Harvard Rules (30 page)

Dating a member of the faculty would later create problems for Summers, but Harvard certainly considered New a more appropriate presidential partner than Laura Ingraham. She was an intellectual, not a partisan flamethrower. Like Summers, New was divorced, with children—he had twin girls and a boy; she had three daughters. In her mid-forties, she was closer to Summers' age of forty-eight. It was unlikely that Elisa New would pose in a leopard-print miniskirt on the cover of a national magazine. She preferred long, flowing dresses.

But if they were at a similar point in their personal lives, Summers and New were very different when it came to ethnicity. Judaism had never constituted a large part of Summers' self-consciousness, and not just because he fell asleep in temple. When, for example, one Jewish student asked him if he had ever turned to the Torah for help in making important decisions, Summers looked startled by the question, as if the idea had never occurred to him, and he answered with an emphatic no. Though steeped in two professional environments that were heavily influenced by Jews—economics and academia—Summers was little interested in exploring that side of his identity. The language of faith was foreign to him; he preached the secular religion of economics.

Judaism, however, was a central theme of Elisa New's life. When she and Summers met, she was working on a book about Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to American port cities that was partly inspired by the history of her own family. One of New's great-grandfathers had run for Congress as a Socialist in 1914. She had always thought he was from Austria, until one day she discovered a cane that had belonged to him. On it were carved the names of several different towns in Lithuania, none of which were the places he was supposed to have come from. The revelation startled New into reconsidering her family's origins.

Whether New influenced Summers' thinking on the question of anti-Semitism is unclear, because neither of them will discuss their relationship. But as the 2002 school year began, Summers decided to address what he saw as a growing problem. He would speak out against anti-Semitism, both at home and abroad, from the pulpit of Memorial Church. Barely two weeks into his second year as president, his words would spark another controversy, one that illustrated what a massive audience a Harvard president could command when he chose to address issues of public importance. Especially when his own evolving ethnic awareness was at the heart of the matter.

 

Over the course of the twentieth century, as the number of Jews attending Harvard grew, the university compiled a distinctly uneven history of tolerance and acceptance. To put it another way, Harvard first tolerated Jews, then discriminated against them, and finally welcomed them—until Jews were clearly such a vital and powerful influence upon the university that discriminating against them was not only morally intolerable, but, as a practical matter, impossible.

The first Jews to attend Harvard in large numbers arrived during the presidency of Charles W. Eliot, in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. As evidenced by his abolition of required courses, Eliot had a broad and open mind and little patience for restrictions, whether intellectual or social. Jewish students, primarily the sons of Germans overseas or immigrants living in the Boston area, found Eliot's Harvard a surprisingly welcoming place. By the end of his presidency, Jews constituted about 20 percent of Harvard College students, a remarkable number for the time.

Eliot's successor, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, was not so open-minded. A wealthy Bostonian from a socially prominent family, Lowell did not much approve of Jews—nor of blacks, Catholics, and other non-Brahmins. He considered Jews shiftless, plebeian, and amoral, and was convinced that Jewish students lacked the honor he ascribed to his own caste. But he was perhaps most concerned about Jews because they seemed so adept at earning their way into Harvard. “An educational institution that admits an unlimited number of Jews will soon have room for no one else,” Lowell warned.

In 1922, Lowell proposed a quota that would limit Jews to 12 percent of the student body. Wary of a formal policy, the faculty nixed the quota but established a special committee to consider how to restrict Jews without actually coming out and saying so. By 1930 the number of freshmen who identified themselves as Jewish had dropped to 10 percent, from 25 percent in 1924—although part of that drop was probably due to students' being increasingly leery, given the mood on campus and geopolitical events of the time, about identifying themselves as Jewish.

James Bryant Conant, who took office in 1933, was better, but barely. An early supporter of quotas, Conant was the type who wouldn't make anti-Semitic remarks but didn't object when others did. Throughout the 1930s and into World War II, he offered little help to refugee Jewish scholars and students. During his presidency, house masters instituted a policy of placing an asterisk next to the names of Jewish students. That way, Jews could be tracked, to ensure that no one house master would have to endure too many of them under his roof.

