Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

  The McCarthys took so many people into their home—foreign exchange students, foster children from China, a friend who’d lost his job—that Tim’s classmates dubbed his house “Hotel McCarthy.” But for Tim, the most important visitor was John Cottingham, an African American kid from a tough section of Brooklyn, New York. John had come to the McCarthys through the Fresh Air Fund, the charity that arranges for inner-city kids to spend time with host families in rural areas. “I was six when he first started coming, for a week or two at first and then a month, and for a long time John was my best friend,” McCarthy remembered. “John would tell me stories about New York, and he was a Yankees fan, and he told me when he lost his virginity—I was about twelve.” There weren’t many black kids in Duanesburg, New York—“the middle of nowhere,” McCarthy calls it—or many people of color, period. Its population of about 5,800 is now 97.2 percent white, 1 percent American Indian, 0.8 of a percent Hispanic, and 1 percent “mixed race.” But McCarthy never felt that John’s presence was unusual. “My parents had invited him into our home, which made our relationship seem normal for me. It was only in retrospect that I realized how extraordinary this was,” he said.

  Young Tim was a troublemaker both in and out of class. “There were constant parent-teacher conferences,” he said. “I was rebellious. I wanted attention. If I was in trouble, it meant I was relevant.” In second grade, McCarthy got all As on his report card, but his teacher wrote in the comment section that “Timothy talks too much.” His father wrote back, “You’re telling us.” Tom liked to joke that Tim was vaccinated with a phonograph needle. At age nine, shortly after his class had practiced a nuclear fallout drill, Tim wrote a letter to President Reagan advocating a nuclear freeze. Someone at the White House sent him a letter back, with the president’s signature on it and an autographed photo attached. It didn’t make much difference. A few days later, McCarthy’s school held a mock presidential election and young Tim organized the students to vote against Reagan.

  It was around then that McCarthy’s teacher came up with the idea of pairing Tim with Shawn Page. Shawn was a boy with Down’s syndrome, a chromosomal irregularity that impedes physical and intellectual development, but because of the way the schools worked back then, he and Tim were in the same class. Tim agreed to hang out with Shawn, helping him with his homework and looking out for him whenever possible. McCarthy didn’t have any brothers or sisters, but he would have Shawn.

  The assignment gave McCarthy a sense of purpose that the other kids didn’t, and he rose to the responsibility. He tried to help Shawn learn to read; he always picked Shawn for his kickball team; he went to Shawn’s birthday party, noticing that there weren’t many other kids there, that it was mostly parents in attendance. Shawn’s mother thanked Tim effusively for coming, but McCarthy didn’t think he deserved any special thanks. He may have been helping Shawn, but Shawn was also helping him. Working with Shawn calmed him down.

  In junior high, Shawn was placed in a special education classroom, and the two boys lost touch. McCarthy went on to be a top-notch student and one of the most popular kids at Guilderland. He was also an athlete whose skills at basketball, football, and track had led Dartmouth and Harvard to express interest in him. Even though McCarthy never expected it, Harvard accepted him. He started there in the fall of 1989.

  In one sense, everything seemed perfect for Tim McCarthy. He was succeeding in high school by every standard measure. He was smart and popular and had a girlfriend, and in their senior year she was voted Classiest and Best-looking and he was voted Most School Spirit and Most Likely to Succeed. But McCarthy’s life was not as simple as appearances suggested. Back in ninth grade, he’d had a homosexual encounter with one of his best friends. Neither spoke about it much; both were popular athletes whose social personae conflicted with their real identities. But their sexual relationship would continue on and off for almost a decade, during which time McCarthy would continue to date women yet occasionally have clandestine flings with men.

  Harvard was a new world for McCarthy. He went there fearing that he wouldn’t fit in, that somewhere, sometime, someone was going to tap him on the shoulder and tell him, sorry, there’d been a mistake, the admissions office meant to send its acceptance letter to some other Timothy McCarthy. That didn’t happen, of course, and McCarthy continued along much the same path that he had in high school. He was gregarious, well liked, and busy, reveling in all that Harvard had to offer. He even joined a final club, the Phoenix. He’d be a little embarrassed about that later, because he wasn’t comfortable with the politics of the exclusive clubs, but he did agitate for the Phoenix to admit women—not that it made any difference. And, yes, he had to admit, it was flattering for a kid from upstate New York to be “punched.” The guy who wasn’t even sure he belonged at Harvard was moving in its innermost circles, and he loved it. The professors, his classmates, the academic opportunities, the social life—McCarthy drank deep from all that Harvard had to offer. When he graduated, he was asked to serve as the secretary for his class, a lifelong post which kept him in touch with official Harvard.

  He did not, however, forget where he had come from or what he believed in. At the end of his sophomore year, McCarthy returned to Guilderland to see a friend graduate. As the names of the graduates were read off, McCarthy suddenly heard the words “Shawn Page,” and saw his old friend walk across the commencement stage, all decked out in cap and gown. Before he could catch himself, McCarthy felt tears roll down his face, and he thought, I helped teach him to read.

