Summers Charts Course For a Global Harvard
By Nicholas von Hoffman
... [Larry] Summers is the president of the richest and best-known brand name in American or, for that matter, world education. By the standards of the past, this energetic and decidedly clever man was an odd choice for the job. Mr. Summers is described by Richard Bradley in his forthcoming book, Harvard Rules (HarperCollins), thus: "He had never studied literature, art, languages, history, or philosophy; he admitted that he didn�t read serious fiction. He was an applied economist whose litmus test for an academic field was the practical results that it could generate. He did not believe that things should be studied for their own sake, or to preserve and understand the past �. "
In the last year or so, Mr. Bradley reports, Mr. Summers has found himself a girlfriend who is at work introducing him to the joys of poetry. The jury�s still out on whether or not this toe dip into literature will take.
How did he get the job? Well, it certainly wasn�t charm. If Mr. Bradley has it right, the man is something of a slob. "Food was a recurring problem. Summers was a prodigious and sloppy eater. The first time he visited the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson � he dispatched an aide to Pinocchio�s, a beloved campus pizza place �. Summers talked to the editors as he wolfed down bites of pizza, much of which found its way on to his shirt �. And then there was the general problem of eating and talking at the same time, which sometimes resulted in Summers� spraying saliva on his audience."
On the plus side, everyone agrees that he is quick-witted, fast on his feet and had succeeded in clambering his way up the rock pile of ambition to being Secretary of the Treasury in the last couple of years of the Clinton administration. At the Treasury Department, he was admired by Wall Street as a globalist. Whether he was the sort of cabinet secretary who will be remembered is another question. Certainly he was no Alexander Hamilton, but his showing was good enough, if I have Mr. Bradley�s meaning right, to become the Wall Street candidate for the Harvard job.
As West Point and the other service academies are to the armed services, so Harvard is to finance, law and government. After noting the exceptions, it is fair to say that the men and women who dominate the organizations in these fields want a Lawrence Summers because, au fond, he and they are pretty much the same kind of people. Mr. Bradley notes that more Harvard students major in economics than any other specialty. And though the more prognathous elements in the red-state world may look on Harvard graduates with distrust, the real red-state bosses have no such qualms, knowing that, by and large, Harvard graduates will perform with cookie-cutter predictability.
Apparently, Mr. Summers also was chosen to head the university because he was tough enough to take power and reorganize the place. In the past, Harvard presidents had more prestige and name recognition than they had power. Throughout the history of the place, its major academic departments raised their own moneys and more or less controlled their own budgets. They were thus able to thumb their noses�albeit in a genteel Cantabrigian way�at the institution�s nominal head. In the face of a new world aborning, a floppy, decentralized Harvard was destined for a slow fadeout.
Mr. Summers� idea of a rejiggered Harvard seems to be, if Mr. Bradley has hit it right, a place that looks a lot like M.I.T., a place where the long fusion between technical-scientific institutions and the modern corporation has come close to completing itself. A walk around the M.I.T. area�it cannot be said to have a campus in the old sense of that word�is to find a collection of buildings which, to the eye at least, look like a very big, very impressive concentration of interrelated high-tech corporate enterprises. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that; it is what it is�a place that trains scientific and engineering researchers and then puts them to work doing what they�ve been trained to do. The work is important, but it could not be less connected to the joys and torments of the human spirit.
Reorganizing Harvard is not an easy job, even if a person can assemble the power to do it. According to Mr. Bradley�s description, Mr. Summers has had notable success in increasing the power of his office, changing it to something which resembles that of a big-time corporate C.E.O. Certainly he has adopted the C.E.O. style. Like star athletes, C.E.O.�s live in the center of an entourage, a moving swarm of staff, press agents, advance men, gofers, speechwriters, bodyguards, chauffeurs, coat-holders and back-patters who feed them, flatter them, take the fall for them and keep the bad news away. This is the way the current Harvard presidency looks to Mr. Bradley, who, incidentally, is a Yale graduate with a master�s degree from Harvard.
C.E.O. Summers hasn�t had mastery over the university long enough for anyone to judge his work. He has been successful in working out an agreement with M.I.T. for a joint venture in the life sciences, and he has flopped in an attempt to write a new core curriculum for Harvard College. You cannot be too hard on Mr. Summers on this one. For a century, literally, the college and its university president have fitfully taken runs at this project and, as in many another place, have failed.
Colleges seated in the midst of gigantic research institutions never have a life of their own. Even under C.E.O. Summers, the various academic departments make a coherent collegiate course of study next to impossible, and Harvard has a long record of anarchy in this regard. If Mr. Bradley has his figures right, Harvard has the second-highest undergraduate suicide rate in the country, topped only by�guess who?�M.I.T. In the eyes of many observers, Harvard�s dirty little secret is that, though the place is filled to overflowing with many of the world�s most gifted scholars and scientists, it is no place to get an undergraduate education.
Thus far, Mr. Summers has hardly been a help, having fired or let go two of Harvard�s most popular teachers, men whose classes attracted hundreds of students and who also were known for the time they gave to individuals�a rare thing on that campus. ...
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Carl
