Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

  But Summers never made it clear that the Sheik Zayed matter was now in his hands and not Bill Graham’s, which meant that Graham had no power to fix the problem even though he was the figure publicly associated with it. “Summers hung Graham out to dry,” said one professor familiar with the interaction between the dean and the president. “Like an officer letting his troops take the blame.”

  Though she rightly suspected that the media attention was having an impact, Rachel Fish never heard back from Larry Summers’ office and didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes in Mass Hall, or at her own divinity school. She was growing disillusioned with the university she had selected because she believed in its motto—or rather, she believed that Harvard believed its motto. Even if the proper response to the gift was complicated, couldn’t Harvard at least issue a statement deploring anti-Semitism? Wasn’t that the kind of moral act a great university was supposed to do? How could Larry Summers hide behind surrogates when he’d given such a principled speech about anti-Semitism?

  Fish was saddened by Harvard’s moral obfuscation and disappointed by the president whose words had inspired her to action. Still, she was a stubborn woman when she had to be. At twenty-three years old, she hadn’t given up on the idea that one person with idealism and persistence could change the world—or at least Harvard. With neither Bill Graham nor Larry Summers talking to her, and the sneaking suspicion that Harvard just wanted her to go away, she began to plan a commencement protest.

  The last Protest Lit class of the semester, the last class of Tim McCarthy’s Harvard career, was titled “The Costs of American Dreaming.” On May 1, John Stauffer began by talking about American wealth and globalization. Both subjects had been themes of the course—the students were now reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, about the reality of minimum-wage jobs, and Kevin Bales’ Disposable People, an investigation of modern-day slavery. As the class moved from the past to the present, the subjects of American economic inequity and globalization inevitably converged.

  “One percent of the United States owns fifty percent of its wealth,” Stauffer announced, holding onto his podium. “The top five percent owns ninety percent of the country’s wealth.” That consolidation of wealth had an impact beyond American borders. “United States’ wealth leads to people in other parts of the world being poorer than ever,” Stauffer said, looking even more intense than usual.

  McCarthy segued into his subject for the day: hip-hop music as protest literature. McCarthy and Stauffer each had areas where one or the other felt more comfortable, and this was McCarthy’s turf. “We can’t understand hip-hop without linking it to globalization, the increasingly rapid flow of money, culture, and information between countries,” he said. He talked for a few minutes about the female hip-hop group Salt ’n’ Pepa, whose frankness about sex and AIDS during the 1980s promoted ties between gays, blacks, AIDS advocates, and the public health community. And McCarthy mentioned how, a decade before, Skip Gates had testified at the obscenity trial of rap group 2 Live Crew. Chuckling a little, McCarthy said, “We won’t tell Larry Summers about that because we don’t need any more people going to Princeton.”

  In the back of the room, McCarthy’s father, Tom, an older man with eagle-white hair, wearing slacks and a coat and tie, sat in a corner chair listening intently. Malcom was there, too. McCarthy’s mother, Michelle, couldn’t come because she had to work that day.

  Before taking over, Stauffer said, he had to digress for a moment. “The problem of being a complete outsider is that you have no power,” he said. “But you have a certain sort of freedom as well…. Effective protest is not about being hip, cool, or trendy, but about principles, about action based in deep-seated belief. To quote James Baldwin, ‘I love America more than any other country in the world, and for this reason I reserve the right to criticize her perpetually.’”

  He paused and cleared his throat and said, “No one I know embodies those ideals better than Tim McCarthy.”

  The class, which knew the import of this occasion, jumped to its feet and applauded, while the course teaching fellows—a white English woman, a black woman, a black man, and an Asian man—approached the stage and hugged McCarthy, who looked a little overwhelmed. “Tim has been a beacon, a source of inspiration, a very close friend,” Stauffer said. “We are, in many respects, very different, but we usually end up at the same point. My Harvard is going to be different from now on. My Harvard has been enjoyable in large part owing to Tim McCarthy.”

  Stauffer stepped back from his podium, looking like he didn’t trust himself to keep talking.

  McCarthy gathered his breath. In a few weeks, he would be heading to North Carolina to start writing his book on church burnings. Dressed in khaki pants, a blue shirt and brightly colored tie, and a seersucker jacket, he looked more suited for preppy Chapel Hill than he did for a class on protest literature.

  He asked the students if they could just listen to something before he started, and punched a button on the classroom’s rack of audiovisual equipment. The music that filled the room was a Tupac Shakur song called “Changes.” Rapping over a drumbeat and the sampled piano melody from Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is,” Shakur laments the state of race relations in America. “Wake up in the morning / And I ask myself / Is life worth living? / Should I blast myself?…Cops give a damn about a negro? / Pull the trigger / Kill a nigga / He’s a hero…”

  Then, at the chorus, Shakur lifts the song from desperation to hope. “We gotta make a change,” he sings. “Let’s change the way we live / And let’s change the way we treat each other.”

