Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

  Summers had learned in Washington that there was a time to play the bad cop, and a time to soften one’s image. That didn’t mean that his agenda, or the way in which he pursued it, had changed.

  Harvard’s longtime dean of students, Archie Epps, died suddenly on Thursday, August 21. The sixty-six-year-old Epps, who was diabetic, had gone into the hospital for surgery after developing an aneurysm in his aorta. The surgery seemed to go well, but two days later, Epps died of liver failure.

  Few of the current students would have known the name of Archibald Calvin Epps III, but the pathbreaking black administrator had led a fascinating life. He was a graduate of Alabama’s Talladega College, a small school founded by freed slaves in 1865, and the Harvard Divinity School. In 1964 Epps was named an assistant dean, and he stayed a member of the FAS administration until he retired in2001. For all those years he was the highest-ranking black man in the Harvard administration. The position could be awkward for Epps, who was often torn between his official responsibilities, the expectations of black students, and the tendency of the Harvard administration to trot him out whenever a racially sensitive issue arose—a tension embodied in one of Epps’ publications, a collection called Malcolm X: Speeches at Harvard. Like Skip Gates, Epps wanted to be an insider at a powerful institution where black people had always been outsiders. It was not easy. In the 1960s Epps sang with the Harvard Glee Club. More than once, when the glee club traveled to southern states, white racists pressured the group not to sing with its sole black member—and the club succumbed to that pressure and performed without him, a fact that caused Epps enormous pain. At the same time, he loved Harvard and refused to indict the entire institution for the mistakes it sometimes made. Reflecting on his career in 1999, Epps said, “The question to be asked now is, what good did I do? Because you either climb the ladder and pull it up after you, so no one else can follow. Or you put it down so others can climb up too.” Epps always tried to extend the ladder, and he did not bear grudges. Gifts in his memory could be given to, among others, Talladega College and the Harvard Glee Club.

  His funeral was held in Memorial Church at eleven o’clock on the morning of Thursday, September 4, a cloudy, intermittently rainy day. Some two hundred people filled the church that morning, including far more African Americans than one normally saw at a typical Harvard event. It was also a crowd filled with Harvard history and the custodians of it. Pallbearers included James R. Pusey, the son of former Harvard president Nathan Marsh Pusey. Harry Lewis was an usher. (Skip Gates was listed as one on the funeral program, but he didn’t show.) Five rows back from the altar, on the left-hand side, sat Cornel West, who had come up from Princeton for the funeral. West was surrounded by friends who nodded and whispered their greetings as they filled the pews around him. Just as the service was about to start, a solo Larry Summers bustled into the church. Harry Lewis sat him next to Jeremy Knowles, in the fourth row on the right, just across from where West was sitting. Other than Knowles, his wife, and Summers, the row was empty.

  As organ music filled the church, pallbearers carried Epps’ coffin down the center aisle toward a table in front of the altar. It was not the first time Epps had been carried within a Harvard building. Thirty-four years before, during the 1969 student takeover of University Hall, Epps had refused to leave his office; he would not abandon his Harvard, even if, on occasion, it had abandoned him. And so angry students had unceremoniously hoisted the dean and carried him out the doors of University Hall, dumping him on the ground outside. Now he was being carried again, to a more final resting place, lifted up by a crowd whose emotion was not anger but sorrow and regret. Could there be a more definitive sign that the 1960s were truly gone?

  “He served Harvard better than Harvard served him,” Peter Gomes said in his eulogy, a bittersweet mixture of love, admiration, and regret. “We all know that, and even he knew that, but it did not trouble him for he, unlike so many of his contemporaries, saw that Harvard was never the present moment, or the present administration, or the present crisis. Archie declined to define his Harvard by its crises, but rather he preferred to embrace the ideal of Harvard as the ‘City set on a Hill’; and even though that city did not always live up to its ideal, the ideal for Archie was worth his aspiration and his cherishing.”

  It was a funeral, and so present conflicts were not spoken of, except perhaps by implication. But at the end of the service, there was an awkward moment. As the crowd filed out of the church, groups of mourners clustered on its steps, hugging, shaking hands, and talking quietly. On the right-hand side of the steps, Larry Summers was greeting those who approached him, stiffly shaking their hands, as if the emotion, the humanity, that surfaces on such occasions made him uncomfortable. On the left-hand side of the steps, Cornel West was warmly hugging friends whom he hadn’t seen since leaving Harvard, and there were smiles and gentle laughter among them. Granted, it was not the funeral of an economist; this was not Larry Summers’ milieu. But it was impossible not to notice that, both white and black, the crowd around Cornel West was several times larger and considerably more relaxed than the grouping around Larry Summers. People were saying hello to Summers because it was appropriate. The rest were welcoming back their friend.

  What did not come naturally for Summers, though, he worked at. Tirelessly, repetitively, and until he improved. Summers would not give up on bettering his relationships with the Memorial Church and African American communities, and in time, his efforts would pay off.

