Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

  His freshman year was Larry Summers’ first year as president, and Green’s confidence was bolstered when he heard the new president say that Harvard’s undergraduate education needed work. He contacted Summers’ office to see if the president would need an intern to help with the upcoming curricular review, but the answer was no, the review wouldn’t really start for another year or so. Still, Green couldn’t stop thinking about the purpose of a Harvard education. In the fall of 2002, he went to a dinner Larry Summers threw for student leaders, and he was pleased when Summers asked the students what would be the one thing they would fix regarding Harvard? Green said that people weren’t asking big questions, such as “Why are we here? What are we supposed to learn?” Summers responded that that wasn’t a helpful answer, because it didn’t include one specific thing that could simply be fixed.

  In the second half of his sophomore year, in February 2003, Green enrolled in Economics 1010A, Microeconomic Theory, a standard introductory course. But along with other students, Green found the professor’s lectures disjointed, rambling, and frequently unhelpful. He grew so frustrated that he sent Bill Kirby a lengthy e-mail about the professor, who ultimately took a four-week leave from the course to “rework” his lectures. That incident inspired a Crimson column headlined “World’s Greatest University, World’s Worst Teachers.” It also put Green in touch with the FAS administration, and that spring Dick Gross invited Green to lunch at the Faculty Club and asked if he wanted to be on a curricular review committee. Green did. He chose the committee on pedagogy, because he thought that area needed the most reform.

  Meeting once every other week, the four committees began their work in the fall of 2003. At the start, Green was hopeful. He wanted to ask big questions about the purpose of a Harvard education, about the way teaching was done. Why were students not asked what courses should be offered? Why do concentrations even exist? Green had heard Larry Summers talk about how important and far-reaching this review was, so he thought that asking fundamental questions was the point. Green kept thinking about a question one of his professors had put to him: “If you could either go here and get no diploma, or not go here and get the diploma, what would you do?” It bothered Green that he couldn’t easily answer the question.

  But the two faculty members on the committee, historian Liz Cohen and biologist Richard Losick, quickly made it clear there wasn’t time for that kind of open-ended conversation. “The response was, ‘If we ask big questions, we won’t get concrete recommendations,” Green said. There was no time for big-picture debates. Summers was impatient: Bill Kirby had to release a curricular review report by May 2004, in time for commencement. His curricular review was supposed to accomplish in one year what had taken Henry Rosovsky four. Green couldn’t even talk to his friends about what his committee was considering—the students had been told to say nothing to anyone outside the review process. “It was,” Green came to believe, “a fantastic way to control dissent.”

  The four committees produced an interim report, which the faculty discussed briefly at a meeting on December 16. Lacking specific recommendations, the report reiterated the oft-mentioned goals of internationalization, scientific fluency, more contact between faculty and students, and increased undergraduate contact with the graduate schools. No one paid it much attention, partly because of the lack of substance, and partly because the faculty wasn’t paying much attention to the review in general. Unlike Rosovsky, Kirby wasn’t making a full-court press to reach out to faculty members. Even if he had, it was questionable whether they would have responded. The faculty didn’t believe that Kirby was really the man running the review—and by and large, they doubted that Summers seriously wanted a university-wide conversation regarding a proposed new curriculum.

  By now, the sense that Larry Summers created committees merely to forestall criticism of his pre-made decisions had grown widespread. Why invest time in a curricular review when their recommendations would be ignored if Summers disagreed with them? Certainly there was no sense that the university’s greatest minds, the really legendary figures, were engaged with the process, invested in it so deeply that they had a personal stake in its success, as they had a quarter-century before. “Several faculty members who were present for the 1970s review told me they remember feeling excitement in the air as questions of education were debated,” wrote Crimson columnist J. Hale Russell in late March. “This time around nobody knows what’s going on, much less feels excitement.”

  There were signs that even Bill Kirby and Dick Gross weren’t all that involved with the process. The two men were traveling frequently, both to talk about the review at other universities and to raise money; from September 2003 to March 2004, Kirby hosted eighteen alumni events designed to give alumni a sense of inclusion and solicit their financial aid. On campus, though, people said that Kirby was oddly disengaged, that despite his rhetoric, he wasn’t actively involved in the review. “Bill’s feeling was that this was so obviously Larry’s report, what was the point of getting involved?” said one source who knew both men. One professor familiar with the review process pointed out an important distinction between Rosovsky and Kirby. It was well known that Rosovsky, he said, had turned down an offer to be president of Yale in order to complete a review. Kirby, the source thought, wanted to become a university president, and so wouldn’t risk picking fights with his boss that he probably couldn’t win anyway.

