Harvard Rules
Subtitle: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: February 1, 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 400
ISBN-13: 9780060568542
First sentence: On the afternoon of Friday, the twelfth of October, 2001, Harvard University prepared to swear in its twenty-seventh president.
Description: 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. And everyone worried that Harvard's outgoing president, Neil Rudenstine, epitomized an unhappy trend: the university president as full-time fund-raiser. Harvard may have possessed a $19 billion endowment, but had the university lost its soul? The members of the Harvard Corporation, the ultra-secretive governing board established more than three centuries ago, 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. 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. Written despite the university's official opposition, Harvard Rules uncovers what really goes on behind Harvard's storied walls.