Larry Summers Speeches/Comments

Freshman Orientation Day Address
President Lawrence H. Summers
September 2, 2001
If I may, welcome fellow members of the class of 2005. Having just returned to Harvard, I think of myself as a member of your class. I have been here since July enjoying an indoor orientation program of my own, not precisely the same as the orientation that you have enjoyed, but perhaps there have been some similarities in the experience.
Around the first week of July, I walked into the Coop, and I said that I was Mr. Summers, the new President of the University, and that I'd like to get a Coop number. The person behind the counter looked at me, and said, 'Well, that's very nice. Do you have a Harvard ID?' I said, no, I didn't. I went without a Coop number.
I'm sure we'll all get lost and confused more than once. And I'm equally sure that we will all enjoy this new beginning together.
Let me say a word about your class, a word about Harvard and what it means, a word about the great things we can do together, and finally, a final thought for your families.
This class is truly a remarkable group of people. Already you include professional level musicians and successful Internet entrepreneurs, published scientists and published poets, star athletes and dedicated social service providers, speakers of more than a dozen languages, and experts in countless areas. Every one of you has stood out, and every one of you has great potential.
Many of you must wonder -- I know I did when I went away to college -- what life would be like in a world so different from your high school, and in a world and living situation so different from that of your family home.
I know that when I was called on to respond to my appointment as President of Harvard, I found myself saying how exhilarated I was, but also, that I was a bit daunted to be here. And so are we all, given Harvard's history.
But to say that your classmates are impressive is not to say that anyone should ever be intimidated. You know, Harry Truman said of the United States Senate, that 'The first six months, I wondered why I was there. And ever after, I wondered why all my colleagues were there.'
That may be taking things a bit too far, but everyone here belongs, and everyone will find their place.
What about Harvard? You know, I must, at this point, confess that I did my undergraduate work at a small technical school located down Massachusetts Avenue, but also, along the Charles River. But I think I do know much about what is special about great universities, and especially about this one.
There will be many things, many traditions, that you will come to know. But you will come to understand what I believe is most important about this place -- that it is a center of new and original thought and ideas. And it is ideas that are ultimately most important in this world.
Isiaih Berlin remarked that governments fall because of ideas developed by a professor in the quiet of his study. At the beginning of this century, an American could expect to live only to the age that I now am, about 47. Today, you all -- students, anyway -- can expect to live until nearly the age of 80. And there's really only one fundamental reason, new ideas in the medical and biological sciences.
We think about the conceptions we have of ourselves, conceptions we have of our family, conceptions we have of relations between the sexes. They are the way they are today only because of the development of new ideas, new conceptions, new theories, new imaginations.
This University is, above all, founded on a core conviction that ideas, their development, and their transmission are what is ultimately most important.
Now, I've said that as President of Harvard, strengthening the undergraduate educational experience here is one of the most important priorities that I face. How can you get the most out of your time here?
As hard as it may be to imagine, in just 45 months, most of you will be Harvard alumni. And for 361 years, Harvard's alumni have been literate, opinionated, and vocal chroniclers of their Harvard experience and what it has meant.
I read this summer about how the great jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes said that he had been -- and these are his words - "set on fire in his freshman year by reading the essays of Emerson." If I had but one wish for each of you, it is that in the years ahead you be set on fire, that your mind be captured by some set of external questions, by some area of human understanding; that you develop a passion for understanding, for progressing, that is so central to successful people everywhere.
This University and its faculty have no more important goal than helping you in this quest. How? It's hard to say. Fires can't be controlled. Passions can't be predicted or planned. You are all different.
But I give this advice:
First, follow your passion, not your calculation. What you will remember of your time here will be the special experiences, the things that really catch your imagination. Choose courses that cohere. Follow a program towards your objectives. But most importantly, do what catches your imagination. If there is something you really want to do, some curiosity that you want to pursue, make sure that you do it, and don't let anything stand in your way.
Second, the faculty is here for you. There is no more important responsibility for any of us as members of the faculty than teaching and working with you, the students of Harvard College.
One of the former young men -- I guess he's middle-aged now -- who's now one of the stars of our Economics Department, was at one time a sophomore at Harvard College. He approached me and said, 'Professor Summers, the paper you wrote is really quite good, but it has a few mistakes. I'd like a job as a research assistant.' That led to an enormously productive relationship for both of us. It may not be everyone's chosen approach to the faculty.
But I promise you -- I promise you that you will find faculty very willing to respond to your interests, to your curiosity, and to your invitations. Do not feel that you are ever wasting anyone's time pursuing your curiosity or your interest. That is what we are all here for.
The last thing I would say is focus on ideas. This is an extraordinary, rich, and diverse community. There are enormous opportunities of all kinds -- extracurricular, athletic, social. Those experiences will have a huge impact on many of you. But I hope that none of you will lose sight of how special this time in your life is. It's a time to learn. It's a time to expose yourself, as you likely will only do during this period in your lifetime, to ideas that are completely different from what you have done, what you have seen, perhaps even from what you will see.
I was very struck by the story in "Time Magazine" two weeks ago about a Harvard professor in the Medical School who had been named by "Time Magazine" as, at this point, a leading researcher in cardiology in the United States. He talked about how, during his undergraduate years, he had studied English and had studied furniture because he knew that for the rest of his life, he would be studying medicine and biology. And that was a curiosity that he wanted to satisfy. And so he did, and it didn't seem to have held him back.
You can focus on ideas. Remember that faculty is here for you, and pursue our passion. You, too, can be lighted on fire during your years here.
Let me conclude with one final thought, if I may. I remember very well, like it was yesterday, the day just about exactly 30 years ago today when I bid my own parents farewell after a similar ceremony at MIT. I remember the look in my parents' eyes that day, the pride in what I was going to do, the sadness that I would not be at the family breakfast table the next day, the excitement about their son's future, the apprehension about their son's future.
This day does, in some ways, mark the end of one stage in the relationship between parent and child. But it also represents the beginning of a different and equally fulfilling stage in a relationship between child and parent. Students call often. Parents call back. If I may presume myself, colleagues of the Class of 2005, good luck and Godspeed to us all.

HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES
September 19, 2001
Dear Members of the Harvard Community:
The shocking events of last week leave all of us with a profound and enduring sense of loss. We grieve together for the victims and their loved ones, and we contemplate a world altered by the unspeakable acts of September 11th, even as we do our best to resume our daily lives.
Especially at so trying a time, we must work to ensure that the diversity of our community remains a source of strength and mutual support, not a source of division or conflict. Each of us should be mindful in these difficult days to treat all other members of our community, from all backgrounds, with civility, decency, and respect. Maintaining such a spirit of tolerance will honor the victims of September 11th by affirming the ideals and values that lie at the heart of our university and our nation. It will also help us to sustain an environment in which all of us at Harvard can continue to feel secure and at home.
I also want you to know that, in light of the recent tragedy, the University intends to make a $1 million contribution toward scholarship assistance for the children and spouses of victims of last week’s events. These scholarships will be based on need and may be used to attend colleges and universities across the country. We are working with colleagues in the field of higher education to identify the most effective way to organize a scholarship fund to meet educational needs.
I know that many of you have already made individual contributions to various relief organizations, and I know that others wish to do so as well. The University is exploring a number of ways in which it may facilitate community giving, including providing information on various relief organizations and projects, facilitating payroll deductions, and designating convenient collection points for donations. Information will be posted on the Harvard home page in the near future.
We may well have a long road ahead. But I have been profoundly impressed over the last week by your generosity in helping our community and others understand and respond to the terrible events of last week.

Sincerely, Lawrence H. Summers


Transcript of address at Morning Prayers, Memorial Church
President Lawrence H. SummersSeptember 21, 2001
I expected, in the first month of the term, to visit many parts of the university. This pulpit was not one of them.
It was just ten days ago, just this moment right now, that the world was turned upside down. Ten days -- long enough to reflect but far too short to comprehend or understand. Ten days. Still time to grieve, and also time to ask 'how will we go on?' As individuals, we will come together, again and again, as we must, in settings like this, to reflect, to pray, to comfort one another, and to honor those who have died.
We remind ourselves, as I did this weekend in Washington, as I went to my children's soccer games, my children's baseball games, my children's dance concerts, birthday parties for my children's friends, that the time we spend with our loved ones is most precious. That we are each blessed to live lives of value, and we must take advantage of that opportunity to its fullest, every day.
But what of us as a university community? We have a special opportunity, and a special responsibility.
We can uphold civility and reason, the values for which we stand, in the face of terror and fanaticism.
We can -and we will - practice inclusiveness and understanding in stark repudiation of prejudice and hatred, and refuse in this community, to tolerate intolerance.
We can, and we have, offer our assistance and support to those directly touched by the terror and the violence.
We can, and we will, debate means and tactics, but all will share in the national and global commitment to victory in the struggle against terrorism.
And, in the fullness of time, we will strive to help ourselves and to help others understand the larger patterns, the meanings, and the future implications of the horrendous events still so fresh in our minds - from perspectives that range from religion to public policy, from history to technology, from psychology to public health, from sociology to law, and beyond. For that is, after all, what we do at a university: contribute in the way we think, in the way we teach, in the way we learn.
But beyond these widely shared sentiments, there is another question. A set of questions that is in the air for many. With what's going on in the world, does it matter if I do my calculus homework or go to field hockey practice? With all that is going on in the world, is it right to carry on with my work of managing accounts or teaching my small class?
These are important questions. They deserve a response. The answer is that yes it does matter, and it matters more than it ever did before. Our character as individuals and as a community is tested much more in bad times, in difficult times, than in good. We support our selves, our community, and our society every hour of every day when we carry forward the important work of learning and teaching, thinking and discussing -- that is what this community is about.
We win an important victory over those who perpetrate this heinous deed when we carry on with what is most important to us, and we do not allow them to divert us from our chosen tasks. We win an important victory when we continue to be an example of those human values -the desire to share with the world tolerance, a sense of community -- that are most important -- when we are a beacon to others and the nation.
We will prevail in the struggle in which we are now engaged because we will not succumb to the temptation of nihilism. We will carry on our work. We will make every day count.
In doing so, we will emerge shaken, but ultimately stronger in the face of what has happened. We will show that we have great hope for the future, despite what has happened. And despite what has happened, we will cherish the ideals on which this university and our nation were founded all the more.

