Harvard Rules (26 page)

He took material from one area and considered its application to others: After reading Michael Lewis' book
Moneyball,
about how Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane used statistics to choose overlooked baseball players and sign them for less money than big name stars, Summers weighed what Harvard could learn from Beane. “Being a good baseball scout is now about doing econometrics,” he told one academic audience. When they laughed politely, he insisted. “It's true—the A's win as many games [as other league champions] with one-third the payroll. That's a two hundred percent productivity improvement, and it must have applications elsewhere.” It did. One reason Summers was interested in offering tenure to younger professors was because Harvard would have to pay them less than it would established scholars.

Summers' intelligence was sometimes mixed with a clinical candor. At a forum with graduate students, one aspiring scholar rose to tell Summers that his Harvard stipend had expired, and the teaching load he was offered in its stead didn't pay him nearly the amount of the stipend. Why would Harvard actually reduce the amount of money it had once offered him as incentive to come to the university?

For the same reason, Summers responded, that Polaroid sells it cameras cheaply, but not its film. Once a consumer bought the camera, he was locked into purchasing the film. Similarly, when Harvard was competing with other universities for the best graduate students, it had to offer them the most attractive financial aid package. But as soon as that student had committed to Harvard, the university was free to lowball its subsequent offers; at that point, the student wasn't likely to transfer.

The graduate student sat down, enlightened but not assuaged.

When Summers delivered a lecture, he spoke confidently, without a hint of nervousness. Still, his body language sent an entirely different message. His head rotated deliberately back and forth, making contact with each section of the audience. The gesture looked stiff and unnatural, as though a public speaking coach had made him practice it. Often he gripped the podium with one hand, while his right leg meandered back and forth as if it had a life of its own. As he bit off his words in clumps of three, two, and even one before taking deliberate pauses, he sounded eerily like Al Gore—a little pinched, a little lockjawed. Sometimes, at the end of sentences, he'd slur a word, so that it sounded like an old cassette tape sticking in its player.

But when Summers took questions, his demeanor changed entirely. His body relaxed, his expression grew animated. As he listened to a questioner, he'd wander so far away from the podium, one could be forgiven for thinking he was simply about to leave the room. He'd absorb the question, ponder it for a few seconds, wander back to the mike, and deliver an answer that sounded like a well-written newspaper editorial. He seemed to know something about everything. Ask Summers questions ranging from presidential politics to the economy of Bolivia, from the nuances of educational policy to the merits of the graduate student dental plan, and he always had an answer, often one that sounded steeped in an expertise most people would have developed only if they had specialized in the subject.

Summers' mind was like a computer, with the memory not only to store vast amounts of information but also to access that information whenever it was needed, lift it, turn it, examine it from myriad angles and manipulate it in unexpected ways. In April 2003, he gave three hour-long lectures on globalization at the Kennedy School over three consecutive nights. Not surprisingly, the pro-globalization arguments he advocated would have prompted disagreement in some quarters. Still, the sheer volume of information he wielded was staggering. Though he brought notes to each lecture, he placed them on the podium and subsequently ignored them. As he usually did, he began with a couple of jokes. “When I left Washington, I did not leave politics,” he said.

Over the course of those three hours, Summers spoke concisely, provocatively, and logically, his arguments following crisply from one to another, without digression or hesitation. He did not appear to have memorized the lectures. Rather, it looked as if, while part of Summers' brain was delivering his words, another part was forging ahead, like a scout, considering the path of his argument and making a decision in plenty of time to report back. In three hours of lectures without notes, Summers did not once utter an incomplete sentence.

Being what Washingtonians might call “wonky” wasn't inherently a bad thing at Harvard. Certainly the community could appreciate, even embrace, a geek—Harvard is, after all, an institution that respects intelligence, accomplishment, and power, three things that Summers had in abundance. But the community also hoped that he would have humility, a sense of humor, and some self-awareness about his own nerdiness.

Not likely. Accurately or not, Larry Summers came across as arrogant, patronizing, disrespectful, and power-hungry. And nothing the Corporation or the university flacks had told the community about the new president before his arrival had prepared them for this unfortunate combination of personal qualities. Inevitably, its members wondered how the Corporation could have chosen a man of such a temperament. Did its members not know? Or not care? The former seemed impossible, but the latter was more alarming—because if the Corporation had known what Larry Summers was like and had still chosen him, what did that say about its opinion of the institution it governed?

Doubt began to pervade the campus. Some students and faculty decided that Bob Rubin had simply deceived the Corporation when he assured its members that the rough-and-tumble Larry Summers was a thing of the past. Others who had followed the presidential choice process began to speak wistfully of Lee Bollinger, who had since become the president of Columbia University, and wonder if he would not have been the superior choice. Some students looked enviously at Princeton and Brown, where presidents Shirley Tilghman and Ruth Simmons, the latter the first African American president of an Ivy League school, were leading their campuses with a less combative, more inclusive style.

In the spring of 2002, with the chaos in the Af-Am department ongoing, and a community ill at ease with its new president, Larry Summers' first year was coming to a rocky end. An oncoming controversy over the limits of speech in the post-September 11 world, set against the magisterial backdrop of Harvard's commencement, would make the conclusion of the 2001–2002 school year even more turbulent.

 

Zayed Yasin, class of 2002, was a model of the modern Harvard student: a bright, thoughtful, motivated young man from an international, multicultural background. His mother was an Irish Catholic nurse from southern California. His father was an engineer, a Muslim from Bangladesh who had immigrated to the United States in 1971 and worked as a designer of power plants. Before college, Yasin had lived in Chicago, southern California—his parents met at UCLA—and Indonesia. But he spent most of his youth in the small town of Scituate, a fishing village turned white-collar suburb about twenty miles southeast of Boston. An international student and a local kid at the same time, Yasin would be the first member of his family to attend Harvard.

