Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

  On the afternoon of October 11, after the pomp and circumstance was done—the transfer of the symbolic keys, the display of the 1650 charter—Summers stood on the stage in Tercentenary Theatre and talked about Harvard’s importance to the world. Universities are sometimes “derided as remote or not relevant,” Summers admitted. But that was wrong. Universities, and Harvard in particular, internalize creative tensions that promote their vitality and relevance.

  “The university is open to all ideas, but it is committed to the skepticism that is the hallmark of education,” Summers said. “All ideas are worthy of consideration here—but not all perspectives are equally valid.” Though universities ought to be places of passionate moral commitment, they were also places devoted to seeking knowledge regardless of its moral implications. Above all else, “We carry ancient traditions, but what is new is most important for us.” Every year a new crop of students brought new energy and ideas to the institution. Now, Summers implied, he was going to do the same—and in the rest of his speech, he talked about what that meant: A renewed emphasis on undergraduate education. A revamped curriculum. A new campus across the river in Allston. Greater emphasis upon the sciences at Harvard. Globalizing the university.

  The new president’s language was lofty and rhetorical, but the implications of his words were clear. Summers was proposing changes that would shape Harvard for decades to come—for the next century, really. If he could effect his agenda, Summers would go down in history as one of Harvard’s greatest presidents.

  Which meant that things really were going to change at Harvard. The old traditions didn’t matter to Larry Summers. Why, when he’d been handed the symbols of Harvard’s tradition—the keys, the charter—he’d held them up to the crowd with an expression that was half smile, half grimace.

  Summers would run things his way. And those in the audience—the faculty, administrators, and students who stayed after the parents and friends had left—could either get onboard or get out of the way. Starting now.

  Larry Summers and Cornel West met at 3:15 P.M. on October 24 in the president’s office in Massachusetts Hall.

  Mass Hall is a deceptive building. Just inside Johnston Gate, the main entrance to the Yard, it’s a four-story brick structure in the Early Georgian style, about one hundred feet long and forty feet wide. Dating to 1721, Mass Hall is the oldest extant building at Harvard, and was used to house soldiers of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. The first two floors consist of administrative offices, meeting rooms, and the president’s office. The third and fourth floors house freshmen said to be randomly chosen for these prime living quarters, although precisely no one on campus believes this. (Mass Hall freshmen have a reputation for being unusually studious and equally quiet.) The students enter by a dedicated side entrance; everyone else comes in through an unadorned green door in front. The president’s corner office is at the end of a long, blue-carpeted corridor on the left-hand side.

  Mass Hall gives the appearance of democratic access while in fact making the president’s office considerably more isolated than those of his counterparts at other universities. That the entrance has only one purpose discourages the curious from peering in; you wouldn’t simply wander into Mass Hall. Inside the front door is another, alarmed door that appears to be made of shatterproof glass. Next to the door is an electronic keypad and an intercom. An eye-level sign instructs, PLEASE ANNOUNCE YOURSELF TO THE SECRETARY. Below it a smaller, more discreet sign warns against trespassing.

  Though the president’s office is located on the ground floor, white interior shutters seal off the bottom half of every window. Members of the Harvard men’s basketball team might be able to peer over them, but for passersby of conventional height, the office of the Harvard president is, like Poe’s purloined letter, invisible in plain sight.

  Behind the shutters, Larry Summers’ office is perhaps thirty-five feet long by fifteen feet wide, with a fireplace in the middle of the interior long wall. It is tastefully decorated, with a crimson-colored carpet, half-moon wall lights, and a grandfather clock. A seating area in the rear half includes a lowback couch, three brown-leather chairs, and a coffee table. Summers’ desk and computer nook are in the front. Opposite them is a bureau containing some of the numerous framed photographs that decorate the office: a portrait of Summers’ three children, a picture of him with Bill Clinton and Al Gore, a framed dollar bill bearing his signature from his time as treasury secretary. There are two doorways, one near Summers’ desk and one in the far corner of the office, so that visitors can be whisked out the back even as others are ushered in the front.

  On that October day, Cornel West and Larry Summers sat facing each other in two of the leather chairs. It was just the two of them, which was a little unusual. Numerous people who’d already met with Summers had been struck by the fact that he seemed to do nothing without an aide present, meticulously taking notes in the background.

  After a few moments of small talk, Summers got down to business. “I want you to help me fuck Harvey Mansfield,” he said.

  West was shocked. He knew right away that Summers was playing a head game, trying to enlist him in the fight against grade inflation by presenting the matter as a way of undercutting the man who blamed the problem on affirmative action. Summers apparently didn’t know that Mansfield and West were friends.

  You don’t know me from Adam, West thought. There’s no need to swear. Don’t assume that because I’m a black brother with an Afro that that’s going to make me more comfortable.

  “I don’t need that kind of talk about a colleague,” West said.

  Well, Summers replied, I am a little upset that the grades you’re giving out might be contributing to the problem of grade inflation. But I’ll get back to that.

  I’ll get back to that? West was already feeling blindsided. There was more?

  Summers then moved to the subject of West’s alleged absences from campus, accusing him of missing three weeks of classes while campaigning for Bill Bradley in the 2000 primary. “I’ll have none of that,” he said.

  West adamantly denied the charge. “Man, you must be kidding,” he said. “My calling as a teacher is primary and paramount. I haven’t missed two classes for over twenty-seven years. Bill Bradley is my dear brother, I would do anything for him—other than that. I wouldn’t do that for anybody.”

  West wanted to know who had told Summers that he skipped classes. Summers said he had three reliable sources, but declined to name them. Anyway, Summers said, now you’re supporting a candidate whom nobody respects.

  He didn’t name names, but West took that as a reference to Al Sharpton, and argued that he had the right to support whatever political candidate he wanted to.

  I’m concerned about you being a “good citizen” of the university, Summers continued—a phrase West would later jot down in his journal—because of your travels away from campus giving lectures or campaigning.

  West pointed out that over the past year he’d given more than thirty talks to campus student groups. Could Summers name another professor who’d given so much of his time?

  The two men were flat-out arguing now, their voices raised. Instead of backing off, Summers was actually growing more animated. More intense. Rocking back and forth, but never looking West in the eye. West had never seen anything like it. Larry Summers seemed to be energized by this. Enjoying it.

  Summers abruptly switched subjects. He said that he was concerned about the level of West’s scholarship. It was too popular and insufficiently serious. He wanted West to write books that would be reviewed in scholarly journals, not the New York Times and the New York Review of Books.

  In fact, only a few of West’s books had been reviewed by those organs. Frankly, West said, he wouldn’t mind it if the Times reviewed more of his work.

  No, Summers reiterated, he was very concerned about this issue. As a University Professor, West had an obligation to set an example of high scholarship. If he wasn’t setting
that example, he shouldn’t spend his time messing around with politics and social activism. Summers wanted West’s work to be “purely scholarly”—another phrase that West wrote in his journal.

  His concern, Summers added, was really a compliment. Just look at economist Robert Reich, Summers’ former Dukakis campaign colleague and Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, now a professor at Brandeis University who had unsuccessfully run for Massachusetts governor in2000. Reich, Summers said, wasn’t even capable of the level of work Summers wanted West to perform. Reich was just a popularizer. West wanted to be more than that, didn’t he?

  West didn’t see why you couldn’t be both a scholar and a popularizer.

  But that rap CD that you recorded, Summers said—it’s an embarrassment and it has nothing to do with the Harvard tradition.

  “I am as much a part of the Harvard tradition as you are,” West shot back, “and we all have our distinctive interpretations of it.” After all, both of them carried Harvard degrees.

  Summers wouldn’t let it go. He told West that he wanted him to write an academic text that wrestled with and interpreted a particular philosophic tradition.

  West couldn’t believe it. What right did Summers have to tell him what he should write about? Summers was an economist. To suggest that he knew enough about another field to tell a Harvard professor what to work on—that was just hubris. If West had told Summers what to research, Summers would have laughed in his face, and appropriately so.

  Summers said that he wanted West to do two things in their subsequent meetings.

  Subsequent meetings? West thought. “What’s that?” he asked.

  Summers wanted West to bring him every grade that he’d ever given in Af-Am 10.

  “You can get that yourself,” West said. “Just ask the registrar.”

  No, Summers said, I want you to get every grade you’ve given and bring them to me.

  West was reeling. He couldn’t think of any reason Summers would make such a request—other than to humiliate him.

  And, Summers said, he wanted to see West again in two to three months, to see how he was progressing on that book. His assistant would set it up.

  At 4:05, fifty minutes after the meeting had begun, Cornel West walked out of Larry Summers’ office and past his secretary. He didn’t bother to make a return appointment.

  In time, Larry Summers’ meeting with Cornel West would receive a massive amount of press attention, most of which focused on the disparate personalities of the two men and the possibility that the tension between them was racially based. On campus, however, professors and students debated another issue, one that was hard to understand for people unfamiliar with the culture of a research university: the nature of academic freedom.

  Perhaps no one at Harvard knows more about the subject than former FAS dean Henry Rosovsky. Rosovsky is in his late seventies now, with a quiet, serene demeanor that belies a sharp and inquisitive mind. Though he was once a professor, a dean, and a member of the Harvard Corporation, he now has no official role at the university. But such is the respect in which Rosovsky is held that he retains an office on the second floor of Loeb House, where the Corporation holds its monthly meetings. The Moshe Safdie–designed headquarters of Harvard Hillel, built in 1992, is named Rosovsky Hall.

  Rosovsky is a modest, self-deprecatory man, proud of his accomplishments but uncomfortable talking about them. He does, however, care deeply about universities—their operation, their excellence, the strength of the social contract between them and the American public whose tax dollars support them. So, in 1990, he wrote a book on the subject called The University—An Owner’s Manual. He meant the term “owner” to refer to anyone who feels some stake in the university: students, professors, parents, alumni, staff. Or just Americans who believe that the American system of higher education is one of the things that makes the United States a unique and special place.

