Minute by Minute
Roger B. Porter is the IBM Professor of Business and Government at the Kennedy School. He’s worked in the White House for more than 10 years under a host of presidents, directing the White House Office of Policy Development under Reagan and serving as the executive secretary of the Economic Policy Board under Ford. This former Rhodes Scholar has been telling our Presidents what to do for a long time. Aside from the top-level positions in Washington he’s held, you probably know him here at Harvard as the co-master of Dunster House, or because he teaches the immensely popular class Government 1540: “The American Presidency.” Unsurprisingly, some of the things Roger Porter does on the average day are out of the ordinary. However, as it turns out, this giant of political science here at Harvard is also a pretty regular guy.
4:45 a.m. – Early. Very early. Is the sun even up at 4:45? Porter could tell you because he wakes up this early every morning. “I rarely if ever use an alarm clock. I rely on my body to let me know how much sleep it needs.”
5:00 a.m. – “I took the hour from 5:00 a.m. to just before 6:00 a.m. to read and to think. I try to spend an hour a day just reading and thinking when it’s quiet.”
6:00 a.m. – Porter arrives in his office at the Kennedy School. “I find that when I’m not interrupted I can get an enormous amount done. I did a lot of correspondence, writing letters, responding to e-mail. I usually get several score of e-mail messages a day.”
8:15 a.m. – Porter returns to Dunster House for a quick breakfast. “It consisted of cereal and juice.” Do does he have a favorite cereal? “Warm hot oatmeal. The oatmeal in Dunster House is actually quite good.”
8:30 AM – Meeting with the staff in Dunster House, including Porter’s wife. “We did some planning and made some decisions with respect to events in December, and had a discussion about the process for selecting tutors that occurs in February. In any meeting I like to devote some attention to dealing with the current situation and another portion of it focusing on the longer term.”
9:30 a.m. – Porter prepares for his killer lecture at 11:30 a.m. in “The American Presidency.”
10:15 a.m. – “I convened a meeting with the teaching fellows for the course I teach, ‘The American Presidency.’ We spent that meeting reviewing the written assignment, and then I had prepared a two-page memorandum regarding sections this week and what I wanted them to cover.” So does Porter like having sections in his classes? “I am very impressed with the quality of students at Harvard, and I am also struck by how much they pay for the privilege of studying here, they or their parents. Therefore my interest is to help them get the best education they can, and therefore I have sought not to limit the size of classes that I teach. If I were a student, I wouldn’t want to be told ‘I’m sorry, you can’t take this class.’ I make an effort to spend time with them in sections; I usually get around every year to each section. Finding good TFs takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. I’ve been very impressed with the quality of the TFs that I’ve known.”
11:15 a.m. – Porter goes to class. “I wanted to arrive a little early in order to write some things on the board and save the time during the lecture. I also wanted to see when people arrived and where they sat. I wanted to see [if] people like to sit down in the back, in the front, in the middle.”
11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. “The big challenge in the lecture method is getting all you want to say about a particular subject into an hour and 20 minutes. For me that’s always a greater challenge than finding an hour and 20 minutes of things to say.”
1:30 p.m. – Lunch at the Kennedy school with Tom Healy, who according to Porter is “a very bright man.” He used to be a senior official at the Treasury Department but now teaches in business and government. “We had a really fun and stimulating discussion, talking both about some current issues and education. We also talked about what we think is happening in the economy, both what was happening before Sept. 11 and how we think the events of Sept. 11 have changed it.” So Porter, what’s going on with the economy? Should we buy or sell? “I would say we’re both cautiously optimistic. I never give anyone investment advice other than invest for the long term. Don’t be driven by timing, because if you’re trying to guess you’re playing a very high risk game.”
2:15 p.m. – Porter does some more class preparation and teaches “The Business Government Relationship in the United States” at the Kennedy School. “The students in the Kennedy school, law school, graduate school, are very bright, in the same way that Harvard undergraduate students are bright. Analytically they are sharp, they are prepared to work hard and do a lot of reading and thinking, but what these graduate students have is a larger set of experiences on which they can draw. In teaching them I try to draw from their experiences.”
4:00 p.m. – It’s back to the office with a course assistant for a discussion about how the class at the Kennedy school went. “I find that the best way to evaluate one’s performance in a class is immediately after when it’s fresh in your mind. I always try to do a debrief.”
5:00 p.m. – Porter does more correspondence, phone calls, e-mails, etc. Unfortunately, today was not that special: “Days when I teach are really frenetic days, so most of the calls that I will make to people in Washington will be on Mondays and Wednesdays.”
6:00 p.m. – “I left to pick up my wife and we went to the Kennedy Library. We went to a reception sponsored by Time Magazine for the Jacqueline Kennedy exhibit, which is just a fabulous exhibit. The reason that I went, aside from to see if it was a good exhibit, was to meet with Hugh Sidey, who was White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for Time Magazine for many years. He’s one of the most respected journalists in Washington. We are both members—well, he’s the chairman and I’m a member—of the White House Historical Association. I also spent some time with Nancy Bush Ellis, who is an old friend and is the sister of President Bush senior and the aunt of the current President Bush.”
8:30 p.m. – Porter returns home. “It’s a little later than I normally like to come home, because I like to spend time with each of my children. I worked with my 11-year-old daughter on some of her homework, on science, we were working on some measurements. It is great fun for me to think about how people learn and how you can help people develop the skill to learn things. One of the funnest things in life is learning new things. I also spent some time talking with our 17-year-old son about his college application process.” So where’s it going to be? “I think the best thing to say is that he’s thinking about lots of great schools.”
10:45 p.m. – Sleepy time for Porter. “I like to start the day early so you need to end the day a little earlier.” So is it tough for Roger Porter to fall asleep? “All I seem to need to do is get horizontal. It takes me moments to fall asleep.” Well, that’s understandable; it’s been quite a day.