‘Down From the Big Hill’

Two months after University President Lawrence S. Bacow took office, he traveled to his home state of Michigan to convince its residents that Harvard and its scholarly work matter to people outside Cambridge.

The trip came days after the University announced two major partnerships with the University of Michigan — one focused on combating the opioid epidemic and another centered on encouraging economic development Detroit.

“What I’ve tried to do on this trip is to connect with people in Detroit and Pontiac...and to help identify ways in which not just Harvard but universities around the country can work to try and address issues of income inequality, social mobility, opioid addiction, and other major issues which exist throughout the country,” Bacow said in an interview at the time.

Throughout his first year in office, Bacow has traveled across the world meeting with alumni, donors, and prominent leaders. Though his visits are not uncommon for a newly minted Harvard president, the places he has traveled offer insight into Bacow’s vision of cementing national relevance for a university that has long been viewed as catering primarily to America’s elite.

While Harvard has historically engaged in partnerships with myriad other universities, cities, and nonprofits, Bacow’s efforts to highlight these initiatives come amid a challenging political climate for higher education institutions. With an impending tax on some large university endowments — including Harvard’s — and general criticisms that elite higher education institutions are out of touch with everyday people in the United States, publicizing these partnerships offers Harvard a mechanism for shifting that narrative.

‘Institutional Humility’

As Bacow settled into office, he made it a top priority to place Harvard’s partnerships across the country at the fore.

“I think what we're looking to do is to enhance our capacity to make a difference in the world more broadly,” Bacow said in an interview. “And in many cases, that's best done in collaboration with other institutions.”

Those involved in these various initiatives say Bacow is pushing to broaden not only the locations where Harvard establishes partnerships, but also the scope of topics on which they focus.

Harvard’s two new partnerships with Michigan are cornerstones in this effort.

The two collaborations arose from conversations between the universities’ leaders following Bacow’s transition into office. The partnerships have since become a highly publicized attempt for the University to apply its economists’, scientists’, and researchers’ work to issues including the opioid epidemic and economic inequality.

Harvard School of Public Health Professor Mary T. Bassett ’74, who leads the partnership tackling opioid overdoses, said the impetus for the project was Massachusetts and Michigan’s “shared” challenges with opioid addiction and what she called Bacow’s desire to work on “something of public importance.”

The National Institute on Drug Abuse calls increasing misuse and addiction to opioids a “serious national crisis” with more than 130 people dying from overdoses each day in the United States. The epidemic has hit Michigan and Massachusetts especially hard in recent years, with both states seeing some of the highest rates of overdose deaths in the country.

Bassett said the partnership — which has already resulted in a conference in Ypsilanti, Mich. and will host another on Harvard’s Longwood campus in the fall — indicates Bacow’s inclination to engage with universities and issues beyond the scope of what may be typical for an elite institution like Harvard.

“I think it’s part of President Bacow’s interest in Harvard sort of coming off down from the big hill and working more collaboratively with others and his idea of institutional humility,” Bassett said.

University of Michigan President Mark S. Schlissel wrote in an emailed statement that the partnership represents Harvard centering its attention on issues with national importance.

“President Bacow expressed a willingness for Harvard to focus more outwardly and collaborate to address big national issues,” Schlissel wrote. “He’s also a native of Pontiac, Michigan. I’ve known him for a while and was eager to reach out to discuss ideas for our faculty to partner and leverage one another’s strengths.”

Harvard has also turned its sights toward elementary education in recent months. In February, the Harvard-based National Center for Rural Education Research Networks received a $10 million grant to address issues such as college enrollment and student absences in rural school districts. The project — led by two Harvard professors and one at Dartmouth — plans to recruit a network of schools in New York and Ohio in which to implement experimental strategies.

Graduate School of Education professor Thomas J. Kane, a leader of the initiative, said the partnership exemplifies Bacow’s efforts to refocus research away from elite centers.

“What we're doing in the rural schools is consistent with his vision for the University to play more of a role around the country — helping solve problems, solving challenging problems,” Kane said. “We see ourselves as not solving challenging problems, but helping these districts solve their own challenging issues.”

Bacow has said that the majority of the University’s partnerships stem from faculty interests and that he focuses on facilitating those collaborations.

“As I like to say, my strategy is always to identify where faculty have trampled down the grass between Harvard and another institution. . .to see how we might, in some cases, sort of pave that pathway, maybe build rapid transit to run on it,” he said. “It's much more effective than just trying to dictate from the top down, you know, me metaphorically going out with a machete in hand trying to bushwhack my way through the fields. That doesn't work.”

“Our job is to help and empower the faculty,” Bacow added. “We're trying to work with others.”

In an attempt to appeal to non-coastal areas of the United State, University President Lawrence S. Bacow has promoted partnerships with universities across the country in places like Michigan and Texas. By Kai R. McNamee

The Harvard Impact

In many cases, researchers involved in Harvard collaborations say the University’s campaign to build its partnerships brings valuable scholarship and resources to the initiatives.

Linda Davis, the Executive Director of Families Against Narcotics — a Michigan organization that aims to address stigmas associated with addiction — said that the Harvard-University of Michigan partnership increases awareness for their goal of educating people about addiction.

“I just think then, when you say, University of Michigan, in Michigan, and then you add the Harvard connection to it, that these two universities are working together on this, it adds credibility to everything that we're doing,” Davis said. “Across the board, it's getting attention.”

“You know, it was probably the most talked about summit that I’ve heard of in Michigan, the one that [Harvard] just recently did,” Davis added.