  In the book, Rosovsky explains how Harvard’s tenure system works and how it protects academic freedom at Harvard. When a tenured position comes open, the members of the relevant department are charged with finding the best person “in the world” for the job. The senior faculty in the department—that is to say, tenured professors—spend months searching for a candidate. After a leading candidate emerges, the department chair sends out a letter to scholars at other universities asking for their evaluations. The letter includes the names of the person being considered and of other scholars tossed in as camouflage. (It’s generally believed that this cloaking device fools no one; everybody knows who the real candidate is.) If the responses to this letter are encouraging, the department nomination goes to the FAS dean.

  If the dean approves, he then sends the nomination to something called an ad hoc committee, a group made up of the president, the dean, three scholars in the field from other universities, and two Harvard professors not in the relevant department. Ad hoc committees meet to weigh the merits of every person nominated for tenure at Harvard College. These can be tense gatherings. “I have seen distinguished older scholars treating one another with icy courtesy only barely masking contempt,” Rosovsky writes.

  The Harvard president must approve or reject every tenure recommendation for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. That enormous power gives the president the tangible authority to shape the intellectual composition of his university—and to slap down department heads making choices of which he disapproves. (Imagine if, say, Congress nominated Supreme Court justices, and the president had the power to veto them.)

  Deciding upon tenure nominations is also an enormous burden. Every year, there are about twenty ad hoc meetings at Harvard College, each requiring hours of preparation on the part of the president, who must intimately familiarize himself with the candidate’s work. The meetings themselves last about four hours. The president must weigh a decision which has required months of work by members of his faculty—or, in the case of the candidate, a life’s work. Rejection is devastating. “From that point on, the scholar is marked with a scarlet letter, always having to explain the basis of a presumably mistaken negative judgment,” Rosovsky writes. “In every case with which I am familiar, the result is a scar that may not even be wiped out by the award of the highest professional honors.”

  But the end result of this arduous gauntlet, Rosovsky argues, is that Harvard accumulates a remarkable group of scholars who have survived the most rigorous weeding-out process the university can devise.

  And then, once someone is granted tenure, they are left alone to write and research as they see fit. This is the very point of tenure—to guarantee academic freedom; to protect professors from the Joe McCarthys of the world, whether inside or outside the university. True, once in a while, you get a dud. Maybe 3 percent of the people chosen turn out to disappoint, to be unproductive, never to write another book. But Harvard can live with 3 percent. The benefits of tenure more than justify a minuscule failure rate.

  Besides, “failure” is hard to define. Scholars are human beings—sometimes quirky, often high-maintenance—who work on their own schedules. Rosovsky remembered one professor who didn’t publish a thing for years and years. His colleagues began to whisper: What was with this guy? Yet Rosovsky never pressured the man, giving him his customary annual raise without question. In 1971, after almost two decades of virtually nothing, the professor, whose name was John Rawls, published a book. It was called A Theory of Justice, and it would be considered perhaps the most important work of political philosophy published in the last half-century. When Rawls died in 2002, he was remembered as one of Harvard’s greatest professors. The fact that he’d gone some twenty years without publishing any major work was largely forgotten.

  Tenure isn’t just about giving people the freedom to publish what and when they want; it creates a secure environment in which professors can freely speak their minds, on any subject, so that they can push the envelope of thought without fear of penalty. Such freedom is the very heart of the university, and Harvard has
a long tradition of defending it. “There is no middle ground,” Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who was president from 1909 to 1933, once said. “Either the university assumes full responsibility for permitting its professors to express certain opinions in public, or it assumes no responsibility whatever, and leaves them to be dealt with like other citizens by the public authorities according to the laws of the land.”

  Derek Bok also wrote eloquently on the subject. “Brilliant and creative people are sometimes eccentric or even irresponsible…” he argued when he was president. “As a result, in institutions whose overriding purpose is to discover and transmit knowledge, it has often seemed best to tolerate unpopular opinions and questionable behavior for the sake of giving the most talented individuals the opportunity to publish and teach.”

  In an interview with Newsweek about seven months before his meeting with West, Larry Summers himself endorsed the notion that professors’ politics were their own business. Asked whether it was appropriate for a university president to take political stands, Summers responded, “Universities—as distinct from the scholars who work in them—have to be very careful about political involvement” (emphasis added).

  Of course, the Harvard president has the authority to meet with University Professors. James Bryant Conant, who created the position, wanted University Professors to be answerable only to the president, as opposed to the FAS dean. That chain of command was not the issue in the case of Cornel West. The problem was that the concerns Summers raised with West seemed to undermine long-established ideas about the nature of tenure at Harvard. Criticizing a professor over the pace of his scholarship? His political opinions? It just wasn’t done. For one thing, if you chastised every professor who went a few years without publishing a major book—or a minor one, for that matter—you’d run out of voice long before you ran out of professors.