Remarks to Yale TercentennialPresident Lawrence H. Summers New Haven, ConnecticutOctober 5, 2001
President Levin, members of the Corporation, members of the faculty, students, parents, and extended members of the university family,
I am honored to convey to this gathering the good wishes of the men and women of Harvard University. And I am gratified to share with President Tilghman the responsibility of representing the nation's institutions of higher learning at a ceremonial event of such importance.
Three hundred years ago, an epic chapter opened in the book of our national experience when the Puritan divines of Connecticut embarked on a lively new enterprise.
Tired of sending their children to Massachusetts Bay for schooling; tired in particular of the quarrelsome Cambridge institution erected for that purpose, they launched the Collegiate School, soon to be renamed for all eternity Yale College.
It was a decision of immense moment for New England, for education, and for the future growth of the United States of America.
And frankly, we have never forgiven you.
For three centuries, your very existence has been a gentle reminder of Harvard's imperfections. More than one observer recorded his opinion that it was not only Yale's potential, but also Harvard's deficiency that impelled Yale's founders to cross the Rubicon – or in this case, the Quinnipiac.
And then there's the whole business about mottoes. Harvard's is Veritas. Yale chose "Lux et Veritas." The message was unmistakeable: Harvard lacks Lux. We were judged, in other words, to be in the dark. Thank you. On the athletic fields, in the libraries, and the laboratories -- we shall see.
A certain ambivalence surrounds Harvard and Yale's connection.
In the spirit of Veritas, I should rely on your discretion not to pass the word back to Cambridge that I was born at the Yale New Haven hospital.
I must also say that I was initially struck to learn that of Yale's twelve founders, eleven earned their degree in Cambridge – a statistic that would seem more impressive were it not for the fact that there was nowhere else to go to college north of Williamsburg.
And finally, three years ago, when a member of the Harvard faculty was named to the Yale Corporation, President Levin's comments captured the nature of Yale's limited spirit of generosity by remarking that, "obviously you wouldn't want a Corporation composed of fourteen Harvard professors – but one shouldn't hurt."
We joke about our rivalry, without ever fully concealing our robust mutual admiration. In a real and deep sense, we are colleagues spurring each other forward and promoting values that we both share.
1701 is a long time ago, but it is not so long ago. We were allied then, and we have been allies since, as the world has changed around us and occasionally because of us. Harvard and Yale's audacious quest for truth quickened the quest for liberty that reached its full flowering in Philadelphia 75 years after Yale's founding. Harvard and Yale stood together inside Independence Hall, just as they have always stood together when freedom needed defenders, from Antietam to Guadalcanal to the World Trade Center.
Forty years ago, a Harvard alumnus, John F. Kennedy, reminded a Yale audience much like this one today of our common mission that "a great university is always enlisted against the spread of illusion and on the side of reality."
Now more than ever, the values we share - the commitment to truth, to tolerance, to the power of ideas - has great importance. We have been reminded these last days that there is dark as well as light in the world, courage as well as fright, and wrong as well as right.
Great universities connect us not just with our history and our values, but also with each other, and our future. Harvard today is proud to join in celebrating the greatness that is Yale University.

Address of Lawrence H. SummersPresident, Harvard University
October 12, 2001
I accept!
Members of the University community, friends of Harvard from far and wide: we celebrate today a ritual generations older than our nation -- a joyous ritual -- a solemn ritual -- that reinforces our sense of tradition and community.
To begin, we acknowledge all who have come before us, all of those who have built Harvard from a small school in a cow yard centuries ago to the vibrant university of today. We are truly blessed by their efforts.
I want especially to recognize one person's leadership. Neil Rudenstine stood in this place ten Octobers ago. His vision, his dedication, his care, have left Harvard far stronger than he found it. Neil, thank you!
Neil and I both know what President Edward Holyoke, who by the way was not an orthopedist, and lends his name to the chair on which the Harvard President sits, said in 1769: "If any man wishes to be humbled and mortified, let him become President of Harvard College."
Humbled, yes; mortified, I hope not; excited and exhilarated, for sure. I pledge my energy to Harvard's work.
Today's gathering is about more than any individual or any office. Harvard's distinction, and its promise, flow from all who are here. From this entire community, from all those who read books, who write books, who shelve books. From all who do their part in the constant quest to make a great university a greater one.
I will do my best to hear Harvard's many voices, and to respond. I admire President Eliot, but not for me his view that a Harvard president should be measured by, and I quote, "the capacity to inflict pain." Nor, I hasten to reassure you, his predilection for the hour and three-quarter inaugural address.
And much as I admire the movie Love Story, I do not believe that being president means never having to say you're sorry.
The Torch of Truth
We meet now in the shadow of the terrible and tragic events of September 11th. These events give fresh meaning to Franklin Roosevelt's words from this stage 65 years ago. Said Roosevelt: "It is the part of Harvard and America to stand for the freedom of the human mind and to carry the torch of truth."
And so, in our present struggle, we do our part, we carry that torch,
When we show support for the victims and their families;
When we honor those who defend our freedom and the calling of public service;
When we stand as an example of openness and tolerance to all of goodwill;
And, above all, when we promote understanding -- not the soft understanding that glides over questions of right and wrong, but the hard-won comprehension that the threat before us demands.
We will prevail in this struggle -- prevail by carrying on the ordinary acts of learning and playing, caring and loving -- the extraordinarily important acts that make up our daily lives. And we will prevail by recognizing anew that each of us owes it to all of us to be part of something larger than ourselves. And here we are.
Today we recommit ourselves to the university's enduring service to society -- through scholarship of the highest quality, and through the profound act of faith in the future that is teaching and learning.
A World of Ideas
Great universities like this one have become more worldly in recent years.
More and more of us directly engage with the problems of the day.
Whether whispering in the ear of a President or helping museums preserve great art;
whether establishing legal foundations for civil society in distant lands or advising on the ethics of life-and-death medical decisions;
whether planning cities of the future or finding better ways to teach children to read.
The people of the university make contributions every day.
This is good and it is important. That we serve in this way reflects the immediate and practical utility of the knowledge developed and taught here.
But the practical effectiveness of what we do must never obscure what is most special and distinctive about universities like this one: that they are communities in which truth -- Veritas -- is pursued first and last as an end in itself -- not for any tangible reward or worldly impact.
Whether reading great literature, or discovering new states of matter, or developing philosophies of ordered liberty, it is the pursuit of truth, insight, and understanding that most defines enlightened civilization.
Indeed, when the history of this time is written, it will be a history of ideas -- and of the educated women and men whose intellect, imagination, and humanity brought them forth and carried them to fruition.
It will, in large part, be a history of what has come forth from campuses like this one.
Creative Tensions
I will speak in a few minutes about some of the specific challenges that Harvard faces in coming years.
But I want to say a word first about the singular success of universities as social institutions. Though they are sometimes derided as remote or not relevant, universities, and Harvard in particular, have an extraordinary staying power -- as we are reminded by this ritual -- in a volatile and changing world.
Why?
The answer may lie in some of the creative tensions that are at the heart of the academic enterprise.
The university is open to all ideas, but it is committed to the skepticism that is the hallmark of education. All ideas are worthy of consideration here -- but not all perspectives are equally valid.
Openness means a willingness to listen to ideas -- but also the obligation to sift and test them -- to expose them to the critical judgments of disinterested scholars and a discerning public.
We must be neither slaves to dogma nor uncritical followers of fashion. We must exalt neither novelty nor orthodoxy for their own sake.
Our special obligation is to seek what is true -- not what is popular or easy, not what is conventionally believed, but what is right and in the deepest and most rigorous sense advances our understanding of the world.
Universities are places of ideas but also places of idealism. We owe allegiance to the dispassionate pursuit of truth. But universities -- and certainly this one -- have been and should always be places of passionate moral commitment.
We cultivate what is special and intellectual here, but we must also nurture the value of generous public service to society beyond these walls.
This takes on a special importance at a moment like this, when we have an opportunity to awaken a new generation to the satisfactions of serving society.
And not just as individuals do we serve, for as a university we serve. Most importantly, always through our teaching and our scholarship, we must avoid temptations to take on tasks beyond our scope and our capacity.
But we can -- and we will -- meet our obligations to members of our campus community and to the communities in which we reside.
Perhaps the most important creative tension in our university is this: we carry ancient traditions, but what is new is most important for us.
Our most enduring tradition is that we are forever young.
Our historic buildings always house new students. We venerate our past but we succeed and endure only when the university renews itself in each generation.
Renewal does not just mean doing new things and growing larger. It means moving beyond activities that have run their course, being selective and disciplined about the most critical paths to pursue, and nimbly and rapidly responding to the opportunities created by a changing world.
Harvard is strong today -- to keep it strong we will need to maintain that careful balance that has sustained us so long, between openness and skepticism, between the imperatives of thought and service, and between tradition and innovation.
Challenges Ahead
Now is the time to consider Harvard's challenges for a new century. We come here together at a moment when this university is fortunate in all that it possesses -- physically, financially, and most of all intellectually.
But we will -- and we should -- be judged not by what we have, but by what we do, not by what we accumulate, but by what we contribute.
Undergraduate Learning
First, we will need in the years ahead to ensure that teaching and learning are everything they can be here, especially at the very heart of the university -- Harvard College.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said late in his life that he was "set on fire" in his freshman year here by reading and discussing the essays of Emerson.
We are exceptionally fortunate in the students who choose to come here. To do them justice, it is our task to set their minds on fire.
We must help them to find what intrigues them most, press them to meet the highest standards of intellectual excellence and start them on a lifetime quest for knowledge and truth.
This has many aspects:
- It means assuring that the academic experience is at the center of the college experience.- It means strengthening and expanding our distinguished faculty to embrace new areas of learning.- It means thinking carefully about what we teach, and how we teach, recognizing that any curriculum, course of study, or form of pedagogy can always be improved.
And what is most crucial is this: Whether in the classroom or the common room, the library or the laboratory, we will assure more of what lies at the heart of the educational experience -- direct contact between teacher and student.
I speak from experience. A moment ago, Karen Kelly mentioned her freshman Ec 10 section -- the first class she took at Harvard and the first class I ever taught.
Karen, as we sat in my office talking about elasticity, I don't think either of us imagined that we would be here a quarter century later. I don't know if you and your classmates learned anything much in that class, but I do know that I learned very, very much.
Coming Together
Second, we need to come together as a university -- a community of scholars and students -- doing different things but united by common convictions and common objectives.
Every tub may rest on its own bottom, but all draw on the reservoir of knowledge and tradition that Harvard represents. And the strength and reputation of each depend upon the strength of all.
We will not sacrifice the flexibility and innovation that autonomy promotes. But we will assure that Harvard, as one university, exceeds -- by ever more -- the sum of its parts.
Discoveries are no longer confined by traditional academic boundaries. Many students no longer crave careers confined to a single profession or field. Specific programs and initiatives have had and will have an important place in responding to these realities.
But real and ultimate success will come only as our culture changes -- only when each of us in a single part of the University is genuinely part of Harvard University as a whole.
The University in this regard has a historic opportunity to create a new Harvard campus for centuries to come.
Think about how grateful we are right now for the vision of those who built the Business School's magnificent campus in what was once a Boston swamp, or helped create the Kennedy School from what was once a not-very-attractive train yard.
If we make the right choices -- if we take full advantage of a physical opportunity across the river in Allston -- an opportunity to create a campus that is several times as large as this whole yard -- we will have earned the gratitude of future generations.
Let us make these choices as a university, as a community, and let us choose well.
Ultimately we are a community though, more of people than of buildings. As we work to strengthen this community, let us reaffirm our common commitment to being ever more open and inclusive.
We have come a long way. A century ago this was an institution where New England gentlemen taught other New England gentlemen.
Today, Harvard is open to men and women of all faiths, all races, all classes, all states, all nations. As a result, we offer a better education to better students who make us a better university.
And yet, as proud as we all are that any student, as we so often stress, can attend Harvard College regardless of financial circumstance or need, I say to you that we should not rest until much the same is true of all this great university.
Inability to pay does not constrain students from coming to Harvard College and it should not constrain the most able students from coming here to Harvard to become scholars, or doctors, architects or teachers.
Revolution in Science
Third, the scientific revolution now in progress demands and compels all of our attention.
Steps from here, scholars, individuals, sitting in offices, are able to fathom what happened in detail in the first billionth of a second of the cosmos billions of years ago. They begin now to comprehend the deep structure of matter and the biological and chemical basis for life.
We are beginning to understand in a rigorous and clear way the inner workings of the human mind.
As a consequence of all of this, as a consequence of science, we have seen life expectancy come close to doubling in the last century, from the mid-forties to the long life expectancies that await the young people who are here today. And all of that was before what looks to be the century of biology and life science.
Still, we live in a society, and dare I say a university, where few would admit -- and none would admit proudly -- to not having read any plays by Shakespeare or to not knowing the meaning of the categorical imperative, but where it is all too common and all too acceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome or the meaning of exponential growth.
Part of our task will be to assure that all who graduate from this place are equipped to comprehend, to master, to work with, the scientific developments that are transforming the world in which we will all work and live.
In a time when multi-billion-dollar projects sequence the genome, at a time when scientific papers are written that have 300 authors, to discern how the university is able to adapt its traditional structures to most effectively engage the adventure of science will pose a closely related challenge.
Science does illuminate the human condition, but many of the most perplexing questions -- including some generated by science itself -- cannot be answered by science alone.
These questions will demand in the future, as they always have in the past, the kind of insight that can come only from philosophers, artists, historians, critics -- from creative works, and those who study them, that illuminate the essence of who we are as humans.
Extending Excellence
Finally, over time, the converging phenomena of globalization and new information technologies may well alter -- will alter -- the university in ways that we can now only dimly perceive.
The Internet and other innovations in information technology represent the most dramatic change in the way that we share and we pursue knowledge since the invention of the printing press. The rippling effects of that invention took centuries to play out and shaped universities and their structure for all our time. And I have no doubt, the same will be true of information technology.
As globalization continues, the opportunity to make a difference through our teaching and our scholarship becomes far more pervasive than ever before.
A century ago, Harvard was becoming a national university. Today, while strongly rooted in American traditions and values, it is becoming a global university.
We will, in the years ahead, need to think very carefully about technology, about globalization, and how we can enable us to contribute as much to as many as possible.
We will also need to assure that we do not compromise our high standards. Our goal will be to extend excellence without ever diluting it.
The Adventure of Our Times
In this new century, nothing will matter more than the education of future leaders and the development of new ideas.
Harvard has done its part in the past. But that past will be prologue only if all of us now do our part to make it so.
We will face difficult choices. We will take risks. Sometimes we will fail. Indeed, if we never fail, we will not have participated as fully as we can in the adventure of our times.
Like all great universities, Harvard has always been a work in progress, and it always will be. In the words of the song we are about to sing, let us together renew this great university for the age that is waiting before.


