Not everyone thought that this was an improper question to ask. The events of the 1960s prompted a still-ongoing debate about the role of universities in American society. How engaged should they be with the world beyond their walls? Given their status as redoubts against the increasing materialism and ever-growing competitiveness of American society, should they infuse their students with an idealistic enthusiasm for reforming American life? Or would doing so corrupt the integrity of universities’ fundamental mission—to seek and impart knowledge?
Given Harvard’s prestige, power, and wealth, these questions were all the more urgent in Cambridge. With the nation’s eyes on Harvard, as was always the case, didn’t Harvard have a responsibility to serve as a university on a hill? Harvard thought it was better than every other university, so shouldn’t it set a standard of idealism to which other universities should aspire? After all, Harvard had so much money, how could anyone pretend that its decisions did not have profound social and political ramifications?
If it took a little revolution to bring these issues to the fore, so be it. That, at least, is what many defenders of student protest believed. Many Harvard students and professors thought that the tangible consequences of the sixties were, on the whole, good ones. The concept of in loco parentis—that universities played the role of parents to the students they enrolled—was severely weakened, leading to greater student freedom and, theoretically, greater individual responsibility. Restrictive social mores were loosened. Men at Harvard were no longer compelled to wear coats and ties to dinner; women and men would live in the same dormitories. The faculty voted to banish ROTC from campus and created a committee on Afro-American studies, which would eventually become the department run by Skip Gates. Meanwhile, the college pushed to increase the diversity of its student body, using affirmative action to recruit African American students in particular. Cornel West, who came to Harvard in 1970, might have been a beneficiary of just this effort.
This emphasis on ethnic diversity and social justice also opened up enormous new fields of inquiry, particularly in the humanities. No longer were DWMs—dead white males—the sole legitimate area of interest. Scholars of history, literature, anthropology, sociology, and the like turned their attention to women, the poor and working class, blacks, native Americans, and other groups traditionally neglected by scholars. This was new and fertile material whose exploration helped detail a richer, more nuanced portrait of American history. It also brought new faces into the academy. Part of Skip Gates’ reputation rested on the fact that he had unearthed the first novel ever written by an American black, Our Nig, by Harriet Wilson, and the first novel ever written by a female slave, The Bondwoman’s Narrative, by Hannah Crafts.
Still, 1969 was a traumatic year for Harvard, and professors present at the time wince and sigh when they reflect upon it now. Nathan Pusey retired in 1971, widely seen as a casualty of the protest but insisting that his actions were proper. His successor was Derek Bok, the conciliator.
For the first years of his presidency, Bok aimed simply to keep the peace. One of the conditions for his taking the job was that he not have to live in Loeb House. Its location in the Yard made it vulnerable to further student turmoil, and Bok had young children. So the president’s office bought the FAS dean’s mansion on Elmwood Avenue from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
Bok took the question of the university’s role in society seriously, and over the course of his two-decade presidency, he struggled to define the appropriate political role for Harvard and its president. A university president, he argued, should address political issues only when they had direct relevance to the mission of the university—teaching and learning. In the 1980s, Bok employed that argument in rejecting student demands for the university to divest its investments in South Africa as a protest against apartheid.
Bok also moved to redress an institutional shortfall that some Harvardians felt contributed to the unrest of 1969: a paucity of administrators. Improbable though it may seem today, Nate Pusey primarily depended upon two secretaries to run his administration, and some members of the faculty and administration felt that the lack of a broader management structure contributed to his loss of control over the students. Bok agreed that the university needed more professional management, if only because it had grown so much in the boom years after World War II. Harvard needed more experts in law, finance, political affairs, public relations, real estate, and so on. Bok hired them.
“One of the things that I faced, which my predecessor deliberately left for me to do, was coming to terms with how we administered a much more complicated institution,” Bok said. “[Pusey] was old-fashioned in that respect…but we couldn’t wait any longer. We had one vice-president for the whole institution, and we had massive complaints about the way in which buildings and grounds operated, the way the budget system worked, faculty pensions…. And so we entered a period that could be described as bureaucratization.”
“Bureaucratization” changed Harvard in profound and unexpected ways. The growth of a corporate infrastructure that reported to the president diminished the power of the faculty while boosting that of the central administration. The culture of the university changed as well. Harvard’s dominant values had once been those of scholars, but increasingly the university was defined by the bottom-line standards of corporate lawyers and MBAs. At points in Harvard’s history, the faculty had essentially run the institution. Now they became more and more like mere employees, with less and less of a sense of investment in the university as a whole. For many, their greatest allegiance to Harvard was due to the fact that it was lucrative to be affiliated with the best brand in higher education. Some might criticize people like Skip Gates for hopscotching from university to university, but the diminished stature of faculty at universities everywhere was partly to blame.
