Bob Stone, a 1947 graduate, was the quintessential 20th-century Harvard man—an economics concentrator, a captain of the crew team, a World War II vet, and a successful businessman. Stone made millions in the shipping business, more than ten of which he donated to his alma mater. From 1975 to 2002, he served on the Harvard Corporation, the university’s powerful, secretive governing board, working alongside 25th president Derek Bok and helping to choose 26th president Neil Rudenstine as well as Harvard’s 27th leader, Larry Summers. The avuncular, gregarious Stone reveled in Harvard and his responsibilities. Once every few weeks, he would breakfast with students at the Faculty Club. Stone believed Corporation members should have such informal and regular contact with the university, be part of its daily workings. Such devotion was why everyone around campus spoke fondly of him. So it wasn’t surprising that Memorial Church was packed for last May’s memorial for Stone. Hundreds of his family, friends, and colleagues—including Harvard’s three living presidents—filed in through the color guard of university police and leafed through programs bearing a photograph of a vigorous, confident Stone on his sloop, Arcadia. The only real surprise was who wasn’t there. Other than Summers, the only Harvard Corporation member attending was 70-year-old senior fellow James Richardson Houghton. As is increasingly the case, the board that governs the most important university in the world—the mysterious council even now handpicking Harvard’s next president—was nowhere to be seen.

The Harvard Corporation, the most powerful body at the university, consists of just seven people, including the standing president. Established by Harvard’s charter of 1650, it is almost as old as Harvard itself. Its “fellows” serve for as long as they want and choose their own replacements. As a result, the Corporation, although theoretically checked by a 30-person Board of Overseers chosen by alumni, has become the university’s locus of power. Once primarily composed of ministers, the Corporation now recruits most of its fellows from the worlds of business, finance, and law. As financial and management experience have become essential to running the modern university, academics have become a minority presence on the board. Many prominent alums quietly lust after and lobby for a spot on the Corporation. Behind the scenes, “people campaign to get on the thing,” says a Harvard College grad whose name is on one Harvard building. They serve on university committees, lead fundraising endeavors, and write large checks themselves. “Ending up on the Corporation,” the graduate says, “is the medal of a lifetime.”

A spot on the Corporation is not just prestigious, but influential: The group has the formal power to review every official act at Harvard. Over the years, though, it has ceded day-to-day governing responsibility to the president. Today, it resembles a corporate board which advises and supports the university’s chief executive officer— the president. But the Corporation does retain one definitive power: the authority to hire and fire Harvard’s president. As a result, the remaining six fellows continue to exercise enormous influence even after the choice is made.

The nature of that influence, however, isn’t easy to uncover: Corporation fellows conduct their business in secret, and the board’s lack of transparency and accountability is unmatched by the governing boards of any other American university. About once a month, the fellows meet for several hours in a large study on the second floor of Loeb House, an imposing Georgian manse in Harvard Yard. Their meetings usually include a reading of the previous meeting’s minutes, followed by a report from the president, perhaps discussion of various committee reports, and then consideration of individual topics (sometimes discussed over a meal). Yet the Corporation refuses to publish an agenda, meeting minutes, or an annual report. In 1968, near the peak of anti-Vietnam protest at Harvard, the Corporation mandated that records of its deliberations be entombed for 50 years after their creation in the underground archives of Pusey Library. Historians have decried the move as hostile to scholarship, but the Corporation’s defenders say that that is exactly the point; the fellows do not want their inner workings examined. Similarly, the fellows’ contact information is not listed in any Harvard directory. Except on singular occasions, such as the hiring of a new president, they shun the press. (The Corporation has an official secretary, akin to a chief of staff, Marc Goodheart, who did not answer phone calls and e-mails regarding this story. Current Corporation fellows declined to comment. Numerous high-level sources spoke but requested anonymity in order to preserve their relationships with the Corporation.) The fellows’ only public appearance is at Commencement. Sitting on stage, they sport black robes (the men wear top hats), seeming to lord over the hoi polloi gazing up from below.