Statement on diversity at Harvard UniversityPresident Lawrence H. SummersJanuary 2, 2002
A number of questions have been asked in recent days about the University's position and my own views on diversity. I thought a brief statement might be helpful in this regard.
I take pride in Harvard's longstanding commitment to diversity. I believe it is essential for us to maintain that commitment, working to create an ever more open and inclusive environment that draws on the widest possible range of talents. Our approach to admissions, cited as a model in the nation's highest court, advances our compelling interest in racial and other forms of diversity. Diversity contributes to educational excellence by enabling outstanding students, faculty, and staff of all backgrounds to come together and learn from one another. I look forward to working with colleagues at Harvard and elsewhere to promote ever greater opportunity for all.
With regard to the Afro-American Studies program at Harvard, we are proud of this program collectively and of each of its individual members. We would very much like to see the current faculty stay at Harvard and will compete vigorously to make this an attractive environment.


Statement from President Lawrence H. Summers
Regarding Petition "for Divestment from Israel"
May 16, 2002
I have received various inquiries about the petition signed by a number of individuals at Harvard and MIT urging the universities to "divest from Israel." Let me state clearly that Harvard has no intention of doing so. Members of our community are free as individuals to express their diverse views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the conduct of the parties involved. The university protects that freedom, and affirms its proper role, by resisting calls to issue institutional judgments on that conflict through the act of divestment. Harvard is first and foremost a center of learning, not an institutional organ for advocacy on such a complex and controversial international conflict. On that proposition I hope we can all come to agree.


Harvard University Statement of Values August, 2002
Dear Members of the Harvard Community:
The attached "Statement of Values," endorsed by the Academic Advisory Group, which includes the President, the Provost, and the Deans of the Faculties, represents an effort to articulate basic values that should be reflected in policy and practice throughout the University. Although we recognize that our various Schools and units have distinctive missions, cultures, and ways of doing business, it is important that we, as a community, embrace certain values as a means of creating and sustaining an environment of trust and mutual understanding.
We are guided in this undertaking by the positive experience of certain of our Schools that have developed values statements and established processes for implementing them, and by the work of the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies, chaired by Lawrence Katz. The Committee articulated the significance of dignity and respect for all who work on this campus, and coupled its recommendations concerning tangible compensation for service workers with suggested measures to improve the quality of work life.
The attached statement identifies a set of basic values that should inform work at Harvard. I have asked each Dean and Vice President to initiate a process early in the Fall to make sure that members of their local communities are aware of and understand the shared workplace values stated here, as well as others they may choose to affirm. I have further requested that they identify individuals in their local communities to whom faculty, students, and staff may turn if they perceive a problem.
In addition, we plan to appoint a University ombudsperson whose services will be available to anyone in the University community concerned about workplace conditions. Many universities have found that an ombudsperson can serve as a useful resource on issues relating to the quality of work life. We have examined models for this kind of position, and we will work cooperatively with the schools to ensure an appropriate relation between the ombuds function and the existing mechanisms within Schools and departments.
All who work at Harvard, regardless of rank or position, contribute in vital ways to education and scholarship. The attached statement of values, and the processes to implement them, are designed to ensure that our policies and practices reflect this principle.
With all best wishes,
Sincerely,
Lawrence H. Summers

Harvard University Statement of Values
August 2002
Harvard University aspires to provide education and scholarship of the highest quality — to advance the frontiers of knowledge and to prepare individuals for life, work, and leadership. Achieving these aims depends on the efforts of thousands of faculty, students, and staff across the University. Some of us make our contribution by engaging directly in teaching, learning, and research, others of us, by supporting and enabling those core activities in essential ways. Whatever our individual roles, and wherever we work within Harvard, we owe it to one another to uphold certain basic values of the community. These include:
Respect for the rights, differences, and dignity of others
Honesty and integrity in all dealings
Conscientious pursuit of excellence in one’s work
Accountability for actions and conduct in the workplace The more we embrace these values in our daily lives, the more we create and sustain an environment of trust, cooperation, lively inquiry, and mutual understanding — and advance a commitment to education and scholarship, which all of us share.


Remarks of Harvard University PresidentLawrence H. SummersHarvard YardCambridge, MassachusettsSeptember 11, 2002
A year ago on this day, we came together in this place to share our grief, to face our fear, to begin making sense of a world torn open.
We now come together again. We vowed then that we would remember and we have.
We remember where we were when we heard. We remember the shock as we watched planes hit symbols of our strength, the horror as we watched people jump to their deaths, the fear in the voices of our families and friends, the dread in our own hearts.
We remember, too, with respect and awe those who climbed stairs into fire risking all and those who searched the ruins for survivors, working past their own strength until all hope was exhausted.
We remember how we in this community supported each other through hours on the phone; braced each other through days of uncertainty, through the weeks when our usual fall business -- of teaching and learning, studying and playing -- seemed never more beside the point, and yet never more crucial.
We remember our fear of what would come next. For we value life and love on earth, and when they are lost, we suffer and we grieve.
Today we remember tenderly and fondly those who were lost. We remember the parents forced to mourn their children; the children suddenly without a parent; the lovers forever separated.
As we grieve for each innocent life lost, we cannot evade the truth that what we commemorate here today is more just than the tragedy of human lives lost multiplied thousands of times over. It is the result of a calculated plan to murder unsuspecting people, innocent people - not because of anything they did or even anything they stood for -- but because they were members of this national community enjoying the fruits of freedom.
Those who killed on September 11 and those who celebrate the killing remind us of the eternal existence of evil. And we regard the world with understanding and openness, but we must also face it with moral clarity. We may debate the nature of truth, but there are truths beyond debate. Pursuit of that truth is our particular objective.
On Sept 11th, our generation learned, as generations before us have had to learn, that the values of life and liberty we venerate cannot be taken for granted but must be the constant object of our common purpose. For we saw that there are no ivory towers or impregnable fortresses — we are bound together.
A renewed commitment to our common purpose in this university, this nation and this world -- let this be a lasting legacy of the terrible events of a year ago. Let us each in our own way make common purpose an objective of our very individual strivings.
Let us advance the common purpose by refusing to excuse or legitimate terror but, equally, by insisting that every person be seen fairly as an individual and not on their race or their creed.
Let us honor those who are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to defend our freedom and show our support for those among us who have the courage to make that fateful choice.
Let us manifest our common purpose by renewing our commitment to this nation and, above all, to the values for which it stands.
Let us reflect -- carefully, courageously, drawing upon our accumulated knowledge and all our capacity to reason -- how we can best defend and advance the ideal of freedom. Let our moral clarity be translated not into reflexive revenge but into determination to prevail against terror and build a better world.
For ultimately, we will be judged not by what we oppose, but by what together we work towards. Privileged to be part of a great university, let us marshal all that we know and all that we can learn to strengthen the ties between the world’s peoples. Let our calling be to use our knowledge to build a world of deeper understanding, greater justice, and heightened respect for human life. For centuries, Harvard has been proud to serve the American nation; and now, increasingly, we are called to serve the world as well.
Together, on this somber day, in this green and tranquil yard, we think back with sadness, we draw strength from each other, we look ahead with hope. Our memory fortifies our resolve as we go forward in pursuit of truth -- our high and common purpose.

Address at morning prayersMemorial ChurchCambridge, MassachusettsSeptember 17, 2002
I speak with you today not as President of the University but as a concerned member of our community about something that I never thought I would become seriously worried about -- the issue of anti-Semitism.
I am Jewish, identified but hardly devout. In my lifetime, anti-Semitism has been remote from my experience. My family all left Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. The Holocaust is for me a matter of history, not personal memory. To be sure, there were country clubs where I grew up that had few if any Jewish members, but not ones that included people I knew. My experience in college and graduate school, as a faculty member, as a government official -- all involved little notice of my religion.
Indeed, I was struck during my years in the Clinton administration that the existence of an economic leadership team with people like Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Charlene Barshefsky and many others that was very heavily Jewish passed without comment or notice -- it was something that would have been inconceivable a generation or two ago, as indeed it would have been inconceivable a generation or two ago that Harvard could have a Jewish President.
Without thinking about it much, I attributed all of this to progress -- to an ascendancy of enlightenment and tolerance. A view that prejudice is increasingly put aside. A view that while the politics of the Middle East was enormously complex, and contentious, the question of the right of a Jewish state to exist had been settled in the affirmative by the world community.
But today, I am less complacent. Less complacent and comfortable because there is disturbing evidence of an upturn in anti-Semitism globally, and also because of some developments closer to home.
Consider some of the global events of the last year:
There have been synagogue burnings, physical assaults on Jews, or the painting of swastikas on Jewish memorials in every country in Europe. Observers in many countries have pointed to the worst outbreak of attacks against the Jews since the Second World War.
Candidates who denied the significance of the Holocaust reached the runoff stage of elections for the nation’s highest office in France and Denmark. State-sponsored television stations in many nations of the world spew anti-Zionist propaganda.
The United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Racism -- while failing to mention human rights abuses in China, Rwanda, or anyplace in the Arab world -- spoke of Israel’s policies prior to recent struggles under the Barak government as constituting ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The NGO declaration at the same conference was even more virulent.
I could go on. But I want to bring this closer to home. Of course academic communities should be and always will be places that allow any viewpoint to be expressed. And certainly there is much to be debated about the Middle East and much in Israel’s foreign and defense policy that can be and should be vigorously challenged.
But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.
For example:
Hundreds of European academics have called for an end to support for Israeli researchers, though not for an end to support for researchers from any other nation.
Israeli scholars this past spring were forced off the board of an international literature journal.
At the same rallies where protesters, many of them university students, condemn the IMF and global capitalism and raise questions about globalization, it is becoming increasingly common to also lash out at Israel. Indeed, at the anti-IMF rallies last spring, chants were heard equating Hitler and Sharon.
Events to raise funds for organizations of questionable political provenance that in some cases were later found to support terrorism have been held by student organizations on this and other campuses with at least modest success and very little criticism.
And some here at Harvard and some at universities across the country have called for the University to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university’s endowment to be invested. I hasten to say the University has categorically rejected this suggestion.
We should always respect the academic freedom of everyone to take any position. We should also recall that academic freedom does not include freedom from criticism. The only antidote to dangerous ideas is strong alternatives vigorously advocated.
I have always throughout my life been put off by those who heard the sound of breaking glass, in every insult or slight, and conjured up images of Hitler’s Kristallnacht at any disagreement with Israel. Such views have always seemed to me alarmist if not slightly hysterical. But I have to say that while they still seem to me unwarranted, they seem rather less alarmist in the world of today than they did a year ago.
I would like nothing more than to be wrong. It is my greatest hope and prayer that the idea of a rise of anti-Semitism proves to be a self-denying prophecy -- a prediction that carries the seeds of its own falsification. But this depends on all of us.