Along with their other demands, the student protesters had sought greater democracy in Harvard’s governance. The growth of a management culture took the university in just the opposite direction. Bureaucratization created a corps of behind-the-scenes powerbrokers whose decisions had great impact on both the students and faculty—yet the students and faculty frequently didn’t even know who those decision-makers were. Looking back at 1969, these administrators and the members of the Corporation saw ample cause to shut students out of decision-making. As was also the case at the World Bank during the 1990s, transparency was a concept praised in theory, but largely ignored in practice.
If the Bok years were considered an era of healing at a university burned by its engagement with the political world, the Rudenstine decade that followed saw what might be called the normalization of the sixties. With his commitment to the Af-Am department and affirmative action, Rudenstine endorsed some of that decade’s inheritance. Another, perhaps less constructive consequence was the growth of identity politics, with students fighting turf battles over ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. The importance of the world outside campus had diminished; the canvas of activism had shrunk to the individual body.
None of this recent history appealed to Larry Summers. Both by training and by temperament, the economist felt a profound skepticism toward the youth movement of the sixties. He thought of himself not as a product of that decade, but a response to it. Born in 1954, he was a little too young to be swept up in the turmoil of the time. As something of a loner, he wasn’t a movement type. He wasn’t a cool kid, a rebel who’d feel comfortable smoking a joint and listening to Jimi Hendrix. He was too driven, too disciplined, and too ambitious for that. A physically ungainly young man, Summers relied on his strength—his enormously powerful intellect.
Nor did he have to worry about being drafted; he was a student throughout the entire 1960s and ’70s. Even after graduation, Summers was not inclined to save the whales or freeze the nukes or end aid to the Contras (or continue it, for that matter). He was a scholar in a field not known for its radicalism. “The reason I decided…to become an economist is that I wanted to work
on solving what felt to me the most important problems in the world: poverty, unemployment, helping poor people,” Summers said in a 2001 speech. “But I knew that I didn’t want to just shout and rant about them…. I wanted to carefully study what worked and what didn’t work.”
If anything, Summers had a visceral distaste for the actions of people just a few years older than he. His academic training instilled in him what he called an “economic rationalism,” and he looked upon activism as if it were something to scrape off his shoe. Sixties-style protest, whether it occurred at Harvard in 1969 or at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in 1999, struck him as anti-intellectual and, therefore, of dubious value. At a meeting with students in October 2004, Summers said regarding the war in Iraq that “If this was the 1970s, [Harvard] students would be protesting the war every day, but as it is, youth apathy means they focus on the important things—their studies—and that can only be a good thing.” He disliked the way protesters simplified complex issues, turning them into chants or slogans to be scrawled on pieces of cardboard. And he thought that the emotion-fueled acts of protesters often worked against the causes they supported. The best example was their anger and dismay over globalization. Summers had no doubt that globalization would lead to higher living standards and greater longevity for people all around the world, as well as a cleaner global environment. If the anti-globalization protesters—the people who would never let him forget The Memo—couldn’t see that, then it was an intellectual failure on their part, an argument for the primacy of logic over passion, data over faith. He referred to those people as “espresso-drinking Westerners.”
Same thing with sweatshops, the original source of 2001’s living-wage protest. Liberals thought that sweatshops were bad. Summers thought that it was better to work in a sweatshop than, for example, to walk the streets as a prostitute. If sweatshop jobs were really so terrible, people wouldn’t take them. Activists who tried to shut down sweatshops were hurting the very people they claimed they wanted to help. That might sound contrarian, but it was really just thinking with your head and not your heart.
Summers was not devoid of passion. During his years in Washington, he became increasingly patriotic and started referring to the 1990s as an “American decade.” But his patriotism took the form more of admiration for American capitalism more than, say, a lump in the throat upon hearing “America the Beautiful.” The more Summers traveled around the world during the 1990s, the more he appreciated the American economy and the political framework that allowed it to thrive. In the trouble spots he visited, he saw how corruption stymied economic development and lowered the quality of life for ordinary people. Conversely, the economic policies that he, Rubin, and Greenspan had crafted and implemented had helped “save the world,” as Time had declared. The anti-globalization protesters who listened to Rage Against the Machine and rioted in the streets may not have understood, but the wise men of Washington knew what they were doing.
When he returned to Harvard, however, Summers saw the flotsam and jetsam of the 1960s wherever he looked. He had to step over it on his way through the student-occupied Mass Hall in the spring of 2001. The incoming president was shocked that Rudenstine had allowed the occupation of the president’s building. And when the sit-in was over and the students got off with punishments so light you could barely call them slaps on the wrist, Summers couldn’t believe that either. He considered such timidity a direct and unfortunate result of the 1969 riot, and he didn’t hesitate to make his feelings known.
