Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

  After two years working in the U.S. Public Health Service and a year of travel overseas, Lewis returned to Harvard in 1971 for graduate work. By mid-1974, just three years later, he had earned his doctorate in applied math, making him something of a young turk in an exciting young field: computer science. In 1981, one year before Summers did, Lewis received tenure, a rare event for a junior faculty member. (Marlyn was also working at Harvard, becoming the director of admissions for Harvard College in 1987.) In July 1995, then-FAS dean Jeremy Knowles appointed Lewis the dean of Harvard College, responsible for overseeing the non-academic side of college life, from the house system to extracurricular activities to the Ad Board.

  The dean of Harvard College had not traditionally been a powerful position. Past deans had been career administrators, who carried little clout with the faculty. But Lewis was a tenured professor empowered by Knowles to deal with some hot-button issues. Knowles knew that the college needed reform and that a weak dean could not effect it.

  The decisions that Dean Lewis made were not always popular. In 1995, he revised the system by which freshmen were assigned to the houses so that they could not choose their houses themselves, but instead received random assignments. With the randomization, Lewis broke up the self-segregation that occurred when students got to pick where they wanted to live—Adams was the artsy house, Mather the jock house, and so on. But in the short term, the move raised an enormous hue and cry from the undergraduates, who liked the old way.

  Randomization was hardly Lewis’ only controversial decision. In the fall of 2002, he banned students from bringing kegs to the tailgate parties at the Harvard-Yale game, arguing that kegs promoted binge drinking. Furious students responded that, given their intractable intention to drink themselves mindless, better they drink from a keg than pint bottles of vodka. It took longer to quaff a beer than to throw down a shot. The debate prompted dozens of Crimson articles and editorials, with headlines such as “Repeal the Keg Ban.”

  A decision of greater import had come in 2001, when Lewis led a committee that altered the college’s sexual assault policy, so that students accusing other students of rape had to show “sufficient corroborating evidence”—a diary entry or a conversation with a roommate about the alleged incident, for example. The change, an attempt to move away from the Scylla and Charybdis of “he said/she said” situations, infuriated some female students, who claimed that it would discourage women from reporting rapes. A subsequent committee, headed by a female professor, decided to tone down the wording and hire a “fact finder” to investigate every single allegation. This soothed student concerns.

  Even if students didn’t always like Harry Lewis’ decisions, they invariably liked him. His dedication to the life of the college was so obvious, the students were a little shocked—they weren’t used to that degree of interest from a high-level Harvard administrator. Lewis was committed to improving the system of advising, and he’d get under the skin of department chairs who didn’t seem to care much—the economics department, which left advising up to a roster of graduate students, was the worst. “Dean Lewis really cared about students,” said John Moore, a member of the class of 2004. “I had an adviser who paid no attention to me, and when I told Dean Lewis, he offered to be my unofficial adviser.”

  Accessible and responsive, Lewis answered all student e-mails within a day. He liked to joke that because the answer was so often no, the least he could do was answer promptly. And he conducted his business with a transparency that was hard to find in the Harvard administration. If the Crimson asked him about something, he’d give the paper an honest answer, on the record. By contrast, Bill Kirby had taken to having his press secretary sit in on meetings with Crimson reporters—when, that is, the Crimson could actually get a meeting with him. And around the university, professors were growing increasingly nervous about talking to reporters under any circumstances, knowing that saying the wrong thing would draw retribution from the president’s office.

  Harry Lewis cared about the students, and they knew it. When, in 2000, a student was dying of cancer in March of his senior year, Lewis worked with Jeremy Knowles and Neil Rudenstine to ensure that the student received his diploma early. Two days after receiving the diploma by overnight mail, the young man passed away, but to the grateful parents, the gesture had made a difference in their son’s last days.

  For Lewis, that kind of effort was standard operating procedure. He believed that the dean of Harvard College wasn’t there just to find space for student extracurricular groups or to set policy on the use of fireplaces, but to help guide students from youth into adulthood, from the structure of Harvard College into an unknowable but exciting future. In his office on the first floor of University Hall, Lewis had hung three maps of the United States at different periods. His favorite dated from the year 1750. It showed the eastern coastline with a crude accuracy, and the same for the rivers and settlements across much of the continent. But the part of the map that would come to be known as the Pacific Northwest was labeled “Parts Undiscovered.” Lewis loved that metaphor. “That’s the right way to think about our souls,” he said in another Morning Prayers talk. “As real places that are, temporarily, undiscovered.”

  Lewis was constantly writing. He wrote talks for Morning Prayers, editorials for the Crimson, and lengthy e-mails to deans, professors, and students about issues in college life. Jeremy Knowles later praised Lewis’ letters, dryly pointing out that while they “are not short, they are gracefully unambiguous.” Unlike Larry Summers, whose experience with The Memo had taught him to avoid committing his real thoughts to paper, Lewis thought that explaining his decisions was a moral obligation. He believed that students would learn from the process, and even if they didn’t agree with his decisions, at least they’d understand why those decisions had been made. That, Lewis thought, was how you built consensus, and consensus mattered, because decisions imposed by one man wouldn’t take. The community would reject them.

