Her name was Amanda Goad, she was from Richmond, Virginia, and she was in her second year at Harvard Law School. She was petite and quiet, almost shy, with dirty-blonde hair and wire-framed glasses—and tougher than she looked. Part of that toughness came from her parents, who grew up “dirt poor” working on tobacco farms in Kentucky and sometimes, Goad said, had “an irrational objection to being told what to do.” Her parents preached the value of education, and Goad was a bookish kid; in 1992, at the age of thirteen, she won the National Spelling Bee. (The winning word was lyceum.) That was pressure. But Goad knew how to stick up for herself. Her mother was a news junkie, and dinners at the Goad household abounded with arguments about politics and current events. “There’s something liberating about being a nerdish kid,” Goad said. “It allows you to be argumentative. And smart.”
For a girl in a conservative southern city who was beginning to realize that she was gay, Goad was also confident. That same year she went to summer camp and kissed her first girl. As it turned out, the girl was straight, but Goad and she would always remain friends. At age seventeen, she came out to her parents. It wasn’t easy, but on the whole, they were supportive of their daughter.
Still, red-state Virginia was not an easy place to be gay. Throughout Goad’s adolescence, the case of Sharon Bottoms was constantly in the local and national news. Bottoms was a Virginia woman, a lesbian, who lost custody of her biological son after a series of state courts ruled—in a lawsuit brought by Bottoms’ mother—that lesbians are unfit parents. The case was a constant subject of conversation, and when it came to Richmond to be argued in the state supreme court, Goad remembered her ninth-grade teachers talking about “those faggot lawyers coming to town.” The ruling was upheld, and Bottoms has never regained custody of her son. Faced with that kind of hate, Goad had to be tough.
As an undergrad at Rice University, in Texas, Goad had participated in a successful movement to win domestic partner benefits for the faculty. Now, at Harvard, she geared up to fight the Solomon Amendment. Among other things, she helped organize students to participate in mock interviews with the military recruiters. The students would sign up to meet with the recruiters and show up, bright-eyed and well dressed, for their appointments. Then, as the interviews were ending and the recruiters were expressing their interest—these were Harvard students, after all; they were impressive—the students would announce that, by the way, they were gay. Which was sometimes true and sometimes not—but the students wanted to show the military that not only did it want to hire smart, talented people who happened to be gay, but it also couldn’t even tell they were gay.
In the spring of 2003, Summers came to a town hall meeting at the law school, and students asked him whether the university would consider a legal fight against the Solomon Amendment. According to Goad, Summers answered that his lawyers had informed him that Harvard didn’t have a case, but that if the students researched the matter and determined that there was a case, “come back to me.”
Goad was skeptical. “We knew that, because of his politics, he wasn’t interested,” she said. “This was around the time that the ROTC video [in which Summers appeared] came out.” A president who was appearing in advertisements for the military probably wouldn’t have much interest in suing the Pentagon.
In the fall of 2003, Goad helped to circulate a petition urging Summers to file or join litigation against the Solomon Amendment. By the time she sent it to Summers in early November, almost 1,100 members of the Harvard community had signed it. She also helped distribute a similar letter among the faculty. Forty-seven out of eighty-one law school professors put their names on it, which was more impressive than it might sound—Harvard law professors do not quickly sign on to activist petitions, and getting forty-seven of them to agree on anything was an accomplishment. Moreover, “some people were afraid to sign because of Summers,” Goad said. Particularly on the part of the junior faculty, “there was a fear of retribution.” After all, Summers was now taking an active role in law school tenure nominations, and he’d already shown in the Cornel West situation that he did not approve of professors getting involved in politics. Or at least politics that conflicted with his own.
Goad and the other members of HLS Lambda sent the letter to Summers on October 22. His response, a letter back, was dated November 21. “Let me be clear that I regard the Solomon Amendment, as it has recently been interpreted and applied, as unsound and corrosive public policy,” Summers said, adding that it “offends ideals of nondiscrimination and individual dignity. By raising the specter of a devastating loss of federal funds for universities…it invokes a form of sanction whose severity and coercive quality seem draconian.
“At the same time, having weighed the circumstances, I do not believe it would serve the best interests of the University to enter into a lawsuit challenging the Solomon Amendment. Particularly in light of the highly constructive partnership that exists between higher education and the federal government in a great many areas, the University must exercise considerable restraint when it comes to the prospect of confronting the government through the quintessentially adversarial act of filing a lawsuit.”
