‘An Intriguing Opportunity’

When Nannerl O. Keohane joined the Harvard Corporation in 2005, one of the first things she did was ask for some reading material to help her understand her job. In typical Harvard fashion, the document she was given dated from the 17th century.

Keohane, the past president of Duke University and Wellesley College, says that as a political scientist, she was thrilled to connect with more than 300 years of institutional leadership, but said that the incident spoke volumes about Harvard governance.

“Harvard is quite specifically Harvard,” she says. “The Corporation and the [Board of] Overseers is not quite the structure I was used to.”

Two years into her tenure, Keohane has not stopped trying to pin down the details of her job description. She has used her outsider’s perspective—she is the only Corporation member without a Harvard degree—and the tumultuous events of her tenure as an opportunity to parse Harvard’s system of governance—to learn its ins and outs, and how to best navigate it. In the process, say friends and colleagues, she has become a quiet leader of Harvard’s most powerful governing body.

DUKE’S DUCHESS

Born in Blytheville, Ark., Nannerl Overholser Keohane received her bachelor’s degree from Wellesley in 1961. She studied at Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship and earned a doctorate in political science from Yale University in 1967.

Keohane taught at Swarthmore College, Stanford University, and the University of Pennsylvania before serving as president of Wellesley for twelve years. In 1993 she moved on to Duke, where she served as the university’s first female president and presided over one of the largest capital campaigns in the history of higher education.

When she stepped down from Duke in 2004, capping 24 years of leadership in higher education, Keohane resigned from her posts on several boards and joined her husband Robert as a visiting professor at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She says she had planned to devote herself entirely to her research and teaching as a political scientist. A phone call from then-University President Lawrence H. Summers made her reconsider.

“She was really agonizing over it,” says Keohane’s sister, Geneva Overholser, a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and a former fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. “She didn’t want to continue to run a university, but here she was with these talents and this experience to put to work.”

“I gained some skills during those 24 years which might be useful, and I don’t want those muscles to atrophy,” Keohane says. “When Larry called, it was an intriguing opportunity. Larry is a very persuasive person.”

‘AN ALL-STAR SWITCH HITTER’

Keohane joined the Corporation in July 2005, filling not only former University of Chicago president Hanna H. Gray’s seat on the seven-person governing body but also Gray’s intellectual niche, according to Interim President Derek C. Bok.

“You wouldn’t want to have the Corporation dominated by former college presidents,” Bok says, “but to have one person who has been there and kind of understands the problems that universities go through, and the academic issues, is a big help.”

Friends and colleagues say her background allows her to be concerned with a broad range of University issues.

“She’s an all-star switch hitter,” says Robert D. Putnam, the Malkin professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government. Putnam has known Keohane for more than 40 years and managed the 1972 Palo Alto Little League champions with her husband.

Even though she has never graduated from a Harvard school or held a University teaching post, Keohane says she has drawn on a wealth of “informal connections” to Harvard in order to navigate her role. When Keohane was president of Wellesley, her husband chaired Harvard’s government department. Keohane served on the visiting committee for the Kennedy School of Government under three different deans, including two years when she was the committee’s chair, and even worked for the University as an office assistant over one summer.

“I’ve always felt very close to the place,” Keohane says.

“It was really kind of a plucky appointment on our part, reaching out to someone like that,” Bok says of Keohane. “We should count ourselves very lucky that she was willing to serve.”

TRIAL BY FIRE

Less than a month after Keohane was announced as the newest Corporation fellow, Summers delivered his infamous remarks on women in science at the National Bureau of Economic Research. The crisis in Mass. Hall only worsened in the months before Keohane took office. When she officially joined the Corporation that June, Summers had already lost a Faculty of Arts and Sciences no-confidence vote. And just four weeks after she took office, lawyer Conrad K. Harper abruptly resigned his seat on the Corporation, saying he could “no longer support President Summers.”

“She came in and was new at such a lively time,” Overholser recalls. “It wasn’t what she expected.”

Keohane played a central role in bringing about the end of the Summers presidency, discussing the possibility of asking him to resign three months before he was forced to do so, as The Crimson reported last year. Both Keohane’s supporters and critics say that her influence on the Corporation rose in that period.

