Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

  Indeed, the fact that Summers had no serious interest in the humanities made some professors question the breadth and nuance of his intelligence. “He is not an intellectual,” insisted professor of romance languages Bradley Epps. “He is a statistician; he is a powerbroker. But he is not an intellectual, because intellectuals know the power of doubt.” Though few others would say so in public, a great many of Harvard’s humanists shared this conviction. Summers, they agreed, was clever, even brilliant in some ways. But he was not wise.

  Summers would have responded that his vision merely corresponded with the true nature of the world, which was a tough place that needed real answers to life-threatening problems. He spoke frequently of the benefits of economic growth and scientific discovery. Science and economics could lift millions out of poverty, eradicate disease, and extend human longevity. Could anyone seriously argue that the study of the past mattered more than finding solutions to the problems of the present and future?

  Those who considered Summers’ vision of the future with skepticism made two recurring arguments. First, it seemed that he was simply imposing his own intellectual experience upon Harvard. He was promoting the sciences and downplaying the humanities because that equation reflected his intellectual interests rather than some more objective judgment. He was anti-athletics because he had never been a jock; he had been the kind of kid whom, in high school, the jocks picked on. He was opposed to extracurriculars because, except for his experience on the MIT debate team, he’d never been much for activities outside the classroom. “Larry wants to make Harvard into the kind of school that would have accepted him,” one faculty member said—a school where all that mattered was brainpower.

  This charge led directly to a second critique, because a school where brainpower was all could already be found just a mile or so down the Charles. Harvard’s new president, both faculty and students fretted, wanted to turn Harvard into MIT—a school where sports were insignificant, science and economics were the dominant disciplines, and extracurriculars were clearly subordinate to classwork.

  A student named Noah McCormack advocated this point of view in the Harvard Independent, a campus weekly. “Harvard is not MIT,” McCormack wrote in April 2003. “We don’t drink to get dead here. We’re not monomaniacal math nerds…. We’re Harvard. Larry Summers doesn’t appear to understand that.”

  What made Harvard special, McCormack continued, was the diversity of its students and their achievements, many of which occurred outside the classroom. It is those “that provide outlets for us and allow us to make friends (President Summers, largely friendless here at Harvard, should take note). If Larry wants to run a school for greasy-grinds without satisfying lives and/or souls, that’s fine. Just walk down the river a little.”

  In spite of the growing chorus of concern, Summers was growing steadily more powerful. One by one, he was outmaneuvering his opponents. Piece by piece, he was putting in place the foundations of long-term power.

  One reason the Harvard presidency had historically been considered weak was that the office was relatively poor. The central administration’s share of the endowment (of which the president controls only an undisclosed fraction) was about $2 billion at the end of 2002—less than one-quarter of the almost $9 billion controlled by FAS dean Bill Kirby. The president had less money because, traditionally, his fundraising role was to aid the various tubs; he was supposed to fundraise for the entire university and only rarely for his own discretionary funds. Moreover, each individual school controlled access to its alumni, but the central administration, of course, had no graduates from whom to solicit. So the president might meet with a wealthy alum of the college to land a contribution for FAS or with a business school graduate to seal a deal for the business school. With his limited ability to fundraise on his own behalf, his ability to fund his own priorities—scholarships, academic initiatives, interdisciplinary programs—was similarly constrained.

  To compensate, Harvard tithes contributions. Depending on the school, and sometimes even the department, about three percent of every gift is redirected to the central administration—something alumni donors almost universally don’t know. But that wasn’t enough for Summers. He wanted more access to alumni money and more control over its disposition. So he convinced Bill Kirby to agree to a subtle but hugely important rule change that weakened the tight relationship between Harvard College and its donors.

  As with many colleges, Harvard’s fundraising is built around the concept of class loyalty. Undergraduates may not feel an overwhelming, sentimental loyalty to their institution, but they often feel a powerful connection to their academic class. They first feel that group identification as freshmen, when they spend the better part of two semesters together before being assigned to the houses. Then, in the spring of their senior year, they are flooded with class-based activities—tickets to a Red Sox game, special dances, a “senior beach day.” The bonding effect is powerful. Harvard students commonly express more affection for their class than they do for the institution as a whole.

  Harvard College promotes class spirit largely so that its fundraisers can tap into it. Students are first asked for donations when they are seniors, as designated classmates urge them to contribute to the “senior class gift.” No one is expected to give large sums—the point is to get the students in the habit of giving money—so the student fundraisers generally ask for ten dollars. Participation level is most important; every class wants to beat the level set by its predecessors. So, although the class gift is generally in the area of $10, 000 to $20,000, a relative pittance, this is serious business. Bill Kirby gives the fundraisers a pep talk, and recent graduates pass on pointers about how best to wrangle contributions from their classmates.

  After graduation, the college continues to promote class loyalty by throwing lavish reunions, replete with parties, dinners, and lectures. Rivers of alcohol flow, and attendees are inundated with Harvard paraphernalia—sweatshirts, mugs, T-shirts, caps, and the like. These are meticulously planned, well-attended parties that more than pay for themselves in subsequent alumni gifts. Then, at the afternoon session on the second day of commencement, an alumni representative proudly reads off the millions given by that year’s reunion classes, being sure to use the phrase “a new record” whenever possible. The idea of getting the classes to compete against each other to see who can raise the most money may seem too crude to be effective, but these alumni take competition seriously, and the appeal to give more than the classes before and after resonates with them.

  Every year, the college prints the “Harvard College Fund Annual Report,” which lists the names of donors by class and rough donated amount. Just to be listed in the report, alumni have to give a minimum of $1,000. It’s the fundraising equivalent of the Social Register, an exclusive roster of people rich enough, successful enough, to give large sums of money to Harvard. One reason that alumni give is so their names get printed in that booklet; they want their classmates to see them.

  In the past, if alumni contributed to any other part of Harvard besides the college, their names didn’t appear in the “Harvard College Fund Annual Report,” and their gifts didn’t count toward the class total. The consequences were twofold: First, their classmates wouldn’t know of their wealth and generosity. Second, their gift wouldn’t help their class beat the fundraising levels of other classes. “If someone’s gifts don’t count, his classmates can get very upset at him,” said one administrator familiar with the process. The threat of that omission helped the college to ensure that its alumni gave money to it, rather than, say, to the president.

  So Summers convinced Bill Kirby to sign off on a new rule that changed fundraising policy. Very simply, it said that a Harvard College alum giving $250,000 or more to other parts of the university could still receive class credit. Summers presented the change as a way to encourage donors to give to Harvard’s poorer professional schools: the money had to go to the schools of design, divinity, education, government, a
nd public health, which traditionally found fundraising difficult because their alumni were not wealthy. The business, law, and medical schools were excluded. But the change also meant that big-dollar donors could give money to the president and receive class credit for it.

  The rule may have seemed arcane, but its impact was huge. Summers already had access to high-level contributors, because people who could give a quarter of a million dollars tended to want to meet with him. And, of course, Summers knew plenty of wealthy people from his days at Treasury. In the past, the president could really only encourage such potential givers to give to the different tubs. Now he could meet with big donors and say, “If you give to my office, your name will still show up with those of your classmates and still count toward your class gift.” If the donor was interested in giving to, say, the Kennedy School, instead of the college, he could.

  Or Summers could encourage him to give the money to the president’s account for disbursal—which meant that, in order to receive the cash, the deans had to come before Summers as supplicants, explaining to him why he should give them the money they hoped for. Summers could give them the money with strings attached, or he could just turn them down. And while gifts of $250,000 might be relatively rare, what mattered was that the principle had been established: The president could raid the college’s donors, drain away the college’s money, and the donors would still be listed as having given to Harvard College. The level of the dollar amount could always be reduced later, and there were hints that it would be. But for now, Summers would control the kind of discretionary funds no Harvard president had ever possessed.

  Inevitably, the rule change meant a loss of power for Bill Kirby. The FAS dean was losing control of his alumni, something no other dean had ceded, so why Kirby had submitted to it was unclear. Perhaps he was simply trying to be a team player, facilitating a shift that would benefit Harvard’s poorer schools. “I’ve always felt that we in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences are part of a broader university,” Kirby said at the time. The rule change “simply expands the number of options open to those who wish to give gifts.” (That, of course, was the crux of the issue.) However, since the change was quietly made not long after Kirby’s appointment, others had a different theory: Summers had demanded that Kirby accept the rule change as a condition for giving him the job in the first place, and Kirby had agreed because he badly wanted to be dean. Whichever the case, the result was predictable: Bill Kirby’s power shrank, and Larry Summers’ increased.

  The power to appoint deans gave Summers that kind of leverage, and during his second year, the number of deanships he filled grew. In addition to Bill Kirby, he had had already named a new dean of the School of Education, a New York University professor named Ellen Condliffe Lagemann. Now Summers appointed a dean of the divinity school, William Graham, a scholar of Islamic religious history, to fill the shoes of the outgoing J. Bryan Hehir, a Catholic priest. At the law school, Summers replaced resigning dean Robert Clark with professor Elena Kagan, a former colleague of his from the Clinton administration. As deputy director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, Kagan had worked on tobacco-related legislation with Summers. “He was extraordinary,” Kagan said of Summers. “It’s a great experience working with Larry.”

  Summers’ decanal appointments had several things in common. All were well-qualified candidates, and Kagan in particular was a popular choice, the first female dean in the law school’s 186-year history. In every case, Summers set up a process for student and faculty input—and in every case, students and faculty complained that he ignored their suggestions and that the process seemed crafted for public relations purposes. Finally, and most important, each new dean was conferred with less power and autonomy than his or her predecessor had possessed.

  Shortly after Kagan’s appointment, for example, it was announced that Summers would now be sitting in on law school ad hoc meetings, something no Harvard president had ever before done; the approval of law school tenure nominations had always been the sole prerogative of its dean. A strong, established dean would likely have fought such a lessening of the law school’s independence. A new dean, especially one who wanted the job, might well have traded the loss of autonomy in order to be appointed.