If the board’s lack of transparency is shrugged off in tranquil times, it becomes more suspect during campus turmoil. Throughout Summers’s presidency, the Corporation remained secretive as ever while being tested as never before. Many professors, particularly from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and some university officials believe that the board barely passed the test—that it should never have hired Summers, and that it took too long to push him out. Other professors and some alumni charge that the board betrayed Harvard’s president and ceded power to a left-wing horde of intransigent academics. “There are people who passionately believe Larry should have stayed and others who passionately believe he should never have been appointed,” says Paul Buttenwieser, vice chair of Harvard’s Board of Overseers. Either way, Summers’s presidency and his departure have roiled Harvard and cost the university years of momentum, considerable bad press, and, very likely, large sums of money in lost donations and severance packages. In the aftermath, and in the middle of a search for a new president, two questions linger: What went wrong? And after almost 360 years, is it time for the Corporation to open its doors and, like any good corporate board, give in to accountability?

When Neil Rudenstine announced, in May of 2000, that he was resigning, the Corporation included treasurer D. Ronald Daniel, former managing partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company; New York lawyer Conrad Harper, a partner in the powerhouse firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett (and the first person of color in the board’s history); James (known as Jamie) Houghton, then the chairman emeritus at Corning Inc., the Houghton family business; Rudenstine, the president, ex officio; and Herbert “Pug” Winokur, a director at the Enron Corporation. But the dominant members of the board were Bob Stone, its senior fellow, and Hanna Gray, a Harvard Ph.D. and the former president of the University of Chicago. If Stone was the paradigmatic well-rounded alum, Gray embodied intellectual rigor above all else. A fierce woman widely described as impatient and intimidating—another member of the Board of Overseers once described her as “straight off Mt. Rushmore,” adding that “you wouldn’t want to cross her”—Gray had grown disenchanted with the mild-mannered Rudenstine. She believed that Harvard needed an infusion of energy, if not spine.

By the mid-fall of 2000, the board had created a four-page memo laying out its vision for the next president’s agenda: improve undergraduate education, promote the globalization of the university, upgrade the sciences, and develop the Allston campus. In winnowing down the hundreds of suggested candidates, including Jack Welch, Al Gore, and both Clintons, the other fellows often deferred to Gray, who had broad experience in higher education administration and unambiguous opinions about the candidates’ abilities. At one lengthy Sunday afternoon meeting late that fall, “Gray went through a list of names, summarily rejecting candidates right and left, while the men watched the Patriots game on TV,” according to a source familiar with the search.

By early 2001, the choice had come down to Lee Bollinger, president of the University of Michigan, and wunderkind economist Summers, the recently departed treasury secretary. Both men bought into the Corporation memo. Gray deemed Bollinger too liberal—like Rudenstine, Bollinger was an outspoken proponent of affirmative action, a policy she did not support—and pushed for Summers. Stone, however, fretted about Summers’s reputation—the Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot once wrote that “Larry Summers is to humility what Madonna is to chastity.” The fellows had spoken with Summers’s former students and colleagues; they felt they had a sense of his impressive strengths and potential liabilities, and they appreciated that Summers had been candid with them about his impending divorce. Still, they were concerned. And so, in one interview in February 2001, they asked Summers to reassure them. I’m a changed man, Summers told the search committee. As examples of maturation, Summers noted that he had overseen the successful restructuring of the Internal Revenue Service in 1997, a potential political disaster. Moreover, he told the fellows, when he had been promoted from deputy secretary to secretary of the treasury in 1999, his entire staff had followed him, which surely they wouldn’t have done if he were a boss from hell.

To settle the issue, Stone, Houghton, and Daniel turned to Robert Rubin, Summers’s predecessor and mentor at Treasury. Rubin was, and is, one of the university’s most admired and accomplished alumni, and Harvard had courted him in the past. Late in the Rudenstine presidency, according to a source close to the president, the Corporation had discussed with Rubin the possibility of his joining the board. “Those negotiations ended by mutual agreement,” the source says. “Rubin had other things to do at the time, and there was a feeling on Harvard’s part that he wasn’t that interested in or knowledgeable about universities.” But when Rubin vouched for Summers, saying that the reports of bad behavior were outdated, the fellows were sold. “They were mesmerized by Summers’s upside potential, and Rubin convinced them that the downside wasn’t so down,” says a professor who was consulted during the search process.

On March 11th, 2001, Stone announced that Summers would be Harvard’s 27th president. The choice was greeted with some raised eyebrows—many faculty had leaned towards Bollinger, considered a successful university president. But the press was glowing; Summers was unquestionably a man of impressive credentials. The Corporation had fulfilled its most important duty, choosing the figure who would lead the university for, they hoped, the next 20 years.

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