  McCarthy stood on the stage, head down, collecting his thoughts. When “Changes” was over, he made a visible effort to pull himself together.

  “I would like just for a second to respond to Tupac,” he said slowly. “After 9/11, after those towers came down, we were better for a couple of hours, a couple of days. Our immediate impulse was to reach out and embrace firefighters, working people…. People came together, regardless of faith and background, to help each other.

  “After that set in the culture of fear that we now live in. By playing to our worst fears and prejudices and ignorance, the president has constructed a republic of fear to keep us subdued. A republic of fear which has led to silence or complicit acceptance of Bush’s policies.

  “There are similar kinds of fears at Harvard,” McCarthy said. “We too often accept what happens in our own backyard as well. I’m worried about the complacency. We have some things that are wrong here. We still have people who don’t make enough money at Harvard to feed their children. We have a president who is interested in a consolidation of power. We need to question why people like Cornel West have to leave Harvard. We need to question why the university did not respond to the suicide of a young woman. We need to ask, ‘Why are people at Harvard not happy? Why are we not more accountable for our teaching?’ You all need to hold your teachers accountable. Because you want to learn. Because you love knowledge.”

  The students knew that this was a moment they would not forget. For many of them, it was just such such idealism that had brought them to Harvard in the first place. They might not have found veritas where they expected to, in the tenured giants of the faculty or in the president of Harvard. But they recognized the passion of a thirty-one-year-old untenured lecturer. And they also knew the bitter irony that the very things they cherished in McCarthy—his commitment to teaching and to their well-being even at the expense of his own scholarship—would ensure that he could never stay at Harvard. Teachers who cared about the students more than they cared about their own success—the institution used them up and spat them out. That was why McCarthy was leaving early, so he would never reach the point where he stopped loving his alma mater.

  “I have been very grateful for my time at Harvard,” McCarthy said, and he was starting to choke up now. “Harvard has taken me from humble roots and given me the world. So when I criticize Harvard, I do so because I love H
arvard.”

  Around the room, students were starting to cry, not even trying to hold back their tears. And not just a few, an isolated sniffle here or there, but dozens of students. Others were taking pictures.

  “With the enormous privilege that we have here, we cannot afford to be afraid,” McCarthy continued. “We must confront the fear and the complacency that threatens to kill us in a moral sense…. Sore member in these times of loneliness to read James Baldwin, read the Declaration of Independence, read Martin Luther King and Betty Friedan. And realize that you will never be alone.”

  McCarthy was losing it now too, biting his upper lip to try to contain his emotion, speechless, but that was okay, because the students saw that he needed help and they were standing and applauding and they would not stop.

  In the spring of 2004, almost a year after McCarthy departed Cambridge, one of the students from that class would visit Larry Summers during his office hours to discuss the problem of teaching at Harvard. They sat in his office, the student on the couch, Summers in one of the leather chairs with his feet up on the glass coffee table. Next to his feet was a small box containing three multicolored stress balls, the kind you squeeze to alleviate tension. (And Summers did squeeze them: during a previous meeting with another student, living-wage supporter Emma MacKinnon, class of 2005, Summers actually popped one.)

  The student told Summers that he was disappointed by how little contact he’d had with most of his professors, and wondered why there couldn’t be more people like Tim McCarthy at the university—professors who really engaged with their students, who were passionate about their material and about teaching it.

  When Summers heard McCarthy’s name, “his face got a little contorted, he put his hand up to the side of his mouth, nodded and looked away,” the student remembered.

  “He basically said that at Harvard, we choose to go only for the best scholars, and that if you wanted somewhere that focused on undergraduate teaching, you should go to a place like Amherst or Swarthmore,” two excellent but considerably smaller colleges. Harvard had to hire the “best physicist” or “the best Shakespeare scholar,” even if they weren’t the best teachers. Even if they were mediocre teachers.

  But Harvard could change, the student protested, startled by Summers’ admission. If we actually wanted things to be different…

  “No,” Summers said. “No, we can’t.”

  For a second, he sounded almost wistful.

  “This has been a good year for the university,” Summers told an audience of about thirty thousand on the afternoon of June 5. It was the first line of his commencement address, and he certainly had reason to be satisfied. The 2002–2003 school year had indeed been a good one for him.

  Granted, his second year as president had not been entirely free of turbulence. There was the controversy over his anti-Semitism speech, the Tom Paulin brouhaha, and the flap over the ouster of Harry Lewis. But none of those controversies had threatened Summers’ viability as the Cornel West matter had done during his first year, and that fiasco was now fading into the distance. Every graduating class meant one less group familiar with the incident. That Summers had come out in defense of affirmative action also eased the sting of the West fiasco—particularly when, on June 23, the Court released its ruling in the Michigan cases and largely upheld university admissions policies that included affirmative action.