His private response was more specific. A week before he wrote to Goad, Summers met with a delegation of law school professors. While he was opposed to discrimination, he told them, he just didn’t think taking on the Solomon Amendment was a winning fight at a time when Republicans controlled both the White House and the Congress. There had been no great wave of opposition to the military’s “don’t ask-don’t tell” policy regarding gay servicemen and women. Maybe if opposition to the policy had reached a critical mass, he might support an official challenge by Harvard. But he didn’t see that developing anytime soon. Instead, Summers said, university officials would work behind the scenes, negotiating privately with Pentagon officials. Summers had said the same thing at a faculty meeting some months before, when professors asked about Harvard’s response to the Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism law that allowed the FBI to monitor library users. We’ll take it up with the feds, Summers had said. But if indeed Harvard’s Washington lobbyists had done so, nothing had come of their conversations, and professors wondered if Summers’ line hadn’t been just a way of shutting them up.
When the law professors suggested to Summers that Harvard’s involvement could accelerate a shift in public opinion regarding anti-gay discrimination, that Harvard could serve as a leader in the fight, he remained unmoved. “He didn’t mind faculty suing [the Pentagon] individually,” said one of the professors in attendance. “It takes the pressure off him. But he doesn’t see this as something worth fighting.”
Granted, Summers was hardly the only university president reluctant to challenge the government; none of the presidents whose law schools were involved in litigation chose to throw the weight of their university behind it. Summers’ letter, vague and legalistic though it was, laid bare a new reality for America’s most prestigious universities: They had become so dependent on federal aid, so addicted to it, that they simply could not afford to challenge a federal mandate on a matter of principle. This was particularly true at Harvard, which year in and year out ranked as one of the top academic recipients of government largesse. That was what Summers meant by the “highly constructive partnership” between universities and the government “in a great many areas.” The unfortunate result was that Harvard, the world’s richest, most influential university, was willing to abandon an official policy of nondiscrimination because it refused to jeopardize federal money. Veritas was not worth $400 million.
Anyway, most of those areas of “constructive partnership” involved scientific research that Summers cared about more than he did the issue of gays in the military, one reason why his language sounded curiously antiseptic. The Solomon Amendment wasn’t “unsound and corrosive public policy”; the amendment “as it has recently been interpreted” was unsound and corrosive. Rather than being offensive and discriminatory, the policy “offends ideals
of nondiscrimination and individual dignity.” The distinctions were subtle, but Summers’ words gave the impression that he was more afraid of offending Republicans than he was upset by discrimination.
While no one would say that Summers supported discrimination, the issue clearly did not stir his moral passions—not even by the coolheaded standards of an economist. He very much supported students who wanted to participate in ROTC, but he did not particularly worry about gay students who wanted to serve but couldn’t. Summers respected power, and gays simply did not have enough of it to force the issue to the front of his agenda. He would not jeopardize the pursuit of scientific discoveries by challenging the government on a policy he considered of marginal importance.
And, possibly, Summers had a point. Maybe, in the grand scheme of things, the Solomon Amendment was of marginal importance. After all, as he often said, what would historians remember about our era two hundred years from now? His answer: the scientific revolution in our understanding of human biology. In all likelihood, the number of gay people who cared about serving in the military, or even cared about being discriminated against by the military, was fewer than the number of people who could be helped by scientific discoveries coming out of Harvard labs. Perhaps saving lives was more important than protecting them from indignity and discrimination.
But was the choice really so stark? If Summers cared about the issue, couldn’t he have found a way to speak out about it? To do more than writing a carefully hedged letter? He needn’t have been antagonistic; he need only have led. After all, he had one of the most visible podiums in the country, if not in the world. On the question of anti-Semitism, he’d shown his willingness to use that podium for something he considered important. Why not stand up for another minority group feeling the pain of prejudice?
Summers’ position was “more than a little frustrating,” Goad said. “Harvard’s involvement would have a huge impact; nothing gets press coverage like Harvard. It said to me that Harvard has lagged behind the other schools. It said that Harvard is not a progressive institution. That it is a follower rather than a leader.”
On January 12, 2004, HLS Lambda filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the FAIR lawsuit. The very next day, fifty-four law school professors, including Dean Elena Kagan, submitted an amicus curiae brief of their own. But the law students were still frustrated. It was possible, Goad said, that in the 2004–2005 school year they might file suit against the university itself. Incoming students, she argued, had come to Harvard with an implicit contractual understanding that they would not be discriminated against. If Harvard would not even try to preserve that right, those students might wind up taking the university to court.
Some months later, Summers showed that he was indeed willing to take on the White House. This time, however, it was regarding an issue he did care deeply about—science. In the spring of 2004, Summers announced that Harvard would create a multimillion dollar center, the Stem Cell Institute, to pursue the therapeutic applications of fetal stem cells. He made the announcement at the Harvard Club of New York on March 2. “There has been an abdication of national responsibility in this area,” Summers said.