  On September 15, the president followed a prayer by Peter Gomes to deliver his now-annual Morning Prayers talk. The previous spring, he’d been stung by Gomes’ remarks about “Charles the Fat” at Harry Lewis’ going-away party, but now he went out of his way to praise the minister. “Any time Peter Gomes ascends the pulpit, the community assembled is fortunate,” Summers said. “…While it is best for the community that he continues to be as remarkable as he is, it makes it harder for me to speak after he does.”

  It is rarely ineffective to flatter a minister from the pulpit of his own church, and Gomes did not look displeased with the remarks.

  Summers then began a talk about the relationship between economics and morality. As he spoke, it became clear that his remarks were an implicit response to all those who questioned his compassion, his empathy, his moral character itself—from those who’d protested the World Bank memo to those who charged that economists were more interested in hegemony than humanity.

  “Economists like me rarely appear in places like this,” Summers said. “…Many economists are uncomfortable with moral, let alone spiritual, discourse.” That didn’t mean, Summers continued, that economists did not think about moral questions, or that the field of economics lacked any means of addressing such concerns. Economists approach the world with respect for the needs and wants of individuals, he said. They did not try to impose their values on others. So, for example, when students criticized sweatshops and called for their boycott, an economist might respond that “there is surely some moral force to the concern that as long as the workers are voluntarily employed, they have chosen to work because they are working to their best alternative. Is narrowing an individual’s set of choices an act of respect, of charity, even of concern? From this perspective the morality of restrictions on imports or boycotts advocated by many is less than entirely transparent.”

  People often charged that economists were “selfish” or coldly rational, Summers said. (He didn’t need to add that these were exactly the criticisms his detractors leveled at him.) But the critics were wrong. “The highest morality is respecting the choices and views of people who we all want to help.”

  Summers’ talk received mixed reviews. Some listeners thought that the president had mischaracterized the remedies advocated by critics of sweatshops, who understood very well that people had to work and so pressured the importers of sweatshop-made goods to contract for better working conditions. Moreover, Summers had essentially said that, given the choice between
working in a sweatshop and starving to death, most people would choose the former, and critics of sweatshops ought to respect their decision. But some listeners considered this a ludicrous dichotomy. If it was a choice, it wasn’t a very palatable one, and only in the most technical sense could one say that it was voluntary. To argue that employees in Asian sweatshops “have chosen to work” was at best a naïve way of describing the situation, at worst a callous misrepresentation of a Hobson’s choice as an act of free will.

  Yet others appreciated that Summers was discussing moral issues and respected his assertion that, even though he might not always sound like it, these concerns did weigh on him. As he spoke at Harvard about fighting cancer, about addressing the problem of AIDS in Africa, and about trying to extend higher education to students from all income levels, it was difficult to charge that Summers lacked a conscience. People might disagree with his methods or his leadership style, but it was unfair to say that he had no heart. His defenders argued that he just had a different way of showing it—but that, in the end, the president might do more good for the poor and diseased than many of his more emotionally expressive critics.

  Then, in the first weekend of October, Summers addressed a gathering of black alumni organized by the college’s Black Students Association. On Saturday morning, Summers rose before an audience of several hundred in an enormous classroom known as Science Center B. It was a delicate moment; in the weeks and months after the Cornel West incident, Summers probably wouldn’t have been invited to address such a gathering. But he had much improved his standing with Harvard’s black community by supporting Harvard’s affirmative action brief, and the outcome of that Supreme Court case was ultimately far more important to African Americans than his altercation with West. It didn’t mean that they had forgotten the incident, just that they were pragmatists.

  Plus, Skip Gates was working the floor on Summers’ behalf. Gates was spending most of his time in New York now, living at an apartment provided to him by New York University and keeping a frenetic schedule. In his year off, he researched a new book, popped up in television ads for IBM, consulted on a Showtime reality series about a search for a homegrown presidential candidate, cooperated with articles in both the New York Times and the Boston Globe on the reinvigoration of his department, wrote guest op-eds for the New York Times, served on the Pulitzer Prize committee, publicized the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, made an appearance on Dennis Miller’s CNBC talk show, traveled to Russia, and promoted a new encyclopedia he had co-edited called African American Lives. Among other things. But Gates would not miss this meeting of Larry Summers and Harvard’s black alumni, and everyone knew that he was now doing his best to help Summers.

  “Welcome home,” Summers told the crowd. “This is your university. This is your science center…. It is your stadium that you will visit this afternoon. And let me tell you, we are a far greater university for it.”

  Summers’ speech was a hit. As he spoke of the importance of African Americans to Harvard, he was interrupted twelve times by applause and received two standing ovations. The president was flattering his audience, but he also sent the message that he took them seriously—that they were people he should flatter. The alumni appreciated that the president of Harvard had come out on a Saturday morning to speak to them, knowing that the audience he would face was potentially hostile. Many of them came away from the weekend thinking that this president was a very different man, a more humble man, than the one who had berated Cornel West.

  But after the alumni departed, many of those who remained on campus were unconvinced. People who lived and worked with Summers day in and day out felt that, however much his public relations management had improved, Larry Summers hadn’t changed at all. Among them were the members of another minority group at Harvard, gay and lesbian students. Many gay members of the Harvard community had felt uncomfortable with Summers ever since his campaign of rhetoric to restore ROTC to the Harvard campus, which diminished the concerns of students forbidden to serve in the military. In the fall of 2003, Summers had another chance to show his humanitarian side by positioning the university to take a moral stance against anti-gay discrimination. Once more, as with the Sheik Zayed controversy, he declined.