Message about Martin Luther King Jr. DayJanuary 17, 2003
Dr. King’s voice was tragically silenced almost 35 years ago, but his message of tolerance, equality, and hope lives on. With each passing year, as the world draws closer together and the pressures faced by people everywhere to live peacefully with and learn from each other grow, the values that Dr. King stood for become ever more important.
Monday is a day to remember Dr. King’s life and to keep the spirit of his message alive. We remember a man who dedicated his life to the hope that one day people from around the world would be able to walk together as brothers and sisters. In this time of increasing global conflict, Dr. King’s life and pursuit of social change through non-violent means can serve as an example for us all.
Dr. King once said that, "Everybody can be great because anybody can serve." As a university, we can be proud so many of our students go on to serve their communities and their nations. Through their work, and through important days of remembrance like this one, we can keep Dr. King’s message and ideals alive. As a community we are committed to becoming ever-more open and inclusive because our diversity is a crucial aspect of our excellence.

Statement on the Patriot Act and academic freedomApril 8, 2003
This statement is drawn from remarks made at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting on April 8.
I think we all, as members of this community, recognize that one of this community's proudest moments was the way in which it stood up for the rights of its members in the time of the McCarthy period. More generally, we recognize that academic freedom is a central and absolute value of this community, and I want to speak from the perspective of academic freedom.
The first issue that has been raised by members of this faculty is the treatment by this community of individuals based on the views that they express. I want to make clear in the strongest possible terms that it is antithetical to everything this community stands for, for individuals to be penalized on the basis of the political beliefs that they express on any question of controversy. For anyone to engage in such treatment would be wrong.
The broader set of issues that have been raised goes to the set of measures taken by the United States government and the appropriate response of the University to those measures. And it seems to me that it is useful to address those issues at four levels.
First, with respect to policy, the University has been in the recent past, and will continue to be, engaged in the policy dialogue in Washington on matters that affect the University's interests in academic freedom, whether with regard to its students, its teaching, or its research. We will use such influence as we have – in the future, as in the past – to work to create legislation that is protective of our interests.
Second, with respect to the implementation of legislation that has already been placed on the books, the University will – in the future, as in the past – seek to work with the government agencies charged with implementing legislation in order to assure that the regulations and procedures that they adopt are protective of our interest in academic freedom.
Third, with respect to any request that any member of the University receives that is potentially invasive of the privacy or the academic freedom of any other member of this academic community, I would request that the person consult immediately with the Office of the General Counsel before taking any action. I can assure you that the University's general counsel will provide advice that is maximally supportive, within the University's legal obligations, of the privacy of all the members of this community.
Fourth, with respect to any individuals within this community – students, staff, junior faculty, faculty – the University will uphold and defend their right of academic freedom and their right of free speech. We do these things because academic freedom is central to what the University is all about. It is central to our ability to disseminate knowledge, and to create knowledge.
Let me say, finally, that I would associate myself with the observations of Professor Sidney Verba on the spheres in which it is and is not appropriate for the University to take an institutional position, or for faculties within the University to take an institutional position. At times, where the direct interests of the University are involved, we have, as in the Michigan affirmative action case now before the Supreme Court, taken a public position on a political or a policy question. Yet generally, where those interests are not involved, the University would be poorly served, in my judgment, to take an institutional position.
This approach, which needs to be carefully considered and applied in light of circumstances, is important for at least two reasons.
First, any effort to take an institutional position, if an institutional position is arrived at, inevitably must have some impact on individuals within the community who wish to take a dissenting view, and must inevitably raise a caution in their minds about considering the expression of a dissenting view. And so the existence of an institutional view on political questions not directly related to the University's interests can work against our objective of promoting academic freedom.
Second, the compact with which we operate vis-à-vis the larger society is a complex one. The compact that enables us to resist pressures of the kind Harvard President Pusey resisted in the 1950s is one that depends on our being an institution that is committed to the freedom of individuals within our community. Equally it depends upon our exercising great care as an institution not to become a political actor in the larger society, with the exception of those issues that pertain directly to our interests.
And so it would be my pledge that the University will, in the future as in the past, uphold the commitment to academic freedom with all the vigor that we can. The University will take care to avoid adopting institutional positions on political matters outside of its direct interests. And it is my belief, as a member of this faculty, that it would be ill-advised for the faculty, as a faculty, to take such positions – valuable as it is, and will continue to be, for us to discuss matters of concern vital to us all.


Statement regarding Supreme Court decisions on university admissionsCambridgeJune 23, 2003
The United States Supreme Court today issued a pair of long-awaited decisions in cases involving admissions programs at the University of Michigan. While the two decisions reach different results, their paramount significance for our community is that the Court's pivotal opinion embraces the core principles that have long informed Harvard's approach to admissions.
A majority of the Court, in the Grutter case, unequivocally recognizes the essential educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body. It recognizes that "the path to leadership" should be "visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity." And it confirms that universities are entitled to substantial deference on matters at the heart of their academic mission, such as the selection of their students.
Perhaps most important, the Court explicitly upholds the right of universities to pursue student diversity through carefully designed admissions programs that flexibly consider each applicant as an individual and that properly treat race as one among a broad array of factors that may be taken into account. As Justice Powell did in the Bakke case a quarter-century ago, Justice O'Connor cites Harvard College's careful and flexible approach to admissions as a model - an approach in which "all factors that may contribute to student body diversity are meaningfully considered alongside race in admissions decisions."
The affirmation of these principles is as heartening as it is important. We all share a vital stake in the education of citizens and leaders for a diverse society. I am pleased the Court has affirmed policies like ours that promote compelling educational interests in inclusiveness. We will continue to pursue those interests with energy and care, so we can provide our students with the best possible education and prepare them to contribute to society.
Note: The full text of the Supreme Court's decisions can be found at http://www.supremecourtus.gov/


Morning Prayers address by President Lawrence H. Summers
Appleton Chapel, Memorial Church
September 15, 2003
Reverend Gomes' prayer put me in mind just now of an experience I had recently in listening to the remarkable eulogy he delivered in memory of the remarkable Archie Epps. The experience was, first, one of admiration for a speaker of such eloquence. Any time that Peter Gomes ascends the pulpit, the community assembled is fortunate. When I sit in my seat as part of that community, I share in that fortune. While it is best for the community that he continues to be as remarkable as he is, it makes it harder for me to speak after he does.
Some of you may recall that one year ago on the first day of classes in fall 2002, I spoke at Morning Prayers on the topic of anti-Semitism. Whatever their merits, I think it fair to say that my observations did not go unnoticed. I hope my remarks today will be cause for reflection but trust that that reflection will be rather more private and local than followed my remarks last year.
I want to reflect this morning on what the discipline that I am trained in -- economics -- can contribute to thinking about moral questions. Economics provides just one perspective, but one that I think is too rarely appreciated for its moral as well as practical significance.
Indeed, it is fair to say that economists like me rarely appear in places like this. Just why is not altogether clear. But when it comes to preaching economists, it strikes me that there is both a lack of demand and a lack of supply. A lack of demand because so many believe that any economic way of thinking is one that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. A lack of supply because many economists are instinctively uncomfortable with moral, let alone spiritual, discourse.
And yet, it seems to me there are some aspects of characteristic economic modes of reasoning that complement other modes of moral thought. One important thing that is distinctive about the way economists approach the world is their great emphasis on respect for individuals -- and the needs, tastes, choices and judgment they make for themselves. It is the basis of much economic analysis that the good is an aggregation of many individuals' assessments of their own well-being, and not something that can be assessed apart from individual judgments on the basis of some overarching or separate theory.
I was reminded of these issues as I had a chance over the weekend to engage with many students at the freshman barbecues on issues of moral concern to all of us. For example, many believe that it is wrong to buy imported products produced by workers who are paid less than a specified minimum wage of some sort. We all deplore the conditions in which so many on this planet work and the paltry compensation they receive. And yet there is surely some moral force to the concern that as long as the workers are voluntarily employed, they have chosen to work because they are working to their best alternative. Is narrowing an individual's set of choices an act of respect, of charity, even of concern? From this perspective the morality of restrictions on imports or boycotts advocated by many is less than entirely transparent.
In a similar vein, it is often suggested that the marketization or Westernization of indigenous cultures is doing great damage. And surely in some cases it is. But here too, the individual-based perspective may help us to see a different side of the moral question -- for an economist would attend first to those directly affected rather than to the judgments of those who are new to the situation. It disturbs the sensibilities of many of us to imagine the TV show "Survivor" being beamed to satellite dishes in rural villages or the pervasiveness of the Nike symbol, but if that is what people want, we need to be cautious about opposing their having it.
There is another observation that is closely related. There is much that is wrong with the market, but one of the things that most bothers many people of faith about market mechanisms is the idea that there is something wrong with a system where we are able to buy bread only because of the greed or profit motive of the people who make the bread. Here I would be very cautious. We all have only so much altruism in us. Economists like me think of altruism as a valuable and rare good that needs conserving. Far better to conserve it by designing a system in which people's wants will be satisfied by individuals being selfish, and saving that altruism for our families, our friends, and the many social problems in this world that markets cannot solve. This is not just an abstraction -- the far larger degree of private charity in this country than in Western Europe, and in Western Europe than in the socialist economies, is worth some reflection -- especially in institutions like this one that are made possible by acts of private altruism.
There is much to argue with what I have said. But I will have served my purpose if I have suggested that many of the viewpoints that are dismissed as selfish or "just economic" are motivated not by an unwillingness to grapple with moral issues but with an insistence that often the highest morality is respecting the choices and views of people who we all want to help.
And I hope also to have demonstrated in some tiny way, on this first day of classes, what we at Harvard are all about -- the continual search to come closer and closer to veritas through the juxtaposition and consideration of very different perspectives.