  Kirby’s appointed overseer, Dick Gross, was traveling frequently as well, for the same purposes as Kirby. But even when he wasn’t, Gross delegated much of the review’s work to subordinates who lacked the clout to inspire the faculty. Foremost among them was Jeffrey Wolcowitz, a lecturer in economics and associate dean for undergraduate education. Wolcowitz, who had studied curriculum management for years, was respected and well liked. He was considered a good and smart man who took questions of curricular reform seriously. At the same time, he was not a tenured professor, much less the dean of the FAS. That someone so low in the pecking order was the most involved in the curricular review struck faculty observers as bizarre, and not a good omen for the review’s future. Some suspected that Wolcowitz was really Summers’ ringer. “Larry pretty much handpicked Jeff to write the report,” said one University Hall source.

  In the early spring, Summers invited the eight undergraduates on the review committees to Elmwood for dinner. As they sat around the dining room table talking about the review, Joe Green grew frustrated with the conversation—it was so specific, all about technicalities, with no sense of the underlying point of it all. “We’re not asking the big questions,” he said to the president. Green thought that the Harvard curriculum needed more than tinkering to challenge and produce great thinkers. “I’m concerned Harvard could never produce another William James,” Green said.

  Summers looked unhappy at the suggestion that Harvard couldn’t generate another important philosopher—which was really a lament that the curricular review was insufficiently ambitious. “What about Michael Sandel?” Summers asked. (Sandel was a member of the review’s Committee on General Education.) Green found it hard to take the remark seriously. Michael Sandel was a gifted lecturer and a smart, provocative thinker. But no one would have put him in a class with William James, and to do so suggested either an ignorance of the history of philosophy or a denial of reality. “I think Larry does care about undergraduate education,” Green said later. “He does care about Harvard College.” Nonetheless, he wasn’t open to challenges to his curricular review.

  By early March, the work of the curricular review committees was done, and the four groups gave their secret recommendations to Wolcowitz. Once so idealistic, Green had grown disillusioned. He realized that in the time allotted, the committees’ couldn’t possibly have undertaken any wide-ranging intellectual inquiry, and he believed that the aggressive schedule had been “a strategy designed to make sure that the administration got its agenda through.” He was so frustrated, he even met with Henry Rosovsky to ask
his advice, but while Rosovsky was happy to discuss the history of the Core, he would not get involved in the current process—no one wanted the architect of the Core looking over their shoulder as they prepared to axe the old curriculum. “I don’t think the committees got to the bottom of things, or even tried to,” Green said. “You couldn’t have, in one year. As an intellectual exercise, it was pretty unimpressive.” After being asked to meet with a prominent alumni donor, Green even began to doubt the rationale for having students in the process. “The administration needed to have us there so they could say there was student involvement” in the review, he said. The alumni liked to hear that.

  In mid-April, Jeffrey Wolcowitz shuttered himself in his basement office in University Hall to finish writing the curricular report in time for release on Monday, April 26. The pressure was on. According to University Hall sources, New York Times education reporter Sara Rimer had told Kirby’s office that the paper planned a front-page story on the review, as long as she got it early enough. But there was plenty of pressure from a source closer to home: Larry Summers.

  From the very beginning of his presidency, Summers had never shied away from stating what he hoped the curricular review would do. His 2003 commencement address was devoted to the topic. But during the course of the review, Summers played an even more hands-on role. At first, he acted through a surrogate. Apparently at Summers’ urging, Wolcowitz had hired for his staff a woman named Inge-Lise Ameer. Ameer had a 2002 doctorate from the Harvard School of Education, but that wasn’t her only qualification for the job. Also important was that she was friends with Summers’ girlfriend, English professor Lisa New. When New was director of undergraduate studies in the English department, Ameer was her “undergraduate administrative coordinator”—essentially her right-hand woman. The two liked each other very much, and through New, Ameer had met and socialized with Summers. He liked her too—and in her new role working for Jeff Wolcowitz, he used her to transmit his opinions on the curricular review. “Larry would pick up the phone and call her,” said one source familiar with their working relationship. Explained another, “Through Inge-Lise Ameer, Larry was delivering messages to Jeff Wolcowitz over the course of the review,” circumventing Bill Kirby and Dick Gross. Ameer’s presence irritated other University Hall staffers, who considered her Summers’ surrogate. She was, according to a third source, “a big problem.” Some of her co-workers were reluctant to talk freely around her, lest their words be reported back to the president. (Ameer declined to comment.)

  Ameer’s presence in University Hall also showed the growth of Lisa New’s power and influence. Though she could appear absentminded and even a little ditzy, New was neither, and she had strong opinions on issues such as undergraduate advising and teaching, and the merit (or lack thereof) of some undergraduate departments. And because Summers himself was not particularly familiar with issues in the humanities—and not always interested anyway—New filled a vacuum. The mild-mannered divorcée and poetry lover had become a major, if sub rosa, player in the direction of study of the humanities at Harvard. That her former aide was helping to shape the curricular review was evidence of that.

