Citizen or CEO? Community or Corporation?

Is Harvard a company just like GM? Many of us would be dismayed by such a conception: students as consumers, faculty as producers, the janitors and dining hall workers mere machinery, I suppose, in the great knowledge factory. But Harvard’s professed educational mission requires that it be much more than that: we value education because we value people enough to think it’s worth educating them. We think that being educated in the arts and sciences is different from being trained to use a machine. While we may seek to substitute technology for repetitive manual labor, we don’t try to supplant the creative minds of an educational community with mechanical replacements.

I usually take sentiments like these as treacly Hallmark™ drivel, platitudinous pomposities heard at Opening Ceremonies and Commencement and scorned in between. But their value becomes clear when you recognize the consequences of ignoring them. And the consequences of thinking of Harvard as a corporation are today unmistakable: more than 1,000 workers receive poverty wages—forcing many to work 80 hours or more a week at two or even three jobs—and it is commonplace to encounter abuse from supervisors.

Student and faculty opinion is openly disdained; alone among major universities, Harvard’s presidential search committee contained not a single student, worker or faculty member. Harvard signs lucrative contracts with companies like Nike, but refuses to deal fairly with the Allston, Cambridge and Watertown residents who fear the destruction of their communities through skyrocketing rents and declining property tax revenues.

Harvard’s secretive and unaccountable governing board is even called the Harvard Corporation. And most of us are so used to things being this way that we never even give them a thought.

If Lawrence H. Summers is to be a successful president, he must take Harvard’s educational mission and its implications seriously; he must value all members of this community, and must respect their concerns as he respects those of Corporation members. He cannot and should not run Harvard like GM, and if he does, the coming years will be some of the most divisive the University has ever seen. To leave these issues unaddressed—to fail to implement a living wage; to preside over a University where people of color are dramatically under-represented in the faculty and over-represented in service work; to keep the Harvard Corporation a secret and unaccountable body; to deepen the area housing crisis; to permit the production of Harvard apparel in sweatshops—is to refuse to respect all members of the Harvard community and the people it affects. As Summers himself told the Los Angeles Times in 1998, “It’s not enough to have a larger pie unless everyone is getting a larger piece.”

Look, no one expects Summers to turn Harvard into a commune. In fact, I’ve spoken to many people—otherwise meek progressive types—who get a secret thrill at the prospect of Summers aggressively wielding tyrannical authority, and who relish the thought of Summers, say, sitting down with law school administrators and telling them to pack their bags for Allston. Such scenarios are appealing because there is a real need for greater centralization, a real need to end the chaos that masquerades as a “philosophy” of decentralization. It hinders the democratic functioning of the school when we have a confusing and sclerotic tangle of fiefdoms instead of a University-wide commitment to hearing and respecting everyone, whether it’s about an outsourced janitor who needs access to affordable health insurance, a faculty member who wants the schools to work together better or a student who demands a women’s center.

And Summers has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make these things happen. As the new guy, he has the chance to change the status quo meaningfully. As he does so, Summers should remember his own words. As he told USA Today while viewing the slums of Jakarta last year, “It’s good to remind oneself that these economic policies have very important implications for real people.” All of Summers’ actions will have important implications for real people in the year ahead: students, faculty and workers. As someone who commands credibility with corporations as Rudenstine never could, it matters all the more that Summers refuse the corporate university model and choose to be a citizen of Harvard instead of its CEO.

Benjamin L. McKean is a member of the Progressive Student Labor Movement and is also a student representative to the Katz committee, which is charged with examining labor policies at Harvard. He is a Crimson editor.