  And Kagan did have reasons for wanting the job. She still hoped to return to Washington, where her work had been interrupted. President Clinton had nominated Kagan to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C., circuit, but the nomination had been blocked by Senate Republicans stonewalling Clinton judicial nominees. In the event of a Democratic administration, Harvard law dean Elena Kagan would instantly become a strong candidate for the position of attorney general, or possibly for a place on the Supreme Court.

  Not only was Summers’ power over the deans growing, so was his influence over the Corporation. Fellow Robert Stone, thought to have been Lee Bollinger’s strongest supporter, announced that he would step down at the end of 2003. Harvard class of 1945, Stone was elderly, and his resignation was not attributable to Summers. But it did give the president the opportunity to put someone else close to him on the Corporation, and he did. Stone’s replacement was Robert Reischauer, Harvard class of 1963. Reischauer was in some ways a natural fit for the Corporation. He had long-standing ties to the university: His father, Edwin O. Reischauer, had been a Harvard professor of Japanese history for decades. And Robert Reischauer had been a member of the Board of Overseers from 1996 to June 2002.

  But Reischauer was an unusual pick in that he was neither immensely wealthy, as Stone and James Richardson Houghton were, nor an academic of great distinction, as Hanna Gray was. Instead, he had other traits Summers found appealing. He was an economics Ph.D. who’d spent the bulk of his professional career in Washington, where he and Summers had overlapped. From 1989 to 1995, Reischauer was director of the Congressional Budget Office. After 1995, he was a fellow of the Brookings Institution, then president of a public policy think tank called the Urban Institute. He lived in Bethesda, Maryland, a mile or so away from where Summers had lived with his wife and children. Robert Reischauer and Larry Summers had much in common.

  The Corporation had always been Summers’ strongest support at Harvard, but its support had not been absolute. Now, with the appointments of Bob Rubin and Robert Reischauer, Summers was filling that body with men who traveled in the same circles as he and who thought much as he did. The Corporation had always been secretive, lacking in diversity, and accountable to no one. Under Summers, it was becoming even more so.

  Piece by piece, Summers was putting his team in place, remaking Harvard in his own image. But there was still one person on campus, maybe the only one in a position of power, who both profoundly disagreed with Larry Summers and was willing to say so.

  Harry Roy Lewis, the dean of Harvard College, was a man of medium size and modest disposition, with thinning brown hair, bright blue eyes, and an amiable face. He looked, one of his colleagues said, “like a preppy wizard.” He was a casual man, not intense or arresting like Summers, but his relaxed demeanor belied a thoughtful and far-reaching intelligence.

  By January 2003, Harry Lewis had been at or around Harvard for most of his fifty-five years. He grew up in Wellesley, Masachusetts, a suburb of Boston. His family were new Americans, a mix of Ukrainians, Russians, and Germans—Lewis liked to joke that his family was “the Lewises of Ellis Island.” His maternal grandfather had been a mill worker in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and his paternal grandfather owned a small grocery store in working-class East Boston. Though Lewis’ grandparents never attended college, his father was raised with the strong sense that education helped a man become an American; he attended Boston University. It was not his first choice. Once, as an adult, Harry Lewis was digging around in the family basement when he found a file of correspondence between Harvard and his father. The letters were all rejection slips from Harvard. It had taken more than one rejection for Lewis’ father to give up his dream.

  Still, Harry Lewis’ pa
rents made for themselves a good life, certainly a more prosperous life than Harry’s grandparents had enjoyed. Both were doctors; Lewis’ mother would become the superintendent of a school for retarded children. She and Lewis’ father were determined that young Harry would benefit still further from America’s opportunities, and he did.

  Lewis attended the legendary Roxbury Latin School, which, having been founded in 1645, was almost as old as Harvard. Well known for its academic excellence, the school took its Puritan heritage seriously. In its mission statement, it says, “We seek to help our students identify and address life’s deepest questions. We seek to help them find out who they are and what they want to do with their lives. Whether or not the resulting direction and values are recognizably religious, the faculty believes that, in helping students find the meaning and purpose of their lives, it is engaged in what our Puritan forebears meant by ‘theological discipline.’” This process of constant questioning, trying to answer life’s deepest questions, was something Lewis would always carry within him, and in later life he would return to Roxbury Latin as a member of its board of trustees.

  Like Larry Summers, Lewis left high school after the eleventh grade—but unlike Summers, he left to go to Harvard, making a family hope come true. He graduated in 1968 with a summa cum laude degree in applied mathematics. Just days after his graduation, he married fellow student Marlyn McGrath, whom he had met while in high school. McGrath’s mother was from Montana, and in later years the two would return as often as possible to visit and relax in the Montanan wilderness. Lewis loved the journey; he loved to drive his 1991 Dodge Caravan across the nation’s great expanse, meeting Americans from all walks of life and appreciating that there remained in the United States places of wild and primitive beauty. “I am not sure what moves me so much about these isolated spots with their ghosts,” Lewis said in a 1999 Morning Prayers talk. “There is something spiritual I find in them. It is, perhaps, a recognition that I, and each of us, is on a lifelong voyage of discovery of ourselves.”