In September 2001, a Harvard undergrad named David Jonathan Plunkett came to talk with Summers at the president’s office hour, which Summers scheduled every month or so. Plunkett had been one of the living-wage activists involved in the 2001 occupation, and as he sat down in Summers’ office, he said, “You know, I used to sleep outside this door.” Summers responded, “If I were president then, I’d have suspended you for at least a year.” Plunkett pressed on, raising the issue of Harvard’s outsourcing of union jobs to non-union workers. “I don’t feel any obligation to buy a union-made trash can,” Summers told him. “Why should I feel an obligation to hire union workers?” Plunkett couldn’t tell if Summers was serious or just trying to start an argument, but either way, he found the comparison offensive.
Summers was not only surprised that the occupiers hadn’t been punished, he also believed that they felt they shouldn’t have been punished. What gave him that idea was unclear. The protesters had fully expected to be disciplined and probably arrested, and were happily surprised when their assumptions proved wrong. But because they had anticipated being hauled out of Mass Hall, most of them hadn’t even brought changes of clothes, sleeping bags, and the textbooks they needed to keep up with their course work.
Still, Summers was convinced that the living-wage activists wanted the moral high of protest without the morning-after hangover of punishment. “The living-wage campaign and the way it was carried on did not engage me as a step toward social justice,” he told one student who asked him about the Mass Hall sit-in. “If you read Gandhi or Martin Luther King or any other thoughtful proponents of civil disobedience…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.”
In February 2002, Summers announced a new “Interpretation” of an existing rule, the “University-Wide Statement on Rights and Reponsibilities.” Passed after the takeover of University Hall, the 1970 statement said that a member of the Harvard community enjoyed “free expression, free inquiry, intellectual honesty, respect for the dignity of others, and openness to constructive change.” Interfering with these freedoms was a “serious violation of the personal rights upon which the community is based.” The Orwellian-sounding “Interpretation” that Summers instigated added that “any unauthorized occupation of a University building, or any part of it…constitutes unacceptable conduct…and is subject to appropriate discipline.”
The Interpretation didn’t actually change anything; it only emphasized extant policy. But it was widely seen as a sign of Summers’ determination to break the spirit of campus activism. Students got the point. First Larry Summers had called Cornel West on the carpet—a warning to the faculty that Summers would not hesitate to castigate them. Now he was sending the students a similar warning: Neil Rudenstine might have tolerated protest. Larry Summers will not.
Summers not only disagreed with Rudenstine’s decision not to have the Mass Hall occupiers arrested, he also found it hard to respect. In his opinion, Rudenstine’s restraint reflected a post-sixties crisis of confidence that had weakened the presidency and degraded Harvard’s intellectual life. Summers believed that the sixties had promoted what he called an “identity-based politics” in which the ideas people advocated were inextricably linked to their own cultural identities—the color of their skin, their religious belief, what social class they belonged to. He felt that scholars and students were afraid to say that one idea was better than another, lest they be accused of cultural insensitivity. Someone who criticized the value of African American studies, for example, risked being dubbed a racist. This way of thinking was so different from Summers’ experiences in graduate-level economics seminars, where every idea was fair game and the thin-skinned did not fare well.
Summers blamed the professors more than the students. In the 1960s, he believed, the average Harvard student was to the political left of the faculty. Today it was the professors who were the knee-jerk liberals. He estimated that in 2000, 85 percent of the Harvard faculty voted for Al Gore, while the rest split their votes between Ralph Nader and George W. Bush. Perhaps 70 percent of the students voted for Gore, 25 percent for Bush, and 5 percent for Nader. Granted, both groups were more liberal than Americans generally, but the faculty was more monolithic and less open-minded than the students. If, as Summers
believed, the decisions of adults were fundamentally the result of their education as young people, then Harvard students were too often being shaped by tenured professors infused with the anti-intellectual, counterculture spirit of the 1960s.
Summers was more hopeful about the undergraduates. They were, as he put it, malleable. Most of the freshmen during his first year as president had been born in or around 1983. Because they were some years removed from the sixties, they were less instinctively hostile to authority. Summers was particularly interested in those who wanted to enroll in ROTC, but were unable to do so at Harvard. The university’s original ban on the officer training program had been extended in 1994, to emphasize the faculty’s opposition to the military’s discrimination against homosexuals. Now Harvard students wishing to participate in ROTC had to take the subway to MIT, which did conduct an on-campus program. The cost of training Harvard cadets, about $135,000, was picked up by anonymous alumni donors. Summers disapproved of that state of affairs, and he called for the return of ROTC to Harvard Yard and a reconsideration of Harvard’s relationship to uniformed authority in general.
“There are still many people who, when they think of police, think too quickly of Chicago in 1968, and too slowly of the people who risk their lives every day to keep streets safe in America’s major cities,” Summers said at a Kennedy School dinner in October 2001. “It is all too common for us to underestimate the importance of clearly expressing our respect and support for the military and individuals who choose to serve in the armed forces of the United States.” Perhaps, he suggested, the terrorist attacks of the previous month could have a silver lining. “If these terrible events and the struggle that we are now engaged in once again re-ignite our sense of patriotism—re-ignite our respect for those who wear uniforms and bring us together as a country in that way—it will be no small thing,” Summers concluded.
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