The 02138 Scoop
In the first issue of 02138 magazine, in my story on the Harvard Corporation, I wrote the following about Larry Summers' severance package:
Summers...extracted a promise that his speech at Commencement would be mailed to all Harvard alumni. That has not yet happened—apparently because no one involved wants to sign an accompanying cover letter.
Well, it's happened now. Thanks much to the professor who mailed me the pamphlet recently put out by the Harvard Alumni Association titled, "Lawrence H. Summers," with the subheds, "2006 Commencement Address," "A Chronological Sampling of President Summers' Tenure," and "Harvard Gazette Article, June 8, 2006."
The pamphlet is introduced by Jack Reardon, executive director of the HAA, who writes:
During his tenure, Larry initiated many important new programs and helped support and guide many others. This booklet...provides an opportunity to reflect on and to capture the spirit of those years.
Poor Jack. He is a loyal Harvard man through and through, but you know that even he had to hold his nose while writing this stuff.
He concludes:
This snapshot of the past five years underscores the role that all of us can play in making Harvard the best that it can be.
I have tried and tried to figure out exactly what that sentence means—it is brilliant in its ambiguity, and I mean that seriously, this kind of piffle is not easy to write—and my best answer is something like this:
Okay, I'll do it, but don't ask me to say anything nice about the guy.
And do give to Harvard.
The following document is propaganda with a Soviet deftness. "Summers Lays Foundation for Renewal and Expansion," says the Gazette. (You almost—almost!—expect the exclamation point.) Summers once referred to the Gazette as "my Pravda," and you can see why.
You have to believe that Summers controlled every inch of this booklet, so I was particularly interested in the choice of photos. (Summers vigorously controlled the choice of photos of himself that ran in Harvard publications.)
In a 16-page booklet, there are 15 photos of Summers. They show him meeting with undergraduates, with poor people, with black people, with the Dalai Lama, with Bono, with Bill Clinton, and with Elena Kagan.
(Will this photo be Kagan's Amy Gutmann—Halloween picture? The presidential candidacy-killer? It, um,
underscores the close relationship she and Summers had...a reminder which Kagan probably isn't dancing in the hallways about, and which Summers would have avoided were he not more interested in promoting the fact that he appointed the first female dean of the law school.)
The photos portray Summers as a celebrity who can range from low—he meets with public high school students!—to high. He hangs out with Bono! OMG! He's, like, a rock star!
And then there is that photo of Summers in Annenberg Hall, surrounded by sycophantic students asking him to sign their dollar bills. Of all the things that Summers did, I found this perhaps the most telling. It symbolized so many things alien to the best aspects of a university: celebrity culture, the cult of personality, the greed culture, the shallowness of modern students' choice of Harvard...
I was always startled that Summers encouraged this practice, and I remain startled that Summers chose this photo for his agitprop. Can you imagine Derek Bok even allowing such a thing to be printed about himself?
Alumni who receive this brochure might be puzzled; it is a curious document.
They should know that Harvard did not want to publish this, but the Corporation agreed to do it as part of Summers' severance package. It makes much more sense when read with that fact in mind. Call it the new New Historicism.
