Where Harvard is going

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.

To judge by “Harvard Rules,” an unauthorized biography of Larry Summers masquerading as a Harvard treatise, Richard Bradley recognizes this, although his book doesn’t delve deeply into it. Mr. Bradley, it’s worth mentioning, is the old Richard Blow of George magazine, the stealth biographer of John F. Kennedy, Jr., who disavowed a confidentiality agreement to write that book and was roundly excoriated for it in New York publishing circles.

He has since changed his name from Blow to Bradley, but denies doing it to deflect ire. As he explained to the New York Times in February, “When you introduce yourself as Richard Blow, people have a reaction that they can’t help.” Whatever the reason, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Mr. Bradley seems better suited for a gossip column than a treatise on higher education. Still, Mr. Bradley is the only biographer of Larry Summers around, and he timed this first hack at Mr. Summers perfectly.

The book has many flaws, not least of which are a flatteringly biased portrait of Cornel West, fawning passages on Mr. Summers’s enemies on the faculty and a surfeit of gossip and innuendo. For a sense of the latter, consider that Mr. Bradley can’t avoid recounting episodes in which Mr. Summers gags on meat and requires the Heimlich maneuver to eject it and slops pizza on his shirt in front of apparently lily-fingered students. Without much basis, he asks whether Mr. Summers has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. Mr. Summers’s press secretary has justifiably called this “sensationalist gossip.”

Despite that, Mr. Bradley gets much of the essence right. The picture he haphazardly pieces together is of an economist first, a do-gooder economic determinist second and a relisher of bureaucratic politicking third. On the first, as Mr. Bradley shows, Larry Summers approaches the world as a confident rationalist and quantifier, and has seemingly little patience for those who aren’t.

Mr. Summers was born into a family of economists that included the Nobel laureates Ken Arrow and Paul Samuelson, and was a whiz with numbers and logic from an early age. Admitted to MIT in his junior year of high school — Harvard turned him down, in a turn of ironies — he excelled in statistics, showed little interest in history, literature and art, and ended up studying economics.

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