  The Skip Gates matter also seemed largely resolved. Largely, but not entirely—there was still a whisper of doubt about Gates’ future at Harvard. This was true even though Gates had leveraged his position after West’s departure to make gains not just for himself, but also for his department. In May, the faculty had voted to enlarge Afro-American Studies, making it the Department of African and African American Studies—a huge victory for Gates. By explicitly adding the continent of Africa to the department’s purview, Gates had globalized Af-Am, expanding its scope far beyond the traditional study of black American history and literature. Now there would be instruction in African languages, bridge-building with African scholars and universities, vast new areas of research, more funding, more travel, more professorships—and, ultimately, more power for Gates and the department. The move had come with Summers’ strong support, and at the May 20 faculty meeting where it was formalized, Gates and Summers had extravagantly praised each other’s virtues.

  Even so, Gates kept people wondering. Earlier in the month, he had announced that he would be taking a sabbatical during the 2003–2004 school year. The sabbatical had been long planned, but the destination came as a surprise to many: Gates would spend his year off at the Institute for Advanced Study, a scholarly center on Einstein Drive in…Princeton, New Jersey. Though the institute is independent, it has close ties to the local university, the new home of Cornel West and Anthony Appiah and a place that had already voted, in 1990, to offer Gates tenure. (News of Gates’ sabbatical was promptly reported in the National section of the Times, prompting one bemused colleague to crack, “Skip Gates could wake up tomorrow and take a really good shit, and the New York Times would write it up.”)

  The decision to go to New Jersey provoked speculation that Gates was initiating a new courtship, inviting Princeton onto the dance floor. Gates insisted otherwise, but few believed him. Especially when, on May 28, he announced that he had donated the manuscript of The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the first novel written by a female slave, to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Gates explained that Yale had given him his start in academia, and this was his way of saying thank you. But there were other interpretations. One was that Gates’ move was a shot across the bow to Summers, who had been pressuring the Harvard libraries to cut their budgets, resulting in reduced hours, closed entrances, and librarian layoffs. Another, more likely, possibility was that Skip Gates did not want to be taken for granted.

  And there were lingering rumbles of discontent throughout the faculty and amidst those administrators who still aspired for a measure of independence. At a May 29 party celebrating Harry Lewis, Peter Gomes rose to toast the outgoing dean. In his sonorous baritone, Gomes spoke of how Lewis believed deeply that history and tradition mattered at Harvard more than the aggrandizement of any individual. “Harry by and large trusted the system,” Gomes said. “He was a child of the system.” Gomes compared Lewis to Charlemagne, the eighth-century emperor of Western Europe, and spoke of the marauding pagans and barbarians who had threatened Charlemagne’s enlightened rule. After his death in 814, Gomes explained slyly, Charlemagne had been followed by bumbling successors with names such as “Charles the Fat.” To laughter from the seventy-five people in attendance, Gomes said, “I think of Harry as our Charlemagne, and I worry for the future of Europe.”

  Still, Summers had worked to improve his image, and at least in the media he had done so. In his first year, he had acquired a reputation as a “bull in a china shop,” and while many people outside of Harvard liked that trope—and some, but fewer, inside Harvard did as well—it was not the image Summers wanted to define him. Now, in a year-end interview with the Crimson, Summers was asked “why he had received less negative press this year than last.” The president replied that he didn’t know, but that “different people have different views on different things. I think my job is just to pull the high academic standards to make the university as great a place as I possibly can.”

  Though the response did not explicitly answer the student’s question, it did suggest one possibility: that Summers had learned that one way to avoid bad press was to issue bland and content-free statements to the media. As he had been advised more than once, just because he had opinions on everything did not mean he always had to give them.

  Nor had there been any full-fledged commencement controversy, like the “American jihad” speech. The student orations at this commencement were safe and sanitized; Summers had made sure of that. The afternoon speaker at commencement would be Ernesto Zedillo, who had been president of Mexico when Summers and Bob Rubin had organize
d the U.S. bailout of that country. Zedillo was ensconced in New Haven now, heading the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. Although Zedillo’s talk would prove less than scintillating, Summers’ choice honored an old ally while promoting one of his favorite subjects.

  In addition to the commencement exercises, Summers’ hold over the university had tightened in other respects. By the end of his second year, he had installed new deans at FAS, the law school, the education school, and the divinity school, all of whom, and particularly Bill Kirby, seemed willing to cede some degree of autonomy in exchange for the job. Summers had also diminished the power of the most powerful deans by boosting his own access to alumni cash; he could now tap into alumni donors through the rule change that allowed those who funneled money through the president’s office to receive class credit.

  He was also starting to shape the professoriat by hiring scholars whom he admired—and rejecting those he didn’t. Summers didn’t hesitate to veto candidates because he thought they weren’t good enough, or because they didn’t fill the niches he considered important. After he rejected two tenure candidates proposed by the government department, “We had a department meeting for almost two hours, everyone talking about Summers,” Professor Harvey Mansfield remembered. “If he had known that—and probably someone told him—I think he would have been quite pleased. He’d gotten everyone’s attention.”