The women-and-science firestorm by itself did not lead to Summers's dismissal late last February as Harvard's president. It was merely the culmination of hundreds of more private displays on his part of disregard for the social niceties that ordinarily permit human beings to work together for a common good. While academia almost expects its younger members to be brash and full of themselves, these qualities are most unbecoming in more seasoned members of the society, and generally fatal in leaders. Reading up on a topic the night before and then appearing at conferences with the bravado to suggest that one knows more than those who have spent their careers thinking about the issues at hand is no way for a president to act. Summers's non-age-adjusted IQ, moreover, at age fifty-one is likely 5 to 10 points lower than when he was a twenty-year-old Wunderkind. Harvard's longstanding mandatory retirement age of fifty-five for academics was never a matter of arbitrary ageism but a recognition born of experience that as academics age they live more by old ideas and less by new ones. Summers, still acting as if he were the brightest person in the room, was bound to offend people who knew better.
It may be, however, that Summers is not entirely to blame for his social ineptitude. His repeated failures to comprehend the emotional states of those he presided over might be indicative of the genetic hand he was dealt as a mathematical economist—the very cards that endowed him with great quantitative intelligence may also have disabled the normal faculties for reading human faces and voices. The social incapacity of mathematicians is no mere stereotype; many of the most brilliant are mild to full-blown cases of Asperger's syndrome (the high-intelligence form of autism), perhaps the most genetically determined of known human behavioral “disabilities.” Like exceptional math aptitude, Asperger's occurs five times more frequently in males than in females. The reason why must remain a mystery until further research shows how genes control the relative development and functioning of male and female brains.
If Summers's tactlessness does, in fact, have a genetic basis, much of the anger toward him should rightly yield to sympathy. No longer can his upbringing be blamed for failing to instill in him the graces of the civilized individual. In any case, all discussion should stop as to whether his dismissal was unduly precipitous—it was in all likelihood overdue. Whether those prominent individuals who promoted his candidacy should hang their heads in shame, however, is less obvious.
Summers's departure has to be seen as the first of many necessary Steps to reclaim for Harvard its once legitimate claim to primacy in science, at least relative to MIT. Toward that end, Tom Maniatis, having come to Cold Spring Harbor to receive its honorary degree in April 2006, prevailed upon me to agree to meet with Derek Bok, the former president, whom the Harvard Corporation had called to serve again until a new leader could be found. A time was soon set up for me and Derek to get together at what had been the home of many Harvard presidents before Bok, the grand Georgian structure on Quincy Street across from the Faculty Club, now called Loeb House.
The day before my 10:00 A.M. appointment, Liz and I drove up to Cambridge to see Tom and his multitalented Long Island-born partner, Rachel von Roeschlaub. After an hour of tennis at the famous Longwood Cricket Club in Brookline, we drove in tandem to dinner at the Charles Hotel, where Liz and I were to stay the night. Before the food came, Tom described the brutal cuts in funding recently dealt out to Harvard's science departments when Summers had launched a massive hiring campaign in translational life sciences and committed large pots of cash to develop Allsten.
Derek's initial reaction to my furrowed face must have been the same as mine to his graying hairs. Neither of us could pass for middle-aged. Twenty-eight years had elapsed since we were last face to face at the June 1978 commencement ceremonies, on which occasion I was delighted to be receiving an honorary D.Sc. A photo from that day shows Derek at forty-eight and me at fifty, each happy with himself, with a few more good years left to advance the causes of Harvard (in his case) and of scientific research (in mine). Neither of us could then have suspected that nearly thirty years later we might yet have cause to meet in the service of both.
Knowing that a petitioner's allotted hour always passes quickly, I went straight to my main message: It was wrongheaded to build a huge Allsten biology complex to compensate for the lack of greatness increasingly enveloping the biology labs along Divinity Avenue. Most likely, I argued, it was the B+ level of most of Harvard's life sciences, both in Cambridge and across the vast medical complex, that would gravitate to the brochure-perfect new campus, resulting in very little bang for the vast bucks that would be spent. This, I insisted, is not how great institutions are built.
With Derek Bok at Harvard commencement ceremony, June 1978
I went on to tell Derek that he and the Harvard Corporation should ask why MIT's life sciences now so completely outclass Harvard's. Past stinginess of Harvard deans played a big role in a problem that indiscriminate lavishness could not now fix. For far too long, University Hall had witlessly acted as if Harvard did not have to spend its own money to keep a place in the top league of science. The leadership assumed that Harvard's golden name would naturally move the federal government to fund not only the university's research but also the creation of new facilities required to stay at the cutting edge. But brand names count for very little in science. And so, foolishly, Harvard sat back on its heels for about two decades while MIT smoothly integrated the privately funded Whitehead Institute into its biology operations and, under the never shy Eric Lander, created a huge DNA sequencing facility. Thus MIT became a major player in the Human Genome Project, the intellectual driveshaft for much of today's most exciting biology and medicine.
