The Boys of Summers

The temperature outside was barely above freezing, but Lawrence H. Summers was walking eagerly, almost rhapsodically, into Loeb House just about an hour after sunrise on Jan. 10. He looked fresh, buoyant, assured. And he was early, a significant feat for the oft-tardy Harvard president.

Summers had good cause for his confident stride. The year just past had been, by all accounts, his most successful since taking office in 2001. The turbulence of his early tenure had subsided. His critics lay dormant. And as Summers prepared to meet with fellow members of the University’s top governing board, his bosses were pleased.

Inside Loeb House, the monthly gathering of the Harvard Corporation was unequivocally positive, according to two University officials who were later briefed on the meeting. The agenda sported the usual array of topics: the undergraduate curricular review, ongoing plans for expansion into Allston, and the University’s multi-billion-dollar capital campaign—key items that were sure to define the next decade or longer with Summers at the helm.

The Corporation had high expectations for their president, whom they had charged four years ago with a mandate to “shake things up,” as one former Corporation member said in an interview last week. And as they departed their January meeting, the University’s most powerful leaders were as optimistic as ever, the officials said. Harvard’s future lay ahead.

Just four days later, Summers would speak at a now-infamous conference at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He would attempt to explain the scarcity of women on elite science faculties. He would use the phrase “intrinsic aptitude.” And, suddenly, the future was on hold.

The phone was ringing constantly at the desk of James R. Houghton ’58, senior fellow of the Corporation, as news of Summers’ remarks first emerged, recalled an employee in Houghton’s office who refused to give his name. Harvard insiders were surely curious to gauge Houghton’s reaction to the faculty uproar, which was then only beginning to gain momentum. Would he lead the Corporation in defense of the besieged president?

From his offices in upstate New York, Houghton serves as chairman of two mighty corporations: Corning, Inc., the $23 billion technology firm, and Harvard University, the $27 billion institution of higher learning. (He’s also chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a director at MetLife and ExxonMobil, among other high-powered projects.)

Houghton, who earned $5.6 million last year at Corning, is paid nothing for his service to Harvard, but his influence over the world’s most prestigious university is boundless. Several individuals close to members of the Corporation, including their friends and former Harvard officials, say that as the board’s most senior member, Houghton effectively exercises veto or approval power over nearly every major decision at the University. His support would be essential if the president were to survive the growing drumbeat of criticism.

And as emboldened professors began raising the specter of Summers’ resignation, attention on campus turned increasingly to the seven-member Corporation, the only group with the power to unseat the president. It seemed an unlikely outcome, and yet as the situation continued to deteriorate, the board would have to respond.

Of his six colleagues on the Corporation, Summers could easily count on the backing of two whose reputations at Harvard are inextricably tied to his own: Robert E. Rubin ’60, Summers’ predecessor at the U.S. Treasury, and Hanna H. Gray, former president of the University of Chicago.

In early 2001, when members of the presidential search committee expressed concern over Summers’ “sometimes abrasive” demeanor, the outsider Rubin was enlisted to convince them otherwise, according to two former Harvard officials familiar with the search. Summers had long ago ditched his propensity to offend, Rubin told them.

And when a seat on the Corporation opened up in the first year of Summers’ presidency, Rubin was selected to fill it.

Gray, who will step down from the Corporation at the end of this month, was widely seen as Summers’ strongest supporter on the search committee. “Hanna, I think, saw some of herself in Larry,” said a former member of the Board of Overseers, the larger and less powerful of Harvard’s two governing boards.

Gray was said to have been nonplussed by the tenure of Neil L. Rudenstine, whose ten-year reign over Harvard she saw as overly passive and lacking in vision. Speaking at commencement ceremonies at MIT in 1995, Gray took what some saw as a veiled swipe at Rudenstine, arguing in lofty rhetoric for more dynamic leadership in higher education: “It is instructive to see how much of the rhetoric having to do with the decline of higher education derives from the language of a larger nostalgia and from romantic visions of a golden age that never quite existed, instructive to see how much has to do with a resistance to major changes that cannot be argued away.”