  As a junior in Quincy House, McCarthy volunteered for a Head Start program in which he mentored a four-year-old African American boy named Malcolm Green. The boy’s father wasn’t around much, so Malcolm quickly connected with McCarthy, and vice versa. Over the following years, the two grew close as brothers; for two people who appeared to have little in common, they actually had a lot in common. “Malcolm and I don’t share an ounce of blood, but we finish each other’s sentences,” McCarthy said. They liked to joke that they could understand each other so well, they could read each other’s minds. When Nelson Mandela spoke at Harvard in 1998, McCarthy brought Malcolm and they sat in the eighth row. Afterward, he asked the boy if he understood how important the day had been, what miracles Nelson Mandela and the liberation of South Africa were. Malcolm responded, “I’m not sure I understand everything, but I do know that democracy is a good thing, right?”

  McCarthy did his best to keep Malcolm out of trouble and help him with his schoolwork, and whenever a major decision needed to be made, McCarthy would sit with Malcolm’s mother and they would talk about what was best for the boy. Their relationship continued even when McCarthy graduated in 1993, heading to New York City and Columbia to study American and African American history with Eric Foner and Manning Marable, two of the most distinguished figures in their fields.

  Graduate school was a struggle. McCarthy didn’t get any grant money from Columbia, so he was constantly broke. For fun, he’d cheer on the Yankees from the cheap seats in the right-field bleachers. It helped him get perspective on the frustrating internal politics of the academic world, the way graduate students fought over teaching positions, competed for grant money, sucked up to professors, and sniped about one another. He was in a serious relationship with a woman, a former tennis star now working in international development, who showed every sign of wanting to marry him. He loved her and told himself that he should be happy, but at the same time he wondered whether, if they did get married, he’d one day become “that guy”—the happily married man who gets caught in the sack with another guy. Increasingly depressed, desperate for a change of scene, he called up Harvard English department chair Larry Buell, whom he’d known as an undergrad, and asked if there was any way he could teach at Harvard. There was. In the fall of 1998, before he had even completed his dissertation, Tim McCarthy returned to Harvard to teach in the Department of History and Literature.

  That helped. But McCarthy’s sexual problems
were still unresolved. His girlfriend moved from Washington to Boston to be with him, and finally McCarthy broke up with her. It was a messy, dishonest breakup, one of the great regrets of his life: he told her that it was because she didn’t get along with Malcolm well enough. Afterward, he exercised too little and drank too much. Still in the closet and deeply unhappy, he rationalized reasons to hide his homosexuality. Malcolm was thirteen now, a student at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, and McCarthy thought he needed to set an example for the boy he considered his younger brother. The two went to church together every week; McCarthy doubted that the predominantly black congregation would feel comfortable with a gay white guy hanging around young Malcolm. So, instead of dealing with the problem, he poured himself heart and soul into his teaching. It was the only thing that kept him going. On the other hand, his dissertation-writing stopped entirely.

  It was Malcolm who helped him break out of his depression. One day after school, he came to Quincy House, where McCarthy was living again, to work on his homework and spend the night in McCarthy’s suite. That day, Cambridge Rindge and Latin had hosted a guest speaker, a civil rights lawyer who happened to be gay. He’d reminded Malcolm of Tim. And so, while McCarthy was checking his e-mail, his thirteen-year-old brother turned to him and said, “Tim, are you gay?” McCarthy hemmed and hawed. Finally Malcolm said, “Tim, it’s a simple question. If you asked me if I’m black, I’d say ‘yes.’”

  And that was it. McCarthy told him the truth, and the next morning he woke up with a feeling of lightness and liberation. He started to tell those friends who hadn’t already figured out the truth. He told his students, because he saw so many of them, both in and out of the closet, who were struggling with their sexuality. Harvard doesn’t have many openly gay faculty members, and McCarthy thought that he could help the students. There were a lot of kids at Harvard who came from backgrounds where being homosexual was a particular stigma—working-class kids, Catholic students, athletes, black kids. McCarthy had had experience with all of those.

  Telling his parents was the hardest thing. He had always been the success story, the adopted kid who’d made good. Now he feared that he would disappoint them. He couldn’t tell them for years, and even then he needed a shove: McCarthy was so enraged by the Bush administration’s push for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage that he grew ashamed of his reticence with his own family. But when he finally sat down with Tom and Michelle in the spring of 2004, they amazed him again, just as they always had. There was no disapproval, only support. “Well, I had a feeling,” his mother said.

  After the conversation with Malcolm, McCarthy’s life started to fall into place. He resumed writing his dissertation. Along with graduate student John McMillian, he began work on a collection called The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition. He began teaching a class for low-income adults in Dorchester, a poor section of Boston. Beginning in 2001, he led a group of students on what he called his “alternative spring break.” McCarthy had grown interested in the widespread incidence of arson suffered by African American churches in the South; while other students were off in Jamaica or the Bahamas, McCarthy and fifteen or twenty students traveled down to Alabama and North Carolina, where they’d work on a church that some coward had tried to burn down. McCarthy was making $42,000 a year, with no savings or investment, and “in debt up to my ass,” as he put it. Until recently, he qualified for food stamps. But he was getting paid to teach at Harvard, and that was a fantastic thing.

