Where Harvard is going

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HARVARD RULES: THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL UNIVERSITY

by Richard Bradley

HarperCollins, $25.95,

375 pages

REVIEWED BY

BRENDAN CONWAY

Since conservatives are now happily embracing Harvard's Larry Summers and Harvard's faculty is busily rejecting him in official votes, they might want to know a little more about him. If they look into his seeming metamorphosis from establishment Democrat to scourge of the Ivy League, they will discover there hasn't been much of a change at all. In fact, they'll find that Mr. Summers has always been the same combative and vigorous rationalist he was as a young economist and bureaucratic brawler in Washington.

To the glee of conservatives, those qualities are fast making him a straight-talking antidote to higher-education political correctness. But there's more than a political showdown series between Mr. Summers and academia's Cornel Wests here. Mr. Summers's real significance has less to do with politics of any stripe, liberal or conservative, than it does with how the modern university is adapting itself to new opportunities for power and self-advancement.

Larry Summers is speeding higher education's transformation into a place where money and technology matter most. And that means mixed things. On the one hand, it can mean more resources and opportunity for everyone. But it can also mean that the idea of the university as a place for inquiry for its own sake must now compete with other ideas of what the university should be.