Reeling Them In With Cards and Flowers

While Harvard lures the world’s brightest high school seniors this pre-frosh weekend with concerts, ice cream socials, and an ’80s dance, departments wooing the world’s top scholars have their own special tactics—flower bouquets, dinner invitations, and even the occasional valentine.

The most coveted scholars, like many Harvard pre-frosh, can have their pick of universities. And recruiting them can be a challenge, says History Department Chair Andrew D. Gordon ’74. Star scholars usually teach at prestigious schools already, and they already enjoy plenty of perks, he says.

Celebrity academics like Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker, Tisch Professor of History Niall Ferguson, and Cogan University Professor of the Humanities Stephen J. Greenblatt say that Harvard’s vibrant intellectual atmosphere drew them here.

But, the professors add, the elaborate courtship certainly helped. Harvard enlisted its biggest names in its campaign to bring Pinker, Ferguson, and Greenblatt to campus.



BE MY VALENTINE?

A huge picture window in Pinker’s office offers him a panoramic view of Harvard’s spires and cupolas. At MIT, where Pinker taught for 21 years, he says he spent most of the time in an office that had only a narrow slit for a window.

Pinker, who was included in Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people and Foreign Policy magazine’s rankings of the top 100 public intellectuals, came to Harvard from MIT in 2003. He says he moved here primarily in order to get a broader intellectual perspective, though his office’s spectacular view doesn’t hurt.

One key player in the campaign to bring Pinker to Harvard was Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., the chair of the African and African American Studies Department.

“Recruiting is an art and a science,” says Gates. “Anyone can match a salary and give [candidates] financial inducements...It’s one thing to win a job candidates’s head. Its another thing to win her heart.”

It took a Valentine’s Day card to woo Greenblatt to the Department of English and American Literature and Language, Gates says.

The department had offered Greenblatt a job, but “it seemed clear that he was going to stay in Berkeley,” Gates says.

So, Gates says, he convinced the entire department to sign a “wish you were here” card to send to Greenblatt.

That was an “incredibly sweet” gesture, Greenblatt says, and he ultimately chose to join the department.

He’s not the only one to experience Gates’ charm. Gates—who has built the Af-Am Department into a powerhouse over his decade-and-a-half at its helm—says he has sent flowers to every single scholar he has tried to recruit.

He says successful recruiting is “a complex mix of reassurance, flattery, seduction and general friendship.”

“We send them e-mails, we call them a lot on the phone, so that they know that they’re joining a community,” Gates says.

CHATTING WITH THE CHIEF

It doesn’t hurt when the leader of the community takes the time to sell Harvard to recruited professors.

University President Lawrence H. Summers’ influence was instrumental in reeling in both Pinker and Ferguson, the professors say.

“He did a very good job of persuading me that I should move to Harvard,” says Ferguson, another one of Foreign Policy’s top 100 public intellectuals, who joined Harvard’s faculty two years ago.

One key selling point for Ferguson, an economic historian, was that—even though he would be at the Business School and on the history faculty—he would be close to an economics department that he says is the world’s best.

A conversation with Summers in November 2002 also induced Pinker to come to Harvard, he says.

During the recruitment process, Pinker says, Summers invited him to a dinner at his house with a number of Harvard professors from different departments who shared Pinker’s interest in human evolution, including Glimp Professor of Economics Edward L. Glaeser and Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology Richard W. Wrangham.

“The fact that [Summers] was interested in so many areas, and had a great enthusiasm for cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology and interdisciplinary work and biological sciences in general made me think that it would be a tremendously exciting atmosphere,” Pinker says.

But it was a 2001 meal with Gates and Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value Elaine Scarry that first whetted Pinker’s appetite for a position at Harvard.

Scarry says the dinner was planned with the approval of the English Department, which initially hoped to recruit Pinker for itself.

The three professors met at the Green Street Grill, which is symbolically situated halfway between Harvard and MIT, Gates says.

Their conversation reflected a hybrid of their intellectual interests, the professors say. The fact that two Harvard scholars from a field so different from his own would take an interest in recruiting him “made me think Harvard must be a very stimulating and interactive place,” Pinker says.

Pinker says he and Scarry discussed the use of imagery in fiction and the way the mind processes imagery. And Gates, Pinker says, was enthusiastic about Pinker’s then-forthcoming book, “The Blank Slate,” which emphasizes the role of genetics in human behavior.

“I think his words were ‘you’re gonna get fried,’ but he thought that was great,” Pinker says.

“That’s precisely the kind of colleague we want at Harvard,” Gates says he remembers telling Pinker.

By the end of the dinner, “they planted the idea [of coming to Harvard] in my mind,” Pinker says. But he says he thought the Psychology Department, not the English faculty, would be a more appropriate place for him.

He had originally turned down an offer of tenure from Harvard in 1988. Since that time, however, Harvard’s Psychology Department had improved markedly, Pinker says, and he approached the department to express his interest.

IS IT WORTH IT?

Though Pinker says he finds Harvard’s intellectual atmosphere stimulating, his move here required some sacrifices. He is required to teach one more class here each semester, for instance, than he taught at MIT.

“That was something that made me nervous,” he says, “because I appreciate time to write and do research.”

Just as Harvard dishes out millions in financial aid to convince admitted students to enroll, it also offers its full professors the second highest average salary in the nation, $163,200, behind only Rockefeller University, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education survey.

But according to Greenblatt, who was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2004 for his Shakespeare biography, “Will in the World,” it wasn’t Harvard’s largess that brought him here.

“You get people because you create a sense that something is happening intellectually that is exciting, that this is a place you can do important work,” Greenblatt says.

Greenblatt says he jumped at the chance to work with Scarry and Reid Professor of English and American Literature Philip J. Fisher.

“It’s not about taking out the institutional checkbook and writing a big check,” Greenblatt says.

In fact, he says, when he moved from Berkeley to Harvard, not only did he accept a heavier class load, but he also took a slight cut in pay.

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.