Before Troubles, a Choice to Provoke

“Here goes,” Lawrence H. Summers muttered as he stood in the hallway of the National Bureau of Economic Research on Jan. 14, 2005.

Pacing from wall to wall, the soon-to-be-embattled Harvard president dragged his right forefinger in circles around his mouth, a nervous tic he had developed long ago. It was Summers’ unique mix of contemplation and impatience, what “The Thinker” might do to pass the time. In his hand, he gripped a single page of handwritten notes, the outline of a speech ostensibly titled, “Faculty Diversity: Research Agenda.”

The topic was benign enough, but the president’s demeanor suggested this would be no ordinary academic recitation, recalled two people who saw and overhead him out in the hallway. He looked uneasy, they said, and was still jotting down notes in the few minutes before he spoke.

By every indication, Summers knew he was flirting with trouble. But what Summers did not seem to know—indeed, what would continue to baffle him for months to come—is how his words that day would emerge as some of the most explosive ever uttered in the ivory tower.

The notes Summers had prepared were scattered with underscores and marginal annotations, arrows pointing from one section to another halfway down the page, a map of his mind at work.

At the very top, Summers had written, “women underrepresented,” and next to that an arrow pointing to the one-word question motivating his remarks: “why?”

A photocopy of the notes was examined by The Crimson last month on the condition that the source, who wished to maintain a relationship with Summers and Harvard, not be identified.

Like he does with many of his public addresses, Summers split the speech into three sections—or “three broad hypotheses,” as he told his audience of roughly 40 academics who had gathered for a two-day conference to study the dearth of women in science and engineering. On his sheet of notes, Summers listed the sections over three lines:

• “high-powered job hypothesis,” suggesting that many women eschew time-intensive scientific careers in favor of familial obligations.

• “availability of aptitude at the high end,” contending that a greater number of men than women are capable of extraordinary brilliance in the sciences.

• “socialization and patterns of discrimination,” two separate theories arguing that men might simply prefer science more than women and that claims of gender discrimination in academia appear overstated.

Much has been made of those hypotheses and their relative merits in the year since Summers and his critics brought them into national view. And the notes, which closely mirror the transcript of his remarks that was released a month later, shed scant new light on the president’s thinking.

But perhaps the most significant line of the speech did not appear anywhere in the president’s notes and went largely unnoticed in the ensuing uproar. It was his very first sentence.

Summers began with a nod to Richard Freeman, the Ascherman professor of economics, who organized the conference: “I asked Richard, when he invited me to come here and speak, whether he wanted an institutional talk about Harvard’s policies toward diversity or whether he wanted some questions asked and some attempts at provocation”—and here, ten seconds into the speech, audience members later said they could sense a bomb was about to drop—“because I was willing to do the second and didn’t feel like doing the first.”

Provocation had long been Summers’ modus operandi, but it was unusual for him to admit that outright. Perhaps he felt comfortable inside the confines of what was ostensibly an off-the-record meeting, though nothing said among 40 professors is private. Or perhaps he thought he could remove his University president’s cap for an hour, though he has since acknowledged, in an interview last February, that “your words will never be heard in a way that is entirely separated from your role as president.”

Whatever motivated Summers toward provocation that day, it is now a cliché to note that he succeeded.

Could he have foreseen the riot he was about to provoke? Four years earlier, in an interview with The Crimson just after his appointment as Harvard’s president, Summers offered a note of caution from his career at the U.S. Treasury.

“You learned very quickly that the right way to handle things was to speak with restraint,” he said. “Being provocative and interesting wasn’t always good.”

—Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu.