Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

McCarthy knew that Summers responded to e-mailed suggestions that he liked. He was disappointed but not surprised when he got no response to this one. Certainly the suggestion was never acted upon.

  The lack of a response didn’t deter him, though. McCarthy had come to see himself as an advocate for students, who had so few advocates on campus—and now even fewer, with Harry Lewis leaving. McCarthy knew how messy, how complicated, a life can be, and the students saw that he knew, and they asked him for help. Like the time when one junior called McCarthy late at night, distraught over a family problem. Things were so bad that the kid was considering dropping out of Harvard. But by the end of his conversation with McCarthy, the student felt a little better, a little stronger. In the end, he would make it through—and he gave McCarthy much of the credit.

  “That kind of thing, it’s not the kind of thing that I could put on my CV, and it’s not going to get me tenure,” McCarthy said. “But how could I not do it? They’re clearly unhappy, these kids, and that’s become something of an obsession for me.

  “I know that I don’t quite belong here at Harvard,” he said. He loved his alma mater, but he was afraid of staying too long, of growing bitter about his inability to change an institution that seemed not to care about its students. If he became pessimistic or cynical, what kind of message would that send to the students? So McCarthy made a painful decision. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had offered him an office and a telephone to work on a book about the burnings of African American churches, and McCarthy accepted the offer. He was going to leave Harvard at the end of the semester, a year before his contract was up. Harvard was going in a direction Tim McCarthy didn’t like, and he could try to change it only so much before getting jaded. It was time to move on.

  “I don’t think that Larry Summers spends a minute thinking about me, but if he did, he would prefer not to have me here,” McCarthy said. “I would just hope that if Larry really knew what I did, that he’d have an appreciation for that.”

  It was not, he admitted, a hope in which he placed much confidence.

  In mid-February, Harvard and six other universities filed an amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court supporting the University of Michigan’s defense of affirmative action. The brief argued that the point of affirmative action was to promote diversity on campuses. “Academically selective universities have a compelling interest in ensuring that their student bodies incorporate the experiences and talents of the wide spectrum of racial and ethnic groups that make up our society,” it stated. Universities couldn’t adequately prepare their students for a globalized world if they didn’t attend school with students of different origins. “By creating a broadly diverse class, [the universities’] admissions policies help to assure that their graduates are well prepared to succeed in an increasingly complex and multi-racial society.”

  In the past, proponents of affirmative action had argued that its purpose was to remedy prior discrimination, mostly against African Americans. But over time the argument had shifted to claim that, because diversity was inherently educational, affirmative action benefited everyone, not just its direct recipients. Affirmative action was no longer so much about fixing the past as about shaping the future. It was impossible to tell whether supporters really believed the new position or simply felt that, in the current political climate, the idea of reaching out to African Americans at the expense of whites would not be broadly supported. Indeed, almost unanimously, polls showed that most Americans agreed with the White House’s opposition to affirmative action, despite the fact that they also believed that the country had not eliminated discrimination based on race.

  Larry Summers’ position on the issue had changed as well. In his early meeting with African American professors, Summers had sounded skeptical about, if not hostile to, affirmative action. Now he signed off on the friend-of-the-court brief, and in March he and constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe published a New York Times op-ed piece headlined “Race Is Never Neutral.” Mostly written by Tribe, the editorial repeated the argument that diversity helped prepare students “to live and work in a global economy and a multiracial world.”

  This was an argument that Summers could support, but whether he actually supported affirmative action as a means to the end of diversity was still in doubt. Charles Ogletree, the law professor who had clashed with Summers at a meeting in the summer of 2001, felt that Summers had genuinely come around—thanks in large part to Ogletree. After the departure of Cornel West, Ogletree met with Summers several times to push him on the issue. “He and I spent more than a year in some intense but very productive meetings, talking about [the Michigan cases] and the future of diversity, and we went from being very far apart to coming to a meeting of the minds,” Ogletree said. “Larry was a new president and he made a number of terrible errors. But he’s moved miles away from rigid thinking to a much more nuanced sense” of the value of affirmative action.

  Not everyone agreed. Two sources familiar with Summer’s thinking on the issue suggested that Summers had, in fact, not changed his mind about affirmative action one bit—he’d only adjusted his public position. His defense of the policy, they said, had more to do with affirming Harvard’s independence—its power to admit whom it wanted, how it wanted, with no government interference. Moreover, opposing affirmative action would break with the tradition of both Derek Bok and Neil Rudenstine. Summers was loathe to reverse a thirty-year tradition advocated by two past, but still living, presidents. And, of course, after Cornel West, Summers was hyper-sensitive to any suggestion that he was hostile to the presence of African Americans at Harvard.

  “In his heart and soul, Summers has some real doubts about anything that is not merit-based,” said one professor who has discussed the issue with him. “But he can’t come out against affirmative action. It’s established policy at Harvard. And especially not after Cornel West.”