Remarks of President Lawrence H. Summers,Reception for Human Rights at HarvardCambridge, MassachusettsSeptember 29, 2003
This really is an overwhelming gathering. The number of people who are here, the range of topics represented, the extent of the range between those involved in immediate advocacy of issues of the day, and those involved in very fundamental philosophical thinking raised by human rights, is something that is very inspiring.
I would not claim to be an expert on your subject, but let me only share these three observations:
First, it seems to me this is a great example of what collaboration around the University is supposed to be like. We don’t have formal dictatorial structures; we have organic growth in which people come to things because they want to. And it turns out that there are a lot of things that they want to come to. We have regular faculty extensively involved, but much of the energy and creativity in what we do comes from those who are part of our community for only a year or less. We have programs that are anchored from within regular schools, but a great deal of energy comes from collaboration. It really is an example of the kinds of things that I wish the University were doing on more subjects of great social importance.
The second observation I would make is that I think the kind of work being done here will make a profound difference over time in the lives of millions and millions of people who, believe it or not, will never have heard of the Carr Center, or will never even have heard of Harvard University. Because ultimately, it actually is ideas that shape what happens in this world.
The longer I was in Washington, the more I came to recognize that while we all felt very important scrambling around, negotiating and planning and deciding and litigating and bargaining, the more we really were like wriggly snakes in a tunnel. And the position of that tunnel was set by a prevailing intellectual climate that was determined by what we all had studied when we were in college -- and what those with whom we were speaking in other countries had studied and absorbed in their formative years. And it is the product of enterprises like this one that form the basis for the education of those who are young today, and the education that future generations will receive.
You know, I thought two years ago that it was basically a silly idea to speak of AIDS as a human rights issue. A public health issue, yes. An issue of profound moral concern, yes. But not an issue that went to basic questions of rights and entitlement. And I’ve learned that I was wrong.
I’ve learned that, just as Amartya Sen discovered years ago that thinking about shortages of food was exactly the wrong way to think about famines, thinking about the continuation and perpetuation and failure to act with respect to AIDS as a question of resource allocation was to miss something that was very fundamental in understanding the moral dimension of that problem.
I may have been, I’m sure I was, slow on the uptake. I know there are people in this room who’ve found me frustratingly slow on the uptake with respect to that principle. But I was not so slow as to be completely unrepresentative of a world policy community that is inactive on this problem. And that is just an illustration of why the kind of work, and writing, and thinking that’s done here is so important.
The salience of gender in discussions of development today, while utterly absent 20 years ago, is yet another example of the power of hard and rigorous and careful thinking to really make differences of life and death for large numbers of people.
The third thing, and last thing, I want to say is that what is particularly impressive to me about the work in this area that goes on at Harvard, and where it seems to me that the work in which many of you are engaged is an example to others who work on issues of enormous moral import, is that you are not satisfied to claim the moral high ground and the megaphone that an affiliation with Harvard provides, to clamor in the advocacy community for the outcomes that you prefer.
You recognize that it is the role of scholars in a university, yes, to be morally concerned, but that being morally concerned does not relieve you of the obligation -- indeed, it imposes on you the greater obligation -- to be logical, careful, rigorous, thoughtful, and balanced with respect to the analyses that you perform.
As part of some preparation for being here, I read Michael Ignatieff’s lectures on human rights published a couple of years ago, and was reminded of that very powerfully as Michael spoke of the lives that had been lost and the damage that had been done in the name of the enormously attractive principle of self-determination.
And in that intellectual honesty, I was reminded of how very important it is -- and if universities don’t stand for this, no one else will -- that it is precisely when problems and issues are most morally urgent that it is most important to think carefully and rigorously and systematically about them.
And that is why the work in which you are all engaged is so profoundly important, and so terrific as an example to all of us in the University community. Thank you


Remarks of President Lawrence H. Summers,'Learning With Excitement' ConferenceHarvard Graduate School of EducationCambridge, MassachusettsOctober 3, 2003
I'm really glad to be here with the Mayor of Boston, Tom Menino, and to welcome him to Harvard and to the City of Cambridge. You know, we are all very fortunate in the kind of Mayor we have.
I was very struck a couple of months ago. Tom and I were participants in an event around summer youth programs at a park in South Boston. And we got there and it was a few minutes before the event started and I was kind of standing there, waiting for it to start. You could see the Mayor. He was looking over. There was a shard of glass sitting somewhere in that park, and he mentioned it to somebody. Didn't look like things had quite been cleaned up in another area. And he was mentioning that. Another part of the park was really set up in a perfect way, and he commented on that.
It was obvious that the basic quality of the environment on every square foot of the City of Boston was of profound concern to him. And that attitude has a great deal to do with why people in Boston are living better than they were 10 years ago. It is a real example of an important aspect of leadership, Mr. Mayor. It's one that I've tried to learn from, and a lot of people who don't have a chance to see it don't appreciate how much of a difference you make. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
Gil Noam, I'll say a little more about what you're involved in, in a few moments. But thank you very much for your leadership with respect to this conference. Without the generosity of the Kargmans, this event would not be possible. And we at Harvard are grateful for your vision and, yes, I don't shrink from saying we're grateful for your tangible support as well. Thank you very much to the Kargmans.
The Duke of Wellington famously observed that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. That was an elitist age. The battle for America's future will be won or lost in the next century in America's urban public schools. It will be won or lost in American public schools because they are the crucible in which the young people who will comprise the largest part of our population a quarter century from now will be formed.
If those schools succeed in their mission, ours will be a country of greater democracy, greater civility, greater prosperity, greater humaneness, and greater inclusion. It will truly be an even greater beacon to the world. If those schools do not succeed in their mission, our country risks being a country that is increasingly divided between rich and poor, between black and white. It risks being a country whose capacity to compete internationally and maintain our prosperity will be diminished. And it risks being a country whose values and civility will be less of a model to the world. There is, therefore, no more important issue than what happens in the schools.
There are many, many parts of that issue and of the challenges facing the schools. But I am convinced that, as central and as crucial as what happens in the school day during the regular school experience is, when somebody looks back at the history of American education and writes the definitive history 50 years from now, a significant part of it will be about the evolutionary changes that took place, not in what happened during the traditional 6 hours a day, 180 days a year, 13 years from kindergarten to 12th grade. It will be about the things we did or did not do before children went to school at the age of five. It will be about the things we did or did not do during the 180 days out of the year they are not in school, particularly in the summer, and will be about the things that they did or did not do with the other 10 hours a day outside of those 6 hours that children were not in school.
And if the battle for America's future is going to be won, it is not going to be won only within that 6-hour school day. And that is why the subject that we're discussing today is so profoundly important. That's why the Mayor's strategies for the schools and the strategies for the young people of Boston have put such emphasis on each of those margins: early childhood, the summer, and our subject today, afterschool education. Because those are the fronts on which this battle is going to be won or is going to be lost.
The stakes here are very, very high. And that's why, in addition to highlighting the importance of this, in addition to celebrating the fact that we are cooperating, in addition to the fact that I'm proud that Harvard has been able to make a significant resource contribution to the Mayor's efforts, in addition to the fact that we are pleased with the sense of partnership and well-being that is around this, there is another aspect that I want to highlight, and it comes out of something that the Mayor emphasized.
Tom, when you spoke powerfully, as you did, about the importance of evaluation, I am sure that you wrapped up the vote of every econometrician in the City of Boston in the next election. I'm not entirely sure that there are a lot of other people for whom that message is a political winner. But let me tell you something. If we had the same commitment, or lack of commitment, to evaluation in medicine that we have traditionally had in many spheres of education, we would still be leeching people to make them better.
If you look at the history of medicine over the last century, I would submit to you that the invention of the controlled experiment as a tool of rigorous evaluation was surely among the 10 most important medical innovations of that century. And it is madness to spend tens of billions of dollars in literally hundreds if not thousands of different school districts in different ways without devising methodologies that rigorously evaluate what works and what does not work, and growing what works and shrinking what does not.
The failure to evaluate what works and the allowance of children to continue year after year in programs that we don't know whether they do work or do not work, is leaving our children behind in every bit as real a way as leaving them in classrooms that are not fully painted, or not providing them with modern textbooks.
If the medical profession was prescribing drugs whose efficacy nobody had tested, the people who ran the FDA would be strung up. And there has been too much of that for too long in education. And that is why the evaluation of what we do - and the Mayor said something very important - he said sometimes when you evaluate things, you find that they do not work. And then you stop doing them and you do other things.
The adoption of that idea in education is something that is of profound importance. That is why I think the significance of this conference lies not just in the significance of afterschool education, not just in the importance of partnership, but in the idea that I think needs to be ever more central in the way we approach social problems in this country.
And that is this: The more morally important something is, the more important it is that we think rigorously, carefully, and logically about it. And we don't simply allow the fact that we care a lot, and the fact that we have compassion, to blind us to the need to evaluate with rigor. And if we are able to do that in this city, we will do better, and in this country we will do better.
And if Harvard is able to contribute in some small way to bringing about that approach in our country, we will have made an enormous contribution. Because, after all, it is the place of great institutions like this one, of great schools like the School of Education, of great new leaders, like your Dean, Ellen Lagemann, who can't be here today, to show the way towards ways of thinking that will make us that much more effective.
This will not be an easy challenge. It will not be an easy challenge for many reasons. There is much more enthusiasm for reporting success than for reporting failure. There are many who want to do what they are doing and want to believe that it works, but aren't fully willing to put the proposition to a test.
There is a great challenge also. And it is a challenge for the scholars in this room. And that is this: There are some things that are easy to measure. You can give a kid a math test. There are some things that are hard to measure. Does the kid have the self-confidence to go forward effectively in life? A question the Mayor raised.
The things that are hard to measure are every bit as important - in some cases they're more important - than things that are easy to measure. And if we're going to succeed, which I think we must, in finding ways to evaluate what we do, we're going to have to devise the means and the methods to assure that evaluation is about not just what is quantifiable, but also about what is important. And how we are going to evaluate in ways that get at what is important, and also maintain the kind of objectivity that is central for it to be real, is a very great question, that I hope you will all ponder today.
In this conference you are part of something that is very important to this University. But, much more significantly, very important to the future of our country. And I am very, very grateful to everyone who is here and is part of this conference, for what they have contributed and what they are going to contribute. And, Mr. Mayor, we look forward to working with you very closely on these questions for a very long time.
Thank you very much.
Related story: Joining 'the battle for America's future'
Read Mayor Menino's remarks: 'Learning with Excitement' Conference



