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  While Oldenburg spoke, a wary policeman stood behind him and watched over the crowd. Terrorism was not the only security concern. Kept at a safe distance by no-nonsense Harvard police officers several hundred yards away, a small group of student protesters stood outside the Yard. They were members of a group called the Harvard Living Wage Campaign, which had organized to pressure the Harvard administration to increase the salaries it paid Harvard workers. “What’s outrageous? Harvard wages!” they chanted. “What’s disgusting? Union-busting!” They were too far away to be heard, though, which was no accident. In his work at Treasury and the World Bank, Summers had seen plenty of protesters, and he did not appreciate them. To Summers, these young activists didn’t understand the forces that were changing the world—forces that he had helped set in motion. He wasn’t about to let them ruin this day.

  As Summers stood and walked to the podium, Oldenburg turned to him with outstretched hands. “Two silver keys,” Oldenburg declared. Representing the unlocking of knowledge and piety, the keys were given to Harvard to celebrate the 1846 installation of President Edward Everett, the man best known for his two-hour speech preceding Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Summers displayed the keys to the crowd, but he looked befuddled, as if he didn’t know quite what to do with them. The audience was with him, though, and chuckled supportively.

  “Two seals of the college,” Oldenburg continued. Summers held those up too and clearly gave a little shrug, as if to say, “I know this is silly, and you know this is silly, but I have to do it.” The crowd laughed again.

  “And finally, the earliest college record book.” Summers took the large red volume and opened it to the crowd, at which point a ribbon used as a page marker fell to the ground. Oldenburg hastily picked it up.

  Another elderly man approached the podium. Robert G. Stone, class of ’45, was head of the Harvard Corporation. A multimillionaire from shipping and international business interests, Stone was one of the people who’d chosen Summers, although Summers hadn’t been his first choice. With his gray suit, wire-rimmed glasses, and meticulously slicked back hair, Stone seemed a throwback to the 1950s, the time just before Harvard men like McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara headed to Washington to serve John Kennedy. Stone gave off the aura of money and power; he looked like a man who had never doubted his place in the world.

  “Mr. President,” he said in a gravelly voice, “it is my privilege to hand you one final insignia of authority—a replica of the charter of the university, dated 1650.”

  Together, Summers and Stone held up the leather-bound charter, which had established Harvard as the oldest institution recognized by Western law in the Western hemisphere. And with that, Summers moved to sit in the President’s Chair, an ungainly wooden structure with a square back and a triangular seat, which was a little small for Summers. President Edward Holyoke bought the chair sometime between 1737 and 1769, although it had probably been made closer to the year 1550, and ever since it had served as the chair in which Harvard presidents sat for their official portraits. Summers was smiling, but he looked impatient. His right leg danced back and forth as if it couldn’t wait to get moving.

  As Larry Summers gazed out over the enthusiastic crowd on his installation day, he looked upon a university that reigned preeminent in American education. In terms of status, reputation, breadth, money, power, and influence, no other university can equal Harvard—not in the United States, not in the world.

  Its dominance is due in part to its age. Founded in 1636, Harvard is the oldest American university by a considerable amount—Virginia’s William and Mary, which opened its doors in 1693, is next. Being older than the United States itself gives Harvard as close to an aura of antiquity as you can get in this country. It has also given the university time to experiment, expand, and mature.

  But it isn’t just age that has contributed to Harvard’s preeminence. Geography has helped too. Harvard is just a few miles from Boston, one of the country’s most important cities until at least the mid-nineteenth century. Perched snugly in Cambridge and delineated by the picturesque Charles River, Harvard was close enough to benefit from its proximity to Boston, yet far enough away to avoid being overshadowed by urban growth or mired in urban decay. And for more than three centuries Harvard could expand physically without running into the dire space constraints that urban universities such as Columbia, in New York City, have faced.

  But age and geography are not the only, nor even the primary, reasons that Harvard has become the world’s most important university. Harvard’s greatest good fortune has been its success in choosing its presidents. At critical times in its history, Harvard has always managed to locate a leader who would take just the right gamble to keep the university innovative and excellent. It could be argued that Harvard presidents have consistently been more successful than American ones.

  For these reasons and more, Harvard has come to occupy a totemic place in the American imagination. The name of no other university carries the cachet that Harvard’s does. That is why high school students cram and practice and sacrifice for years to get into Harvard—all those class presidents and star athletes and musical prodigies and budding scientific geniuses—even though they know that in any given year 90 percent of the roughly twenty thousand who apply to the college will be rejected. Because once you’re in—well, is there any surer ticket to success in American life than a diploma with the word Harvard printed upon it?

  Harvard is strong and famous not just because of its undergraduate college but also because of its professional schools. Every year those schools produce the elite of America’s white-collar professions, from architecture to education to academia. Most powerful are the schools of law, business, and medicine. If they are not always ranked first in their field, they are always near the top. And they are unrivaled in terms of the connections they provide their students, the status they confer, the aura of success that cloaks their graduates like elegantly tailored clothing.