  And McCarthy grew increasingly politically active. He got involved with the living wage movement, which was why he had met with Larry Summers in August 2001. That meeting, at which Summers had humiliated the sophomore who got a fact wrong, until McCarthy intervened, left McCarthy worried. On the one hand, he appreciated that Summers had taken an hour from his day to meet with the group of living wage supporters. But Summers’ tone, the hostility he’d shown to the kid who dared to challenge him, were alarming. “I found his behavior in that meeting to be really unsavory,” McCarthy said.

  Though McCarthy thought that Neil Rudenstine had erred by not supporting the living-wage movement, he had always liked and admired the former president. He’d once written Rudenstine a letter reflecting upon the importance of ethnic diversity at Harvard, and gotten a two-page, handwritten response back. “I appreciate more than anything your own description of what the experience of diversity at Harvard meant to you and your roommate,” Rudenstine said, “and how the experience turned into such a rich and lasting friendship. These are exactly the kinds of experiences that will be lost if we don’t somehow change the mood of the courts, legislatures and others.”

  When it was announced that Larry Summers had been chosen to replace Rudenstine, everyone said that he’d been picked to “shake up” Harvard. Tim McCarthy hoped that support for affirmative action would not be a casualty of the shake-up.

  Then came the Cornel West matter, and that more than worried McCarthy—it infuriated him. He knew West only slightly, but admired him immensely. And he owed him. When McCarthy and McMillian were trying to land a contract for their collection of documents, West had picked up the phone and called a publisher on their behalf, and his recommendation had probably sealed the deal. Not many professors would expend capital in the publishing world to help out a couple of junior scholars. For Summers to attack a man who did so much for the Harvard community—no, who did his best to make Harvard a community—seemed inexplicable. McCarthy could think of only one rationale that seemed to fully explain Summers’ actions—racism. But he hoped he was wrong; he did not want to believe that of Harvard’s new president.

  McCarthy was also uncomfortable with Summers’ notion of patriotism. McCarthy did not believe that it was the work of a university to rally around the government, but to analyze and question the actions of that government. This was particularly true after September 11, when the White House was using the terrorist attacks to justify all sorts of far-reaching policies. At a peace rally on September 20, 2001, McCarthy decried the rush to war. “I deplore those who are deploying rhetoric and deploying troops without thinking before they speak,” McCarthy said. He argued that the Bush administration was exploiting the aftermath of 9/11 “to further its imperial intentions.”

  Shortly after that, McCarthy’s name landed on a list of one hundred and seventeen unpatriotic academics compiled by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative think tank founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney. Mrs. Cheney’s group had published a report called “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done about It.” The report argued that “the events of September 11 underscored a deep divide between mainstream public reaction and that of our intellectual elites.” Rather than rallying behind President Bush, “many faculty demurred. Some refused to make judgments. Many invoked tolerance and diversity as antidotes to evil.” The report concluded that “moral relativism has become a staple of academic life in this country.”

  The words were only slightly to the right of the rhetoric that Larry Summers was then employing. But McCarthy couldn’t agree with the sentiments, whether they came from the president of Harvard or a vice-president’s wife. He didn’t think of himself as an intellectual elite; he was the son of public school teachers. And he certainly was no moral relativist. He believed in right and wrong. He was a religious man, deeply involved in social work and social activism, with passionately held moral convictions. They just weren’t those of Lynne Cheney or Larry Summers.

  As Summers’ presidency continued, McCarthy grew increasingly skeptical of the tone Summers was establishing. Harvard, he thought, did not need a president who would make it a still more competitive, more individualistic place, but rather a more humane and spiritual community. The suicide of Marian Smith helped crystallize his concerns. Just a few days after her death, McCarthy was taking a group of students from Quincy House to see the Michael Moore documentar
y Bowling for Columbine. The subject of Smith’s death came up, and McCarthy noticed that even though the university had said nothing official about her suicide—hadn’t even told the students what was really going on—everyone in the group knew what had happened and was deeply upset by the tragedy. Some of them had known Smith and were on the verge of tears as they remembered their late friend.

  “I started talking to them about ‘Why do you think she did it?’” McCarthy remembered. “One student said that she could understand how Marian Smith could seem so happy outside and be so depressed inside. And I said, ‘Do the rest of you feel that way?’ And their answer was, ‘Yeah, maybe not that bad, but Harvard’s a place where you always have to look happy, always on the go.’”

  So, after the movie, McCarthy sat down at his computer and composed an e-mail to Larry Summers. It said something like, “I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, but someone high in the administration should send out a message about Marian Smith, just to say that it’s always tragic when something like this happens, what a vivacious person she was—that kind of thing. Just so the students know that someone up there cares.”