And there was another problem. On the facts in question, Summers was simply wrong—and he had been warned that he was wrong. In the days before West’s meeting, Skip Gates had written Summers a long memo in which he rebutted the allegations Summers had mentioned. West missed classes? Not true, Gates wrote. If Cornel West had missed three weeks of classes, you’d have read about that on page one of the Harvard Crimson. Grade inflation? That wasn’t true either, and outside sources agreed. “Cornel was not the biggest offender,” one high-ranking Harvard administrator said. “If you went down the list of who was giving all As, Cornel would not be high on the list, and certainly no worse than a lot of people.” Even if the charge were accurate, grade inflation was clearly a systemic problem; you didn’t address it by attacking one professor.
What, then, explained Summers’ decision to lambaste one of Harvard’s most esteemed professors?
After Cornel West left Mass Hall that afternoon, he called Skip Gates to tell him what had transpired. Gates couldn’t believe it. “That man is going out of his way to demean you,” Gates said. Then West called his old friend, the writer Toni Morrison, who teaches creative writing at Princeton. “Summers has lost his mind,” Morrison said.
For the next two months, West would ponder his meeting with Summers, discussing it with only a few close friends. He couldn’t make sense of it. Why would a new president make calling West on the carpet one of his first official acts? Why would he attack an African American professor to whom his predecessor awarded Harvard’s highest honor, the title of University Professor, and a member of the department that Neil Rudenstine considered his most important legacy? Why would he embarrass West with allegations he had good reason to believe were untrue? And why would he instruct West to appear for mandatory intellectual check-ups when he must have known that no Harvard professor would accept such babysitting?
The more he thought about it, the harder it was for West to avoid the conclusion that Larry Summers wanted him gone. West had tenure; it was virtually impossible for Summers to fire him. But he could make Cornel West’s life at Harvard so miserable that West would leave of his own volition.
Over the next days and weeks, rumors began to fly, first within the Af-Am department and then beyond. West’s colleagues knew that something bad had happened between the professor and the president, but they didn’t know exactly what—except that whatever had gone on, it was upsetting enough that West was thinking of quitting. Soon a reporter from the Boston Globe showed up outside West’s office door. West wouldn’t talk to him. The rumors were also circulating down south, at Princeton. And when Princeton provost Amy Gutmann—whose name had been leaked as a candidate for the Harvard presidency to make it seem that the Corporation was seriously considering a woman—called West to see if he would consider returning, West took that call.
There are academic departments at Harvard whose members are competitive with one another, don’t like one another, and don’t trust one another. In recent times, for example, the Department of History has been so bitterly divided that it couldn’t agree on tenure candidates, and the senior professors grew older and older until the department fell into decline. The Departments of Government and Economics, two of the more powerful groupings of faculty, are also known for their internecine tensions.
But Afro American Studies is a small department whose members care about one another, take an interest in one another’s work, and socialize with one another outside of their official duties. “I have been in lots of departments” at other schools, said Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. “I have been in history departments, I have been in other African American departments. I have never been in a department where people like each other so much. It is truly a community.”
For months, this community tried to persuade Cornel West that he should not head to Princeton. What had happened with Summers could be patched up, Gates and others insisted. And if it couldn’t, West should stay to act as a thorn in Summers’ side. “Don’t break up the team,” Gates urged West.
But West was pessimistic. Not once after their meeting had he heard from Summers. The president must have known that West hadn’t scheduled another appointment, but he didn’t seem to care—which only reinforced West’s conviction that Summers wanted him out.
West was also distracted by tensions in his personal life. Recently diagnosed with prostate cancer, he would soon undergo an operation to remove the tumor. He was also going through a difficult divorce. As his marriage had begun to fall apart, he’d become romantically involved with a thirty-eight-year-old woman who was studying at the Kennedy School on a journalism fellowship. The woman had become pregnant and would decide to keep the baby. Although she and West would not stay together, West was determined to be a good father to his new daughter. Still, it was a messy, painful situation, and the tongues of campus gossips were wagging. “There was a rumor that the mother of my precious daughter was a twenty-one-year-old junior,” West said. “I heard it from friends—even Skip and others were saying, ‘Corn, I don’t know what the heck is going on, but there’s this thing…’ I said, wait a minute, I haven’t touched an undergraduate in twenty-seven years of teaching.”
On December 22, a Boston Globe reporter named David Abel—the one who’d shown up at West’s office—broke the story: Skip Gates’ Dream Team was in turmoil because of tensions with new president Larry Summers. West was thinking of heading to Princeton. So was Anthony Appiah, whose significant other lived in New York City. If West and Appiah left, could Gates be far behind? Charles Ogletree spoke on West’s behalf, saying that it would be “a miscarriage of justice if for any reason Cornel were no longer at Harvard.” Summers, meanwhile, explained that he had not meant to offend West. “It’s a very unfortunate misunderstanding,” he said. Just to reaffirm the point, an anonymous Harvard official called the situation “a huge misunderstanding.” Summers and his aides would use that term again and again over the next weeks, months, and years. West thought that was kind of funny. There was no misunderstanding; Summers had made himself perfectly clear.
