers knew how immersing oneself in work helped one carry on even when staring death in the face.
Summers’ official inauguration was held three weeks later. The timing was slightly awkward, and not just because of the heightened security that the terrorist attacks had prompted. On October 7 and 8, two long articles on grade inflation at Harvard appeared in the Boston Globe. Reporter Patrick Healy found that an astonishing 91 percent of Harvard students graduated with honors. At Yale, by comparison, the number was about 51 percent; at Princeton, 44 percent. Healy wrote that the easing of the standards required to earn an A was Harvard’s “dirty little secret,” and it was corroding the value of a Harvard diploma.
The Globe articles caused consternation on campus. Many professors thought that the origins of grade inflation could be traced to Vietnam, when professors were reluctant to grade harshly because of the risk that failing students would become eligible for the draft. Others, such as Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, argued that because Harvard students were outstanding, one would expect them to get good grades. (Not surprisingly, this belief was widely shared by students.) Another possibility was that grade inflation stemmed from the fact that most grading at Harvard was done by graduate student teaching fellows, who might have had a different idea than professors did of what constituted honors-level work.
The most controversial explanation was advocated by government professor Harvey C. Mansfield. Mansfield was old school—literally. He’d been at Harvard since 1949, earning his bachelor’s degree and then, in 1961, his Ph.D. A scholar of Machiavelli, he’ d joined the faculty in 1962 and earned a reputation as a proud conservative. One of Mansfield’s longtime frustrations was grade inflation. He’d been talking about it for so long that students started calling him “Harvey C-minus Mansfield.” Mansfield joked that the C stood for compassion,
explaining that “that’s what I lack when it comes to grading.”
For Mansfield, grade inflation was directly attributable to the influx of black students at Harvard that occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s. These students weren’t prepared for Harvard’s rigor, Mansfield argued, and liberal professors didn’t want to stigmatize them with bad grades. “White professors, imbibing the spirit of affirmative action, stopped giving low or average grades to black students and, to justify or conceal it, stopped giving those grades to white students as well,” Mansfield said.
Mansfield’s explanation disturbed many on the faculty, and one man in particular strove to rebut it: Harry Lewis, the dean of Harvard College. Though Lewis oversaw the non-academic side of college life, he felt strongly enough about the issue to speak against Mansfield. He too was a Harvard man through and through, a computer scientist who’d earned his Harvard B.A. in 1968 and his doctorate in 1974.
The numbers didn’t support Mansfield, Lewis argued. Data Lewis had compiled showed that grades had been rising at Harvard since the 1920s; in fact, the only fifteen-year period during which grades did not go up was from 1970 to 1985. The idea that grade inflation had stemmed from the lenient grading of black students was the result of gossip, Lewis said, and “gossip is a dangerous basis for a social theory.”
Nonetheless, the statistics in the Globe articles resonated. Ninety-one percent! Regardless of the nuances of the situation, the perception that Harvard had become far less academically rigorous than its competitors was devastating. An incoming president would be compelled to address the issue.
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