Huffington Post on Harvard's Secret Seven

Larry Summers, Robert Rubin: Will The Harvard Shadow Elite Bankrupt The University And The Country?


by Harry R. Lewis
Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and former Dean of Harvard College
Posted: January 12, 2010 07:30 AM

Harvard's Secret Seven

At the heart of the new system of power, says Janine Wedel, is "a decline in loyalty to institutions" and "the proliferation of players who swoop in and out of organizations with which they are affiliated." There is no more vivid example of this phenomenon than Harvard University, which for centuries was held together by institutional loyalty. Today, that loyalty has eroded, and those at the top act much more flexibly. Yet they still enjoy almost unlimited power. Like all forms of mismanagement, Harvard's woes call for transparency and accountability. The story resonates to Washington, where Harvard's power elite is deeply entangled.

Harvard lost $11 billion from its endowment last year, plus another $2 billion by gambling with operating cash and $1 billion in bad bets on interest rate fluctuations. Harvard had been borrowing vast sums to leverage its assets and to expand its physical plant; its president, Lawrence Summers, had described as "extraordinary investments" what ordinary people would call crushing debt. The only way to balance the looming deficits was through huge investment returns. The speculating worked for a while, but when the bubble burst, Harvard was left almost insolvent.

A presidential resignation might have been expected, but Summers, the president most responsible for Harvard's unsustainable growth plan, had resigned already--he is now a top economic adviser to Barack Obama. In any case, plenty of costly mistakes were made after he left. In this era of heightened corporate accountability, one might have expected instead a shake-up of Harvard's board. But Harvard's directors are invulnerable.

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