One week later, the story of the president and the professor appeared on the front page of the New York Times, and after that in newspapers across the country and the world. The Times account enlarged the issues at stake. West and Gates, wrote reporter Jacques Steinberg, were considering leaving because “Mr. Summers…has yet to speak out forcefully enough in favor of affirmative action and diversity.”
That wasn’t quite true. Summers’ disastrous meeting with West was by far the most pressing issue at hand, and people on both sides of the matter suspected that Charles Ogletree had just piggybacked on the West controversy to pressure Summers on affirmative action. If that was his intention, it worked. On January 1, Jesse Jackson arrived in Cambridge to proclaim that “Harvard must be a beacon of light for the nation, not a shadow of doubt.” Al Sharpton announced that he, too, would be paying a visit.
This was not the kind of attention that the Harvard Corporation hoped for when it hired Summers. Though Bob Rubin had assured them that Summers was a changed man, this was just the kind of ugly episode others had warned of. And so Corporation member Conrad Harper, the only black on the Corporation, called Summers and strongly urged him to defuse the crisis.
On January 2, Larry Summers released a public statement reaffirming his commitment to a diverse campus. “I take pride in Harvard’s long-standing commitment to diversity,” his statement said. “I believe it essential for us to maintain that commitment…” But privately, Summers was furious. He had never expressed doubts about the value of diversity; he’d only questioned the merits of affirmative action as a means to that end. Summers had never anticipated that chastising West could lead to such an uproar and leave him exposed to charges of racism.
On January 3, Summers and West finally met again in Mass Hall, this time an evening meeting, at Summers’ request. At first they spoke of personal matters; Summers asked about West’s illness, and shared his own experience with cancer. W
est appreciated the concern, and he was impressed with the strength that Summers had shown during his treatment. Summers then thanked West for not having made their disagreement a racial issue, which startled West a little, because he believed that, at least in part, it was a racial issue.
Over the course of the meeting, Summers repeatedly apologized to West. He cited Richard Posner’s recent book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, which called West one of the most often-cited scholars in the country. As the rest of Harvard would learn soon enough, with Summers, it was all about the data. Arguments from the heart didn’t move him; he wanted to see numbers. And he hadn’t seen these numbers before his and West’s first conversation. He confessed that he wished that he had; he would have reconsidered some of his earlier remarks.
Neither of them may have realized it, but the two men were similar in ways besides their experiences with cancer. Each was a charismatic figure who had attracted numerous admirers and a subset of equally fervent critics. Each was living through the pain of a failed marriage. And both were academics who may have compromised their intellectual potential for a career in the public eye. For all his gifts, Cornel West had never had “a single compelling idea of his own,” author Sam Tanenhaus would later write in Vanity Fair—the exact same criticism that many economists applied to Summers.
West was heartened by Summers’ outreach for all of about twelve hours. The next morning, he picked up the New York Times and read an account of their meeting—an account that had not come from him. “Summers resolved the last issue with the Afro-American Studies department when he met with Dr. West and cleared the air, though he made no explicit apology,” the article said. No explicit apology? West couldn’t believe it. He called Summers and demanded an explanation; Summers said that the Times must have misquoted him. West didn’t buy it. He decided that Summers had lied to the Times and was now lying to him.
“That’s when I decided to leave,” West said. “I can’t deal with a place where people stab me in the back.” That apology had mattered to West. Everyone in the world, it seemed, knew what Summers had accused him of. It was only fair that they read that it wasn’t true.
Three weeks later, on January 25, philosopher Anthony Appiah announced that he was leaving Harvard to teach at Princeton. The decision was made for personal reasons, he said—he wanted to be closer to his partner. But the West affair surely contributed to his decision. “I don’t think Anthony would have left if all this hadn’t happened,” said Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Appiah didn’t want to break up the dream team, but “this opened a door that Anthony could go through.” Meanwhile, Ogletree announced that he was weighing a possible offer to be dean of the law school at Washington’s Howard University. And one newspaper article after another suggested that Skip Gates had one foot out the door as well.
In some venues, though, Summers was winning the PR war. “In all politics, one needs an enemy, and preferably an incompetent, misguided, or socially adverse one,” Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote. Summers had chosen an enemy who could be easily caricatured. With his afro and black suits and street slang—indeed, by the very color of his skin—West hardly looked or sounded like the stereotype of a Harvard professor. Quoted out of context, his writings were easily lampooned. And then there was that “rap” CD.
And so cultural conservatives—both white and black—cheered Larry Summers. He wished only to restore “excellence,” they said, and Cornel West was, well, less than excellent. To them, West epitomized the kind of tenured radical who had torn apart universities in 1960s protests, then found sinecures drinking cappuccino and preaching revolution from within the security of ivy walls. The Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and the New Republic all praised Summers for calling West on the carpet. (As a general rule, the fewer the number of black staffers at a news organization, the greater was its hostility to West.) Forbes magazine suggested that if West left Harvard, he could be replaced by the rapper Eminem. In the New York Times, black academic John McWhorter criticized Harvard’s Af-Am scholars for “shooting a gun at Larry Summers’ feet and making him do the ‘I’m not a racist’ dance.” Another black conservative, Shelby Steele, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Summers’ “rebuke [of West] for failing to deliver excellence was an act of social responsibility.” Since none of these critics appeared to know what had actually transpired between the two men, their conclusions seemed drawn from their own politics rather than from any fact-based interpretation of the situation.