  As Wolcowitz approached the home stretch, Summers’ involvement became still more direct. According to several sources, he began simply calling Wolcowitz directly, telling him what to put in the final report regardless of whether the review committees had recommended it. “At the end,” said a University Hall source, “Larry was just dictating to Jeff, ‘These are the changes and they are going in.’” Wolcowitz, said another source familiar with the process, had become the “fall guy.” If the report bombed, then, at least internally, he would take the blame. Other sources said that Wolcowitz was “traumatized” and “depressed” by the experience. He would not get the chance to recover. In early September 2004, Bill Kirby summarily relieved Wolcowitz of his decanal duties, almost certainly ending the nontenured Wolcowitz’s decades-long service at Harvard. Kirby gave no explanation; University Hall sources said that Wolcowitz had started to chafe at the untenable position he was in, and his resulting shows of independence had irritated Kirby. In any event, the publicly identified author of the curricular review would now have nothing further to do with it.

  The end of the drafting process was not pretty. On the evening of Thursday, April 22, members of the review committees were e-mailed a password that granted them Internet access to a draft of the report. They had until Sunday to read it and make comments; their comments were expected to be minor, as there was no time for major changes; the report was to be released to the press on Monday. “We were supposed to see the draft report several weeks before it was released,” said Joe Green. He believed that Wolcowitz didn’t want feedback from the committee members, but it seemed equally possible that Wolcowitz had simply run out of time.

  Summers was so concerned about the report’s status, he insisted that Kirby intervene. On Sunday, April 25, according to two sources familiar with the incident, Kirby “literally took the report out of Wolcowitz’s hands.” There followed a late-night editing session in order to finish it and deliver it to Sara Rimer, the Times’ education reporter. It was, however, too late; Rimer’s story ran on A19—still impressive for a report whose import had yet to be determined—but not page one. The president was not happy. Rumors began to circulate around University Hall that he was so displeased with his dean, and so anxious that the report would get ripped in the media, that he had lost confidence in Kirby.

  Bill Kirby, some thought, had done everything Summers had wanted him to. Just to prepare a publishable report in a year’s time was a considerable feat. But now some of his colleagues began to suspect that Kirby’s future as dean was in doubt. Replacing an FAS dean so early in his tenure would once have been considered unthinkable except in the most extreme circumstances. But Summers had shown that the traditional way of doing business mattered little. All that mattered was results.

  The final document, sixty-seven pages in length, was called “A Report on the Harvard College Curricular Review,” and in essence, it transcribed everything that Larry Summers had been evangelizing about since the fall of 2001. The proposed new curriculum would replace the Core with a distributional requirement. Students would still be required to take courses in a few broad categories. Gone, however, was the idea that students should study “ways of thinking.” The new curriculum would try to ensure that students learned specific facts, although it did not say which ones. There was no mention, for example, of a mandatory Western civilization course, often a central thrust of general education programs in American universities. Instead, “a central component” of the distributional requirement would be the creation of a new set of courses, to be called “Harvard College Courses.” Though study abroad would not be required, it was strongly recommended, and student transcripts would show whether they had undergone a “significant” international experience. (What significant meant was undefined, but apparently the term was intended to exclude spending a night walking the Seine with a Parisian art student or discovering an Eden-like beach in Thailand.) As Kirby would say in press accounts, “If you’re going to come to Harvard College, it would be very good to have a passport.” In addition, there were proposals for fewer concentration requirements, mandatory freshman seminars, and a four-week January term in which students could take intensive courses, write a research paper, or perhaps study abroad. Students would have to study more science and international affairs, and possibly science courses ought to be more “interdisciplinary,” although what exactly this meant also went unspecified. Perhaps the last significant recommendation was that the system of assigning students to houses at the end of their freshman years be changed to what critics would angrily call a “Yale-style” housing system, in which students received house assignments as incoming freshmen.

  And that was pretty much it. (There was a lot of padding.)

  In the national press, the report garnered some early good buzz. The Times declared that it “i
s likely to have an impact on universities across the nation.” In an editorial called “Rethinking at Harvard,” the Boston Globe assured readers that the review “promises to be a bold step forward.”

  As it turned out, though, those two newspapers were pretty much the only ones to feel that way. The highly respected Chronicle of Higher Education noted that “the last time Harvard reviewed its undergraduate curriculum…the results influenced colleges across the country.” This time, according to Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, many of the report’s recommendations simply mirrored what a number of other colleges already have in place. The Crimson added that “university administrators across the country say they are not expecting anything as radical or as influential from the current curricular review” as the Core had been. The promotion of study abroad, for example, was new to Harvard, but it was certainly not new at many other colleges around the country. The proposal for Yale-style housing, to build a stronger bond between freshmen and the houses, came, of course, from Yale. The idea for a January term seemed to come from MIT, which included a “J-term” in its calendar. This was one reason why the Crimson’s J. Hale Russell, a consistent critic of the review process, called the report “60 pages of stunningly bland and half-baked recommendations” and “the rather unsurprising product of a one-year process conducted behind closed doors and largely driven by the narrow-minded agenda of a university president who…seems intent on turning Harvard into his alma mater, MIT.”