Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

  On the prescribed day, Summers arrived only a few minutes late, which was early for him. He wore a dark suit, a light blue shirt, and a slightly darker blue tie. As the year had progressed, Summers had regained some of the weight he’d lost in the previous summer and fall, but he still looked thinner than in his early days as president. Standing on the stage before a packed room—the students were eagerly anticipating this class—he also looked supremely confident. Summers loved the question-and-answer format. Even more than prepared speaking, it was his strength, his virtuosity. Answering questions was like playing tennis; he could pick his shots, play the angles, run his opponents around a little. A game of strategy. Summers loved it.

  Palmer briefly introduced Summers, and then the first student rose to question him. “What personal sacrifices have you made to become as successful and accomplished as much as you have, and do you have any regrets?”

  Summers looked mildly surprised. He’d attended dozens of question-and-answer sessions at Harvard since becoming president, but this may have been the first time that he’d been asked to speak about the downside of success.

  Maybe because Summers was caught off guard, his answer meandered. He spoke about how people’s lives never went quite as planned, and “there’s a tendency when you look at people’s careers or read biographies…to assume that there was a plan or a strategy.” But that hadn’t been the case with him—he’d benefited from good luck and fortuitous timing. “It’s terribly, terribly important in life to try to take what you do seriously but not to take yourself too seriously,” Summers added. “Do I have regrets? Anyone in a position like I have now is in a position to make lots of decisions, and if you make eighty percent of them right, you’re doing well. If you can bet on a roll of the dice, and you’re given the choice between betting on one through four or [betting on] five and six, you’re going to bet on one through four. But you’re still going to be wrong a third of the time.

  “Speaking more personally,” Summers concluded, “I’m really very happy with how my life has turned out.”

  The next questioner, a woman, stood up. She asked Summers, “As a father of three, what kinds of fatherly influences transfer to your current line of work?”

  Summers looked still more confused; the possibility that being a father was relevant to his current line of work did not seem to have occurred to him. He answered that he was a father of three children, two thirteen-year-old daughters and a ten-year-old son. “I hope they’re going to grow up to be fulfilled, happy people,” he said. But “as president of the university…it is my task to focus more on your academic and professional development than I do on your personal development.” Then Summers said something about how he hoped Harvard was a place where students were able to grow emotionally. “I hope that we as a university are a model of openness and tolerance…in which it is the power of ideas rather than the idea of power that matters.”

  Summers had used the line before, and this time it did not appear to go over well, partly because it sounded out of context and partly because many in the room seemed unconvinced that, in Summers’ presidency, it was the “power of ideas” and not the “idea of power” that carried the day.

  Then it was Palmer’s turn to ask a question, a prerogative he sometimes took advantage of. He began by referencing the New York Times Magazine profile, the part in which author James Traub asks Summers why so many people dislike him and Summers responds that leadership is not a popularity contest. Before Palmer could get to that line, Summers interrupted, joking that “I have a passing familiarity with its content.” He began swinging his microphone up and down like a nightstick. Palmer continued, saying that there were different kinds of leadership—Gandhian leadership, in which people followed the example of an inspiring leader, or leadership as described by social theorist Max Weber, in which followers could be compelled to act by virtue of the authority invested in a strong leader. Could Summers describe any instances where he had exercised Gandhian leadership?

  Summers looked a little irritated now; the question implied that his leadership was based on compulsion rather than inspiration. “This is unlike any experience I’ve had at Harvard,” he said.

  “Well, this will be my last experience like this at Harvard,” Palmer said, and the crowd burst into supportive applause.

  “Maybe exposing myself to this questioning is the Gandhian experience you asked about,” Summers shot back. “I’m not sure I can answer the question in the terms you put it,” he continued. He then launched into the story of the Mexican bailout, which took about ten minutes of class time. The students seemed interested, but unsure how it answered the question.

  When Summers was done, a freshman named Ellen Quigley stood up to question him. Quigley knew Summers, and vice versa. In the fall, she had taken the sixteen-person freshman seminar on globalization Summers had taught, his first time teaching a course while president. She had proved such a fearless questioner in the class, challenging Summers on subjects such as sweatshops, the economies of socialist countries, and the virtues of free trade, that she’d earned the nickname the “anti-Summers.”

  That was a badge of honor for Quigley, because though Summers did try to get the students to relax, questioning him wasn’t always easy. For one thing, he himself wasn’t always relaxed. Plus, the group met on Monday nights in a conference room in Mass Hall, upstairs from the president’s office. That was a little intimidating. So was the fact that Summers would sometimes have the students watch video of him at public events. When one student disputed Summers’ interpretation of a week’s reading, Summers replied, “It’s a good state of affairs when a student can criticize the president of Harvard University—but you’re wrong.”

  When Quigley stood now to take the microphone from Palmer, Summers smiled a little, anticipating a tough question. After their last seminar meeting in Mass Hall, Summers had said to Quigley, “Thank you for being in the class—you keep us human.” But even knowing Quigley, he looked surprised by just how tough her question was.