On campus, students were dismayed and the professoriat divided. In early April, 1,200 students petitioned West not to leave. But few professors outside of Af-Am spoke on his behalf. Some agreed with Summers that West deserved to be criticized; others simply did not want to get involved. They didn’t know exactly what had happened, and saw no gain in picking a fight with the new president. Every tub was indeed on its own bottom.
Meanwhile, Harvard alums—particularly those who had graduated before, say, the mid-1960s—rallied round their school’s new president. “There’s an enormous reservoir of goodwill out there” for any Harvard president, explained Derek Bok. “You can feel it when the alumni come back for reunions or when you go speak in different cities. These people want him to succeed, and they want to love and respect the institution, and to respect the president, simply because they assume that if he was chosen, he’s the guy.”
When many Harvard alumni looked at the situation, they saw a white man who was the former secretary of the treasury, a man of Nobel-level intelligence—after all, Harvard had told them that—taking on a black professor who supported Al Sharpton and recorded rap CDs. Letters to the university ran three-to-one in Summers’ favor. Still, staffers who worked in alumni affairs weren’t entirely happy about the mail they were getting. A number of the letters—a substantial enough number that the staffers were genuinely disturbed—could only be described as racist.
West could not imagine a scenario in which he could remain at Harvard without seeming to endorse Summers’ aspersions. And he didn’t want to stay just to make things difficult for Summers. Life was too short for that. West wanted to be somewhere that wanted him.
On April 12, Skip Gates sent around a short e-mail to his colleagues in Af-Am and elsewhere. Cornel West would be joining Anthony Appiah at Princeton in the fall of 2002. If you had happened to walk into several departments around Harvard that day—Af-Am, history and literature, English—you would have seen people crying after they’d read that e-mail.
And that wasn’t even the end of the matter. With West leaving, would Gates be next? If Skip Gates left, the whole thing—the department that Neil Rudenstine had cherished and built up for a decade—would implode. No one would stick around in a department that had lost Anthony Appiah, Cornel West, and Skip Gates. That’d be like buying a ticket for the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.
In the months and years following Cornel West’s departure, Larry Summers would largely avoid the subject, refusing to get into the specifics of what had happened. When asked about it by the Crimson in October 2002, he said, “I have not talked about the content of that meeting and certainly do not intend to start now.”
But that wasn’t quite true. At an off-the-record meeting with the editorial board of the New York Times that same fall, one Times editor asked Summers what had really happened with Cornel West. According to several people familiar with the exchange, Summers coolly replied, “What would you do if you had a professor with a sexual harassment problem?”
The remark, apparently an inaccurate reference to West’s relationship with the visiting journalist, made its way back to several professors who were friendly with West. They did not mention it to him, and indeed, West did not learn about the comment until asked about it for this book. Those who heard of the accusation were stunned. It was one thing to confront a scholar face-to-face, but this rumor felt deliberately planted in the press, meant to be spread behind the scenes, without accountability. The new presi
dent was obviously versed in the ways of Washington. What did that bode for Harvard?
5
Washington on the Charles
According to several people professionally close to him, Larry Summers little regretted the departure of Cornel West. True, the way that the drama played out wasn’t entirely to his liking. The controversy had been embarrassingly public, and on campus, most student opinion ran against Summers. The president knew that he had overplayed his hand, and now he had to worry about the possible departure of Skip Gates, a man harder to caricature than West and impossible to replace.
On the whole, though, Summers considered West’s exit a victory. The high-profile professor was gone, and that was good. Plus, much of the media coverage surrounding the fracas had lauded the new president. In general, the press had portrayed Summers as a take-charge, reform-minded newcomer who wasn’t afraid to break a few eggs to make an omelet, and Summers knew that many Americans had a deep, almost primal affinity for such men of action—particularly when juxtaposed against hand-wringing, nervous-nellie egghead academics. “[Summers’ critics] kept calling him ‘a bull in a china shop,’” James Traub, a New York Times reporter who wrote about Summers, said in a 2003 lecture to the Harvard Club of Westchester County, New York. “But who wants to work in a china shop?” Traub did not appear to realize that the Harvard faculty was not the origin of that simile; it was a Treasury Department aide who had first described Summers thusly, and the Treasury Department is not usually thought of as a haven for gentle souls.
No matter. Many outsiders and some campus conservatives saw West and his allies as defenders of the status quo, digging in their heels to fight a new president’s desire to raise standards and impose accountability. Summers had immediately framed the debate in a way that put them on the defensive. Like the soundbite slogans of a political campaign: Change versus more of the same! Excellence versus mediocrity! Mainstream values versus tenured radicals! Such reductive dichotomies were standard operating procedure in Washington, and Summers knew how to exploit them far better than did the residents of Harvard.
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