Harvard Rules (14 page)

Bollinger was a popular and effective president. He successfully launched Michigan's Life Sciences Initiative, a several hundred million dollar plan to expand science facilities. In the arts, he brought England's Royal Shakespeare Company to campus and helped found the six-hundred seat Arthur Miller Theater. Bollinger was passionate about the role of culture in university life. “This is vital to what we are as a community,” he said when proposing the theater. “No one can give me a reason not to do it. So let's do it!”

Students loved Bollinger. When hundreds of excited revelers gathered outside the presidential mansion to celebrate the football team's 1997 victory over Penn State, Bollinger simply invited them all inside. Posing as a distant, Olympian figure wasn't his style. Lee Bollinger, said one student journalist, “is like a hyper-articulate version of your best friend's father.” He certainly looked the part of a casual authority figure. Sitting for an interview in March 2003, Bollinger wore leather boots, wide-wale corduroys, a button-down shirt with a tie, and a fluffy down vest. About the only thing missing was a golden retriever at his feet.

Politically liberal, Bollinger reacted calmly when a 1960s-style protest broke out on the Michigan campus. In March 1999, thirty students took over his office to protest the use of sweatshops in making university-branded clothing. “They are terrific students,” Bollinger said. “They're just the kind of students you want on your campus. They were interested in a serious problem, they were knowledgeable about the problem, and they really wanted to do something about it.” He didn't appreciate them taking over his office, but he did respect their passion.

But Bollinger became best known for his handling of two lawsuits brought against the university and its law school,
Gratz v. Bollinger
and
Grutter v. Bollinger.
Targeting the university's affirmative action program, both cases were brought by whites who'd been denied acceptance at Michigan. With the support and advice of his friend Neil Rudenstine, Bollinger vigorously fought the lawsuits, defending affirmative action as essential to diversity, which was, in turn, essential to the fullness of any student's education. The Supreme Court had agreed to hear the cases in the spring of 2003.

At age forty-six, Larry Summers was eight years younger than Bollinger but already had a storied résumé of his own. Summers wasn't a university president, but he brought plenty of relevant experience to the table. He certainly had management experience; the Treasury Department employed more than one hundred sixty thousand people. Summers knew Harvard well, having spent years there as both a student and a professor. And though fundraising would not be the next president's priority, were Summers chosen he would instantly become the best-connected fundraiser in the university's history—after all, who has more experience with big money than the head of the Treasury Department?

Summers had something else that was appealing—an intangible but definite aura of star quality. He was an unconventional man, a brilliant academic who'd quit the cloistered world of his profession to pursue public service in Washington. Along the way, he'd acquired power and fame. In the Internet-age jargon of the 1990s, choosing Larry Summers would constitute thinking outside the box. The genius economist and former Treasury secretary as president of Harvard? No question, that'd generate some press.

 

On Sunday, February 18, 2001, the search committee interviewed Bollinger at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, on East Sixty-fourth Street and Madison Avenue in New York City, a tony, discreet place where rooms start at $500 a night—the perfect locale for such a delicate mission. Things were long past the point of pretending that this was not an interview; it was Bollinger's third meeting with Harvard officials. Eight members of the committee dined with him that Saturday night, and on Sunday morning they convened a meeting at a $3,600-a-night penthouse suite, ate lunch, then reconvened for another short session.

The committee, Bollinger recalled, “had a very strong concern with undergraduate education, with attention to undergraduates right down to advising policies. How do you make this undergraduate experience richer than it is, and more fulfilling?” The Harvard emissaries also wanted to talk to Bollinger about where he would invest in the sciences, the development of the Allston campus, and the globalization of Harvard.

The meetings went well. Bollinger was comfortable addressing the questions and impressed his audience with the breadth of his knowledge. Harvard needed to focus on its undergraduate life, he argued, making the student-professor relationship more relaxed and accessible. He spoke of the need for university presidents to be engaged in society, and argued that they could do so without risking alumni contributions. In his years fighting the affirmative action lawsuits, Bollinger said, he couldn't remember a single instance in which an alum had refused to donate as a result. But after the interview was over, something happened. A small incident, but still, it said something about how Bollinger's style and Harvard's were different.

Two enterprising reporters from the
Crimson,
a junior named Garrett McCord Graff and a first-year named Catherine E. Shoichet, had tracked down the committee at the Plaza Athénée. The presidential search was the year's biggest story for the
Crimson,
which was pulling out all the stops to scoop the national press, and several times did. Graff and Shoichet had been tipped off that the Corporation was meeting in New York; they just didn't know where. So they showed up at the Manhattan offices of various Corporation members, doing their best to look youthful and innocent, whereupon they'd announce, “We're from Harvard. We're here for the Harvard meeting.” Eventually, they got lucky. An unwitting secretary said, “Oh, it's not here,” and directed them to the Plaza Athénée.

When the reporters reached the hotel, they rode the elevator to the penthouse, where the committee was meeting. Almost immediately, Shoichet and Graff bumped into Marc Goodheart. “Who are you?” he asked. They told him. Goodheart, an important but little-recognized administration official, asked them to leave. Was he a hotel employee? the reporters asked. No? Well then, they weren't about to leave. But, just in case, the students rented a room so that they couldn't be thrown out of the hotel for loitering. (The
Crimson,
which has an endowment of its own, could afford it.) Then they staked out the lobby.

At the conclusion of its interview, the committee asked Bollinger to avoid the reporters by taking the freight elevator and exiting by the hotel's back door. “I'll leave by the front door, thank you,” he replied, bemused. Shoichet and Graff caught up to him just outside the hotel entrance. Bollinger wouldn't answer their questions, but they took his picture, and two days later the
Crimson
broke the news of his meeting with the search committee.

The veil of secrecy was lifted, if only for a moment.

Six days later, the committee met with Larry Summers.

 

A chauffeured limousine whisked him from Logan Airport to the Boston Harbor Hotel, taking Summers through the underground garage so that he could ride the freight elevator up to the sixteenth-floor, $2,500-a-night presidential suite. Summers would spend the next five hours talking with the search committee, going over much the same issues that Bollinger had. He agreed that Harvard needed to hire more professors, in part by awarding tenure to junior professors who were coming into their own rather than to stars from other universities who might already have done their best work. And, because the committee didn't want to have to go through this process again anytime soon, he vowed his devotion to Harvard. Even if Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan were to step down, Summers said, he wouldn't leave Harvard to take the job.

It was, by all accounts, an impressive presentation—lucid, wide-ranging, and backed by a broad sense of the world beyond Cambridge that Summers had developed over a decade of jet-setting around the globe. “What we saw was a powerful intellect and understanding of the university and a university's mission and purpose, and a tremendous taste for excellence,” Hanna Gray said later.

Gray was Summers' most ardent supporter, in large part because of her disappointment with Neil Rudenstine. Although she publicly praised Rudenstine, she was privately impatient with him, and his collapse in 1994 had offended her. In Gray's eyes, not only had the episode embarrassed Harvard, but there was something damningly effete about the act. It represented the lack of toughness, the absence of rigor that she felt permeated academic culture in the 1990s. “Hanna didn't like Neil at all,” said one professor who knew them both. “Like many successful women in our world, she didn't like unmanliness, because she's had to be pretty manly in her career. So, from her point of view, Neil's breakdown was disaster.” Larry Summers, Gray was confident, would never pose such problems. He had been tested in the pressure-cooker worlds of Washington and international finance, and the tests only seemed to have made him stronger.

Robert Stone, though, was reputed to be leaning toward Bollinger. The Michigan president had the temperament and experience to step smoothly into the job. He was affable, likeable, a familiar type. Along with at least three other members of the search committee, Stone was worried about Summers' reputation as hot-headed and haughty.

No one was asking the faculty's opinion, but if they had, Bollinger would have been the likely favorite, a known quantity under whom the University of Michigan was prospering. Summers was obviously a man of enormous capability, but he had question marks. He hadn't been a well-known figure when he was at Harvard; he'd hung around with other economists and hadn't gotten involved in larger university issues. And he'd been away from academia for a decade.

“Bollinger was in many ways a much more intellectually appropriate figure” than Summers, said Everett Mendelsohn, a Harvard professor of the history of science since 1960. “He was someone who had dealt with issues of the university in the modern world in a way that Larry had not. Summers was known as someone with a hot temper, with strong ideas on some things but no reflections, as far as anyone knew, on what a university is or ought to be. Bollinger had dealt with issues of affirmative action, of student activism, of faculty salaries. Almost to a person, I don't think anyone on the faculty would have been a strong supporter of Summers.”

That assertion may be too strong, but in any event, it was moot. In the committee's eyes, faculty support might actually have been a negative for a candidate; the Corporation wanted to shake things up. And to some search committee members, Bollinger had his drawbacks. He had no Harvard degree—though his daughter had attended the college, Bollinger matriculated at the University of Oregon before Columbia Law School, and for some members of the Corporation, “UO” was not quite Harvard material. According to sources close to the search process, Treasurer D. Ron Daniel was adamantly opposed to putting the university in the hands of someone who hadn't gone there. Plus, at fifty-four Bollinger was a little older than the committee would have preferred, almost as old as Rudenstine was when he took the job. That made it less likely that he'd serve the fifteen or twenty years the committee wanted.

In fact, there were hints that Bollinger was too much like Rudenstine in a number of ways, especially to Hanna Gray's taste. Rudenstine had been known for his promotion of the arts and African American studies, along with his defense of affirmative action; Bollinger too was a patron of the arts, and was fighting two lawsuits on behalf of affirmative action that were attracting national attention even before the Supreme Court heard them. Some Harvard officials were already uncomfortable with the amount of attention the Af-Am department under Skip Gates was attracting. Would Lee Bollinger change that trend—or continue it?

Larry Summers was pulling ahead. Only the question of his disposition remained. Could the committee entrust Harvard to a man famous for his brilliance but notorious for his temper?

So Summers' old mentor Bob Rubin stepped in. The widely respected former treasury secretary, Harvard class of '60, had enormous credibility. He was judicious, discreet, thoughtful, and enormously wealthy—a thoroughly impressive combination of old-school values and new-world money. Rubin didn't want to be president of Harvard, but if he had wanted the job, he probably could have had it. Instead, he wanted the job for Larry Summers.

So Rubin called three members of the search committee who had particular doubts: Stone, D. Ron Daniel, and James Richardson Houghton. It was true, Rubin admitted, that Summers had once had what Rubin would call a “rough-edges” issue. But he'd mellowed, Rubin insisted. This was a man who'd successfully negotiated with congressional leaders and foreign treasurers, who'd survived and prospered for a decade in a viciously partisan Washington environment. His temper existed more in legend than in reality.

Rubin's seal of approval worked. “Rubin made us confident that we weren't getting a bull,” one member of the committee later said.

On February 26, 2001, the search committee met in its Loeb House conference room and unanimously chose Larry Summers as Harvard's next president. Robert Stone called Summers to ask if he would take the job, then flew to Washington, where Summers lived, to press the issue. Summers took a week to officially say yes. Then, on Sunday, March 11, he and the search committee met with the Board of Overseers on the sixty-fourth floor of 30 Rockefeller Center. The search committee members explained their reasons for choosing Summers, and then Summers gave a brief talk, laying out his vision for Harvard. As expected, the Overseers voted unanimously in favor of Summers.

After nine months of searching, Harvard had found a new president.