Harvard Rules (16 page)

In the midst of that conversation, Gates let slip that he hadn't heard anything from Larry Summers, but he was uncomfortable saying anything to the new president—after all, the president called you to say he wanted to meet, not the other way around. Could Winokur mention to Summers that Gates would be interested in a meet-and-greet? Winokur could mention it, and did. Before long, Summers was on the phone.

Why didn't you call me before? Gates asked. I could have helped introduce you around. Gates was taken aback by what Summers said in response.

“Because,” Summers answered, “everyone told me to.”

Soon enough, Gates would get his face time with the president. But it wouldn't turn out exactly as he'd hoped.

 

The meeting between Larry Summers and African American faculty members took place in early July, in the Alain Locke seminar room in the Af-Am department at the elegant new Robert and Elizabeth Barker Center, just across Quincy Street from the Yard. Af-Am used to be tucked away in a slightly decrepit house on a small side street a few blocks away, but Neil Rudenstine had helped raise $25 million to transform what had been the freshman dining hall into a stunning humanities complex. Afro-American Studies was a proud resident, along with the English department, the Committee on the History of American Civilization, the Committee on the Study of Religion, and others. The symbolism was important: Just as the proximity of federal agencies to the White House reflects their importance (or lack thereof), Harvard departments want to be as close as possible to the Yard. After being stuck on the outskirts of town, Af-Am had been integrated into prime real estate on campus.

It was about a month after graduation, and Harvard had settled into the rhythm of summer, when the campus feels considerably more easygoing than it does the rest of the year. Perhaps a dozen African American faculty and staff members had come to this meeting, including Gates, Anthony Appiah, law school professor Charles Ogletree, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, William Julius Wilson, and Charles Willie, a professor at the Graduate School of Education. They had gathered in the seminar room, a small but cozy space with room for about twenty and a blackboard at one end.

When Summers arrived, Gates gave him a tour of the department and presented him with a gift, a CD-ROM of
Encarta Africana,
the Microsoft-published encyclopedia that he and Appiah had edited. Higginbotham, a soft-spoken, dignified scholar of black religion and history, gave Summers a copy of
The Harvard Guide to African-American History,
for which she had served as editor-in-chief. Summers himself arrived bearing a gift of sorts. As he had wandered around campus, he said, he'd noticed the prevalence of academic centers devoted to the study of specific subjects—the Ukrainian Research Institute, for example. It seemed odd that there was no African studies center.

For the professors sitting around the seminar table, this was a welcome sign. Gates in particular had long wanted to expand the focus of his department to include Africa. How could you study African American history without studying Africa? But that would require more faculty, more staff, a travel budget—it was a major commitment.

The good start did not last long. Charles Ogletree, a law school professor known for his civil rights activism, asked Summers where he stood on the issue of affirmative action. Harvard had a tradition of supporting affirmative action, Ogletree said. The university had written an
amicus curae
brief in the fabled 1978 Supreme Court case
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke,
in which a white man named Allan Bakke sued after being rejected by the medical school at the University of California at Davis. Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., the critical swing vote in the decision to uphold affirmative action, had singled out Harvard as a practitioner of constructive and legal affirmative action. Now two more cases attacking affirmative action were headed to the Supreme Court, the ones involving Lee Bollinger and the University of Michigan. Would Summers align Harvard with the defense of affirmative action once more? And would he appoint blacks to top positions in the lily-white Harvard administration?

Until this point Summers had been civil, if not exactly warm. But he looked prickly at the questions, as if surprised that the subject had come up. “That's one of the things that I need to think about,” he said. “I need to look at all the relevant data and decide what position Harvard will take, and that is something I plan to do in time.”

This was not the answer those assembled were expecting to hear. “I thought that, whatever your views, you should have not have allowed yourself to become president of a major university and not have made up your mind on affirmative action,” said one participant later. “It was very odd.”

Ogletree, a handsome, elegantly dressed man who can be as intense as he is smooth, did not look happy. Affirmative action was essentially a settled matter at Harvard, he continued. Former president Derek Bok had co-written an entire book articulating the need for affirmative action. How could Summers not have a position on it?

“I've read parts of that book, and I didn't find it convincing,” Summers said. He wanted to look at more data before making up his mind.

“Come on, Larry,” Gates said, “that sounds like something you'd hear at a Washington press conference. I don't think I heard you make a commitment to diversity.”

It was meant to be a joke to cut the tension, but Summers didn't laugh. “He was coming to tell us that we weren't going to get special treatment anymore, and he was upset by Ogletree's style,” said one person present.

Visibly upset. “I believe in diversity, but I also believe in excellence,” Summers snapped.

If the mood in the room had been precarious before, this remark pushed it off a cliff. Neil Rudenstine had believed that diversity was a prerequisite for excellence; Summers seemed to be suggesting an incompatibility between the two.

“In retrospect, he might not have meant that,” remembered Higginbotham. Possibly Summers had simply misspoken. Still, when he inserted the
but
between
diversity
and
excellence,
then “all of a sudden, we looked at each other and thought, ‘Oh dear, I wonder if he thinks these two things don't go together. Because we certainly think that excellence and diversity go together, and we don't want anybody here who isn't excellent.'”

Gates changed the subject by telling Summers about
Transition,
a journal devoted to black studies, which Rudenstine had funded with monies from the president's office. Gates hoped that Summers would continue to support
Transition.
Still annoyed, Summers wrapped up, saying, “I'm judging everything on a case-by-case basis. Make the case.”

After less than half an hour, Summers was gone, and the professors' moods ranged from puzzled to anxious to grim. “My God,” said one, “it's not just that he's not going to help us; it's that he wants to destroy us.”