Only belatedly had Harvard tried to enter the Genome Age by committing itself, as the twenty-first century began, to becoming strong in systems biology, a discipline so sprawling and unwieldy as to merit comparison to Enron's limitless expansions before its collapse into nothingness. In turn, the large MIT Center for Genome Research, thanks to the generosity of the California-based philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, was able to metamorphose in 2003 into an even more ambitious incarnation, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Its sleek Cambridge Center edifice across from MIT's Koch Biology Building would have looked as much at home in the Boston financial district. By diverting funds that might have been spent along Divinity Avenue, Harvard under Summers bought a say in how and by whom the Broad's massive genomic resources would be utilized. Within its doors, however, Harvard Yard seems light-years away.
Through such lavish commitments to joint ventures the pain of being shortchanged continued to be felt along Divinity Avenue. Still much rued was the failure in 2001 of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to lure the clever Roderick MacKinnon, then in his late forties, away from Rockefeller. Longtime Harvard stalwart and X-ray structure whiz Steve Harrison, who was convinced that MacKinnon's crystallo-graphic studies on ion channels would earn him a Nobel Prize (he would indeed share the 2003 award in Chemistry), felt likewise certain that with the right inducement MacKinnon would return to Harvard, where he'd had a lab at the medical school before leaving for Rockefeller. The package offered to him by then-dean Jeremy Knowles, however, was not remotely competitive with Rockefeller's commitment. Upon seeing the dean's letter, in fact, MacKinnon's wife wondered whether a mistake had been made in locating the decimal point. Depressed at Knowles's failure to think realistically big, Steve himself developed a case of wanderlust and spied a much brighter future for himself at Harvard Medical School. He wasted little time moving his highly productive X-ray crystallographic research group across the Charles.
Several years before these events, a dinner party at Mark and Lucy Ptashne's spectacularly renovated huge house on Sparks Street had reunited me and Jeremy, whom I first knew when he was one of Oxford's stars in chemistry. Given his background, I had assumed he would use his new powers as Harvard's number two to brighten the future of science there. So I was slack-jawed as Jeremy told the assembled scientists and their spouses of
the forthcoming boon to their work in the form of $1 million for supplies and equipment he would soon disburse among all the science departments. I blurted out that such a pittance would scarcely cover a small fraction of the scientists working at Cold Spring Harbor, adding that the miserly way Oxford was being run toward insignificance was no way for Harvard to keep pace with MIT. The stunned silence made me realize that no one had ever before witnessed such brazen disrespect for University Hall. Back at the Charles Hotel, I went to bed imagining Jeremy moving through a Max Beerbohm short story.
At this writing, University Hall is still under temporary stewardship. Larry Summers's firing of the East Asian studies scholar Bill Kirby as dean was not only the last straw of the Summers presidency; it also paralyzed Harvard administratively. But making new faculty appointments is not something that can wait—a short hiatus from hiring could do years of damage. Derek correctly understood that the job must be filled at once but also that the next president had the right to choose the next dean. So just prior to our appointment, Derek asked Jeremy to return temporarily to the helm of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
We now know that the eminent historian Drew Gilpin Faust will be the next president of Harvard. Who should the next dean be? Clearly it must be someone of commanding intellect and deep knowledge of the Harvard scene. But even if he or she also possesses Henry Rosovsky's uncanny sense of knowing when not to say no, this person will be taking on a role now too large for one individual. For the sake of excellence in all areas of inquiry, Harvard should divide the responsibility into three more manageable groupings—science, humanities, and social sciences. Each should be led by a distinguished academic with substantial powers of the purse. Only the capacity to judge and pay market rates can assure a better than 50-50 chance that the first-choice candidates of the respective ad hoc committees will accept a Harvard offer.
To be certain of success overall, Harvard salaries must once again be much higher than those of serious competitors. To get stars, you must offer star salaries. The best of academia no longer will come to Harvard because it is Harvard. No one goes into scientific research to get rich, but one doesn't undertake it to evade the comforts of life. Living close enough to Harvard Yard to enjoy its ambiance and diversions is now beyond the means of new Harvard appointees with families unless the faculty salary is matched by another of the same magnitude. Paying top salaries is well within the means of the largest university endowment on earth—provided that it abandon the almost Soviet-style fantasy of the Allsten expansion, at present envisioned to cover the area of twenty-five football stadiums.
Science that leads over the horizon depends on gathering the best minds and enabling them to do what the best minds naturally seek to do: pursue the most thrilling questions of the time. Such minds inevitably draw their like, and the rest takes care of itself. The dividends of such greatness, however, go beyond what is to be gained by winning the next scientific race. They extend to the enrichment of the student body by giving them a broader appreciation of intellectual values.
Harvard's new president will need to see paramount among her goals the seeking of potential greatness for its undergraduates through equipping them with the best ideas of the past, honest assessments of the world today, and realistic expectations about the future. This was Robert Hutchins's vision for the University of Chicago when in 1929, at age thirty-one, he became its president. His charismatic impact reached its apogee in the 1940s as great books and ideas became the mainstays of undergraduate education along the Midway. Though his successors, pressed to maintain a viable inflow of new undergraduates, saw the need for partial retreat from the purity of his vision, those educated in the primacy of great thoughts never doubted that they were the chosen people.