  On occasion, though, Summers showed glimpses of his true feelings. At one meeting with agents of the Harvard Alumni Association, in the spring of 2003, the subject of a commencement speaker for 2004 arose. One person suggested then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Summers reacted quickly and angrily. “I will not select my commencement speaker based on affirmative action,” he snapped.

  Nor did Summers feel the need for affirmative action—or even simple desegregation—within Harvard’s upper echelons: He did not speak at all about the importance of diversity on the faculty. By the end of his first three years in office, the percentage of tenure appointments who were women had dropped from 36 percent in Neil Rudenstine’s last year to 13 percent. This wasn’t entirely Summers’ fault—tenure nominations came first from the departments—but it did reflect the fact that Summers never mentioned the issue, and department chairs clearly did not think he cared about it. On this issue, Summers chose not to use his bully pulpit.

  Moreover, after his first three years as president, Summers had not appointed a single African American to a high-level university position. His mostly male administration was glaringly white. (One exception was aide Colleen Richards Powell, the woman who took notes while students met with Summers.) While Summers grudgingly conceded the need for affirmative action to promote diversity within Harvard’s student body, he did not appear to believe that the same approach applied to his own administration. He had worked with homogeneous groups in the Harvard economics department and at Treasury, and as Harvard president would repeat the pattern.

  In the spring of 2004, Summers spoke at a Harvard Club luncheon, and one alum asked him how he felt about affirmative action. “I do believe in affirmative action,” he responded. “The reasons for my belief are stated in the brief Harvard filed…. But the really important issue for the future is not affirmative action in college admissions today, but what are we going to do about the continuing achievement gap in American education?”

  Which was his way of saying that he would tolerate affirmative action, but he preferred to change the subject
from race to class. Summers was more interested in the relationship between income and education, which was, to be sure, an important area to investigate. Poor students of any color had a harder time getting into Harvard than did more affluent students, because they lacked access to good schools and other educational opportunities—music lessons, travel abroad, and so on. The problem was that reaching out to such students almost always necessitated a lowering of standards—they lacked the training and resources to match up with more affluent students—and that was something Summers was loath to do. He hoped that if the university looked hard enough, Harvard could find poor students who were academically gifted and tough enough to survive there.

  The president’s public support for affirmative action, then, was carefully crafted but not entirely honest. In truth, he would put Harvard’s weight in defense of affirmative action because that was his only realistic option. At the same time, he would push the institution to worry less about racial discrimination and more about the inequities of class in America.

  In his first year as president, Summers had spoken his mind more freely. He’d learned, however, that sometimes it was better to keep his opinions to himself—or at least largely to himself, because he could not entirely contain his true feelings and they inevitably spilled out one way or another. He had also learned that you could say one thing in public and another in private and usually get away with the contradiction. Like when the New York Times called for input on an article about how pragmatic and career-focused modern students are, and Summers gave them this quote: “I do worry. I do somehow wish that students would smell the roses a little more.” Suggesting that his students “smell the roses” contradicted virtually every message, spoken or otherwise, he had delivered to his campus—this was the president who repeatedly urged his students to “get cracking”—yet the Times ran the quote without question or context. It was understandable that Summers thought the press could be manipulated.

  He still chafed, though, at the idea of restricting his public commentary to those issues that had direct relevance only to Harvard. Summers was strongly in favor of the coming war—he believed that Iraq posed a genuine danger to the United States and that preemptive military action was justified—but there was no particular reason for the Harvard president to say so publicly, and he was frustrated that few campus questioners seemed to want his opinion on the matter. He lamented that students were more interested in talking to him about the pre-registration debate—a failed attempt by Bill Kirby to curtail the time in which students could choose courses—than about his position on the war.

  There was, of course, one issue on which Summers had taken a very public position—anti-Semitism. That he had done so was about to make his life extremely awkward.

  There were, of course, many on the Harvard campus who strongly agreed with Larry Summers’ attack on the advocates of divestment from Israel. One of them, a young Jewish woman named Rachel Fish, was inspired enough to act on Summers’ words. Fish, a second-year student at the Harvard Divinity School, was convinced that the leftwing anti-Semitism Summers was talking about was prevalent at HDS. “The school is very sensitive about race, gender, and women’s rights,” she said. “Yet it seems to be lacking any sensitivity to anti-Jewish sentiment.”

  Certainly the Harvard Divinity School has a long-standing reputation for political radicalism; that was a big reason Summers didn’t like it. He considered the place a hotbed for students more interested in activism than academia. Another possibility is that many students interested in theology and spirituality are interested in promoting social justice, and vice versa. But whichever the case, there’s no question that the divinity school tilts to the left. A not-atypical 2002 conference at the school included sessions on the following topics: “Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman,” “Seeds of Violence in Religion,” “The Legacy of Patriarchy: Unraveling the Gender Knot,” and “Is Violence in Humans Inevitable?”

