Many members of the Harvard community—on both sides of the schism—were left wondering why Summers had picked such a risky fight so early in his tenure. The idea of singling out a popular black professor for criticism seemed so fraught with hazard, they found it hard to believe that Summers’ stated reasons were his only motive—especially those who believed that the criticisms were of dubious merit. Instead, most people believed there was some other, deeper factor at work in Summers. An impulse to define himself in opposition to Neil Rudenstine? The alleged ear-whispering of Martin Peretz, Leon Wieseltier, and FAS dean Jeremy Knowles? Ethnic retribution for West’s support of Al Sharpton?
Such theories are perhaps best left for psychiatrists to ponder—and Harvard’s did—but there was one interpretation for which tangible proof did exist. Rebuking Cornel West was really only a microcosm of Summers’ larger purpose: to prepare Harvard for an expansive future by eradicating what Summers perceived as the noxious remnants of an unhealthy past—the tumultuous, divisive, corrosive 1960s. Only by moving beyond the legacy of that decade, Summers felt, could the university embrace the magnificent future he envisioned for it.
Larry Summers may have left the Treasury Department, but he had no intention of disappearing from the circles of the world’s power elite. He no longer had hundreds of billions of dollars at his disposal to promote American influence and his own power, but Harvard had its own distinctive assets. Summers was presiding over probably the greatest collection of brainpower anywhere, backed by one of the world’s most powerful brands. Like a corporation with foreign subsidiaries, the university had outposts all over the globe—offices and partnerships with other universities in Asia, Europe, South America, and the Middle East. Summers knew that by further extending Harvard’s influence around the world—and by shaping the content of that influence—he could extend his status as one of the globe’s most influential citizens.
He would never say so explicitly. Unlike Neil Rudenstine, Summers would not talk about Harvard’s destiny as an empire of the mind. But that was partly because the two men approached public speaking very differently. Rudenstine slaved over his writings and struggled to make each new speech clear and meaningful. “Neil doesn’t delegate,” said one man who knew him well. “If Neil was giving a speech to his three nieces, he’d stay up the night before to write it.” Rudenstine thought that serious, painstaking writing was part of the job of university president. He believed in leaving a paper trail.
Plus, Rudenstine could get away with calling Harvard an empire. He was so mild-mannered, so self-effacing, no one would suspect him of grand personal ambitions. Summers did not have that luxury. He’d already been accused of exactly that. Nor could Summers forget “The Memo” from his days at the World Bank. To him, leaving a written record of his actions and ideas, whether they dealt with toxic waste or anything else, entailed more risk than benefit. As a result, the speeches that he did give were circumspect, containing rhetorically powerful lines but a notable lack of specifics—more the speeches of a cabinet secretary than a university president. It was no coincidence that Summers enlisted David Gergen, a Kennedy School professor who had served both political parties as a communications adviser in four White Houses, to help write them.
But in more intimate settings—in question-and-answer sessions, dinner parties, meetings with alumni, and talks with colleagues and aides—Summers made clear that a Harvard stretching out across the globe was exactly his intention. He did not want to rule the world, of course. But he did want to guide it, to shape it, to influence its development, just as he had during the 1990s. Harvard would be his power base, a knowledge factory exporting hundreds of soon-to-be leaders every year. And he would run the factory.
“You know,” he said in more than one speech, “I was overwhelmed during the time that I was at the treasury by the fact that I would travel all over the world and I would meet the deputy finance minister of this country or the foreign minister of that country, and half the time his reaction would be, ‘Well, it’s nice you’re here from the U.S. Treasury Department, Mr. Summers, but you were a professor at Harvard, weren’t you?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, I was.’ And then the person would say, ‘In 1977 I spent a year as a fellow at Harvard University and it was the most important year of my life, because of what I learned, the connections I made, the experience that I had.’
“…The network of people who have been through our campus and have become leaders around the world is something that I could not have conceived of when I was a professor here, and would not have believed if I had not met these people through my travels.
“What will shape this world is the people who come forth to lead it,” Summers said on another occasion. “And the group of 1,650 people [in every freshman class] from every state, from dozens of countries, from every possible background…is every year the most remarkably talented group of young people that has ever been assembled in the history of the world.
“The years in which students are here at Harvard College are the years of tremendous malleability in their lives,” he said. “We have such a wonderful opportunity to shape and prepare what these students do.”
Again and again Summers returned to the idea that, more than any other place, Harvard created the earth’s leadership class “The world is really shaped by what its leaders think,” he said on another occasion. “What they think…depends on what happens in the years in which they are being formed. Harvard College will do its part.”
And Summers explicitly linked the future of the United States in its fight against terrorism with the success of Harvard. As he said to students at a Florida high school, “There is…nothing that would give greater support in the long run to countries that are adversaries of the United States, than for us to have the situation where members of every group don’t feel like they have a chance to be at places like Harvard.”