  It was inevitable that Harry Lewis and Larry Summers would clash. In some ways, both men were surprisingly similar—opinionated, stubborn, strong leaders. But their similarities only highlighted their points of contention. “The differences between them became apparent very early on,” said one of Lewis’ co-workers. “Harry would stand up to Larry, and you could tell that wasn’t appreciated. At the beginning, we’d be talking about dealings with Mass Hall, and Harry said, ‘This is going to be interesting.’ I don’t think he knew how interesting it was going to be.”

  They disagreed about the state of college academics. While Summers joined in the cry against grade inflation, Lewis was skeptical that grade inflation existed, or, if it did, that it made very much difference to people interested in hiring Harvard graduates. He had already challenged Harvey Mansfield’s view that grade inflation was the result of affirmative action, but in a subsequent Morning Prayers talk he went further, suggesting that grades were just not as important as some people made them out to be; that they were, in fact, a superficial way of judging a Harvard student. “We certify a minimum standard with our diplomas, and our consumers choose among our graduates on criteria other than grades,” Lewis said, “because they recognize that for most purposes, course grades at Harvard are not the most important thing differentiating one student from another. Things that Harvard used to talk about—courage, ambition, mental toughness, integrity, compassion, capacity to rebound from reversals, a desire to leave the world a better place than you found it—these are the things that matter in real life. Not insignificant variations in grade point average.”

  Lewis and Summers also disagreed on the question of globalization and the university. Even as he spoke of the need for Harvard to support ROTC and act patriotically, Summers pushed for the internationalization of Harvard, hoping to steadily increase the number of foreign students enrolled. If there was a tension between making Harvard a “truly global university,” as Summers said, and insisting that “The Star Spangled Banner” be played at
commencement, Summers either didn’t recognize it or didn’t acknowledge it. Lewis worried that Summers wanted to reduce the number of American students at Harvard, which was inevitable unless you increased the total student population. He feared that Summers’ globalization push was occurring without any meaningful discussion of what it meant to be an American university in a post–9/11 society, particularly in the context of the curricular review. “A review taking place post–Sept. 11 will inevitably have a different character because America’s place in the world is so much under discussion today,” Lewis wrote. “How will the Harvard faculty balance the reality that the U.S. is one nation among many in an ever smaller and more interconnected world, with a recognition that the particular ‘free society’ in which Harvard exists is founded on ideals which Americans continue to be proud to defend and preserve?” The Crimson editorialized that “Lewis’ introduction of American values into a debate that has hardly begun contrasts sharply with the themes emphasized by Summers and Kirby.”

  The two men disagreed about the tolerance of free speech at the university. After Lewis tried to stick up for commencement speaker Zayed Yasin, Summers told Lewis to say nothing. In a letter to the Crimson on September 11, 2002, Lewis reflected about the year after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. “I was least proud of our civility during the controversy over the undergraduate Commencement speaker, during which I heard both American Jews and American Muslims referred to as ‘those people.’”

  Summers’ attack on the divestment movement as anti-Semitic also disturbed Lewis. On September 23, 2002, just ten days after Summers gave his anti-Semitism warning, Lewis took his turn at the pulpit of Appleton Chapel. The subject of his talk was the dialectic between the Harvard curricular review and events in American life. He began with a Biblical quotation from the Book of Kings: “It pleased the Lord that Solomon has asked this. And God said to him, ‘Because you have asked for this, and have not asked for yourself long life or riches or the life of our enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right, behold. I now do according to your word. Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind.’”

  If any in the audience thought that Lewis might have chosen that Biblical text as a commentary on Harvard’s new president, his subsequent words probably confirmed their suspicions. “We have just come through a year in which America has been reminded of her dependence on the rest of the world, and of the fact that her fundamental values of freedom and equality are not accepted universally,” Lewis said. “We rely on these freedoms more in this old University than anywhere, especially the freedom to speak and to have a rational argument, an argument in which distinctions are respected and broad labels are avoided.”

  Lewis did not call the Crimson to publicize his talk, but his rebuttal of Summers was clear. Everyone knew to which “broad label” he was referring.

  Lewis and Summers disagreed about the importance of extracurriculars, and in particular athletics. Student athletes understood that Harry Lewis supported their efforts. In the winter of 1999, he had even flown to Minnesota to watch the women’s hockey team compete for a national championship, and after they won, the team had asked Lewis to pose for pictures with them. But the real object of Harvard athletics, Lewis thought, was not victory, but learning to work with others. “Except for that minority of our graduates who go on to academic careers…most students go into careers in which teamwork is more important than individual achievement,” Lewis said. In its classrooms, Harvard didn’t prepare its students very well for teamwork; in its extracurriculars and athletics, it did. And Lewis didn’t hesitate to note that alumni who had played on teams were among the university’s most loyal and involved graduates, not to mention its most consistent givers. “Viewed from the distance of their twenty-fifth reunion, most Harvard graduates remember their friends, a few of their teachers, and their coaches, artistic directors, and other mentors better than they remember what they learned in most of their courses,” he said, and he clearly didn’t think this was a bad thing. “On many college campuses, athletes are the last group that is safe to stereotype,” Lewis said. “We just don’t do that here.”