  While the divinity school’s primary purpose has always been to train Christian ministers, it welcomes students of all faiths, many of whom never enter the ministry but go into social work or political activism on behalf of women, gays, children, and other oppressed groups. Some, perhaps many, divinity school students would include Palestinians among the ranks of the oppressed.

  Rachel Fish was convinced that some of that pro-Palestinian sentiment crossed a line into anti-Semitism. She had already helped to organize a group called the Harvard University Graduate Student Friends of Israel. Her next act, in December 2002, was to stage a conference about global anti-Semitism. She invited some experts on the subject for a panel discussion, moderated by professor Ruth Wisse, in a divinity school classroom. The conference took place on a bitterly cold night, but some forty people showed up, which Fish considered a pretty good turnout. She was distressed, though, by something she learned from one of the speakers that night.

  In the summer of 2000, the divinity school had received a $2.5-million donation to endow a chair in Islamic Studies. Two and a half million dollars is a lot of money for that school, which has always been one of Harvard’s poorest tubs. (Its endowment of around $350 million is about two percent of Harvard’s total.) This gift came from a potentially huge source of future contributions, but one that was also morally problematic: Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nayan of the United Arab Emirates. Born in 1918, Sheik Zayed had been that country’s unelected “president” since 1971, and, though well into his 80s in 2003, he was still an immensely powerful figure in the Middle East. Fish learned that while Sheik Zayed was giving money to Harvard to promote the study of Arab culture, in his own country he was using his immense wealth to promote anti-Semitism. And that made Fish wonder: how could a university whose president denounced anti-Semitism accept millions from a man who funded it?

  Rachel Lea Fish does not particularly look like a fighter. Born in 1979, she is a pretty, petite woman with blonde hair and brown eyes. She speaks so quietly it’s possible not to hear the grit in her voice. But her upbringing gave her a passion and a courage to stick up for her convictions. Fish is the daughter of a pediatrician and a homemaker who settled in Johnson City, Tennessee, after her father’s military service during Vietnam. Johnson City is a medium-size town of about fifty thousand people, very few of whom were like the Fish family. “In that town and the six surrounding it, there were only about 60 Jewish families,” Fish said. “We all knew each other.”

  Folks in Johnson City took it for granted that their neighbors were Christian. When Fish started grade school, each day would begin with Christian prayer, and Fish sat outside her classroom while the other students bowed their heads. When she told her parents, they met with the teachers and the school board, and eventually the prayer was dropped. Of course, virtually everyone in school soon knew what had happened, and some of Fish’s classmates decided that the appropriate response was to try to convert her to Christianity. “It wasn’t malicious,” she said. “Just ignorant.”

  Some behavior was especially ignorant. In sixth grade, a classmate scratched a swastika onto the front of her locker. Her teacher wanted to suspend the boy, but Fish thought that would only make the problem worse. He didn’t come from much of a family, this kid. Even though he was in sixth grade, he was illiterate. Suspending him from school would only make things worse. So Fish proposed another option: after school every day, she’d teach the boy to read. “Because if he knew what the swastikas meant, he probably wouldn’t have done it.” And for four months, she did just that. “I didn’t understand how he couldn’t know how to read,” Fish said. “He taught me about that, and how his family didn’t support him.”

  After high school Fish attended George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she double-majored in Judaic studies and Middle Eastern studies. She spent her junior year abroad at Hebrew University, in Jerusalem. Her identity as a Jew was important to her, and after college Fish wanted to pursue the study of the religions of the Middle East. The Harvard Divinity School seemed a natural
choice. Graduates included such inspiring figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker. “Harvard is the university,” she explained. “It’s the place where people go to make something of themselves.” Fish liked that the divinity school application said that the school was seeking people who could create change in the world. “The notion of ‘veritas’ seduces you,” she said.

  When Fish took a closer look into what else Sheik Zayed did with his money, what she found was disturbing. In 1998 the sheik’s wife donated $50,000 to support Roger Garaudy, a French writer whose book The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics argued that the Holocaust had not happened, but that Jews had died of disease and starvation during World War II. And in 1999, Sheik Zayed founded the Zayed Centre for Coordination and Follow-up, intended to be the official think tank of the twenty-two–nation Arab League. Sheik Zayed’s son, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, was the center’s director.

  Over the next few years, the Zayed Centre hosted a number of foreign dignitaries, including Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and former secretary of state James Baker. But it also engaged in some less savory activity, including the publication of anti-Semitic literature charging that Israel is the tool of “forces of world hegemony.” The center offered programs on topics such as “the Jewish control of the American government and media”; its director announced at one conference that “Jews are the enemy of all nations.” One guest lecturer, Saudi professor Umayma Jalahma, declared that “the Jewish people must obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare holiday pastries.” And the center had published a translation of French writer Thierry Meyssan’s crackpot book, The Horrifying Fraud, which charged that the United States attacked itself on September 11, flying planes into the World Trade Center by remote control in order to justify imperial war against Afghanistan and Iraq. Reading the Zayed Centre’s literature, Fish said, “was like reading history written by the Nazis.”