Because foes of abortion charged that stem cell research would lead to an increase in abortions, politics had intruded on science: in 2001, President Bush announced that the federal government would fund only research into existing stem cell lines. But most scientists in the field considered those cell lines inadequate, and the restrictions were impeding research that could make a huge difference in the lives of adults suffering from diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, as well as children suffering from neurological damage such as cerebral palsy. “We have a set of policies in place that will not permit stem cell research to be carried on through the traditional channels,” Summers explained. “Given those policies, if this research is to be carried out, there is no alternative to strong and decisive efforts by institutions like Harvard.” The board of this new institute would include professor Michael Sandel, Summers’ erstwhile critic, and Dr. David Scadden, who, twenty years before, had treated Larry Summers for cancer and very probably saved his life. For Summers, this was a very personal matter indeed.
The decision to open the Stem Cell Institute did not directly jeopardize federal money, and in fact it would bring new money into Harvard from private-sector donors. Nevertheless, it was a calculated and highly public rebuke of the Bush administration that entirely contradicted Summers’ public rationale for not fighting the Solomon Amendment—that “the question is heavily a political one in terms of the Congress and executive branch.” As Summers himself said in a March 20 luncheon at the Harvard Club of New York, “By supporting stem cell research, we are going to take up the slack where our government decided—in my view, mistakenly—not to go.” (The line received a healthy round of applause, which may have suggested that, unlike with “don’t ask–don’t tell,” there was a growing and positive consensus regarding stem cell research.) Inevitably, though, the Stem Cell Institute risked angering conservatives in the White House and Congress, which could certainly have resulted in cutbacks in federal aid to Harvard. Summers was willing to take that chance.
It could not be said that Larry Summers would not fight for things he believed in. But there was ample evidence that he would not fight for things other members of the Harvard community believed in, principles to which the university had once been committed. If the president of Harvard was going to place his university in opposition to the government, it had to be for a purpose in which he himself had a personal stake. After all, he was Harvard.
Halfway through his third year as president, Summers had imposed an unprecedented level of control over the amount of information that flowed out of the university. Press releases from around Harvard had to be approved—and sometimes rewritten—by Mass Hall. Fewer and fewer members of the faculty spoke to the press about much of anything, because they did not consider it worth the risk of angering Summers. “There is a sense of resignation, of faculty passivity,” said professor Bradley Epps, who had already clashed with Summers and didn’t much mind if he did it again. Only a few professors, such as history of science professor Everett Mendelsohn, dared to question Summers at faculty meetings, which had taken on a Soviet feel; deviations from the script were not allowed. As a young scholar, Mendelsohn had been accused of being a communist by Joseph McCarthy; having survived that, he was not afraid to dissent. “There is a feeling in the faculty that important decisions which may or may not be good are being made with insufficient consultation,” Mendelson said. The professor was a gentleman; he understated the problem.
Most professors, however, buttoned their lips and hunkered down. During the Cornel West affair, Summers had seemed vulnerable, his future uncertain. Now it was clear that not only was he not going anywhere, but that he would brook little dissent. If the professors were going to rise in opposition, they would have to wait for Summers to make a mistake. Until then, they held their tongues.
The university publications marched in lockstep with Summers’ agenda. Harvard Magazine, once relatively independent by the standards of university alumni magazines, had taken a deep interest in all things scientific, and month after month ran cover articles on scientific issues that curiously paralleled Summers’ own interests, while downplaying the abundant signs of campus discontent. Longtime readers of the Harvard Gazette noticed that the weekly bulletin had become increasingly Pravda-like, featuring a steady stream of flattering photographs of its new president. Summers had instituted an unwritten rule: he would allow his picture to be taken only by photographers of whom he approved. And he cooperated with print journalists only when he appeared to expect gentle treatment from them. As the year progressed, he granted interviews to John Cloud of Time and Daniel Goldin of the Wall Street Journal. Both were graduates of Harvard College—class of ’93 and ’78, respectively—though only Cloud disclosed that fact in his piece on Summers. The interviews contained less-than-formidable question
ing, as when Goldin asked Summers, “What would you cite as your biggest successes at Harvard so far?”
In the meantime, Summers stiff-armed those journalists who followed his activities more closely, the reporters and editors of the Harvard Crimson. His obstructionist attitude toward the student newspaper was not justified by any irresponsible or confrontational reporting. Crimson writers and editors report on an institution of which they are a part, and so they err on the side of caution. Though Harvard administrators may sometimes consider the Crimson a thorn in their side, they generally concede its professionalism and value to the campus.
On February 20, 2004, however, the Crimson ran an astonishing editorial that reflected its frustration with Summers’ hostility to the open flow of information. “Ask undergraduates what they think of University President Lawrence H. Summers, and their replies will range from unfettered vitriol to fawning praise, with all possible stops in between,” the editorial said. “Still, though every student can be counted on to have an opinion of our University’s head, many of them would be at a loss to back up their judgments with specifics—for as Summers has consolidated his hold on Harvard, his administration has demonstrated an unsettling penchant for secrecy and centralized decision-making rather than the proper level of transparency and consultation.
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