The clubs’ most widespread effect, however, is to polarize the campus between those who join them or are invited to their parties, and those who don’t get punched and aren’t invited. If you’re a male junior wandering around campus on a Saturday night wondering where all the cutest girls have gone, they’re probably at the final clubs, dancing and drinking with guys who, apparently, rank higher in the social pecking order than you do. Inevitably, the social disparities cause tensions among friends and roommates. The irony is that few involved with the final clubs, neither members nor guests, sound entirely comfortable with their existence. “In my ideal Harvard, I wouldn’t have the clubs,” said the Phoenix member. “But there aren’t many other opportunities for fun.”
Everything is competitive at Harvard: applications, academics, extracurricular activities, social life, sex. And while of course this is to some extent true at any college, and in life itself, at Harvard that competition is ramped up. Because, although these students sit atop the educational pyramid, they’re still young, still developing the emotional maturity that enhances judgment and helps weather stress. The combination of competition at the highest level and all the psychological and emotional challenges of young adulthood is a potent recipe for unhappiness and, sometimes, worse.
Many students seem to have a love-hate relationship with Harvard. They respect its history, its tradition, its power; students refer to that moment when they tell outsiders where they go to school as “dropping the H-bomb.” But they also feel oppressed by the weight of the university’s past. They are encouraged to be individuals at an institution whose oft-cited glorious history obliterates individual importance. Sometimes they long to rebel—but rebellion seems foolish when all around them they see the rewards of conformity: the power, wealth, and prestige that come to those who play by Harvard’s rules.
The students do, however, have their subversive moments. It’s telling to consider the three rituals that, according to campus tradition, every Harvard student endeavors to participate in before graduating. All three protest against Harvard’s self-importance, reminding the institution that its hallowed halls ring empty without the sounds of flesh-and-blood human beings.
The first ritual is to have sex in the dimly lit stacks of Widener Library, amid the millions of dusty volumes and the book-lined carrels of solitary, diligent graduate students. This is not easy, as the windows of opportunity during which a couple can escape detection are of short and unpredictable duration. Library employees are constantly re-shelving books, and then there are those midnight oil–burning grad students. Of course, the risks are what make it exciting. So is the sense of bringing crazy, irrational life to a place filled with the august works of the dead. It’s a much healthier—and potentially more comical—version of the anti-intellectual impulse that led SDS to threaten to burn the Widener card catalog in the 1960s.
The second ritual is called Primal Scream. Every semester, at midnight on the evening before exams start, hundreds of male and female students run around the interior perimeter of the Yard—stark naked. This is courageous, and not just because hundreds of other students and some faculty members gather to watch, but because fall-term exams take place in January, arguably the coldest month in New England. Wearing only sneakers, yelling and screaming and shivering, the students streak around the Yard, a course of probably five or six hundred yards. It’s not a sexual demonstration or an act of physical braggadocio; no one looks good running naked. It is, rather, a wonderfully human outburst, this posse of Harvard students cutting loose in a manner that is inherently unpretentious and deliberately dumb. Primal Scream is that rare thing at Harvard, a communal act. Even if for only a few minutes in the thick of the night, it makes people feel that they are part of something both human and humane—like the tent city that sprang up in the Yard during the Mass Hall occupation.
The third ritual involves the bronze statue of John Harvard located in front of University Hall in the Yard. Engraved with the words JOHN HARVARD, FOUNDER, 1638, the 1884 statue is a stopping point for tour groups, whose guides refer to it as “the statue of three lies.” John Harvard wasn’t the founder of the college but its first large donor. The founding date wasn’t 1638, but 1636. And because there are no surviving paintings of John Harvard, sculptor Daniel Chester French had no idea what he looked like, and so he used as his model a comely young graduate named Sherman Hoar, class of 1882. Hence, three lies.
Because it makes a picturesque backdrop for a photo, the statue of John Harvard is probably Harvard’s most popular tourist attraction. In fall and spring, it’s rare to walk by without seeing visitors snapping pictures of each other standing in front of it. Usually they partake in another ritual—rubbing its left foot for good luck. So many thousands of people have rubbed that foot over the years that its dark bronze color has been polished to a shiny gold, considerably brighter than the rest of the statue.
But there’s another reason why that part of the statue is colored gold, one that the tourists don’t know. The third rite of passage for Harvard undergrads is to urinate on John Harvard’s left foot. The act involves some athleticism, as the statue rests on an elevated base that would require climbing for anyone wishing to relieve him or herself on its foot. But anyone walking through the Yard late on a weekend night can see students gleefully baptizing John Harvard with their urine. Such blasphemy, of course, only happens in the dark. When the sun rises, the rebellions disappear, and the polishing starts anew.
“On Monday mornings, I see all these visitors eagerly rubbing that foot,” one tour guide said, “and I wish I could tell them what they’re really rubbing. But of course I can’t.”