At the same time, Conant passionately believed that Harvard needed to move away from its history as a school for posh young men from New England prep schools and become a meritocracy. So, while he didn't exactly proffer a helping hand, Conant decided that those Jews who qualified to be at Harvard ought to be welcomed. And in the aftermath of the war, as the horrors of the Holocaust became known, the idea of restricting Jews became unpalatable. Moreover, any university that wished to retain or improve its competitive position, as Harvard certainly did, had to recognize the wealth of brilliant minds among the exodus of Jews from Europe. Harvard hired Jewish professors not so much because it was the right thing to do, but to prevent rival universities from snapping them up.

By the 1950s, concern over what one university official once termed “the snowballing New York contingent” had virtually disappeared. Anti-Semitism at Harvard remained only in lingering pockets and occasional outbursts. One was the 1948 tenure battle involving Larry Summers' uncle, Paul Samuelson. Another involved Memorial Church. The Congregational church had been used for Christian weddings since 1932, but in 1953, Willard Sperry, the chairman of the board of ministers that ran the church, prevented a Jewish couple from getting married there. The prohibition against Jewish weddings continued for five years, until 1958, when the
Crimson
editorialized against it. Then-president Nathan Marsh Pusey supported the ban, but backed down in the face of opposition from the Corporation.

In the decades following, fights over the status of women, blacks, and gays became far more common than battles over anti-Semitism. After the 1960s, as the WASP establishment fell out of fashion and into decline, Jews became probably the most powerful ethnic bloc at Harvard. So far had the question of anti-Semitism receded from sight that when Larry Summers became Harvard's first Jewish president, the event was barely remarked upon.

Until Summers himself raised the subject.

 

He spoke from the modest pulpit of Appleton Chapel, the warm, peaceful space at the front of Memorial Church, at about 8:50 on the morning of Tuesday, September 17, 2002—the first day of classes at the college. Only a few dozen people were seated in the stained wooden pews flanking the pulpit, mostly regular churchgoers but also a few visitors curious to hear what the president had to say. Often speakers at Morning Prayers used a biblical passage to discuss some aspect of life at Harvard, or simply tried to bring a spiritual perspective to questions of daily life. One year before, Summers had spoken at Morning Prayers about the healing power of learning after the attacks of September 11. This talk would prove to be less therapeutic.

“I speak with you today, not as president of the university but as a concerned member of our community, about something that I never thought I would become seriously worried about—the issue of anti-Semitism,” Summers began.

“I am Jewish, but hardly devout. In my lifetime, anti-Semitism has been remote from my experience…” Indeed, the Clinton administration economic team—including Summers, Rubin, Greenspan, and trade representative Charlene Barshefsky—was “very heavily” Jewish, and no one had even mentioned the fact.

“But today I am less complacent,” Summers said. “Less complacent and comfortable because there is disturbing evidence of an upturn in anti-Semitism globally, and also because of some developments closer to home.”

Summers cited synagogue burnings in Europe, anti-Semitic political candidates in France and Denmark, and the UN conference on racism—the one he had asked Michael Ignatieff about. “I could go on,” he said. “But I want to bring this closer to home. Of course academic communities should be and always will be places that allow any viewpoint to be expressed. And certainly there is much to be debated about the Middle East and much in Israel's foreign and defense policy that can be and should be vigorously challenged. But…profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities.”

Summers' next line would prove particularly controversial.

“Serious and thoughtful people,” he said, “are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.”

At the same rallies where protesters criticized the International Monetary Fund and denounced globalization, “it is becoming increasingly common to lash out at Israel,” he said. And the problem was hardly limited to mass demonstrations. “Events to raise funds for organizations of questionable political provenance that in some cases were later found to support terrorism have been held by student organizations on this and other campuses…”

This was a reference—carefully worded, but factually inaccurate—to the fundraiser held by the Harvard Islamic Society while Zayed Yasin was its president, whose proceeds had gone to the International Red Crescent.

