Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University [Hardcover]

Richard Bradley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2005

It is the richest, most influential, most powerful university in the world, but at the beginning of 2001, Harvard was in crisis. Students complained that a Harvard education had grown mediocre. Professors charged that the university cared more about money than about learning. Harvard may have possessed a $19 billion endowment, but had it lost its soul?

The members of Harvard's governing board knew that they had to act. And so they made a bold pick for Harvard's twenty-seventh president: former Treasury Secretary and intellectual prodigy economist Lawrence Summers.

Although famously brilliant, Summers was a high-stakes gamble. In the 1990s he had crafted American policies to stabilize the global economy, quietly becoming one of the world's most powerful men. But while many admired Summers, his critics called him elitist, imperialist, and arrogant beyond measure.

Today Larry Summers sits atop a university in a state of upheaval, unsure of what it stands for and where it is going. At stake is not just the future of Harvard University but also the way in which Harvard students see the world -- and the manner in which they lead it. Written despite the university's official opposition, Harvard Rules uncovers what really goes on behind Harvard's storied walls -- the politics, sex, ambition, infighting, and intrigue that run rampant within the world's most important university.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In an attempt to place Harvard's current president, Larry Summers, in historical perspective, this intriguing study explores his policies, leadership style and previous career in reference to other presidents as far back as Charles W. Eliot (president from 1869-1909). Bradley, author of the bestselling American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, writes with tactful reserve about the backroom intrigues and infighting that have characterized Summer's presidency, always showing both sides of the issues-and the book is no less gripping for it. These struggles, involving such luminaries as Cornel West, Skip Gates, Robert Rubin and Alan Dershowitz, are riveting even when handled with kid gloves. But Bradley addresses much more than simply the contentious start to Summer's tenure at Harvard. On the one hand, he offers an insightful look at how the role of the American university president has changed from a moral and intellectual leader independent of political and corporate power to the administrator of an institution largely dependent on corporate and government largesse for its continued existence. On the other, he places Harvard's development and growth in a larger context, exploring its shifting goals, pedagogy and values in reference to other prestigious American universities such as Princeton, Stanford and Yale, as well as to American society in general. On a whole host of issues-including unionization, civil rights, affirmative action and militarism-Bradley uses events at Harvard to illuminate wider social trends and vice versa. Although Harvard alums will naturally gravitate toward this timely volume, it will also appeal to anyone concerned with the evolving relationship between higher education and American society.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Its very name a cultural weapon, Harvard arms the fortunate few it admits with such social power that they can "drop the H bomb" on overawed listeners merely by mentioning where they attend school. How this revered institution and its students acquired such daunting social power and whether they still deserve it are the questions at the heart of this incisive critique written from the Left. Bradley agrees that the evolution of Harvard in recent decades has seriously imperiled intellectual life on campus. He acknowledges pervasive problems--a weak undergraduate curriculum, a faculty more interested in extending resumes than in mentoring students, an institutional surrender to external political and economic imperatives. But he blames one man--the current president, Lawrence Summers--for creating (or at least ignoring) these problems. Though Summers won his political credentials as a warrior for liberal Democrats such as Dukakis and Clinton, Bradley characterizes him as the tool of malign conservative forces alien to the university. Bradley apparently believes that the vexing problems besetting Harvard would have been resolved if only Summers had fostered rather than suppressed the high idealism of his distinguished faculty. ' Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Harper (March 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060568542
• ISBN-13: 978-0060568542
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,815,597 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect Timing, February 21, 2005

By 

Jim Innes "Jim" (NY. NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University (Hardcover)

As a Harvard alum, I naturally tend to browse articles about politics at the university. So I was amazed by last Friday's front page article in The Wall Street Journal about the faculty revolt against the centralization of power under Harvard's president, Larry Summers. It seemed amazing that he could be so politically ham-fisted after his years spent in government. Richard Bradley's book is eye-opening: from Summers' unwillingness to attend Peter Gomes' service on the day he was installed as president (I remember Peter Gomes as a wonderful gentleman--the embodiment of Harvard ethics and culture--Larry Summers would have done well not to have missed it!) to his off-the-record smear of Professor Cornel West to the New York Times reporters ("What would you do if you had a professor with a sexual harassment problem?") Summers is a manifestation of inside-the-beltway power grabbing that ill-befits a Harvard president. The book is fast-paced and engrossing. I recommend it highly (and you might as well get it at Amazon because it isn't available at the Harvard Coop!)

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Read the Crimson and Find Out the Same Things, July 12, 2005

By 

William D. Shingleton "Wishful Thinking Is No... (United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University (Hardcover)

Disclaimer: I am not a fan of Larry Summers. I didn't care for him when I was an intern at Treasury, and as an alum I really don't care for him as president of Harvard. But even I think this book is unfair to Summers and goes too far in trying to villify the man.

Bradely has written a book that is very easy to read and draws almost all of the issues enveloping Harvard in easy to digest, black-and-white dramas between Summers (always in the black hat) and various members of the faculty and student body (always portrayed sympatetically). This book makes no pretence of being objective or looking any further than skin-deep at the controversies that surrounded Summers before the most recent blow-up over his comments on women in science. Several chapters end with essentially the same line: by doing X, Summers had further consolidated his rule over the university. If all of this is true (it's not), Summers would be the absolute dictator of Harvard Yard by now.

In fact, what has been written here is basically an expanded, book-edition copy of the Harvard Crimson from 2000 to the present. There is little new in the book that readers of Harvard's student newspaper don't already know other than a few re-interviews that Richard Bradley has done with various personalities involved in the recent events at Harvard.

What's lost here is that what is going on at Harvard is a microcosm of what's going on at many other American universities, and that much of it isn't new. As far back as I can remember (and I come from a family of academics), students and faculty alike have hated their university presidents, viewing them as uninterested in academics or out of touch with their student bodies. As at Harvard, with the decibel level of campus politics higher today than at any time since the 1960s, there is a lot of talking (or complaining, depending on one's perspective) going on and less respect for opposing viewpoints. Harvard is hardly unique in this respect.

Bradely castigates Summers for his handling of several episodes with faculty (most noteably the Cornel West debacle) but misses the broader trend that acadmics as a whole have been getting into narrower and narrower specalties that prevent their work from being of much use to anyone. This doesn't mean that Summers was justified in how he treated West, who was (and is) a true educator, but it does deny this book some much-needed context.

Similarly, Bradley's comments on Summers' stress on achievement by students misses that the same line was toed by the genteel Neil Rudenstine, who once told the Crimson that 'students don't come to Harvard to have fun' when asked why the university maintains an academic schedule that places fall term finals immediately after winter break. This was a particularly poor-timed comment after a rash of student suicides on campus and reports that Harvard's student suicide rate was twice the national average.

Overall, only the most die-hard Summers haters will find anything valuable in Harvard Rules. Everyone else interested in the state of campus would be better of reading the Crimson from time to time.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Smart, Thorough, Timely, June 4, 2005

By 

airvonb (NYC, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University (Hardcover)

This is an outstanding book. It covers the first three years of Larry Summers' Harvard presidency and really takes you inside the university. Harvard Rules treats the issues of higher education seriously, but it also conveys all the drama that goes on behind-the-scenes at Harvard. I particularly liked the way Bradley treated the people involved as characters, so that the book reads almost like a novel, which is not what you'd typically expect of a book about higher education. Like him or hate him, Larry Summers is a fascinating man, and this book provides grist for both sides of the mill. If you're interested in Harvard or higher education, this is a must read. But if you're interested in just a good read about ambition and power, I'd recommend Harvard Rules for that, too.