Even now, mention of the University of Chicago to educational leaders not directly exposed to Hutchins or to his immediate successors elicits wistful admissions that Hutchins largely had it right when he branded much of American higher education as a prolonged mismatch of triviality and ignorance. During our meeting Derek allowed that despite the failure of Hutchins's ideas to take hold at any other major American university, his was the only past American university presidency that educators still actively talk about. While the Ivy League turns out graduates who for the remainder of their lives seek out one another, the University of Chicago still strives to see its graduates leave with lifetime-long ideas and a passion to see the world as it is. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought and The Brothers Karamazov had much more impact on my life than any of my University of Chicago classmates.
At their best, universities promote outside their walls the spirit and values that enable the proper conduct of their work within those walls. Going to the College of the University of Chicago completed my conversion to a life devoted to discovery of the natural world for its own sake, the impulse first stirred by looking for birds with my father. Yet whatever great advance in knowledge a university may bring us, it will fail in its ultimate mission if it allows concerns such as self-marketing and customer satisfaction—concerns of the service institutions that most universities are fast becoming—to overtake the pure good of pursuing truth. And this is particularly important to science, in which the race, though it may be to the swift, is never over.
Before leaving Derek's temporary office I remarked that the time was surely not far off when academia would have no choice but to hand political correctness back to the politicians. Since 1978, when a pail of water had been dumped over E. O. Wilson for saying that genes influence the behavior of humans as well as of other animals, the assault against behavioral science by wishful thinking has remained vigorous. But as science is able to better prove its hypotheses, such irrationality must recede or betray itself as such. In showing that human genes do matter, behavioral biologists will no longer be limited to comparisons of fraternal and identical twins. Soon the cost of sequencing the A's, T's, G's, and C's of individual DNA molecules will drop to a thousandth of what it has been, thereby transposing our studies of behavioral differences to the much more revealing molecular level. DNA messages extracted from, say, many hundreds of psychopaths can then be compared to equivalent numbers of DNA messages from individuals prevented by their consciences from habitually lying, stealing, or killing. Specific DNA sequences consistently occurring only in psychopaths will allow us to pinpoint the genes whose malfunctions are likely to produce psychopathy. The thought that some people might be born to grow up wicked is inherently upsetting. But if we find such behavior to be innate, the integrity of science, no less than that of ethics, demands that we let the truth be known.
The relative extents to which genetic factors determine human intellectual abilities will also soon become much better known. At the etiological heart of much of schizophrenia and autism are learning defects resulting from the failure of key brain cells to link up properly to each other. As we find the human genes whose malfunctioning gives rise to such devastating developmental failures, we may well discover that sequence differences within many of them also lead to much of the observable variation in human IQs. A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so. Rather than face up to facts that will likely change the way we look at ourselves, many persons of goodwill may see only harm in our looking too closely at individual genetic essences. So I was not surprised when Derek asked apprehensively how many years would pass before the key genes affecting differences in human intelligence would be found. My back-of-the-envelope answer of “fifteen years” meant Summers's then undetermined successor would not necessarily need to handle this very hot potato.
Upon returning to the Yard, however, I was not sure that even ten years would pass.
Cast of Characters
With Swedish pro Carl Wermee at Piping Rock Club in Locust
Valley, New York
George Beadle(1903-1989)—After heading the Biology Division at Caltech from 1946, in 1961 he became the president of the University of Chicago, so serving until he was sixty-five. Then, as director of the Institute for Biomedical Research of the American Medical Association, he resumed research on the origins of modern corn. In 1982 he moved with his wife, Muriel, a writer, to a retirement village in Pomona, California.
Seymour Benzer(b. 1921)—In 1976, he moved from Purdue to Caltech, where he exchanged phage for Drosophila, using it to effectively probe the genetic basis of behavior and neurodegeneration.
Derek Bok(b. 1930)—After retiring as Harvard president in 1991, he remained highly involved with higher education, writing six books on the topic: Our Underachieving Colleges (2005), Universities in the Marketplace (2003), The Shape of the River (1998), Universities and the Future of America (1990), Higher Learning (1986), and Beyond the Ivory Tower (1982). His recent research focuses on the U.S. government's approach to domestic problems, about which he has written two books, The State of the Nation (1997) and The Trouble with Government (2001). Following the resignation of Larry Summers, Derek returned in July 2006 to Harvard to serve as acting president for one year.
Sir (William) Lawrence Bragg(1890-1971)—He left his post as director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1954 to head the Royal Institution in London, which his father, William Henry Bragg, had directed between 1930 and 1942.
Sydney Brenner(b. 1927)—Upon the retirement of Max Perutz, he became head of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge, serving until 1986. By then he was devising methodologies for studying the human genome, early on seeing the importance of making DNA copies of cellular messenger RNA molecules. Increasingly he worked outside the United Kingdom, at the Scripps Research Institute in La lolla, California, at the Molecular Sciences Institute that he founded in Berkeley, and in Singapore as a biotechnology adviser to its government. In the United Kingdom, he and his wife, May, maintain their primary residence in the town of Ely, to the north of Cambridge.
Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science Page 33