  It is that name, Harvard, that does it—“the best brand in higher education,” as many around campus will tell you matter-of-factly, without a hint of irony (or, for that matter, humility). Students describe telling outsiders that they go to Harvard as “dropping the H bomb.” The name prompts a reaction—sometimes flattering, sometimes awestruck, sometimes resentful, but always a reaction. Going to Harvard, you become part of something bigger than yourself—and in return, you become something bigger, something more, than what you were before. Students rarely change Harvard, but Harvard almost always changes its students profoundly.

  The farther away you get from Cambridge, the more the name impresses. In New York City, Harvard is respected. But if a boy from Billings, Montana, or a girl from Johnson City, Tennessee, gets into Harvard, it’s news for the local paper. Outside of the United States, the name carries even more weight. Harvard students and professors marvel at how they can travel to every corner of the globe—to China or Argentina or Romania—and when they say they come from Harvard, people will nod in recognition and accord them a certain respect, sometimes even awe. That wouldn’t happen if you mentioned Yale or Princeton, Berkeley or Stanford, Oxford or the Sorbonne. Harvard is a golden passport that can take its bearer anywhere and everywhere.

  And the money: On this campus the scent of money wafts from between every red brick. The day Larry Summers became president, Harvard’s endowment stood at a staggering $19 billion. No other American university—and American universities are the world’s richest—could even come close; Yale was second, with a relatively paltry $10 billion. And Harvard’s figure didn’t even count the hundreds of acres of real estate worth billions more, or the Florentine villa it was bequeathed by a grateful graduate, the thousands of treasures in its twelve museums, or the four hundred thousand–acre lumber forest in New Zealand that the university would purchase soon thereafter. Harvard was reported to be the second-richest non-profit institution in the world. Only the Catholic Church had more money than Harvard—an
d Harvard was gaining.

  And yet, not all was right at the university Larry Summers was about to take charge of. As Harvard faced the beginning of a new century, it looked to the future not with confidence and serenity, but with anxiety and doubts. All that money had brought tensions, conflicts, and questions. It was changing the very nature and identity of the university. How could Harvard be so rich and still teach its students that the life of the mind mattered more than the never-ending quest for cash? When your endowment grew at an annual rate of about a billion dollars a year—and that was a conservative estimate—what differentiated you from the world of big business? And when a university had more money in the bank than any number of countries, did such wealth change the responsibilities of that institution? Its mission? How could a university be so rich without risking the corruption of its soul?

  All that money, swirling through the air like what you’d imagine after the crash of an armored car…

  Maybe that was why, during the 1990s, Harvard endured a growing number of problems with graft and corruption, a string of embarrassing incidents involving both students and faculty. The same kind of thing happened to the rest of America, true, but Harvard wasn’t supposed to be like the rest of America. What was it that its twenty-fourth president, Nathan Marsh Pusey, had said? Harvard “was in society but it was set apart and better than that society, and not a corrupt creature of it.” You wouldn’t know that from looking at Harvard in the 1990s. All that money. Nineteen billion dollars.

  And Harvard had another problem, one that money alone couldn’t fix: its undergraduate education was inconsistent, conceptually flawed, and sometimes just not very good. Harvard College had an aging curriculum that half of its students couldn’t explain and still fewer liked. It had professors who didn’t want to teach and, what’s more, who frequently weren’t required to teach, and so they spent their time consulting and lecturing and writing books, activities that garnered them more money and renown than the prosaic duties of instructing undergraduates. Harvard students were paying close to $40,000 a year for tuition, yet the bulk of their scholarly interaction was with teaching fellows—graduate students who, however well-meaning they may have been, weren’t what you thought you would be getting when you mailed in that Harvard application. Was that why students were getting such high grades? Something like 90 percent of the undergrads were graduating with honors. No wonder the whispering had become conventional wisdom: it was tough to get into Harvard—brutally tough—but once you were in…well, once you were in, you didn’t have to work very hard at all if you didn’t want to.

  And while Harvard was unquestionably on top of the aspirational heap in the public psyche, other schools were catching up. Yale was always a competitor; even people at Harvard were admitting that the undergrad education at Yale was better. Thank God the latter’s hometown of New Haven was saddled with a reputation as a depressed and depressing city. That scared people away.

  Beyond Yale, though, there was new blood that couldn’t be easily dismissed. Some claimed that Princeton had the country’s best undergraduate experience. Stanford and Berkeley and New York University were creating buzz. They didn’t have the reputation Harvard did—not yet—but they had energy and momentum; they had presidents with vision. And if Harvard was losing ground that it had always owned, what was all that money really accomplishing?

  That was why the Harvard Corporation had chosen Larry Summers: to take charge; to fix what was embarrassingly wrong and make sure that the gap between the public perception of the university and the reality of Harvard didn’t grow so broad that it became a chasm; to revive the image of the Harvard president as a national leader, a figure who spoke out not just to ask for money, nor even to voice his thoughts on higher education, but also to deliver his opinions on issues of import to the nation and the world generally. Not so many years before, Harvard presidents had done that as a matter of routine, but recently, this was less and less the case. For the members of Harvard’s governing body, this was unacceptable. If Harvard presidents weren’t national leaders, how could Harvard be? Conversely, how could America be great if Harvard was not?