Remarks at Celebration of Black Alumni
Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers Harvard Law School
September 16, 2005(As prepared for delivery)
Thank you, Professor Ogletree for that introduction and for bringing this group together. I am honored to be here.
I was also honored to play a part in yesterday's opening of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute. Professor Ogletree's persistence, his dedication, and his commitment to issues of equality and justice are what brought the Institute into being and will drive its commitment to excellence in the years ahead. Thank you, Professor Ogletree, for all that you have done and all that you will continue to do. I urge all of you to visit the Charles Hamilton Houston exhibit in the Caspersen Room in Langdell before the weekend is over.
I would also like to thank Professor David Wilkins for his remarks. I know the program says that today we are honoring Judge Leighton, but I think that is only partially true. I think we all recognize that Judge Leighton honors us with his presence, and I would very much like to thank him for being here.
Let me also thank Dean Elena Kagan, the Charles Hamilton Houston Professor of Law. Elena is doing an extraordinary job as Dean, and all of us are benefiting from her leadership.
I want to focus on three things today that I believe are central to the mission of our university: how graduates of this institution step up and serve; the diversity of our faculty, students and administration; and the knowledge we produce and the impact that knowledge can have on the world.
I. Leadership and Service
Since this law school was founded in 1817, far too few African Americans have been given the chance to attend. Yet those who did have that opportunity made the most of their time here. Anyone associated with Harvard Law School can take pride in their accomplishments - whether leading the nation's largest financial services or media companies, giving the keynote address at last year's Democratic National Convention, or serving as leading members of public and private organizations throughout the country.
We can also be proud of the role black alumni of the law school have played in reshaping the legal and social fabric of our nation. Charles Hamilton Houston's work with the NAACP fighting for civil rights was just the beginning. For the last 100 years, black alumni of this law school have been breaking down the barriers that have kept African Americans from fully participating in the life of our nation. To name just a few:
William Henry Hastie '30, who served as aide to the Secretary of War during World War II and was the first African American appointed to the Federal bench;
Lila Fenwick '56, the first African-American woman to graduate from Harvard Law School, who went on to serve as Chief of the Human Rights Division at the United Nations;
Bill Coleman '46, first in his class at Harvard Law, served as the first African-American clerk on the Supreme Court for another illustrious graduate of this institution, Felix Frankfurter, and was one of the lawyers on the brief in Brown;
Barack Obama '91, who you will hear from tomorrow, was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review and is currently the only African American in the United States Senate.
The list goes on. We can all be proud of them and the role Harvard played in encouraging them to step up and serve.
I want to thank one law school alumnus in particular: Conrad Harper. I want to thank Conrad for his service on the Harvard Corporation and for his service to our country. We are in the process of looking for his successor, and it is my hope that we will be able to find an equally outstanding individual to help guide Harvard in the years ahead.
II. Environment
This brings me to my next point - the success of our alumni is critically dependent on the environment that we create for them while they are students. Whether we are inclusive and welcoming - whether we create an environment that encourages students to learn not just from casebooks and in classrooms, but from other students who have had very different experiences than themselves - all of this plays a vital role in determining whether our students will have the skills and experiences needed to be effective leaders.
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote famously that, "The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a center of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization." If that adjustment is to be successful, it requires a commitment to diversity. Without it, we will not be as excellent as we can be, nor will we be as true to our mission as we can be.
The Law School led the way in this regard by awarding the first J.D. in our nation's history to an African American in 1869, but the University as a whole has often lagged behind. Harvard did not allow African Americans to live with white students in its dormitories until the 1920s. In the 1960s, despite enrolling over 1,000 undergraduates a year, Harvard admitted only 6 or 7 African-American students in each class. And here at the law school, you need look no farther back than 1965 to find a class with just one African-American student.
And yet, looking back on the last 50 years, while recognizing all the problems, we can take considerable pride in what Harvard has done to contribute to America's progress toward more equal opportunity. Whether it was:
Our programs of admission, which this year resulted in a law school class that was 13% African-American; or
The growing diversity of our faculty; or
The work our scholars have done to help us understand the nature of the prejudices within ourselves.
All have played an important part.
And even though we may have reached a point of understanding and fairly universal acceptance in the broader society of these basic moral principles, mere acceptance of these principles is not genuine equality and it is not genuine fairness.
That is why Harvard will continue to ensure that, as Justice O'Connor said, "the path to leadership" is "visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity." As she said, "nothing less than the nation's future," is at stake.
There are many ways we can contribute. It starts with the kind of community that we are. It starts with assuring that everyone can look around and see other students like themselves, professors like themselves, and portraits of people who look like themselves hanging on the walls.
That is why we continue to take race into account as a factor in the individualized review of an applicant's qualifications for admission to this law school. That is why we have eliminated the expected parental financial contribution for students entering Harvard College whose families make less than $40,000 a year.
That is why we appointed Evelynn Hammond earlier this year as Senior Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development, where she will have a broad mandate to look at our policies and procedures in every aspect of faculty hiring and retention to make sure that we are doing all we possibly can to have the most diverse faculty possible.
That is why it is essential that as we prepare our students for the world of legal practice, we must globalize not only our future, but our past as well. That means continuing the task of ensuring that our libraries, art collections, and course catalogues reflect the diversity and vibrancy of all mankind, and not just Western Europe. It means expanding, as we have done, the University's African Studies program. It means requiring, as I understand the Law School is moving toward, the study of international law as a critical component of every law student's education.
III. Knowledge
Finally, what can we hope will be said, when people look back at our university 50 years from now? Yes, the fraction of our faculty and students who are African-American will have increased. Yes, we will have embarked on major new initiatives to pursue the study of the African continent. Yes, our School of Public Health will have established a major presence in Africa for the treatment of AIDS as part of that. Yes, the African-American studies program will have experienced its most rapid years of expansion in its history.
But we will not have done our part if we have only strengthened our ivory tower. We will only do our part if we meet the central civil rights challenge of this day and go far beyond questions of access to institutions like this - by assuring not just de jure equality, but genuine equality of opportunity and genuinely equal participation in American society. Genuine equality of opportunity is not true today:
When those left behind to face the ravages of Hurricane Katrina without means of escape or assistance from the government were overwhelmingly African-American.
When a black male child born in Washington, D.C., has less of a chance of surviving to his first birthday than a child born in urban parts of Kerala, India, and when that child is twice as likely to die before reaching age 20 than a white child.
When one third of black males in their 20s are incarcerated, on probation, or on parole - when more African Americans are in prison than in higher education.
When a vote cast in an African-American precinct is nearly 10 times more likely to be rejected than a vote cast in a white precinct.
When an African American is almost 10 times more likely to die from homicide than a white person.
When the typical African-American family earns just 60% of what the typical white family does.
When African Americans are less likely to have health insurance, be vaccinated, or receive prenatal care. When a black man is 40% more likely to die of cancer than a similarly diagnosed white man. When the black-white health care gap costs the lives of more than 83,000 African Americans each year.
The only way in which we will be able to address the problems of the achievement gap and the health gap and all the other ways in which racial gaps persist in our society will be through the pooling of knowledge, of energy and of conviction to develop new ideas and strategies for tackling these problems. There is no place where these ingredients exist in more abundance than at our nation's leading research universities - and no university where there is more commitment to addressing these issues than Harvard University.
Indeed, the greatness of this university lies very importantly in the strength of its professional schools - it lies in the fact that while we venerate the ivory tower and the search of truth for its own sake, we also seek to make a contribution to our society.
We will not have met our obligation in medicine and public health if we have not made a positive contribution to assuring that the ability to get health care is open to every American. We must use the same kinds of powerful ingenuity that have led us to find solutions to complex diseases to address the complex social disease of lack of access to the most basic health care.
Our school of education, which is working to try and improve the way education is delivered to students around the country and around the world, will not have met its obligation if it does not devote a substantial amount of its energy and creativity to addressing the large gap in educational achievement between African-American and white children - (and we are already doing that through the Achievement Gap Initiative, under the leadership of Ron Ferguson and Charles Ogletree and others).
Our business school, which is committed to training those who will lead the institutions that will serve as engines of prosperity in our economy, will not have met its obligation if we do not work to ensure that these engines of prosperity are engines for all. President Clinton used to say that there are emerging markets outside our country, but there are also very important emerging markets inside of our country and we need to train the leaders who will assure that those markets are served.
And here, at the Law School, as we think about questions of crime and punishment - about the structure of government and the protection of the basic rights of the least among us - we must do everything possible to close the dramatic gap separating African-American and white children.
In a world where the very category of race is becoming less sharply defined as society evolves, there are large questions as to how we are to address these manifestations of continuing racial inequality. There are huge unanswered questions that I hope scholars at Harvard will be able to provide answers to.
If, as Du Bois recognized, the "color line" was the central problem of the 20th century, we were reminded by Hurricane Katrina - which held up a mirror to American society - that the "color line" and achieving social justice remain central challenges in the 21st. And I hope that 50 years from now a gathering very much like this one will be able to say Harvard did more than its part - by developing new knowledge, by educating a new generation of leaders, and by setting an example for our country and our world. Anything less is unacceptable.