Michael Fuller, the director of the innovation and data services center at the Muskingum Valley Educational Service Center in Ohio, said he welcomes Harvard’s partnership with rural schools in Ohio and New York.

“Harvard brings a lot of resources in terms of technical know how,” Fuller said. “I think Harvard can take advantage of what we already have infrastructure-wise in place in terms of some of our knowledge about the data infrastructures in Ohio, about the culture of the school, about just educational programming in general.”

Experts also say that Harvard can, and should, bring its intellectual and financial resources to parts of the country that don’t typically receive such support.

Neal McCluskey, director of the center for educational freedom at the Cato Institute, said Harvard should engage in this kind of work and bring students from underrepresented places to Cambridge itself.

“There is no reason that the expertise that's housed at a place like Harvard or elsewhere couldn't do some good in all sorts of places around the country and around the world,” McCluskey said. “And I don't see any reason that you couldn't get some more students — maybe by working harder to make Harvard known to people who are outside the usual recruiting grounds — and to help students who may be qualified to go to Harvard, but don't come from backgrounds or don't have social networks where they know how to navigate the college application process, get the word to them.”

David A. Bergeron, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said it’s important for Harvard and its peer institutions to “step up” and ensure that students across the entire country have access to higher education.

“For Harvard, to go into those communities makes a strong statement about the kinds of things that those communities should be working to being able to offer to their students so that they're able to access higher education institutions, on par with suburban and urban students,” Bergeron said.

“And so, for me, that's the one area where it's really important that institutions of higher education step up because otherwise we're going to leave broad swathes of the country behind in terms of access to higher education,” he added.

‘Reaching Beyond Privilege’

While many believe Harvard’s partnerships yield benefits for their collaborators and the causes they study, some say the University’s participation is not always critical, and others say its outreach might be better directed to other issues.

One “major collaboration” Bacow has highlighted exists between Harvard, Texas A&M, and a number of other universities that jointly collect atmospheric data from convective storms and analyze their impact on the stratosphere. The $30 million partnership is funded as part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Earth Venture program.

Kenneth Bowman, a geosciences professor at Texas A&M who heads the project, said multi-university collaboration is “absolutely essential” to collecting relevant data.

“On projects like this, there's no way that a single institution can do this,” Bowman said. “It's not really a question of doing this for altruistic reasons or something like that, it's really the only way that you can put together the team that you need in order to be successful in a project like this.”

NASA scientist Kenneth W. Jucks, however, said that Harvard’s reputation is “just as credible” as any other institution conducting earth science research and the decision to partner with the school on this project was a matter of convenience based on current research.

“There's nothing in particular, that special about Harvard, other than a number of the observations that are being made to this are at Harvard, and they were deemed as quite applicable to it,” Jucks said.

Experts noted that university partnerships that do not succeed can spell danger for schools’ reputations.

Richard R. Rush, the chair of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities Task Force on University Partnerships, said that the “optics” of collaborative projects can hang in the balance for their duration.

“If a partnership should fail, the community's perception of the university or universities or the partners, including from the private sector, broadly defined, could be diminished,” Rush said.

Dartmouth professor Douglas O. Staiger — a leader in the rural schools initiative — said he is “optimistic” about the center’s prospects, but that tackling issues in rural districts might be challenging for many involved who currently only have experience in urban and suburban school districts.

“I think there's there's a perception issue, but there's also a reality issue, which is that we have primarily worked in urban districts,” Staiger said. “There will be some of these issues, these Ivy League folks coming in, and so. . .I think our hope is that we have a lot of things in place to help manage that issue.”

Higher education experts also say that Harvard can do more to partner with a wider variety of universities and more directly engage with their students.

Bergeron said that Bacow and Harvard should work to partner with and promote work at institutions beyond wealthy, elite public universities like the University of Michigan and Texas A&M.

“If what he’s trying to get across is that he’s reaching beyond privilege, then he’s got to go a little bit further than just public flagships,” Bergeron said.

“Historically, getting faculty from a historically black colleges like Xavier University in New Orleans, to come and teach at Harvard, and have Harvard faculty spend a semester teaching at Xavier — those are the kinds of things that go beyond just staying at a privileged tier,” he added.

Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute Frederick M. Hess said Harvard should be cognizant of how it interacts with those who may take issue with its affiliates and researchers advising them on local issues.

“One of the big issues for many people in Middle America and red states’ rural communities is they feel like people who don't live in their communities who have different views and values frequently come in and tell them what they're supposed to think what they need to do,” Hess said.

“Part of the challenge that is how does Harvard partner with people and organizations in a way in which it is actually partnering to help solve problems, rather than showing up with folks saying, ‘hey, we're from Harvard University, we're here to help,’” he added.

University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain wrote in an emailed statement that Bacow has promoted a “wide range” of partnerships with the aim of making a “positive difference.”

“President Bacow has put an emphasis on the importance of Harvard engaging with a wide range of organizations and institutions to make a positive impact in communities locally, across the country and around the world,” Swain wrote. “He has sought to highlight and support the work of many Harvard faculty, students, staff and alumni who are working in communities with local organizations, educational institutions, government agencies and public service leaders, to address critical issues and help make a positive difference in the world.”

Bergeron agreed with Hess that Harvard’s partnerships and their promotion must take into account the experiences of those outside the University.

“It's hard to escape the elitist perception of institutions, and partnerships have to be genuine, they have to be reciprocal, in order for them to not reinforce the elitist...tone that exists,” he said.

—Staff writer Alexandra A. Chaidez can be reached at alexandra.chaidez@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @a_achaidez.

—Staff writer Aidan F. Ryan can be reached at aidan.ryan@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @AidanRyanNH.