The culture of Harvard, and student reactions to it, matter for two reasons. First, because Harvard shapes its students’ understanding of the way the world is and ought to be. As Summers said, the students are malleable. For four years, they are instructed that the way to get ahead in life is to compete relentlessly and individually—indeed, that competition is the essence of life. And then, they go out after graduation, some 1,600 strong every year, making their way into leadership positions in banks, law firms, businesses, the media, and governments, and they apply the lessons that Harvard taught them, shaping the world around them as they were shaped. It may not make them happy, and it may not make the world a better place in which to live. But it keeps them on top. And, very frequently, it makes them wealthy—so that they can, in turn, give back to Harvard, and help it stay on top as well.
And second, the culture of Harvard matters because Larry Summers’ vision for Harvard’s future didn’t address or ameliorate the tension between its students’ prowess and their discontent, but amplified it.
By the end of 2003, Summers’ specific agenda for the university was clear—reforming the curriculum, boosting the sciences, globalizing the university, and launching the massive expansion of the Harvard campus across the Charles River, in Allston. Progress was being made on all fronts. As part of the globalization effort, for example, FAS dean Bill Kirby had taken direct control of the study abroad office. He aimed to facilitate studying in other countries, something Harvard had previously discouraged on the grounds that foreign academic programs did not meet its standards. Kirby was also preparing four different committees to study aspects of the curricular review. And the university was bidding on yet another large chunk of land in Allston.
But gradual progress was too slow for Summers. Always impatient, he wanted things to change faster. The people who worked for him talked about how Summers wanted to create “a legacy.” He was already thinking about how he would be remembered in the pantheon of Harvard presidents, possibly already considering what he wanted to do after Harvard. If his next move was already on his mind, then he didn’t have much time to effect a legacy. Everything had to happen fast.
The president of Yale, Richard Levin, once wrote that “in Yale Time, the day (at least the weekday) has four parts: classes, extracurricular activities, study, and hanging out, gen
erally in that sequence, although sometimes (I hope not too often) the hanging out part starts early in the evening and displaces the study portion of the day. Each part of this daily cycle is an essential element of the Yale experience.”
If he were aware of it, Larry Summers would have questioned the merits of Levin’s temporal division. He didn’t want his university more relaxed or introspective; he wanted to make it more “rigorous,” a word he used like a mantra. Just as globalization meant a quickening of the pace of economic competition and cultural integration, Summers wanted to eradicate from Harvard the old-fashioned, the venerable, and the traditional, replacing it with the faster and the tougher and the more competitive. “The greatest danger for a university is to be complacent and comfortable,” Summers explained. “I have tried to resist the idea that the fact we have done things in a certain way is the reason why we should continue to do things the same way.”
In practice, what Summers’ credo usually meant was that if a thing had traditionally been done one way, Summers was instinctively hostile to it. To lead in the twenty-first century, Harvard would have to move more aggressively than it had in the past. Forget about “hanging out”—Summers already thought the students spent too much time engaged in extracurricular pursuits, like writing for the Crimson, or performing in dance and theater productions. He was not much interested in creating well-rounded graduates; he wanted students who excelled within specific fields, who would make new discoveries, reach new heights of accomplishment, and win the highest awards. He was convinced that many students put more effort into their extracurricular activities than into their classwork, and he was probably right—though not everyone would have said that these differing priorities were a bad thing.
Summers’ argument was substantive and serious, but his way of expressing it was usually less than diplomatic. At a first-year meeting with house tutors—the administrative heads of the houses—Summers emphasized his desire for students to work harder by saying, “We don’t want this place to be Camp Harvard.” Reported in the Crimson, the comment infuriated students, who spent long hours in libraries and slept less than they should have (another contributing factor to mental health problems). Perhaps the greatest insult one can deliver to Harvard students is to call them slackers. They pride themselves on their ability to balance academics and extracurriculars while doing both at a high level.
Although Summers never changed his mind about Camp Harvard, he did distance himself from the remark. In his second year, a Crimson columnist asked him about the incident. Summers equivocated, saying that he was “not aware of having used that phrase, [but] I did once use the phrase ‘camp counselor’ to refer to some of the functions of House tutors.” Nonetheless, the memory of Camp Harvard lingered. In Summers’ third year, a student asked him about the remark when the president visited Adams House for pizza and conversation. “I don’t recall ever saying that,” Summers answered. “It’s taken on elements of an urban myth.” Others disagree. “Larry denies it now, but I remember him saying that,” said one senior administrator who was in the room at the time.
About college athletics, Harvard’s largest extracurricular pursuit, Summers was profoundly skeptical. Harvard has forty-one varsity teams, the greatest number of any NCAA Division I school in the country. Some of them are better than others. Men’s crew and women’s hockey are perennial national leaders, but the Harvard football and basketball teams aren’t high-powered programs. Yet regardless of the teams’ excellence relative to schools that devote more resources to athletics, Harvard has long considered sports a valuable part of a liberal education. Summers, however, thought that the breadth of Harvard athletics was a waste of money and a poor use of student time. Worse, he was convinced that highly intelligent students were being rejected from Harvard to make room for less smart athletes. In public, he talked up Harvard athletics because he knew that alumni who had played sports at Harvard were among the university’s most consistent donors. But in private he pushed a plan ultimately adopted by the Ivy League that lowered the number of football recruits from thirty-five to thirty every year and instituted a mandatory seven-week break from training for all athletes during their off-seasons. Summers wouldn’t have minded if the number of athletic recruits fell lower still. Even when he tried to look like he supported Harvard teams, he was less than convincing. When he attended a women’s hockey game during the 2002–2003 season, he turned to someone on the bench and asked, “So, are we any good?” At the time, the team was ranked number one in the nation.
Summers preferred the sciences. At every opportunity, he talked about the need for Harvard students to be more scientifically literate. Harvard had missed out on the Internet gold rush, he said; this time around, it would not miss out on biomedicine. Again and again he spoke about the importance of the human genome and how critical it was that students understand it. For too long, Summers argued, a university graduate could be considered well-educated if he was fluent in a literary tradition, a foreign language, some history—but knew next to nothing about science. The current age of discovery was making such scientific illiteracy irresponsible. In just a few years, Summers predicted, every human being could have his or her genome sequenced for about two thousand dollars. “That has staggering potential for increasing our understanding of disease, for making it possible to find scientifically based cures for disease,” he said. “…And that is likely over the next quarter century to lead to profound progress. My guess is that the life expectancy of my daughters is probably one hundred, and it’s going to keep rising.”
Two hundred years from now, Summers asked over and over, what would historians of the future consider most noteworthy about our time? His answer: the scientific revolution in the understanding of human biology. It was imperative, Summers insisted, “to create a culture in which it is as embarrassing to not know the difference between a gene and a chromosome as to not know the names of five plays by Shakespeare.”
Summers’ passion for science was proportionate to his disinterest in the humanities. He had never studied literature, art, language, history, or philosophy; he admitted that he didn’t read serious fiction. He was an applied economist whose litmus test for an academic field was the practical results that it could generate. He did not believe that things should be studied for their own sake, or to preserve and understand the past, and repeatedly questioned the need for the existence of certain small departments and areas of study. Why did there have to be a Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures? What about Sanskrit? Why were there so many German books in Widener Library when no one studied the language any more? Even some of the social sciences weren’t exempt from his skepticism. Was there any question that sociology could answer, he wondered aloud, that economics couldn’t answer better? His clash with Cornel West exemplified this pattern. Few believed that Summers would have lambasted West if the former had taken Afro-American studies seriously.
“Economics is a hegemonic discipline,” said one law school professor who has interacted with Summers on a number of issues. “This informs his vision in a number of ways. He actually believes that there are right and wrong disciplines. So, to him, Cornel West was simply illegitimate.”
True, Harvard was not the only institution where humanists felt defensive. The power and status of the humanities had been declining at American universities since World War II showed not just the importance of scientific research, but also its potential for profit. That trend has only become more pronounced in recent years, as government aid has become more uncertain and the payoffs from science have grown. In 2004, for example, Stanford University stood to make hundreds of millions of dollars from the initial public offering of Internet search company Google, because much of the research that had led to Google’s creation had taken place under Stanford’s auspices. Science can bring not only big profits, but big donations. Wealthy benefactors give tens of millions for new science laboratories. In the humanities, even when a star like Skip Gates hauls in a gran
t from a massive corporation such as Time-Warner, the numbers are relatively small, maybe a few million dollars. Since the stock market collapse in 2001, talk of that legendary billion-dollar gift, the Holy Grail of university fundraising, had subsided. But someday, a billion-dollar donation would happen—and whether at Harvard or anywhere else, it wasn’t likely to go to a history department.
Still, Summers’ manifest disdain for the humanities unnerved their practitioners at Harvard. It was true that their work did not produce the tangible results that, say, chemistry and biology did. There were few eureka moments in literary criticism. But professors of history, literature, the arts, and the like did not believe that the value of a field was determined by the number of its practical applications. Few humanists thought—and many scientists agreed with them—that the point of a liberal arts education was so limited. Maybe studying the humanities couldn’t help you live longer, the way that knowing the breakdown of your genome could, but it could uplift the character and quality of your life. It could add morality and wisdom, introspection and humility. And it could inform the way you approached other citizens of the world—whether you saw them with tolerance and understanding and curiosity, or whether you took a more competitive, hierarchical, imperialistic approach.
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