The Lawrence Summers I Knew

By Keith Boykin, in pop culture
Wednesday, February 22 2006, 12:01AM

Under pressure from faculty and board members, Harvard President Lawrence Summers abruptly resigned yesterday. In just five years as the head of the Ivy League school, Summers managed to alienate many of the people who should have been his allies. But his announcement reminded me of several encounters I had had with Summers over the years, most recently last fall.

It was a pleasant day in September and many of the leading lights in black America had gathered on the lawn of the Harvard Law School. Assembled under the tent were Franklin Raines, Cornel West, Barack Obama, Deborah Lee, Charles Ogletree, Randall Kennedy, Ellis Cose, David Wilkins and many others. And then there was Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University. Summers's speech that day could most charitably be characterized as unusual.

Visibly uncomfortable at the event, President Summers spent most of his time thanking the others who were gathered there. He even thanked Conrad Harper, the only black member of Harvard's elite 7-member governing corporation, who had resigned his position to protest the president's leadership.

The tension was also noticeable as Summers stood before an audience that included one of the nation's most recognized black intellectuals, Cornel West, who had left Harvard for Princeton to get away from Summers. Then when Summers spoke, he did the unthinkable. He mispronounced the name of Barack Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School who is also the only African American in the U.S. Senate. It was an unbelievable mistake for the president of Harvard University, but then again it was not so surprising given the man who was speaking.

I first met Lawrence Summers back in 1988 on the Dukakis for President campaign. Summers was a noted economist and an adviser to Governor Dukakis. I was a young college graduate traveling everyday on the governor's campaign plane. We met over M&Ms. I had just opened a box on the plane when Summers leaned over and asked me for some. Five minutes later, the box was empty and Summers had poured every last M&M into his mouth. That was my first impression of Lawrence Summers.

I met him again in the Clinton White House when Summers came on board first as an economic adviser and later as Secretary of the Treasury. He didn't hold the position long, but his name is still on American dollars circulating throughout the world today. Following the direction set by his predecessor Robert Rubin, he helped to steady the economy in the final years of the Clinton Administration.

And then there was Harvard. The president of Harvard received only polite applause when he spoke last fall to his own alumni. He delivered an uninspiring speech filled with platitudes that touched on need blind admissions and the importance of international experience, among other topics. He talked about the university's $20 billion endowment and he talked about the hurricane that had just devastated New Orleans.

Then he said something that made me stand up. There are more blacks in prison than in higher education, he told the crowd of well-to-do Harvard alumni. It was a vaguely familiar statistic, but it had one fatal flaw. It wasn't true. There were actually far more blacks in higher education than in prison. Even among black men, there were far more black men 18-25 in college than in prison. The president of Harvard should know that, so I stood up to question him about it. To his credit, he acknowledged that he may have been wrong, and he asked for a copy of my book, which one of the organizers agreed to provide him.

That was the last time I saw Lawrence Summers. But when I read the news on Tuesday that he had resigned as president of Harvard, I was not the least bit surprised. Summers is still a very intelligent man, but intelligence is not enough to be the president of a major university. It takes diplomacy, leadership, personality, character and some humility. Hopefully the next president will bring all of those skills to the table.

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