Alums Want Summers To Stay

An upstart magazine for Harvard graduates launched its preview issue this week with a poll showing that alums want—by a three-to-one margin—Lawrence H. Summers to keep his post as University president.

The magazine, 02138, reports that only 19 percent of alums believe Summers should resign, while 63 percent of Harvard graduates want the president to remain on the job.

Those results show a clear gap between Harvard’s alumni and the members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who voted 218-to-185 for a resolution expressing a “lack of confidence” in Summers’ leadership in March.

“Alumni want Summers to stay,” said Bom S. Kim ’00, publisher of the bi-monthly 02138. “But there’s a gender gap in the results.”

According to the poll, 65 percent of male alums—but only 25 percent of female graduates—said they “have a favorable impression of Summers.”

The telephone survey of 402 Harvard alumni was conducted in late April by the professional polling agency Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.9 percent.

Summers’ spokesman, John Longbrake, declined to comment on the results.

CURRENT EVENTS

The poll, released online at 02138mag.com and featured in a glossy four-page edition that is being distributed at Commencement Week events, comes more than two months before the magazine’s first full-length issue is slated to go to press.

Harvard’s 300,000-plus alums constitute a highly-coveted demographic among advertisers. According to the magazine’s promotional material, more than half of the University’s graduates are millionaires.

But the alumni community is already served by another publication­—the bimonthly Harvard Magazine.

That publication’s editor, John S. Rosenberg, said that he is not concerned about the possibility that 02138 will pose a threat to his 108-year-old periodical.

“I can say in all honesty that I haven’t paid any attention to it,” Rosenberg said.

02138 won’t be the first periodical launched by Kim and acting editor Daniel M. Loss ’00. As undergrads, the duo co-founded Current, now the nation’s largest student-run newsmagazine. Kim and Loss expanded the start-up to 18 campuses and reached a print circulation of 100,000.

The masthead of 02138 also includes editorial director Benjamin B. Taylor ’69, the former publisher of the Boston Globe.

Kim said that 02138 will be a “luxury magazine for Harvard alumni” akin to Vanity Fair. But he pledged that it would also include “the hard-hitting investigative stories of ‘60 Minutes.’”

“It has attitude. It has wit. It’s sophisticated. It’s a guilty pleasure,” he said.

The magazine currently has fewer than 10 staffers working out of a suite on Winter Street in downtown Boston.

But it boasts several prominent names on its 11-member advisory board—including James M. Fallows ’70, a former Crimson president who also served as a speech writer to Jimmy Carter, and Steven Brill, a media critic and founder of The American Lawyer.

Kim said that 02138 would charge $36 a year to subscribers—unlike Harvard Magazine, which is free for alums.

Harvard Magazine is published by a nonprofit group that “is under its bylaws editorially independent” from the University, although it receives some financial support from Summers’ office, according to Rosenberg.

Meanwhile, Kim said that 02138 has no official affiliation with Harvard.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.