Remarks of Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers,
Panel discussion: 'Public Health Crisis in Africa:How May Harvard Help?'
Harvard School of Public HealthBoston, Massachusetts
October 28, 2003
It is great to be at the Public Health School and it is great to have a chance to talk about a profoundly important issue. And I want to thank very much all of those who have been involved in organizing this program. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, for your moderating this program, Professor Akyeampong for his leadership of the University's efforts in African studies. You know, for the first time, we now have a department in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences that is in part a Department of African Studies and that is an important milestone in the history of the University. I want to thank Dean Bloom for his leadership of the Public Health School and I want to acknowledge especially Max Essex's work on AIDS. For a distinguished scientist to work on AIDS today, because it is a profoundly important problem, is something that can be quite easily anticipated and there are many who are doing it. When Max Essex started working on AIDS, when he focused his career on AIDS, when he began doing things in Africa, it was a courageous and it was an important choice. And there are many thousands of people who are alive today, who would not be alive today, if Max Essex had not made that choice. And Max's example is a very powerful one for all of us of the moral accomplishment that can come from the pursuit of knowledge. Max, thank you for your example.
I want to talk for a few minutes about why I think the study of health in Africa is at the center of what a university like this ought to be about. And then talk a little bit about some of the things that I hope we'll accomplish at the University over the next few years. And then I want to respond to your questions and comments because ultimately in a university what happens is not what administrators decide. It is what students and faculty accomplish.
I am convinced that the public health of the developing world and especially Africa is the single issue that has the greatest significance for humanity over the next half century. More people will live or die based on our success in addressing AIDS, malaria, and other diseases than will live or die based on our success in creating prosperity, based on our success in advancing freedom, or based on our success in keeping the world at peace.
There is no other issue of comparable significance for humanity.
I am also convinced that there is no other issue that is as amenable to Africa, that the challenge of protecting public health is amenable to effort, through increased resources and human commitment. There are literally millions of lives a year that could be saved with today's knowledge, today's resources, if we simply were able to make the requisite commitments in the countries. And there are yet millions of people whose lives could be saved each year with advances in knowledge that are within our reach, that do not involve miracle cures but involve the steady and sustained application of research protocols that we know. That is not true with respect to many of the world's other great problems. Someone may have an inspiration for how to promote peace. Someone may have an inspiration as to how to promote economic growth everywhere that hasn't been found yet. In public health we have the knowledge of today and we have the pathways to the knowledge of tomorrow. And when there is a situation in which the greatest problem and challenge facing humanity is also one of the more tractable challenges facing humanity, it behooves us to be seriously engaged. It behooves us to be seriously engaged all the more because in a way that is quite unique, this challenge of disease in the developing world and especially in Africa seems to me to engage all four of the things that I think are central to what the University is about in the years ahead.
You know, as Deborah said, I'm the 27th person to become President of Harvard since 1636. I'm also only the seventh person to become President since the end of America's Civil War, and that inclines one to take a long view.
And you know, if I think about what will be in history books about the time when we were alive 200 years from now, it won't be that many things. You know, you don't remember that much about 200 years ago and not that much will be in history books 200 years from now. But there will be a few things. The first will be how does the coming together of developing and developed countries work out? We're in an unprecedented period when the communication, the transportation, the extent of interaction between the developing world and the industrial world is far greater than it has ever been before in our history. That can work out splendidly. Look at the way in parts of East Asia standards of living have doubled in a decade, doubled in a decade and doubled in yet a third decade. Look at the fantastic emancipation of women that has taken place in parts of China where a generation-and-a-half ago women could expect to have their feet bound at birth. Look at the fact that in a city like Seoul, Korea, there were a million child prostitutes a generation ago and today there are almost none.
There are staggering opportunities for progress and if this progress is realized it has the potential to be an event that would rank in the history of the last millennium, in terms of really changing the conditions of mankind, only with the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.
But equally and in the same world within a 14-hour airplane flight, within the distance of a picture that can be transmitted in a matter of seconds, there is an entire continent in large parts of which a child is more likely to be malnourished than to learn to read, and more likely to die before the age of five than to enter secondary school. A continent where two teachers die of AIDS for each teacher who is trained. A continent where something is happening that has not happened, did not happen in Europe during World War I or in Europe during World War II, and that is the life expectancy is substantially declining. A continent in parts of which life expectancy is declining back to the Biblical norms of one score and ten years and it is part of the same planet. And that difference, that progress that is possible, and that disaster that is looming, will be part of how our generation is judged.
There's a second thing that is happening and it's happening right here. It's happening all over the world but the epicenter of what is happening is actually, probably within a few hundred yards of where we are right now and that is that there is a revolution underway in the life sciences.
For the first time in all of human history we are coming to a fundamental scientific understanding of human nature. And that fundamental scientific understanding is an operational understanding in which we can influence human beings, in which we can in scientific and planned ways interfere with disease processes. I'm told that it's not unreasonable to expect, given the progress that we are making, that my 12-year-old daughters, and if not my 12-year-old daughters, surely their daughters, will live to be a hundred.
But you know something? If you look at the American pharmaceutical industry it is spending more on pet disease than on tropical disease. Less than 1 percent of the patents that have been given in recent years have gone to address the diseases of tropical countries. And yet those diseases can be addressed by this scientific revolution, as well. We in the City of Boston have the highest fraction of concentrated talent in the life sciences that exists anywhere on the planet earth. You look at the five institutions in all the world who are able to attract the most peer reviewed scientific funding. Institution number one, institution number two, institution number three, institution number four, and institution number five are all here in Boston. And no small part of that funding through the City of Boston comes to people like Dyann Wirth for her very important research on malaria, to people like Michael Reich for his very important research on death due to accidents, his very important research on schistosomiasis. Surely, if we at Harvard are in possession of the most significant life science concentration of talent that there has ever been, we have an obligation to this problem.
There's a third thing that's important about this time and it's something that I believe in very strongly, perhaps reflecting my background as an economist, and it's something that's really at the center of a great deal of what goes on in the Public Health School and that is that a far wider range of human phenomena, of challenges and of problems, are becoming amenable to analysis, can be confronted using the data. People can have not just hunches and superstitions but they can actually have evidence and they can approach truth in ever-closer ways.
A facetious example comes from the book that some of you may have seen, Moneyball. That book shows how a very smart guy who hires some very smart statisticians was able to produce the best baseball team in the American League at a third of the payroll of the other teams by drafting the right players based on statistical analysis.
A different kind of example is provided by the people who advertise on television who don't just figure out what would be a fun advertisement but look very carefully and with very carefully controlled experiments at which advertisements work. None of this is new to the traditional medical field. If you wrote a history of medicine within the 20th century and you had to list all the important innovations, penicillin would be there, transplant surgery would be there, cancer chemotherapy would be there, but you know what is probably the equal of all three? The idea of the double blind clinical trials, which permitted us, actually, to know and not just to guess what worked and what didn't work.
Those same techniques of analysis are possible with respect to what types of interventions work to promote public health. What is the best way to interfere with sexually transmitted disease? Which regimens do and do not work with respect to AIDS? What are the optimal strategies in an environment where blasting a disease is important but where avoiding the creation of resistant strains is important? What are the optimal strategies for using drugs? These are questions we don't have to guess about any more. We have critiques of rigorous analysis for figuring out the answer and that is not just socially important. It is an enormous practical intellectual challenge and it one that is within our reach and it is one that is at the center of a great many people's research here at the Public Health School and in other parts of the world.
And finally, a university like this is very fortunate. All of us who have a chance to be part of this university community are very fortunate. I was reminded of that this morning when I was a visitor to a public school in Boston and spent time with many of the children, many of whom don't have a chance to grow up in a family background like the one I was fortunate enough to grow up in and the most disadvantaged of those children lives in an enormously fortunate environment, compared to most of the children who are alive on this planet today.
We are fortunate to spend our lives studying problems that we find fascinating, being compensated in a way that enables us to live comfortably, to do work that we love, surely we have an obligation to make a contribution in what we do to the broader mass of humanity. And make no mistake: the failure to address global disease in as effective a way as we can would be a moral failure. It would be failing to be a Good Samaritan. It would be walking past a sick person and not giving assistance. This is something that is truly important.
I've been reminded in recent weeks of a moral dimension of these problems that I didn't previously appreciate by the work of the only Center on Human Rights and Health that exists in the world, the Center here, and its counterpart centers at Harvard's Kennedy School that have emphasized that what is happening in South Africa, the denial of treatments, the misleading of people with respect to treatments that work, is a human rights violation. It is a human rights violation to not tell people the truth about what will work and will not work, in just the same way that it is a human rights violation to withhold their food or to withhold their education and as tragic as it is, there is no one among us who would not rather have the right to vote withheld than to have the right to an available treatment for AIDS withheld.
There is a moral dimension to all of this, as well. All of these are reasons why this work is so very important to the University and we're doing many, many things, many of which Barry will detail. I just want to comment on what the three broad areas are in which I hope we will substantially expand our efforts in the years ahead: the first is training of students for positions of leadership in this area. I hope that an increasing fraction of those who do research in the life sciences at Harvard will do research in the life sciences connected to the problems of the diseases of the developing world. I hope and I expect that we will provide instruction to our undergraduates in issues relating to global health that will bring together in an interdisciplinary way their thinking in the social sciences and in the sciences in much the same way that we do with issues like environmental science. I hope that we will succeed in making it possible for more of the very best students to come and study public health. You know, the "every tub on its own bottom" system that we have at Harvard has many virtues. But it is a grave mistake to ever suppose that the importance of a professional activity is measured by the average income of those who go into that profession. One of Barry's predecessors told him that public health was a distinctive field. It was the only post-graduate degree that you could earn that reduced your salary. Well, it may reduce your salary, but it sure increases your contribution to society and that's why people go into it.
But we have an obligation at the University to make it possible for the things we say about assuring that everyone can come who is excellent, to come. That needs to be true in every part of this University. That's why we started providing increased financial aid for public health education, other fields like it, and we need to do a great deal more to build on those efforts. And it would be my hope also that as we have our Program in African Studies that we will assure that not just those students who are going to specialize in the area but that a much wider range of our students become familiar with these basic ideas, the importance of what it is that is happening in the developing world.
The fundamental insight that Dean Bloom says so well, that not one person in 50 in America appreciates that with respect to many problems it is not about your behavior. It is about the way the society functions. We had American automobile accidents; the number of people who died from automobile accidents increased by 3 percent a year for five decades. And for all of those five decades, America had a plan with respect to automobile fatalities. It was to tell people to drive more safely. It was a plan and we talked about it and we talked about it, I don't know who did but really it was a plan and global automobile companies advocated it. It was a really very serious plan. And then we decided, well, people are kind of people and maybe what we should do is have safer cars and have safer roads and suggest systems like seatbelts that would make them safer and today we've got twice as many people driving as we did when I was a kid and we've got a third fewer fatalities. That is the fundamental lesson of public health — that the system matters — and we need to make sure that a larger fraction of educated people know it.
All of that is about education and training, which is a fundamental thing we do at Harvard. There's a second thing we do at Harvard and it's something that we are very fortunate to be able to do because of the standing of this university and that is the tremendous convening power that this university has. We're very lucky, people come to Harvard, people are invited to come to Harvard, they have a way of deciding if they want to come and discuss these issues. When the food industries wanted to discuss the set of questions having anything to do with people who are overweight and their contribution to the obesity epidemic in America, and they wanted to have the people who market foods get together with the other people who market foods, get together with the health experts, get together with the regulators, it could have happened in many places but, because there was a place called Harvard with the reputation that Harvard has, it happened to take place at Harvard.
We need to use that convening power to bring together people who are in a position to make decisions, people who are in a position to influence the global debate on public health. We've done it in important respects. There's a major project at the Kennedy School that's underway, in which I know people from the Public Health School are engaged, that is around the AIDS epidemic, that is around working with businesses to talk about how they can make a difference in reducing AIDS by working with their employees in Africa through the things that they do in their education. But there are many, many more groups that need to come together and need to be sensitized if we're going to do everything we can with respect to this problem.
Timing, convening power, and dissemination — development and dissemination of new knowledge. You know, a really tremendous thing happened in the last year that most people take for granted, or more accurately, a really tremendous thing was a thing that didn't happen in the last year. In 1918, about 3 percent of the people on planet Earth died of the flu. Think about that: 3 percent of the people on planet Earth. Today that would be 180 million people. SARS had some of the same kind of virulent potential that the flu had, and less than 1,000 people died. That is because of what we understand now that people didn't understand then.
The research that we do, sometimes in ways that are predictable what Dyann will discover with respect to malaria — sometimes in ways that are completely unpredictable — what a mathematician, now working in FAS, thinking about strains of mutations, discovered with respect to the nature of the AIDS process.
New knowledge makes a huge difference in our ability to prevent, to contain and to treat disease. And we need to make sure that we are bringing here to Harvard the people who have the greatest potential to contribute to this knowledge, to contribute to the scientific knowledge, to contribute to the social scientific knowledge that is necessary if the world is going to make the fullest possible effort. If we're able to bring more and more of the greatest scholars to join the remarkable community we now have, if we're able to use our convening power and our voice in the world with respect to this problem, and if we are able to train a yet larger and greater next generation of leaders, we will have done our part with respect to what is both the greatest and the most tractable moral problem facing humanity.
Thank you very much.
Related story: Summers: Will and knowledge can beat AIDS


