From the beginning, Larry Summers worked to establish control of the Corporation. By several accounts, Summers ran Corporation meetings forcefully, setting the agenda and steering conversation to the topics he considered worthwhile. During controversy, he would begin meetings by acknowledging the hubbub, generally framing matters as a dichotomy in which he was an advocate of change while his critics stood for business as usual. One participant in Corporation proceedings says that Summers just wore down the other fellows. “Larry would speak for 90% of the time,” according to this observer. “He would speak for 45 minutes straight until the other fellows were probably, in their minds, elsewhere.”

Not only did Summers’s commanding intelligence and personality help him control meetings, but at least two of the fellows, Bob Stone and Jamie Houghton, never felt at ease with Summers, and thus were atypically reticent. “Stone and Houghton were not culturally comfortable with Larry,” says someone who knows all three men. “There was a sense of old money and privilege about them, while Larry was very aggressive, a wheeler-dealer, not willing to credit Harvard’s history as justifying anything.” Another source who knows the fellows says the issue was in fact generational. Summers was in his 40s while Houghton was closer to 70 and Stone nearing 80; the old guard was deferring to the new.

The old guard was also changing. Three fellows resigned during the first three years of the Summers presidency: Pug Winokur, to spare Harvard bad publicity from the Enron scandal, and Daniel and Stone, already past the Corporation’s unofficial retirement age of 72. In theory, new fellows are chosen by the entire Corporation and approved by the Overseers. In reality, says a professor familiar with the process, “the president basically handpicks the members of the Corporation.”

Summers filled those three vacancies with natural allies. At the president’s request, Rubin came on board. The other fellows welcomed Rubin as a kind of insurance policy—his close relationship with Summers might come in handy. “If Bob Rubin thought Larry weighed too much or dressed poorly, he told him,” says a source who knows both men. None of the other fellows could be so blunt. Next came economist Robert Reischauer, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, and California hedge fund manager James Rothenberg, who took Daniel’s place as treasurer. The retirements left Houghton as the board’s senior fellow—but even in his new role, Houghton maintained his deferential attitude towards Summers. “Jamie was a CEO himself [at Corning] and thought that the board’s duty was to support the CEO,” says one person who knows him. “He’s not a shrinking violet—he’s gruff, he’s straightforward—but he’s also not someone who speaks a lot.”

Including the president, the Corporation had acquired four new fellows, a majority of the board, between 2001 and 2004. Summers expected Rubin, Reischauer, and Rothenberg to see the world as he did—the same priorities, inclinations, and values. Of the three, only Reischauer, whose father, Edwin, was a renowned Harvard professor of East Asian studies, had any deep knowledge of the university. None of them lived in Massachusetts, as fellows traditionally have.

Since it was logistically more difficult to meet, the fellows did so with decreasing frequency—about once a month instead of every two weeks. Predictably, informal contact between Corporation fellows and the rest of the university evaporated. The fellows flew in for their Monday afternoon meetings—Rothenberg on a private jet from Los Angeles—and scooted out at the end of the day. In turn, their limited time in Cambridge left them increasingly dependent on Summers for information about the state of the university. In just two years, the Corporation had become less independent and more removed from the university it oversaw.

Meanwhile, the Board of Overseers, which must approve the selection of Corporation fellows, had become a rubber stamp. The Overseers meet just four times a year and have virtually no contact with the Corporation. In past decades, the Overseers have become more and more docile; many members aren’t the type to ruffle feathers, and some would very much like to be on the Corporation. As one source who knows many of the Overseers puts it, whenever the two boards crossed paths, “The Corporation would pat the Overseers on the head and thank them for being so concerned.”

The turmoil of Summers’s tenure began as early as October 2001, just weeks after his installation, when the new president abruptly challenged the academic credentials of Cornel West, the celebrity professor of African-American studies. West wound up leaving Harvard, but the members of the Corporation—who had not known in advance of Summers’s decision to confront the professor—saw the incident as “an aberration,” according to one high-placed source. “The Corporation thought this was bad chemistry, that it wasn’t going to be typical.” Only one board member was displeased: Conrad Harper, who had spoken with Af-Am department chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. and came away worried. “Conrad said to Larry, ‘Whatever you think happened here, this wasn’t handled well.’” Still, none of the fellows—including Harper—was particularly upset when West decamped for Princeton.

Before long other Harvard professors and administrators began voicing concerns about the new president’s management style. By and large, the Corporation did not hear those complaints: The fellows did not know the faculty, and the faculty did not know them. Those rumblings of discontent that did slip through were pooh-poohed by Hanna Gray, Summers’s most stalwart defender. “When they did hear criticisms,” explains a source who knows Gray and Summers, “Hanna would say, ‘This is just the faculty in its complacent way complaining about change.’”

Rubin’s role was also provoking concern among observers. Multiple sources close to the Corporation say that he showed meager enthusiasm for a fellow’s duties. Rubin often seemed pressed for time at meetings, repeatedly excused himself to take cell-phone calls, and fled Cambridge at the earliest possible opportunity. Meeting times were changed to accommodate his schedule, but he missed some sessions entirely.

Summers continued to generate controversy. In September 2002, he blasted the signatories of a petition calling upon Harvard to divest from Israel as “anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.” Several Corporation fellows were displeased with Summers’s assertion that he could voice such an accusation “not as president of the university but as a concerned member of our community.” The president of Harvard could not temporarily abdicate his office.

On the whole, however, the board was pleased with Summers, who seemed to be moving quickly on the agenda of renewing Harvard that it had laid out during the presidential search. So a few professors were grumbling. As Gray argued, wasn’t their resistance to change just proof that they were the problem to which Summers was the solution?

For a time, public controversy abated even as private resentment grew. Then, on January 14, 2005, Summers spoke at a now infamous gathering of economists on the subject of women in science. He pointedly began by saying that he was more interested in “provocation” than in “an institutional talk about Harvard’s policies towards diversity.” Summers then listed several possible reasons why men outnumber women in scientific fields, including differences in “intrinsic aptitude.”

This time the controversy did not blow over. On March 15, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a vote of no confidence in Summers, an unprecedented rebuke to a Harvard president. The vote, and the outcry that preceded it, took the fellows by surprise. The New York Times reported that Rubin “was unaware of any widespread faculty discontent with the management style of Mr. Summers.” That disclosure stunned the faculty: How could Rubin possibly not know? “I remember thinking, ‘If this guy really believes this, then there is something substantially wrong here,’” says Howard Gardner, a professor at the Graduate School of Education who, though once a Summers supporter, had come to believe that the president should resign.

And Rubin wasn’t the only one out of the loop. When Corporation members fanned out to talk to the faculty, professors were appalled to discover that the fellows had scant knowledge of dissention in the academic ranks. “Anybody who knows anything about the situation came away thinking that the Corporation was very ill-informed,” says one centrist professor who met with two Corporation members for several hours. “They thought that the problem was a few minorities and women and left-wingers who were opposing Larry’s reforms, which was the line that Larry was arguing, and it was definitely wrong. Any board in a situation of conflict has got to have a perspective to some extent independent of what the CEO thinks, and that’s exactly what they did not have.”

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