  “President Summers, you’ve made your views on scholarship and teaching fairly clear during your time as president,” she said. “Frankly, this class doesn’t seem like something you’d like. It emphasizes compassion over cash and social concerns over hard data. What has changed during the last couple of years for you to agree to come to this class now, but not accept previous invitations? As a follow-up: This class is not going to be offered next year, and I’m sure the other 612 students in this room are as disappointed as I am about that. Can Harvard really go without classes like this one?”

  Summers was starting to look like he was trapped on the set of a reality television show he’d never signed up for. Still swinging his mike, he strolled around the stage for a few seconds as if looking for an exit, then turned back to the audience and said, “Someone in my position has to have two different ways of seeing the world—personal views versus what types of activities are valuable to the university.

  “It’s true,” Summers admitted, “that I think that a certain number of views expressed by some of the speakers in this course are silly, and not supported by evidence. A question like whether a course like this should exist doesn’t have to do with my views. The views that Brian has on a number of questions are views that I disagree with, but that isn’t any reason for me not to participate.”

  He hadn’t come in the past, he said, because he received more invitations than there was time in the day. He then launched into a discussion of whether Harvard should be, in his phrase, “a political institution.”

  “It’s my belief that Harvard will make a grave mistake if we become a political action institute,” he said. Citing past anti-Semitism and less-than-universal opposition to McCarthyism, Summers added, “Frankly, Harvard’s record as a political institution is not one that we can be terribly proud of. We exist independent of the society precisely because we do not become a political institution. It is not for Harvard to have an opinion on the merits of
the Iraq war. It is not for Harvard to have an opinion on the right to choose or the right to life. The idea urged by some that we should be a great social action foundation supported by a huge endowment…would greatly compromise us as an institution.”

  Quigley sat down, frustrated. She had said nothing about Harvard becoming a political action institute or social action foundation. Summers’ answer set up a straw man that he then easily demolished, but Quigley herself wouldn’t have supported that straw man. She’d hoped that Summers would really talk about the need for at least one Harvard course to consider critically the ways in which the university shaped its students.

  Summers next took a question about the Mass Hall sit-in of 2001. “Was it justified,” a student named Michael Heinz wanted to know, “and is civil disobedience ever legitimate?”

  “I don’t see how anybody who looks at the history of the world can possibly take a position that civil disobedience is wrong,” Summers said. “…[But] if you read Gandhi or have seen the movie, or if you read Martin Luther King…they will all tell you that the punishment of the civil disobedient is integral to the concept of civil disobedience.…So the position that’s been taken by some in this community that civil disobedience is so noble that it shouldn’t be punished seems to me a misleading proposition.”

  After one more question about the merits of accepting legacies into the college, the class was over. The students gave Summers a healthy round of applause, and Palmer walked him back to Mass Hall. Afterward, the students were asked to post their reactions to Summers’ visit on the course web page. Palmer encouraged them to consider the question of President Summers’ leadership style. The president had said on many occasions that Harvard would train the next generation of leaders, and that all the leaders he knew in Washington were most shaped by what they had learned in school, particularly college. What lessons in leadership had Larry Summers passed on to them?

  Some students responded favorably to the president. They recognized that he had been the subject of aggressive questioning. They thought he had handled the situation well and answered the questions directly, and they respected him for toughing it out. Some of their comments—anonymous here because they were not meant for public distribution—reflected that respect:

  —“While Larry Summers may not be my favorite person, given his somewhat callous way of dealing with sensitive issues, I have to admit that I liked some of his answers today…”

  —“I think that Summers’ confidence in speaking to us came from his personal confidence in what he believes. I think he does have a lot more social responsibility than he is usually given credit for. Is he somewhat closed-minded? Perhaps. But he seems to give himself plenty of opportunities to be disproved by students or faculty…”

  —“Summers’ most valuable lesson about leadership was that sometimes you must go against what everyone else thinks is right in order to make the right choice. In a democracy, ‘the people’ can sometimes make the wrong decision. Part of being a good leader is knowing when to disregard what the people you’re representing want…”

  Other students strongly disagreed with Summers’ answers, particularly regarding the politics of Harvard, the nature of civil disobedience, and the relationship of the president to the students’ well-being. For example:

  —“I absolutely do not deny that ‘the punishment of the civilly disobedient is integral to the movement’ of whatever is being civilly disobeyed. [But] my heart seemed to translate his comments in a terrifying way; he seemed to be saying, ‘It’s my job to arrest King, to beat Gandhi, and I accept that role…I’ll be waiting and ready to punish them.’ Those comments made me fear ever exercising any kind of power. I do not think sacrificing my sense of right and wrong is worth the accolades that come with high leadership positions. I think I’ll leave the punishing to President Summers…”

  —“The question isn’t whether the university SHOULD be a political institution. The university IS one. The university makes political choices because it makes economic choices. The university hires and fires and spends and saves, and economic decisions are political decisions about distribution and values…”

  —“Larry Summers has no idea what is going on with the students he supposedly values so much. He has refused to take action on the mental health crisis this college is facing, and he is moving the college towards a more competitive and stressful environment. The students, while possibly still functioning at a high level, are not happy and enjoying life. How can you be a good leader while reducing people to the value of the work they produce?”

  Probably the largest group of students questioned Summers’ candor. They felt that he dodged the questions, answered questions that had not been asked, and generally sounded more like a politician than the president of Harvard.

  —“It seemed to me that he had pre-set answers for the questions and somehow managed to evade all the tough inquiries. I felt like his answers were insincere and he was trying to weasel his way out of the truth…”

  —“Summers skirted some questions with answers that were crafted in an intentionally vague or generalizing way. He would use phrases like ‘when you look at the history of the world…’ or ‘I don’t think anyone would disagree that…’, even when asked about some very specific matters. Granted, some of the questions put him in a tough spot, but it was still frustrating to see him dance around the answers. This skill, however, is a major lesson in leadership…”

  —“What Larry Summers showed us today is that an ability to frame a question and answer selectively is a great way to talk to others from one’s strength…. It is about the strength and power to make people think that they came to their own conclusions, when really things are framed in such a way as to make those conclusions inevitable.”

  And a final judgment:

  —“What I really took from Summers’ practice of leadership is the importance of pursuing a path that interests you and you know you are good at—politics and economics for him—and fine-tuning your best qualities to earn influential positions.”

  It was true, then, that Larry Summers was indeed helping to shape the next generation of leaders, although perhaps not in the ways that he had expected. Certainly there were students who admired him enormously, who valued his fame and power and respected his intelligence. They were the students who still asked Summers to sign their dollar bills, and they liked the idea that Harvard was led by a man who occupied such a high position, straddling the worlds of power, politics, education, and money.

  But many students who had a more in-depth experience with Summers came away with different lessons: that conversations were competitions; that the way to win such competitions was to dissemble, to use your powers to boost your case while stifling even legitimate opposition, to conquer by picking only fights that played into your strengths. And maybe something more: that life consisted of battles, and they always had to be won.

  For many of Brian Palmer’s students, that was not a life, nor a way of living, that they would choose.

  For all the ways in which Larry Summers had changed Harvard during his first years as president, in the spring of 2004 there still remained a lack of tangible results, clearly defined accomplishments by which to judge the Summers presidency. The Broad Institute and the Stem Cell Institute existed only on paper; the Allston planning was moving ahead slowly, as one might expect given the enormity of the project. No one was more aware of this lacuna than Summers himself, and his impatience with the pace of change was a source of ongoing stress to those who worked for him. But in the spring of 2004, that state of affairs changed as the work of the curricular review was introduced to the Harvard community. The review mattered for two reasons: It would affect every undergraduate at Harvard College, and it would be a real measure of the results of Summers’ leadership style. As he and his supporters had often suggested, he may have been a bull in a china shop, but if that was what was required to change Harvard, and if that leadership style produced successful result
s, real improvements, then being a bull was not only justified, it was also necessary. It was essential.

  In one sense, the Harvard College curriculum was a simple matter. It dictated what students had to do to graduate from Harvard: how many courses they had to take, what requirements they had to fulfill, whether they had to study a foreign language or pass a rudimentary writing course. But for those who believed that Harvard had a great influence on its students—which was to say, virtually everyone who had ever worked or studied there—the curriculum meant much more. It reflected the university’s values, priorities, and mission. Harvard told its students that it wanted them to lead the world, and the curriculum was the official blueprint for their construction as leaders. The curriculum was, in a sense, the matrix in which Harvard students were grown. That was why people cared so much about what it contained, what it encouraged. It was no coincidence that Cornel West had appeared in two of the Matrix films; for a man who wanted to liberate students from the addiction of passively received knowledge, the coma of intellectual apathy, such a role made perfect sense.

  As times had changed over the twentieth century, Harvard changed its curriculum so that its students would never be unprepared for the world beyond its walls. But that had not always been the case. For the first two centuries of its existence, Harvard had put its students through an inflexible course of study in which they essentially memorized books—Greek, Latin, religious works—then recited the texts back to professors. Change did not come until the presidency of Charles W. Eliot, from 1869 to 1909. Eliot abolished the prescribed curriculum and instituted a program of elective study similar to those at European universities. His successor, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, tacked backwards. Convinced that students had too much freedom under Eliot’s system, Lowell imposed the system of concentrations that still exists at Harvard nearly a century later. While the details have changed, the principle is consistent: Harvard students should be exposed to broad areas of study, but it is imperative that they specialize in one area, so that they not be intellectual dilettantes whose four-year education amounts to no more than a hop, skip, and a jump through the course catalogue.