Summers, Gray seemed to believe, was the antidote to Rudenstine’s inertia. And “no doubt she sees the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as a foil to Larry’s bold leadership,” the former overseer said.

But if Gray harbors any resentment towards the Faculty, if she has any opinion at all about the recent fracas, she isn’t saying. Neither, for that matter, are her colleagues on the board. Corporation members, notoriously secretive but not clinically mute, ignored repeated e-mails and calls and to their offices, homes, and cell phones over the past three weeks. And a protracted effort to coordinate an interview with Houghton through the Harvard News Office ultimately proved fruitless.

The firm support of Rubin and Gray may have been enough to protect Summers’ job, but with his leadership challenged, the president maintains another key advantage: in a period of extraordinarily rapid turnover, Summers had overseen the appointment of half the Corporation in just four years, molding a body more amenable to his leadership than even the group that picked him. When Nannerl O. Keohane, the former president of Wellesley College and Duke University, takes over for Gray on July 1, just two fellows from the era before Summers will remain on the Corporation.

Following his selection of Rubin, now a director at Citigroup, Summers again turned to an old colleague from his time in Washington: Robert D. Reischauer ’63, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and president of the Urban Institute, a non-profit think tank in the nation’s capital. Reischauer speaks Summers’ figures-based language, and his appointment in 2002—as a replacement for the short-lived Enron director Herbert S. “Pug” Winokur ’64-’65—made him the third economist to join the board in less than two years.

Back in 1994, when Houghton replaced Charles P. Slichter ’45, a beloved physicist and chemist at the University of Illinois, the swap of a businessman for an academic seemed to augur a marked corporatization of the Corporation. But Summers was taking the board in a slightly more specific direction. His appointees were pure economists by training, men most likely to concur with his empirical approach to university governance. And perhaps more importantly, the three economists—Summers, Rubin, and Reischauer, stewards of the golden era of the Clinton economy—were all pals. It would be far more difficult for the president to lose a confidence vote of his friends.

Summers broke from the D.C. mold to find his new treasurer last year, drawing James F. Rothenberg ’68, president and director of Capital Research and Management, the investment advising firm for the country’s most successful hedge funds. Although he concentrated in English as an undergraduate, Rothenberg was yet another Corporation member in finance or economics, the fourth on a board of seven. Summers had shaped the Corporation in his own image.

But there is one dissenter.

Conrad K. Harper, a 1965 graduate of the Law School and a partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in New York, has long harbored serious qualms about Summers, according to several current and former Harvard officials familiar with the Corporation. Harper has been particularly critical of Summers’ abrasive management style and made those objections clear during the presidential search, say the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Indeed, every person who agreed to be interviewed for this story insisted their name not be used. They said they did not wish to compromise their relationship with the University and members of the Corporation, who cherish their sense of secrecy

Summers and Harper crossed paths once before Harvard, when they both held major posts in the Clinton administration. From 1993 to 1996, Harper was the top legal adviser to the State Department, which maintained a notorious rivalry with the Treasury over control of Clinton’s foreign policy. If Harper followed the party line at the time, his distaste for Summers may have begun in Washington.

But Harper’s objections now are an open-secret among observers of the Corporation, and many have speculated that when the board moved to issue its first public statement supporting Summers in February, Harper refused to put his name on it.

Ultimately, the Corporation’s statement, offered at the same time Summers released a transcript of his remarks on women in science, bore only the name of Jamie Houghton, who employed the royal we.

“We are confident of his ability to work constructively with the faculty and others to advance the goal that all of us share—ensuring that Harvard’s academic programs are as good as they can be, and that our community of faculty, students, and staff is as strong as it can be, now and in the future,” Houghton wrote. “We fully support him in that effort, and we know how devoted he is to its success.”

Two months and one more statement of support later, Houghton sent himself and Hanna Gray to a meeting in Loeb House requested by members of the Faculty Council. Two professors who attended the April 25 meeting said they came away with a sense the Corporation would slow the pace of its major initiatives—the capital campaign, curricular review, and Allston expansion. Both Houghton and Gray said the University needed to undergo a period of “convalescence,” according to the professors who attended the meeting.

Four years after instructing Summers to “shake things up,” the Corporation was calling for healing.

—Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu.