Cambridge on the Potomac

For Harvard, 'change' means a return to power

OBSERVERS CURIOUS ABOUT the contours of the incoming Obama administration could do worse than scan the pages of the Harvard Crimson. Over the past month and a half, the college paper has treated its readers to a steady diet of stories relaying the news that yet another high-level executive branch job has gone to someone who is, in fund-raising parlance, part of "the Harvard family" - the community of those who, as students or professors or administrators (or in some cases all of the above), have spent time there.

Larry Summers, the university's former president, has been named director of the National Economic Council; and Elena Kagan, the law school dean, is Obama's pick for solicitor general. Arne Duncan, a member of the university's Board of Overseers and a graduate of the college, has been selected education secretary; John Holdren, a professor of environmental policy, and Eric Lander, head of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, are key science advisers. Cass Sunstein, one of the biggest names on the law school faculty, will head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and Julius Genachowski, a law school alum, will head the FCC. There is also the lengthening list of alums and faculty members taking on jobs as deputy secretaries, associate attorney generals, ambassadors, and all the other powerful - albeit not always visible - posts whose occupants hash out and enforce the details of policy.

That Obama's administration will have a Harvard imprint makes sense. A preternaturally self-confident product of the meritocracy, Obama has a reputation as a seeker of the expertise and intellect that Harvard prides itself on attracting. And while it wasn't something he emphasized - or even much mentioned - on the campaign trail, Obama first made a name for himself in Cambridge, as a standout student at Harvard Law School and the first black president of the school's law review. He remains close to many of his mentors and friends from those days, some of whom are on the long Harvard roster in the administration that assumes power this week.

Still, if Washington's new Crimson tint has felt like something of a departure, it's because the Bush years were an era of comparatively slight White House influence for Harvard and its peers. Some Harvard alumni and faculty did serve under Bush, including economics professor Greg Mankiw, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers, as well as college alums John Yoo at the Justice Department and Douglas Feith at the Defense Department, who helped shape the administration's response to terrorism. But the administration's eight years of hiring were shaped by a leeriness of Ivy Leaguers. Bush is vocal in his suspicion of "elites," and the schools that educate and employ them, and his administration tried to create alternative educational feeder systems, looking to institutions like Regent University, a school founded by televangelist Pat Robertson. After this unaccustomed exile, then, many at Harvard can't help savoring a return to the seat of power.

"Harvard prides itself on its people being on the airplanes to Washington all the time," says Theda Skocpol, a sociology professor and Harvard dean.

Since its founding nearly four centuries ago, Harvard's relationship to political power has evolved, the school's prominence ebbing and flowing. But in general the link has grown cozier, and that has gone a long way toward explaining the school's rise from a small seminary for New England gentry to the most prestigious university in the country, if not the world. At the same time, say a few observers, the proximity to power has also brought costs for the university, making it a poster child for a particular brand of intellectual overreach and arrogance - the "best and the brightest" of David Halberstam's book, which chronicled how some of Harvard's finest minds went to Washington with President Kennedy and gave the country the Vietnam War.

Founded in 1636 to educate young men for the Puritan ministry, Harvard has always seen itself as a training ground for leaders. Early on, though, those leaders needed to be men of a particular, refined sort. The college was engulfed by controversy, for example, over the awarding of an honorary degree to President Andrew Jackson. Outraged faculty and alumni protested giving a degree to a man who had risen to the presidency by playing the rough-hewn frontiersman, unsullied by higher learning.

"There were these occasional efforts on the part of the school to ingratiate itself with power, followed by almost at the same moment a strong temptation to dismiss power," says Ted Widmer, a historian who is director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University and a former speechwriter and adviser to President Clinton.

By the early 1900s, that institutional aloofness from the hurly-burly of politics had relaxed, but had not disappeared. One man who dropped in to see A. Lawrence Lowell, president of the university for much of the first half of the 20th century, was told that Lowell was out of town, visiting the White House on business. As Lowell's secretary put it, "The president is in Washington seeing Mr. Taft."

When Harvard alum Franklin Delano Roosevelt ascended to the presidency in 1932, he was able to lure a few professors, most prominently Felix Frankfurter, to Washington to help him fight the Great Depression and manage a federal government massively enlarged by the new bureaucracies he was creating in the effort. Still, the Roosevelt administration was hardly an exodus of Harvard talent. Most Harvard professors and students leaned Republican at the time, and there was deep suspicion of Roosevelt - especially in the economics department, where the New Deal was largely dismissed as an exercise in economic quackery.

By most measures, the apex of Harvard's influence in Washington was the Kennedy administration. President Kennedy was deeply attached to the institution: He and his brothers attended as undergraduates, and he served on the board of overseers. (In 1963, Kennedy hosted the annual overseers dinner at the White House.)

As described in "Making Harvard Modern," a 20th-century history of the university, Kennedy's administration was shot through with Harvard connections: His secretary of defense and secretary of the treasury, his solicitor general, his postmaster general, his ambassadors to India, China, and Japan, all were either Harvard faculty members or men with Harvard credentials - as was his special assistant, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Early in the administration, McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy's national security adviser and a former Harvard dean, sent a note to Harvard president Nathan Pusey inviting him to a party in Washington where the guest list was described as "the President, the President, and the professors they are sharing."

Cartoonists and editorialists commented widely on the influx of Harvard talent, and the sense of outsized importance that came with this "sharing" ultimately proved costly to Harvard, according to Morton Keller, coauthor of "Making Harvard Modern" and an emeritus history professor at Brandeis. It contributed, he argues, to the high-handedness with which the university administration responded to mounting student unhappiness on campus throughout the 1960s, a growing unrest that culminated in the riots and student takeover of a campus administrative building in 1969.

"The people running the school didn't need a boost to their ego," he says. "In the end it did Harvard a lot of harm."

In Keller's argument, the arrogance of the university in dealing with its student uprising was, in a small, almost farcical way, a parallel to the hubris with which Bundy and secretary of defense Robert McNamara (a former Harvard Business School professor) would confidently escalate and then lose control of the war in Vietnam.

But if the Kennedy administration was a high-water mark of Harvard influence, the university continued in the following decades to be a place determinedly engaged with the world of government.

"We're a large institution and our goal is to make the world a better place, to solve problems, to train leaders who can frame public debates," says David Ellwood, the dean of the Kennedy School and a former Clinton administration official. Skocpol contrasts Harvard, for example, with the University of Chicago, where she taught earlier in her career, and where the culture, as she sees it, tends to privilege pure scholarship over political engagement - though, as she points out, Obama's own connections to the University of Chicago have ensured that several faculty members from there remain influential advisers.

That engagement, and history of feeding some of its biggest stars to the federal government, can pose problems, though. When Kagan's appointment as solicitor general was announced, the feeling at the law school was bittersweet. Kagan is widely credited with having brought a newfound sense of excitement, purpose, and congeniality to the school, and there's a worry, especially among students, that without her the place will revert to some of its old bad habits.

As the members of the editorial board of the law school student newspaper wrote soon after the presidential election, it was with a "mix of enthusiasm and regret" that they anticipated the likely move of some of the school's stars into the new administration. Obama, they wrote, "won't be able to build his brain trust without creating a brain drain from Harvard. . . . We hope that the strides the law school has made under [Kagan's] direction are neither stopped nor reversed in the event either of her absence or of an exodus of her many distinguished hires."

Still, at the law school and elsewhere, there's a strong institutional pride over those chosen to serve in the new administration. Despite the whiff of solipsism on campus, and despite the legacy of ambitious failure that still shadows Kennedy's Harvard brain trust, it remains very hard to say no to Washington. After all, most members of the Harvard community would likely agree with Dennis Thompson, a professor of government at the Kennedy School. "It's better that there be a Harvard imprint on the administration than a Regent University imprint on the administration," he says.

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.