Dark-haired, clean-cut, and slender, with a manner that was mature yet earnest, Yasin was always interested in public service. As a boy, he became an Eagle scout. While a high school senior, he won a scholarship from the Navy Reserve Officers Training Corps that would pay for his Harvard tuition in exchange for military service after college. But he turned down the scholarship because, he said, “I didn't want to go to MIT all the time” for training, and he was worried about committing himself to the military until he was in his thirties. Yasin intended to make up the financial difference with help from his parents and aid from Harvard, but the lost ROTC scholarship was a big hit. “We're not poor, but we're not filthy rich,” Yasin said.

Like most Harvard students, Yasin was active in extracurricular pursuits. He wanted to be a doctor, and as a freshman he worked as an emergency medical technician. For a while he was president of Harvard-Radcliffe Friends of the American Red Cross, a group that taught first aid and helped in disaster relief. Before his senior year, he worked on a public health program to try to eradicate malaria in Zambia.

But perhaps his most challenging work came during his junior year, when he became president of the Harvard Islamic Society. HIS was a small but growing group on campus, in proportion to the small but growing numbers of Muslim students from South Asia and the Near and Middle East. Yasin hadn't been particularly devout before college, but at Harvard, he started to become more serious about his faith. “The people that I liked the best at Harvard, the people that I respected for the way they lived their lives, were Muslims,” Yasin explained. “I really admired the people who did have that moral and religious compass. And I saw the difference between people who did live that way and people who didn't.”

The Harvard Islamic Society didn't have the numbers, the money, the alumni, or the tradition that Harvard Hillel did. For evening prayer, HIS members met in the lounge of a classroom building in the Yard. The Jewish cultural and religious organization, by contrast, was housed in the multimillion-dollar Rosovsky Hall. But Yasin did what he could with the resources he had, and one of his priorities was to build bridges between the different religious organizations on campus. During his year as president, he held several inter-faith meetings with Hillel and initiated a discussion series with Hillel and the Catholic Student Association.

One activity, however, would come back to haunt him: During Yasin's tenure, HIS threw a fundraiser to benefit the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a U.S.-based Muslim group that raised money for Muslims around the world who needed health care—particularly Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. From what Yasin knew, HLF was a legitimate, valuable group. Before his junior year, he had spent a summer working for Balkan Sunflowers, a nongovernmental health organization in Albania, which has a largely Muslim population. “I saw the HLF doing good work there,” he remembered, delivering health care to the stream of refugees flowing back into Kosovo.

But after the fundraiser, there were news reports that HLF was funneling money to Hamas, the Islamic terrorist organization. (In December 2001, the Bush administration froze HLF's assets for just this reason, although the group vigorously denies the accusation.) So, instead, the Harvard Islamic Society gave the money it had raised, about $900, to Red Crescent, an international relief organization affiliated with the Red Cross. “We wanted to avoid any murkiness,” Yasin said.

As president of HIS, Yasin had gotten to know Harry Lewis, the dean of the college, and Rick Hunt, the university marshall who was also head of the faculty committee on religion, a group that set university policy regarding religious issues. Both Lewis and Hunt were impressed with Yasin. They liked his positive attitude and admired how he struggled with the problems of the world at such a young age. And so both administrators encouraged him to try out for one of Harvard's biggest honors: the position of undergraduate commencement orator.

The Harvard commencement ceremonies, which take place in Tercentenary Theatre, are so filled with history and ritual, they're like a performance art piece for scholars. Commencement is divided into two parts. On Wednesday's Class Day, a humorous speaker addresses the undergrads. Recent Class Day speakers have included Conan O'Brien, Al Franken, and actor Will Ferrell. Day two on Thursday sees diplomas conferred upon the cap-and-gowned graduates, not just the college seniors but students from the graduate schools as well. Though it's ostensibly for the graduates, the afternoon of commencement's second day is actually called the “Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.” That's because Harvard hosts its reunions at the same time. The idea is to fill returning alums with school spirit, and then—boom!—hit them up for money. Simultaneously, the new graduates transition instantly from tuition-paying students into the ranks of gift-giving alumni.

The second day of commencement is by far the more formal of the two. Before the degrees are officially awarded, the morning ceremony kicks off with the Harvard band playing; a procession of the president and members of the faculty and governing boards filing onto the stage, and an opening address delivered entirely in Latin.

After the morning ceremony, the undergraduates go to their various houses, and the graduate students to their schools, to receive diplomas. And in the afternoon, everyone is supposed to reconvene in Tercentenary Theatre to hear the university's commencement speaker. (It was on this occasion in 1947 that George Marshall outlined his plan to aid postwar Europe.) In June of 2002, that speaker was scheduled to be Robert Rubin; Summers had shown his gratitude to his former boss by asking him to speak at Harvard's commencement. But he had done more than that for Rubin. He had offered Rubin the seat on the Harvard Corporation being vacated by Herbert “Pug” Winokur. (The Enron-affiliated executive had resigned from the Corporation to spare Harvard bad publicity.) With Winokur gone, Larry Summers and Bob Rubin would be a team again.

As part of the Thursday morning rites, every year one undergraduate delivers an address to the assembled crowd. Called the “Senior English Address,” it's usually about five minutes long. Being chosen to deliver the undergraduate oration is considered a high honor. On the most public, elaborately choreographed occasion of the university year, one undergraduate is entrusted with the opportunity to stand before the university community and speak his mind. It was this responsibility that Harry Lewis and Rick Hunt wanted Zayed Yasin to compete for. “I had rough ideas,” Yasin said. “I wanted to talk about graduation from Harvard in a post-9/11 world. But I didn't think I had a shot. I just figured, why not go for it?”