During his final days in office, Summers was said to place much of the blame for his ouster on Keohane. Some supporters of Summers on the Harvard faculty have criticized Keohane for her role in the former president’s ouster, saying that she is intolerant of dissent and overly focussed on political correctness.

“She is a woman who cannot stand controversy or dispute,” Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz told The Crimson a few days before Summers’ resignation in February 2006. “I can’t imagine a worse person making this kind of a judgment call.”

But friends and colleagues say Keohane didn’t come to the Corporation with an agenda.

“Anyone who has been a president has sympathy for a president,” Putnam says, adding that for Keohane, spending her first year dealing with a leadership crisis was “the last thing she wanted to do.”

However, her background gave her the ability to serve as a communicator between displeased professors and the Corporation, Putnam says.

“One thing Nan did have...was a good feeling for what it’s like to live in a university and manage university life,” Putnam says. “So the reason that she came to play such an important role in that period is that she was the one person in the Corporation who was able to translate what was actually happening on campus to the Corporation.”

Following Summers’ resignation, Keohane was briefly considered for the interim presidency, but she took herself out of the running. Instead, she and the Corporation’s senior fellow, James R. Houghton, travelled in person to Sarasota, Fla. to convince Bok to come out of retirement. Still, just days after Summers’ resignation, Keohane’s name was being added to lists of possible permanent presidents.

Joseph S. Nye Jr., the former dean of the Kennedy School, says that Keohane played a significant role in the search, and her support was a major factor in President-elect Drew G. Faust’s selection.

“She helped to be an important point of liaison to the faculty,” Nye says. And “she played an important role in overcoming the problems of the past few years.”

Eric N. Jacobsen, the Emery professor of chemistry and member of the faculty committee that advised the presidential search, says that Keohane “stood out” during her frequent sessions with the committee.

“She was a real presence at the meetings,” Jacobsen says. “She gave us all sorts of help and guidance. For somebody that accomplished, I was really struck by how personable and down-to-earth she was.”

Keohane is currently working on a book on leadership, and she says that while she was framing a section on judgment recently, Faust came to mind.

“You can see the way her mind works when you’re around a table,” Keohane says of Faust. “She ponders [an issue], and then comes out with a very thoughtful observation.”

Keohane describes Faust as thoughtful and judicious in almost the exact language that Bok and Overholser use to describe Keohane, and her words suggest that perhaps Keohane sees a little bit of herself in Harvard’s next leader.

AN EXAMINED CAREER

As Keohane enters her third year on the Corporation, she will have served alongside a different president each year. Keohane’s willingness to examine her own role in leading Harvard as a member of the Corporation has been a constant during the shifts in leadership that have marked her tenure.

“As a political scientist, I’m still trying to figure out what exactly our responsibilities are,” Keohane says. “Are we to be a sounding board for the president? I would think we have at least the responsibilities of a normal board of trustees.”

Keohane has considered using more traditional boards as guides for the Corporation. She says she has also been thinking about ways to involve students and professors in the business of the Corporation, using her experience at Duke, where faculty members and students sat on board committees, as an inspiration.

Bok says that Keohane “asks a lot of questions,” and that she seems ever-willing to learn on the job, even asking undergraduate reporters whether she can best reach out to students by eating in dining halls and going to campus events or by setting up more formal points of contact.

Keohane says she hopes that with the search concluded, the Corporation—a “mysterious group of people” by Keohane’s own admission—will be able to increase its campus presence and interact more with students and faculty.

“The first year, I had started meeting regularly with faculty members, and had met with some students, and that was put on hold,” Keohane says. “During the search, I met with quite a few faculty members, but that was in a different way. That wasn’t just getting to know someone.”

Keohane says she hopes to spend several days at a time in Cambridge when she comes for Corporation meetings next year, and wants to make time to get to a sporting event—something she says she misses since leaving Duke, where she presided over one of the most prestigious athletic programs in the country.

Mostly, though, after a tumultuous first two years as a fellow, Keohane hopes that next year will be marked by relative peace and quiet.

“Thank God we don’t have to be searching for a new president,” she says. “Yes, I think it will be a year where I’ll have a little more time to write my book.”

—Staff writer Laurence H. M. Holland can be reached at lholland@fas.harvard.edu.