Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University

by Bradley, Richard

• ISBN13: 9780060568542
• ISBN10: 0060568542
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-02-03
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

It is the richest, most influential, most powerful university in the world, but at the beginning of 2001, Harvard was in crisis. Students complained that a Harvard education had grown mediocre. Professors charged that the university cared more about money than about learning. And everyone worried that Harvard's outgoing president, Neil Rudenstine, epitomized an unhappy trend: the university president as full-time fund-raiser. Harvard may have possessed a $19 billion endowment, but had the university lost its soul? The members of the Harvard Corporation, the ultra-secretive governing board established more than three centuries ago, knew that they had to act. And so they made a bold pick for Harvard's twenty-seventh president: former Treasury Secretary and intellectual prodigy economist Lawrence Summers. Although famously brilliant, Summers was a high-stakes gamble. In the 1990s he had crafted American policies to stabilize the global economy, quietly becoming one of the world's most powerful men. But while many admired Summers, his critics called him elitist, imperialist, and arrogant beyond measure. Today Larry Summers sits atop a university in a state of upheaval, unsure of what it stands for and where it is going. His allies believe that Harvard needs shaking up and appreciate Summer's blunt language and unabashed displays of power. His foes accuse the new president of tearing apart a venerable institution simply to remake it in his own image. At stake is not just the future of Harvard University, but the way in which Harvard students see the world -- and the manner in which they will lead it. Written despite the university's official opposition, Harvard Rules uncovers what really goes on behind Harvard's storied walls -- the politics, sex, ambition, infighting, and intrigue that run rampant within the world's most important university.

Author Biography

Richard Bradley is the former executive editor of George magazine.

Table of Contents

Introduction : the emperor's new clothes
The remarkable, controversial career of Larry Summers	p. 1
Neil Rudenstine's long decade	p. 39
Searching for Mr. Summers	p. 61
The president versus the professor	p. 85
Washington on the Charles	p. 125
Larry Summers and the bully pulpit	p. 169
The unexpected exit of Harry Lewis	p. 207
War	p. 243
Silent campus	p. 281
Conclusion : the president on his throne	p. 337
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Harvard Rules
The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University

Chapter One

The Remarkable, Controversial Career of Larry Summers

From Love Story to Legally Blonde, Harvard abounds in American popular culture. Partly this is because the university produces many creative, ambitious, and occasionally dysfunctional graduates whose Cambridge experience provides a natural subject for their work. It'salso because the campus is so picturesque, so resplendent with timelessred brick, graceful bell towers, and sleek sculls gliding along a sparklingCharles River. This is cinematic stuff. Setting a story at Harvard conveyshistory, power, and tradition; Harvard raises the stakes. Littlewonder that thriller writer Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code,made his hero, symbologist Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor. Thelabel gives Langdon instant credibility.

Nevertheless, much of the literature and film featuring Harvardcasts the university in a critical light. Consider perhaps the mostfamous Harvard drama. In Erich Segal's 1970 novel Love Story (thefilm of which is screened for Harvard freshmen every fall), the universitycomes across as a cold and uncaring place, aesthetically impressivebut officially hostile to the romance of Harvard man Oliver Barrett IVand Radcliffe student Jenny Cavilleri. They fall in love at Harvard, butcertainly not because of it. Love distracts from work.

In The Paper Chase, the 1973 film about a law student who falls inlove with his august professor's daughter, Harvard is a place where excellencetakes root not because of its culture of competition, arrogance, and frosty interpersonal relations, but despite it. Then there's 1997's GoodWill Hunting, the tale of a working-class math genius who falls for a Harvardundergrad. In that film, the typical Harvard student is presented aspompous, effete, and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Other, lessgood movies present Harvard still more cynically. In 1986's Soul Man, theonly way a young man can afford Harvard is to pretend that he's black inorder to win a scholarship. And in the 2002 comedy Stealing Harvard, awell-meaning uncle attempts to pilfer $30,000 so that his niece can payHarvard's costs.

In the realm of nonfiction, there is a sizeable genre of "I spent ayear at Harvard" books—memoirs of the law school, medical school,divinity school, and so on. In theme and structure, such chronicles -- such as Scott Turow's One L -- constitute survival narratives. A year atthe Harvard Law School is the academic equivalent of surviving aplane crash in the Peruvian Andes or being stranded on a desertedisland with only a beach ball for company. As in most Harvard-themedworks of culture, individuality is in short supply, spontaneity promptsrebuke, and love is an endangered emotion.

Harvard's administration devotes enormous amounts of time,money, and energy to generating more positive media coverage. Theuniversity seems to have more press secretaries than Congress, andthey spend as much time shooting stories down as helping them getwritten. Much of their job involves getting faculty members quoted innewspapers and magazines on issues related to their expertise, and atthis they are remarkably successful -- helped, no doubt, by the prevalenceof Harvard grads in the press. Some years back, a writer workingon a book about Harvard asked a group of researchers to count thenumber of instances in which the New York Times cited Harvard over aperiod of several months. They expected the number to be large, buteven to their surprise, they found that the Times mentioned Harvardmore than all other universities combined.

Of course, Harvard doesn't rely on outside press organizations toadvertise itself. It publishes dozens of reports, bulletins, journals, andmagazines lauding the accomplishments of members of the Harvardcommunity. There's nothing sinister about this -- all universities doit—but Harvard does it bigger and better. Among numerous examples,the Harvard University Gazette, a weekly newspaper during the school year, profiles Harvard faculty and lists the remarkable number of lectures, exhibits, and performances happening on campus in any givenweek. Harvard Magazine is a slick, professional magazine sent to allHarvard alums six times yearly. The university web page, a more recentinnovation, projects a harmonious image of Harvard across the world,twenty-four hours a day.

If, in the summer and fall of 2001, you had read the articles in Harvardpublications and on Harvard websites about new president LarrySummers, you would have acquired a meticulously selected and oftrepeatedset of facts about him. You would have known that Summerswas energetic and "brilliant" -- a word repeated so often to describehim that it became almost a third name. You would have known thatSummers was an inspiring teacher, often mentioned as a likely winnerof the Nobel Prize in economics. And that Summers had spent a successfuldecade in Washington, capped by his eighteen months as secretaryof the treasury. From all the things written about him, you mighthave gotten the impression that Summers resembled TV's West Wing'sPresident Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen -- only smarter.

All the promotion paid off. Summers received glowing treatmentin the non-Harvard media, which proclaimed that he was just the manto restore the role of university president to its pre-Rudenstine standing.Larry Summers, wrote one Boston Globe columnist, "has thepotential to be the greatest president of Harvard since Charles W.Eliot," the nineteenth-century figure generally considered to be Harvard'sgreatest president, period ...

Harvard Rules
The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University. Copyright © by Richard Bradley. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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