For the next several months, Gates didn't hear from Summers. Then, one day, in early October, he got a phone call from the president. There was something on his mind. He had been hearing some worrisome things about Cornel West, things that made him wonder if West was upholding his responsibilities as a faculty member. There were rumors that West had skipped classes to campaign for New Jersey senator Bill Bradley in the 2000 Democratic presidential primary. That he was contributing to the problem of grade inflation at Harvard. And that he was neglecting his scholarship, publishing popular books rather than serious academic works.

Summers was very concerned. He wanted to meet with West as soon as possible.

 

In the months to come, Cornel West would be labeled an egomaniac, a con man, a charlatan, a tenured radical, and a media whore. None of these caricatures explained him. West's story did not easily translate onto the pages of the daily newspapers whose columnists and editorial writers were so quick to judge him.

West was born on June 2, 1953, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of an Air Force administrator and an elementary school principal who had met at Fisk University, an all-black college in Nashville, Tennessee. His paternal grandfather was a Baptist minister. When West was just a few years old, the family moved to Sacramento, California, where he was raised.

Growing up in the 1960s, West was a dissident and nonconformist from an early age. When he was just nine, he refused to stand and salute the American flag along with the rest of his fourth-grade class. His teacher slapped him. He slapped her back, and was promptly suspended from school.

But whether in school or not, West had a passion for learning. As a kid, he spent countless hours reading in a traveling bookmobile, a public library bus that traveled to neighborhoods whose residents didn't have easy library access. One of the books he read was a biography of Harvard graduate Theodore Roosevelt, whose story so inspired West that he decided he wanted to go to Harvard after finishing at Sacramento's John F. Kennedy High School. Harvard accepted him, and in 1970 West began his freshman year in Cambridge. He lived just across the hall from William Samuelson, the son of economist Paul Samuelson and Larry Summers' cousin. One year later, Larry Summers would begin his first year down Massachusetts Avenue at MIT.

Thirty-five years ago, there weren't many students at Harvard like Cornel West, a lower-middle-class black man whose enthusiasm for scholarship was as urgent as his commitment to social justice. He loved Harvard and all its riches—brilliant professors such as the philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick, gifted classmates, libraries with their millions of volumes, like nothing he'd ever seen before. “You could get lost in Widener Library for two years,” he remembered. “Man, you'd come out
knowing
something.” At the same time, West wanted to make Harvard more responsive to the social exigencies of the era. He became president of Harvard's Black Student Association, a radical student group at the time, and in 1972 the group took over President Bok's office in a protest over Harvard investments in Angola.

West worked to help pay his way through school, washing dishes and working “dorm crew,” a job that still exists at Harvard. Rather than having students clean the bathrooms inside their suites, the university pays other undergraduates to do the dirty work. It's one of the better-paying campus jobs, so dorm crew slots tend to go to the neediest students. As have hundreds of Harvard students before him and after, Cornel West literally cleaned the shit of his more affluent classmates.

Even so, he ran out of money. Unable to pay for four years of college, West took sixteen classes in his junior year, twice the usual eight Harvard students take per year. He graduated magna cum laude in June of 1973 and headed to Princeton to start graduate work in philosophy. After finishing his doctorate in 1980, he taught at New York's Union Theological Seminary, Yale, and Princeton over the next decade.

As a young professor, West cut a charismatic figure. He is tall and slender, with a large afro and heavy, black-rimmed glasses. Following the model of 1950s jazz musicians, he wears three-piece black suits with black wingtips, a black tie, and a white shirt. And he has a physical intensity and a contagious passion for his material. A West lecture can glide smoothly from Dante to Nietzsche to Chekhov to Duke Ellington. Onstage, West sounds more like a preacher than a professor. It is a performance, but not an act; for someone so dramatic, West is strangely lacking in self-consciousness. “He is always the same—completely guileless,” said one scholar who knows West well. “There's a kind of public Cornel,” the man you see at a lecture or conference. “And then you go have a drink with him afterward, and he's exactly the same person.”

West's 1993 book,
Race Matters,
accelerated his growing renown and popularity. Written in response to the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles and the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, the book is a manifesto for black progress and racial healing—criticizing, for example, black anti-Semitism and calling for improved relations between blacks and Jews. It also attacks American capitalism and the market economy, which West sees as a kind of drug dealer to black America. He warns of “unbridled capitalist market forces…that have devastated black working and poor communities…. The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism.”
Race Matters
sold half a million copies, and West acquired a reputation as a public intellectual—a scholar who used his learning to address a popular audience on topics of current interest. He began popping up on the television talk-show circuit, making the rounds on CNN, PBS, and C-SPAN.

Gates and Appiah wanted West at Harvard, and in 1994, with Rudenstine's support, they got him. While West had liked Princeton and appreciated the intimacy of a small community that valued undergraduate teaching, what was going on in Af-Am at Harvard felt too important to miss. “I wanted to be part of the team,” he said. “Skip's team.”

Four years later, Rudenstine elevated West to the position of University Professor, the highest status a scholar can attain at Harvard. President James Bryant Conant created the position in 1935 because, in the words of Harvard historian Richard Norton Smith, Conant wanted the University Professor to “roam as he wished across disciplinary bounds, teaching as he saw fit, conducting research or simply pondering.” West and sociologist William Julius Wilson would be the first two blacks appointed University Professors, and West certainly roamed: he taught in the college, the divinity school, and the law school.

West's promotion prompted subterranean grumbling among the faculty, some of whom took it as another sign of Rudenstine's favoritism towards African American Studies and sniped that West's record of publications didn't merit the position. Though he had published more than a dozen books, the most recent ones were popular works, more journalism than scholarship. Sometimes he had a co-writer; other times he was only the editor. He'd co-written or co-edited three books with Skip Gates alone.