  So perhaps it was understandable that Larry Summers looked a little nervous on the day of his installation, a little uncomfortable with all the trappings of history and ritual. Much was being asked of him. The expectations were high, the pressure immense. And Summers was instinctively more comfortable doing something than going through the motions of ritual.

  Then again, the new president wasn’t the only nervous one. Most Harvard professors and students knew very little about Larry Summers, only the bare bones of his biography, really. He hadn’t been around campus for a decade. He hadn’t even been in the world of academia. All they knew was what they had heard and read, and while some of that was encouraging, some of it was worrisome. Summers was famous not just for being brilliant, but also for being arrogant and hot-tempered. In the past, he’d led more by fiat than by suasion or example, while Harvard presidents traditionally had to rely on all their skills to head such a famously independent and self-assured community. How would Summers fit into a role where he couldn’t simply order people to do what he wanted?

  It was time for the new president to speak. Summers carefully rose from the ancient President’s Chair and strode to the podium. “I accept!” he said. The words sounded slightly forced, but the audience cheered heartily.

  Judging from the events of the months and years that were to follow, it is fair to say that neither Larry Summers nor Harvard had any idea what they were getting into.

  1

  The Remarkable, Controversial Career of Larry Summers

  From Love Story to Legally Blonde, Harvard abounds in American popular culture. Partly this is because the university produces many creative, ambitious, and occasionally dysfunctional graduates whose Cambridge experience provides a natural subject for their work. It’s also because the campus is so picturesque, so resplendent with timeless red brick, graceful bell towers, and sleek sculls gliding along a sparkling Charles River. This is cinematic stuff. Setting a story at Harvard conveys history, power, and tradition; Harvard raises the stakes. Little wonder that thriller writer Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, made his hero, symbologist Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor. The label gives Langdon instant credibility.

  Nevertheless, much of the literature and film featuring Harvard casts the university in a critical light. Consider perhaps the most famous Harvard drama. In Erich Segal’s 1970 novel Love Story (the film of which is screened for Harvard freshmen every fall), the university comes across as a cold and uncaring place, aesthetically impressive but officially hostile to the romance of Harvard man Oliver Barrett IV and Radcliffe student Jenny Cavilleri. They fall in love at Harvard, but certainly not because of it. Love distracts from work.

  In The Paper Chase, the 1973 film about a law student who falls in love with his august professor’s daughter, Harvard is a place where excellence takes root not because of its culture of competition, arrogance, and frosty interpersonal relations, but despite it. Then there’s 1997’s Good Will Hunting, the tale of a working-class math genius who falls for a Harvard undergrad. In that film, the typical Harvard student is presented as pompous, effete, and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Other, less good movies present Harvard still more cynically. In 1986’s Soul Man, the only way a young man can afford Harvard is to pretend that he’s black in order to win a scholarship. And in the 2002 comedy Stealing Harvard, a well-meaning uncle attempts to pilfer $30,000 so that his niece can pay Harvard’s costs.

  In the realm of nonfiction, there is a sizeable genre of “I spent a year at Harvard” books—memoirs of the law school, medical school, divinity school, and so on. In theme and structure, such chronicles—such as Scott Turow’s One L—constitute survival narratives. A year at the Harvard Law School is the academic equivalent of surviving a plane crash in the Peruvian Andes or being stranded on a deserted island with only a beach ball for company.
As in most Harvard-themed works of culture, individuality is in short supply, spontaneity prompts rebuke, and love is an endangered emotion.

  Harvard’s administration devotes enormous amounts of time, money, and energy to generating more positive media coverage. The university seems to have more press secretaries than Congress, and they spend as much time shooting stories down as helping them get written. Much of their job involves getting faculty members quoted in newspapers and magazines on issues related to their expertise, and at this they are remarkably successful—helped, no doubt, by the prevalence of Harvard grads in the press. Some years back, a writer working on a book about Harvard asked a group of researchers to count the number of instances in which the New York Times cited Harvard over a period of several months. They expected the number to be large, but even to their surprise, they found that the Times mentioned Harvard more than all other universities combined.

  Of course, Harvard doesn’t rely on outside press organizations to advertise itself. It publishes dozens of reports, bulletins, journals, and magazines lauding the accomplishments of members of the Harvard community. There’s nothing sinister about this—all universities do it—but Harvard does it bigger and better. Among numerous examples, the Harvard University Gazette, a weekly newspaper during the school year, profiles Harvard faculty and lists the remarkable number of lectures, exhibits, and performances happening on campus in any given week. Harvard Magazine is a slick, professional magazine sent to all Harvard alums six times yearly. The university web page, a more recent innovation, projects a harmonious image of Harvard across the world, twenty-four hours a day.