  Like Summers, Lewis worried about what Harvard students would go on to do with their lives. But when they raised the topic, the two men sounded very different. Summers focused on individual achievement; Lewis emphasized community. In a 2000 Morning Prayers talk, Lewis wrote of Harvard scholar Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, which argues that Americans have markedly less social engagement with friends and neighbors than they did in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Harvard needed to do its part to redress this problem, said Lewis. “We need to think about how Harvard can produce not just better scholars, better leaders, and better social activists”—Summers would never have wanted Harvard to produce social activists—“but better and more committed ordinary citizens,” he said. “We need to think about how to do our part, over the long run, for this country, through the lessons we teach our students about working together with their peers, not simply about excelling as individuals.”

  Both Lewis and Summers thought of themselves as teachers inside and outside the classroom. Both wanted to influence the development of their charges. But they had profoundly different visions of what the proper influence should be. Nowhere did their clashing perspectives show themselves more starkly than in their disagreement over “slowing down.”

  Before the beginning of each school year, Lewis sent a lengthy letter to every incoming freshman. Entitled “Slow Down—Getting More out of Harvard by Doing Less,” the letter encouraged the new students to consider carefully the pace of their lives at Harvard. Rather than trying to excel at everything, Lewis suggested, students ought to focus their choices. Certainly Harvard wanted them to maintain the excellence for which they had been selected. Nonetheless, “you may balance your life better if you participate in some activities purely for fun, rather than to achieve a leadership role that you hope might be a distinctive credential for postgraduate employment,” Lewis said. “College is a transition period; we will certainly give you grades and transcripts attesting to some of the things you have done here, but much of what you do, including many of the most important and rewarding and formative things you do, will be recorded on no piece of paper you take with you, but only as imprints on your mind and soul.” Lewis concluded with a simple admonition: “It’s your life, even at Harvard,” he said. “Enjoy it.”

  Larry Summers was not a big believer in slowing down, nor was he a big fan of “Slow Down.” Summers had always done everything fast—and young. None of his many achievements had come as a result of introspection, reflection, hanging out, slowing down, taking time to smell the roses. And, in thinly veiled autobiographical references, Summers didn’t hesitate to point this out.

  In his 2002 baccalaureate address to the seniors, given on the Tuesday before Thursday’s commencement exercises, Summers gave the imminent graduates his view of life after graduation. Neither community nor self-examination were his emphasis.

  “Think about this,” Summers encouraged the students. “Newton and Einstein did their main thinking about physics in their twenties, Alexander conquered most of the known world by the time he was thirty, and when he was your age, Mozart had composed all his violin concertos. Of course, when he was my age, he had been dead for fourteen years.

  “So take it slowly from Dean Lewis,” Summers continued, “but from me: blow off the rest of this week, have a great commencement, and then on Friday, get cracking.” That meant the students should get to work the day after they graduated.

  Three months later, Summers gave virtually the exact same instructions to the incoming class of 2006. Only the ending was slightly different. “Not to put too much pressure on you—enjoy the rest of Freshman Week and then get cracking,” Summers said.

  This time, the reference to Harry Lewis was deleted.

  Bill Kirby liked to start his speeches with anecdotes about Chinese hi
story, and when he spoke at Morning Prayers in the fall of 2002, he began thusly: “In Chinese history—my area of study—autumn was the time for executions. For us, however, autumn is a time for renaissance.”

  In Cambridge, apparently, spring was the time for executions.

  On the afternoon of March 5, 2003, Kirby informed Harry Lewis that he wanted to make a change. Kirby was restructuring his administration, merging the office of dean of Harvard College with its academic counterpart, the dean of undergraduate education. Lewis was out. After eight years as dean—and with two more years left on his contract—he would have to leave the office by the end of the semester.

  Lewis couldn’t quite believe it. “Harry was stunned by the way his dismissal was handled,” said one administrator familiar with the details. Kirby informed him that his replacement would be the current dean of undergraduate education, a mathematician named Benedict Gross. Kirby had hired Gross at the beginning of the school year, primarily to oversee the upcoming curricular review. Dick Gross, who’d earned his B.A. from Harvard in 1971 and his Ph.D. in 1978, was well respected and well liked—“one of the few mathematicians with social skills,” said a math concentrator who took a course with him. And he was ambitious—”the most ambitious man I’ve ever met,” according to a classmate who knew him well.

  But perhaps Gross’ most important qualification was that he had a friend in a high place: Larry Summers, who had once wanted to be a mathematician himself, not only thought highly of Gross as an intellect, but also played tennis with Gross every couple of weeks. With Gross’ appointment, Summers had not only an FAS dean who was under his thumb, but also a friend who was about to become the second most powerful person in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And then Summers wouldn’t have to worry about Harry Lewis anymore.