Of course, all teachers hope that they will have a lasting influence on their students; on a much larger scale, the same was true for Summers. During his time in Washington, he had become convinced that the single most important factor in how politicians made decisions was their education. Now Summers ran an institution containing the world’s best and brightest students, and he was determined to teach them how to lead. “Harvard exists for only one reason—the future of the world depends more than anything else on what young people learn and go forth and do,” he said.
For someone who had thought as long and hard about globalization as Summers had, the opportunity was inescapable and inevitable—not just for Harvard, but for himself. Once he had been able to prod, cajole, and sometimes even bully world leaders using billions of dollars in IMF loans and “conditionality,” the implementation of specific, pro-American policies attached to all those loans. Now he could shape the world in a different way—by training its elite. Through his paradigmatic textbook, Paul Samuelson had influenced generations of economists; Larry Summers wanted to influence generations, period. He had called the students of Harvard “the most remarkably talented group of young people in the history of the world.” In the history of the world. And every year another group, equally or more impressive. And he was now the president of this, the elite of all elites.
First, though, he had to wipe the slate clean. To purge Harvard of the bonds that kept it from realizing its enormous potential and seeing itself in a new way—his new way. And that meant eradicating the influence of the 1960s.
What was that influence? Larry Summers had one decidedly negative view. In the years to follow, those who held a different perspective would become Summers’ most ardent critics. They did not disagree that Harvard should shape the world’s future leaders. But on the question of how those leaders should be shaped, what they should be taught, what their values were, they could not have disagreed with Larry Summers more. As Summers moved to remake Harvard in his own image, these people would become his most passionate opposition.
The man who had been president of Harvard during the decad
e of Vietnam, civil rights, student protest, and political assassination had been tragically out of sync with his era. Nathan Marsh Pusey was a classics scholar who’d graduated from the college in 1928 before earning his Harvard Ph.D. in 1935. (He enjoyed, according to one report, a “passion for Athenian law.”) Pusey was a deeply pious man, a regular attendee at Memorial Church who was committed to improving the lot of the chronically impoverished divinity school. Minister Peter Gomes called Pusey “the last Christian,” by which Gomes meant the last Harvard president profoundly infused with and motivated by faith. (“It’s a problematic title, but one that I can get away with,” Gomes joked.) Pusey’s conviction showed in his broad, resolute face, which never looked creased by doubt—or, for that matter, flexibility.
When James Bryant Conant announced in the spring of 1953 that he would leave his office to become the U.S. high commissioner to Germany, no one at Harvard expected Pusey to succeed him. How could they? Few even knew who Pusey was. The leading candidates were McGeorge Bundy, then a thirty-three-year-old associate professor of government, strikingly young but manifestly brilliant, and John Houston Finley, a professor of Greek literature who had helped author the famous “Harvard Red Book,” a blueprint for education in postwar America. In different ways, both were men of gravitas and stature.
Pusey, who had in the interim become president of Lawrence College, a small liberal arts school in Appleton, Wisconsin, was not—at least, not to many Harvardians. A native of Iowa, he would be the first Harvard president born west of the Hudson. Unlike Abbot Lawrence Lowell, he didn’t have family money. Unlike James Bryant Conant, he wasn’t married to a Harvard professor’s daughter. Pusey had never even been a member of the Harvard faculty. He was so anonymous around campus that, after the choice was announced, a joking refrain sprang up: “Pusey? Who’s he?” Once the students and alums answered that question, they concocted another rhyme: “We couldn’t be choosy, so we took Pusey.”
But for most of his presidency, Pusey confounded his skeptics. He smartly appointed Bundy dean of the FAS, bringing into the fold a man of enormous intelligence and energy who also possessed the disposition of a potential rival. Pusey also proved to be a master fundraiser, leading what was then the largest capital campaign in the history of higher education—$82 million. And he wasn’t afraid to use his bully pulpit to rebuke an American bully. During his time at Lawrence College, Pusey had been a fearless critic of the increasingly dangerous Joe McCarthy—on Pusey’s appointment, McCarthy remarked that “Harvard’s loss is Wisconsin’s gain”—and he would play the same role at Harvard. “Someday I am sure we shall all look back on the hateful irrationality of the present with incredulity,” he told one journalist. A 1954 faculty citation said that Pusey confronted McCarthy “with a serene and quiet courage,” and called Pusey “the president of Harvard both in name and deed.”
But the moral certitude that served Pusey so well in the 1950s proved less suited to the 1960s, when the greatest threat to Harvard came from within. As student protest began to embroil campuses nationwide, Pusey refused to believe that Harvard might become infected by the unrest. Why attack the university for problems that were so clearly the result of external forces? “The number of undergraduates who get excited about political problems is not large,” he declared. “Most of them are above that sort of thing.”
As it turned out, they weren’t—though at first the students’ protests seemed more hormonal than political. In 1960 the faculty voted to publish Harvard diplomas in English rather than the traditional Latin, and a horde of some two thousand cranky undergraduates marched on Loeb House, then the president’s residence. “Latin Si, Pusey No,” the students chanted. The president came out of his house and addressed the crowd—in Latin. Since virtually none of the students had any idea what he was saying, the protest quickly fizzled.