  The controversy began, in a way, with a war—but not the one in Iraq.

  Gerald Solomon was a former Marine, a veteran of the Korean War, and a conservative Republican who became a congressman from northeast New York in 1978. Fervently patriotic, Solomon was a passionate advocate of a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning and a vociferous critic of the United Nations; he once suggested that UN head Kofi Annan should be “horsewhipped.” He might also have said “pistol-whipped,” because Solomon hated gun control even more than he hated the UN. During one 1996 debate on the floor of the House of Representatives, he flew into a rage when Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy mentioned the toll that gun violence had taken on his family. “My wife lives alone in a rural area in upstate New York,” Solomon fumed. “She has a right to defend herself when I’m not there, son. And don’t you forget it.” Solomon asked Kennedy if he would like to “step outside” to settle their differences. (Kennedy declined the invitation.)

  Before his retirement from Congress in 1998, Solomon, who died in 2001, was known primarily for two legislative pursuits: his missionary-like advocacy for General Electric, which had manufacturing plants in his district, for which Solomon earned the nickname “the congressman from General Electric”; and his repeated legislative attempts to force universities that received federal aid to facilitate military recruiting. Beginning in 1983, Solomon made a concerted effort to make students register for the draft or lose their federal financial aid. In later years he extended that principle to universities as a whole, and in 1996 he authored an amendment to a military appropriations bill that compelled universities that received federal money to permit military recruiting on campus. If a university prohibited such recruiting, the federal government could terminate all of its aid to that school, regardless of whether the money had any connection to the military.

  The Clinton administration never enforced the Solomon Amendment, partly because it did not like the military’s ban on homosexuals and partly because the amendment seemed to connect unrelated policies. (After all, many Americans receive government benefits, such as Medicaid, welfare, and Social Security, without having to prove that they have registered for the draft.) But when the Bush administration took office in 2001, and especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, the Pentagon stepped up its enforcement of the Solomon Amendment. One big reason was that the military needed lawyers for its Judge Advocate General (JAG) program, and most prominent law schools did not permit military recruiting. That was less a byproduct of 1960s’ protest than a function of the more modern concern over discrimination against gays. Harvard and most other law schools, deeply concerned over civil rights, did not allow employers that practiced discriminatory policies—any employers, not just the military—to use their employment offices to recruit students.

  The Pentagon wanted to change that policy, and with the Solomon Amendment, it had a powerful lever with which to do so. In the spring of 2002, the Pentagon notified then-dean Robert Clark of the Harvard Law School that HLS was in violation of the law. If the school would not allow the military to recruit lawyers from among its students, Harvard could lose every single dollar the university received from the government—some $412 million in the 2002–2003 fiscal year, the vast majority targeted for scientific and medical research. In May, Clark issued a press release saying that the law school had no choice but to reverse its policy, and would now allow military recruiters to interview on campus. Clark explained that the law school could not afford to jeopardize funding for the entire university because of its own principled position.

  Straight and gay alike, many HLS students were furious that their school had buckled under with barely a peep of protest. Certainly there was a huge amount
of money at stake. Were there no legal options the school could pursue? With Clark leaving and new dean Elena Kagan coming in, however, the law school administration chose not to pick a fight with the government. At a “meet the dean” forum in April 2003, when one student asked Kagan about whether HLS had any plans to file suit to block enforcement of the Solomon Amendment, Kagan demurred. “We have no plans to reopen the issue that I know of,” she said. “My own view is essentially congruent with that of Dean Clark’s—[the Solomon Amendment] is immoral policy, but when university funding is at risk…”

  “But are we considering litigation?” the student asked. “It looks really bad when the government just says, ‘This is the law and this is what you have to do,’ and the law school says, ‘Well, okay.’”

  “That depends on the merit of the legal argument” against the Solomon Amendment, Kagan answered, and confessed that she was not well versed enough in the matter to give an opinion. The subject was changed when the next student questioner complained that the business school did a better job of branding itself than the law school.

  Harvard wasn’t the only university affected by the Pentagon’s crackdown, and by the fall of 2003, a number of other schools were ready to fight the Solomon Amendment. In late September, a coalition of law schools and law professors called the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, or FAIR, filed suit against the Pentagon, charging that the Solomon Amendment was discriminatory and unconstitutional. Harvard was not a member of FAIR; Elena Kagan explained that joining the coalition would reduce the university’s flexibility. But a number of HLS students and professors thought that Kagan was simply stuck in a hard place—a new dean trying to balance her personal opposition to the Solomon Amendment versus the opinion of the president who not only had appointed her, but was widely believed to disagree with her on this issue. Two weeks later two student groups at Yale Law School filed a similar suit against the Department of Defense. Members of HLS Lambda, the law school gay students’ organization, were frustrated that Harvard was lagging behind. One in particular decided she had to prod the university in any way she could.