Speaking to Yale About Harvard
So I dined at Portland's University Club with about 15 members of the Yale Club of Portland who were very interested in the goings-on up at Cambridge. Very nice people, very smart questions, and a much more casual vibe than you get from the East Coast Ivy League alumns. (It must be said that Portland is a deeply pleasant place.)
One of the numerous interesting questions posed was this one: How would you compare Larry Summers' leadership style to that of Yale president Rick Levin?
The answer, of course, is that you couldn't have two more different kinds of leaders. Levin is low-key, modest, completely unpretentious, and a little dry. If he's ever been embroiled in a national controversy, I'm not aware of it. When I spoke to the group of Harvard/Stanford/MIT alums, only one of them could name the president of Yale.
For some folks, that may be good, for some bad. You certainly wouldn't say that Levin is a well-known "public intellectual," or "intellectual celebrity," as Larry Summers is, and some people want that from a university president.
On the other hand, Yale has done very well in Levin's 12 years at its helm—investing in the sciences, sprucing up New Haven, refurbishing the 12 residential colleges, conducting a successful curricular review. None of this is particularly headline-making, but there is a kind of quiet excellence about it.
Whereas regarding the situation at Harvard—is it better off than it was four years ago?—well, that is not an easy question to answer.