Pusey had a sense that the students either weren’t dealing with important issues or didn’t understand the complexity of the matters they were going on about, and the events of the next years did nothing to dissuade him. In 1963 students protested a plan to cut down sycamore trees along Memorial Drive, the four-lane road that runs parallel to the Charles River. The protest succeeded; the trees were spared. A 1966 attempt to block the introduction of WALK/DON’T WALK signs in Harvard Square did not. Trivial though these little flare-ups seemed, they had an underlying consistency—a reaction against the incursions of unwelcome “progress” into Harvard’s tradition-minded community.
Nor was all the student activism at Harvard so slight, and Pusey failed to distinguish between jejune rebellion and genuine political anger, or to recognize how potent the two combined could be. In 1966 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a 1939 graduate of the business school to whom the university had awarded an honorary doctorate in 1962, was invited to speak on campus. He never got the chance to deliver his speech. A shouting mob of students corralled him outside Quincy House, on Plympton Street. McNamara responded with bravado—“I was tougher then, and I’m tougher now!” he shouted, referring to his own student days—but the situation verged on chaos. A young student (and future congressman) named Barney Frank hastily led McNamara to safety through a labyrinth of underground steam tunnels. The ugly incident only hardened Pusey’s conviction that student protest subverted the sine qua non of the university, a respect for free speech and civil debate. The students argued that extraordinary times required exceptional behavior. Without concession, Pusey disagreed.
As the war in Vietnam escalated after 1965, the tension at Harvard also rose. Some students, perhaps the majority, were not particularly demonstrative. But others grew angrier and angrier—over the war, the draft, racial injustice, on-campus recruiting by military contractors such as Dow Chemical, and the campus presence of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. The fact that Harvard had numerous connections to the Johnson administration—including the since-departed Bundy, now special assistant to the president for national security affairs—fueled many students’ conviction that their university was complicit in the war.
Students weren’t the only ones torn between their reasons for being at Harvard and the pull of social unrest outside the campus gates. A politicized faculty split into liberal and conservative caucuses (both tilted considerably more to the left than either term now connotes). So broad was the divide that members of the two groups stopped speaking to one another. At the Faculty Club, who ate lunch with whom was meticulously scrutinized. Professors aligned themselves with or against the students. When the radical group Students for a Democratic Society threatened to burn the Widener Library card catalogue, several members of the conservative caucus camped out in the library for months keeping watch.
The collegiality that bound Harvard together was crumbling under the combined assaults of war and protest, mistrust and incivility. Still, most professors thought that widespread civil disobedience was unlikely. Hundreds of demonstrators might have seized buildings at Columbia and Berkeley, yet the faculty firmly believed that Harvard was different; Harvard was too old, too venerable, too good. Harvard had always thought of itself as exceptional among universities, in both senses of the word—better than and apart from the mass. Student uprising could not, would not happen here.
It did. On the afternoon of April 9, 1969, some three hundred students and outside activists, angered by Pusey’s refusal to evict ROTC from the campus, raced into University Hall, the administration building that sits between Memorial Church and Widener Library. Shouting, swearing, and ransacking file cabinets, the protesters infiltrated the offices of the college deans. The stunned administrators were pushed, threatened, and forced to leave, subject to a torrent of verbal abuse and the threat of worse. One, Archibald Epps, Harvard’s first African American dean, refused to depart. The protesters carried him feet first out of the building, unceremoniously dumping him on the ground. Epps, who considered himself someone who could sympathize with the students because of his own groundbreaking position, would never quite recover
from the sense of violation and betrayal he felt.
Over the course of the afternoon, shocked university officials debated how to respond. While they talked, two to three hundred more students, most more curious than committed, joined the original protesters in University Hall.
Pusey had no intention of waiting out the sit-in or negotiating with student leaders. Instead, he called the cops—and not just Harvard police, but Cambridge and Boston troopers as well. In the gray pre-dawn light of April 10, they took University Hall back. About four hundred masked policemen filled the building with tear gas and waded inside, liberally wielding their nightsticks against anyone who didn’t get out of the way fast enough. Coughing, crying, and gasping for breath, the demonstrators rushed out doors and jumped out windows. Less than twenty-four hours after it began, the occupation was over.
The immediate consequences were a ten-day campus strike, vociferous denunciations of the president, and media portrayals of a bitterly divided university. Those would pass. But in the longer term, the assault on University Hall—both assaults on University Hall—scarred the campus for decades. The trust between students and faculty was shattered. Relationships between some professors would never fully heal. And no longer would the students see the Harvard president as an Olympian figure to whom they deferred, but as a flawed and fallible individual against whom they protested. After all, the students may have taken over a building, but Pusey unleashed armed outsiders upon them. Not all trespasses were equal.
Most seriously, perhaps, Harvard’s self-confidence, that invisible armor that had cloaked the university since the seventeenth century, had been profoundly shaken. If its own students could hate Harvard so much—and could such a treason stem from anything other than hatred?—then what was the very point of the university?
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