Finally, Summers continued, “some here at Harvard…have called for the university to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university's endowment to be invested. I hasten to say that the university has categorically rejected this suggestion…

“I would like nothing more than to be wrong,” Summers concluded. “It is my greatest hope and prayer that the idea of a rise of anti-Semitism proves to be a self-denying prophecy—a prediction that carries the seeds of its own falsification. But this depends on all of us.”

With that terse declaration, Summers ended his comments.

If the audience for Summers' talk had been limited to those few people who heard it, his jeremiad would probably have attracted little notice. But Summers wanted the speech to get attention, so later that morning a member of his staff called the
Harvard Crimson
to make sure that its reporters knew of the speech and to signal that Summers thought it should be covered. Ordinarily, Summers discouraged the paper's efforts to report upon his activities.

The
Crimson
did cover the speech, then the
Globe's
Pat Healy wrote about it, and then the
New York Times
followed up on the
Globe
piece. It didn't take long before Summers' warning about a resurgence of anti-Semitism made news all over the world—and again, as with the Cornel West incident, the majority of commentary was positive. This was what university presidents were expected to do: take a stand on issues of public import. Certainly, many Jewish alumni were pleased, but supporters were hardly limited to Jews. Their ranks also included many people who liked the idea of a public intellectual as president or who thought that divestment was a wrongheaded idea, and conservatives who disliked the political left—the
National Review
's William F. Buckley, for example—which had become so critical of Israel's government.

But what played as a clear-cut morality tale beyond Harvard Yard was more subtly argued within. Scholars who made a living out of deconstructing texts or analyzing DNA applied their critical faculties to Summers' speech, and some of them came to feel that the president possessed, in addition to a sincere concern about anti-Semitism, several less high-minded agendas. According to sources familiar with his thinking, Summers was still angry about the Zayed Yasin speech three months earlier and wanted to make amends to Jewish alumni, who'd let him know that they had felt insulted both by Yasin's choice as speaker and the title of his speech. Now Summers would personally redress the wrong.

Others thought that his choice of venue was telling. In certain circles, it was believed that Summers did not much like the idea of a Christian church smack in the middle of Harvard Yard and that the centrality of the university's Protestant heritage, both literally and figuratively, made him deeply uncomfortable. Churchgoers thought that Summers seemed ill at ease with Christian ritual and WASP tradition, as evidenced by his visible discomfort with the ceremonies of his own inauguration. This was a club that he could not join, no matter how impressive his achievements.

Moreover, Memorial Church was a tub on its own bottom. It had its own endowment, its own community, and its own alumni relationships, all of which was a challenge to Summers, who wanted to centralize power in the presidency. Those active in the Memorial Church community believed that if he had had his druthers, Summers would have converted the church into some sort of non-denominational community center. As evidence, they pointed to the fact that Summers had skipped a service Peter Gomes had arranged for him on the day of his inauguration—“my mother would never forgive me” for going, Summers was said to have explained.

Relations between Summers and Reverend Peter Gomes could be charitably described as tense. (Gomes, who agreed to be interviewed regarding Harvard history and culture, declined to address this subject.) Although Gomes happily opened the church for Jews to use during Jewish holidays, he fiercely believed in maintaining its fundamentally Christian identity, partly because he thought that that was the very point of the church, and partly because any diminution of its Christian primacy would mean a concurrent decrease in his own power. So Gomes, who is twelve years older than Summers, had taken to telling friends that he would “outlast” Summers at Harvard. Gomes, normally a courtly man, had a hard time hiding his antipathy to Summers. At least once while teaching his class on Harvard history, when the suit-and-bowtie-clad Gomes referred to Summers, he untucked his shirt and yanked on his tie in imitation of the president's sartorial lapses.