Remarks of Harvard PresidentLawrence H. Summers:'Europe and America in the 21st century'London School of EconomicsLondon, EnglandNovember 13, 2003
I am honored to have this opportunity to return to the London School of Economics, especially with Howard Davies as its director. Howard, I hope the transition from government service to academia is proving enjoyable. One thing I know from my own transition is that I have not left behind politics.
I have spent many happy and enlightening hours here at the LSE - first as a child when my father was on sabbatical here in the 1960s and then on my own sabbatical from Harvard in 1987. The LSE - as I hope is Harvard - is committed to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. But it is also blessed with a faculty that is concerned with the relevance of its research to the pressing problems of the day.
Today, I want to reflect on an issue that I believe is of profound importance to the United States, to Britain, to Europe, and indeed to the world - the evolution of the transatlantic relationship in the 21st century. As co-chair along with Henry Kissinger of a task force of the Council on Foreign Relations on this subject, I have been involved for some months now in thinking about its past and its future. I should like to be very clear at the outset in saying that anything perceptive I share with you today was almost certainly someone else's idea first, and I am speaking here only for myself. The views I express should not be attributed to the U.S. government, to Harvard, to Henry Kissinger, to the CFR task force, or to any of its members. My objective is not to make immediate policy prescriptions - it is to try to understand the current situation and raise for discussion some thoughts as we all go forward.
I shall reflect on three issues.
First, I want to assess the current state of the relationship and to argue that for a variety of reasons we are in uncharted and very difficult territory - and without the possibility of return to the familiar and more congenial territory of the past.
Second, I will urge that the continued fracturing of the Atlantic Alliance, or even a failure to close the cleavages of the last two years, could have grave consequences for the United States, for Europe, and for the world as a whole.
Third, I will offer some suggestions as to the best way forward on both sides of the Atlantic.
Where are we?
Let me begin by taking the long view. The accomplishments of the transatlantic alliance in the period since the Second World War have far exceeded what even optimists could have hoped for in the late 1940s. Indeed, history records few, if any, alliances that have yielded such benefits for their members or for the broader international community. Lord Ismay's famous dictum - that NATO's purpose was to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down - captures well the main dimensions of the alliance's success.
After centuries of recurrent conflict, war between the powers of Western Europe has become inconceivable. And an iron curtain no longer separates Central and Western Europe.
The Cold War has been won, and the side of freedom has prevailed. The 20th century threat of global nuclear conflict has receded; the totalitarian ideologies that supported the slaughter of over 100 million people by their own governments no longer pose a global threat.
Driven by technology, but permitted by politics, the global system of trade, travel and investment is far more open today than at any point in history. And the result of growing integration has been more progress in raising the living standards of humanity - in rich and poor countries alike - than in any half century in the history of the world.
It does not disparage the accomplishments of statesmen in any country to suggest that none of these achievements would have been possible without the Atlantic Alliance and its manifestations - NATO, American troops in Europe, the Marshall Plan, the U.N., and other international institutions. Supporting all of these is the habit of close consultation on all matters of profound importance that gradually developed over a half century.
To be sure, in admiring past accomplishments and worrying over current cleavages, it is easy to forget the transatlantic confrontation over Suez, the degree of anti-Americanism in Europe engendered by Vietnam, the strains on the alliance in the early Reagan years. Remembering these episodes, some are prepared to be relatively complacent about current tensions - arguing that in many ways the Iraq War, whatever its merits, is sui generis, and that with patience, this crisis too shall pass.
I confess that I am not so sure. In the last year, France and Germany did not just fail to support, but actively organized opposition, enlisting Russia and China in opposing what the U.S. administration had announced as a major U.S. national security initiative. Some political leaders in Europe sought to increase, and succeeded in increasing, their popular support by attacking the United States. At the same time, some American officials appeared to many to be disregarding Europe, or when they paid attention to it, appeared to be seeking to split the Union. And prominent Americans and Europeans began to wonder out loud about the death of the West.
Public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic has polarized to the point that an Euro-barometer survey released this week found that a majority of Europeans see the United States as a threat to world peace. Indeed, the fraction of Europeans seeing the United States as a threat equalled the fraction seeing Iran and North Korea as a threat and far exceeded the fraction alarmed by Syria, China or Pakistan. The only country seen as a greater threat to world peace than the United States was Israel.
It has seemed at some moments that the United States is the object of malign intent in at least some European quarters, and Europe is the object of malign neglect by the United States. The idea of the United States as a hyperpower that must be contained or at least constrained has become increasingly fashionable in Europe, whereas the notion of coalitions of the willing without great concern for who joins them has become increasingly fashionable in the United States.
Why and why now? There is much that can be questioned in the conduct of diplomacy on both sides of the Atlantic over the last year. Communications channels were not kept open. Negotiation on key points, at times, took place through the press. Statements were made more for domestic consumption than to promote international comity. Disagreements were not managed but allowed to escalate into confrontations. There was very little of what is necessary if an alliance is to have meaning - adjustment of national policies in response to the needs of allies.
This all has not been the norm in the Atlantic Alliance. During the Cuban missile crisis, Kruschev placed missiles in the Western Hemisphere, very close to American soil. President Kennedy sent Dean Acheson to Europe to consult with allies regarding the American policy response, including the possibility of pre-emption with respect to Soviet missiles in Cuba. President De Gaulle famously turned away Acheson's offer to present the photographic evidence, saying that he trusted the word of the President of the United States and that France would support the United States in whatever course it took.
As many misunderstandings as there have been made on both sides over the last 18 months, it would be a mistake to see the tensions besetting the alliance as dominantly matters of diplomacy or personality. Rather, much of the strain arises from the response over time on both sides of the Atlantic to events of two dates - 11/9, the date when the Berlin Wall fell, and 9/11, when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and killed 3,000 Americans.
Take, first, 11/9. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the existential need for solidarity that drove agreements, and insured the careful management of disagreements, has been removed. The unification of Germany and the comfortable integration of a unified Germany into the European Union are historic achievements. But with the Soviets durably out, and the Germans durably integrated, the felt need on both sides of the Atlantic for the Americans to be in is attenuated. In important respects, the Atlantic Alliance risks becoming a victim of its own success.
There is another important aspect of 11/9 and all that followed. Existential threats concentrate national attentions. And with their removal, domestic political considerations inevitably loom larger in the decisions of national governments. Without the Soviet threat, the need for European and American leaders to present a common front is reduced while the attractiveness of criticizing allies for domestic political benefit is increased. The ability in the United States to respond to populist and isolationist sentiment is enhanced, and in Europe there is scope for the redirection of political energy from the Atlantic Alliance to the unification project. If 11/9 made the world safer for disagreement between the United States and Europe, 9/11 created the grounds for real disagreement.
One does not have to agree that the U.S. is from Mars and the EU from Venus to recognize that 9/11 led Americans to a greater feeling of vulnerability and insecurity. This, in turn, led to a very substantial reorientation of U.S. foreign policy towards the objective of confronting terrorists and the states that sponsor and comfort them. While French newspapers may have proclaimed solidarity with America on September 12, 9/11 has not had anything like the impact on the European approach to the world that it has had on the American view.
With the Soviet threat removed and the focus shifted to out-of-area issues, it is in retrospect unsurprising that transatlantic tensions have increased. And the nature of out-of-area preoccupations - their location in the Middle East, where there have long been profound disagreements between the United States and Europe, the fact that the U.S. was victim on its own soil for the first time in nearly two centuries, and salience of issues of pre-emptive attack where capacities are highly asymmetric - all contribute to the increase in tensions.
The continuing importance of the Atlantic alliance
Some look at all of this from a European perspective and propose that standing up to, or containing, the United States ought to become a major objective of European foreign policy. Others on the American side wonder out loud whether European integration continues to be in America's interest or whether it instead degrades the ability of the United States to assemble coalitions of the willing on an issue-by-issue basis. Less radical is the suggestion sometimes made explicitly but more often revealed implicitly: that an amiable divorce between the United States and Europe is desirable, inevitable, or both, given their divergent interests and philosophical approach.
These views seem to me dangerously misguided. While no one can predict how the future will evolve, I am convinced that it is enormously in the interests of the United States, Europe and the world that the transatlantic alliance continue to be a central element of the grand strategy of both the United States and the nations of Europe. This proposition is often defended with resort to clichés - the shared heritage of the West, the importance of a community of democracies, the traditions of close cooperation, and so forth. And indeed propositions often become clichés because they are so obviously correct. But the necessity of the transatlantic alliance can be given a much more concrete defence.
The central paradox confronting the United States is this: American power is at its zenith and American influence is at its nadir. U.S. military dominance has never been greater. After nearly five decades of convergence between the economic strength of other industrial nations and the United States, the United States has pulled ahead over the last decade. The best available demographic and productivity forecasts suggest that this divergence is likely to persist. And yet events in Iraq, in North Korea, in the Middle East - and the difficulty the United States had in generating support of even Latin American countries for Security Council resolutions in support of the Iraq War - suggest how little international influence we now have. And, no thoughtful American can be oblivious to the global backlash against the United States manifested in the public opinion polls I cited earlier and in similar polls around the world.
Surely if the United States is to succeed in achieving its primary objectives in the world, whether those objectives be the successful confrontation of terror, or the more ultimate ones of spreading democracy around the world, Americans must recognize that they cannot succeed alone. Without the leverage provided by protection from the communist threat, America must find other means of influence. It is often much easier to induce others to want what you want than to pressure them to do what you want and they don't. One nation may be able to win a war but it usually takes many to win a peace. Legitimacy matters over time and it depends on international support. And if international imperatives were not enough, there is this: As we are seeing today, the American political system is unlikely to provide enduring support for international ventures carried on without foreign support.
And without European support, it is not possible to imagine the United States assembling meaningful coalitions of other nations. The resources of Europe, the influence of Europe in international forums, and the common values shared by the United States and Europe, all mean that if as Americans like to believe, American influence is such as to make us an indispensable nation, then the nations of Europe are indispensable allies.
What about European interests? I cannot presume to speak for Europe but it would seem to me that its interest in the continuing strength of the transatlantic alliance is still very strong. The world remains a dangerous place, and the American capacity to project force is not likely to be matched in the next several decades. Closer to home, if the United States and Europe do not find an effective modus vivendi, there will inevitably be increasing tensions within Europe as different nations take different views on actions taken by the United States. The events of the last 18 months, I would suggest, have been not only unsettling across the Atlantic but also across the English Channel and across a variety of intra-European borders. Nor is the most visionary of European projects - the gradual extension of international law and institutions to the global community on the model of what has happened in Europe over the past half century - a viable concept without successful cooperation with the United States.
If these considerations of American interest and European interest were not sufficient to make the case for the importance of the alliance, there is the issue of how the global system will evolve if the United States and Europe were to go their separate ways. There will not be successful cooperation on issues like global warming and weapons of mass destruction, and yet these are issues where progress cannot be made except on a global basis. But there is a more ominous prospect. A quarter century from now, China and India will likely be great powers, and there will have been dramatic growth in the economic strength and political power of the other nations of Asia. If the United States and Europe seek to jockey for influence in this part of the world, without an alliance, as these nations seek to establish their place, we will see a return - this time on a global basis - to the kind of international system that prevailed in Europe before the First World War. Peace did prevail for a long time but ultimately was unsustainable.
All of these considerations point to a common conclusion. While the original objectives of the Atlantic Alliance - winning the Cold War, and assuring peace within Western Europe - have been achieved and are not now in jeopardy, it is no less true than it was a half century ago that the prospects for enduring security for the United States, for Europe, and for the world depend on the Atlantic Alliance.
The path forward
If this argument for the importance of the Atlantic Alliance is accepted on both sides of the Atlantic, what is to be done? In important respects, the challenge is philosophical - it's really in the attitudes of political leaders as they commit to act to lower the rhetorical temperature, to consultation and cooperation, to managing disagreements, to broad common purposes. The dangers I have highlighted will be avoided whatever precise arrangements are made for summits or particular initiatives. And without a genuine commitment on the part of political leaders, no set of recommended meetings, institutions or programs will make much difference.
This is a moment when political leaders are truly challenged - for in democracies, leaders both shape and respond to public opinion. There is the danger of a mutually reinforcing negative dynamic as leaders respond to, and in the process exacerbate, current trends in public opinion. And there is the very real prospect of a positive dynamic as trust is restored across the Atlantic.
An alliance only has meaning if countries do things because of the alliance that they would not otherwise have done out of their calculation of national self-interest. In recent years, the United States and Europe have increasingly had different primary areas of concern, with Americans identifying terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and the export of democracy as of the greatest concern, and Europeans placing more weight on issues like global warming, economic development, and the strengthening of international institutions. There has been too little willingness on both sides to allow allies to pursue their priority concerns. The common agenda has too often been the intersection rather than the union of national priorities.
I would submit if the transatlantic relationship is to be strengthened over the next several years, Europeans will need to understand and find ways to accommodate the security preoccupations of the United States, and Americans will need to be more cooperative than in the recent past in addressing problems of global concern even where they do not pose an imminent threat to our national security as conventionally defined.
If this is to suggest a complementarity between American and European priorities, there is also complementarity between American and European capacities. Whatever happens in European defense policy over the next decade, the United States capacity to project force will far exceed that of Europe. Equally, barring a sea change in the preferences of the U.S. policy, Europe's ability to contribute to peacekeeping efforts and more generally to the global development effort will far exceed that of the United States. Complementary capacities as well as complementary priorities provide a basis for cooperation.
Let me conclude by identifying three specific areas where I believe substantially more intense dialogue and cooperation between the United States and Europe will have substantial benefits in the years ahead.
First, the related issues raised by terrorism and rogue states. In both cases, there is reason to doubt the efficacy of conventional deterrence and the question of pre-emptive action arises. Whatever one's view on the Iraq War, it seems almost inevitable that questions of pre-emption are likely to loom larger in the future than they traditionally have. On the one hand, it is hard to imagine a stable world in which all nations claim the right to pre-empt based on their own threat assessments. On the other, it is difficult to believe that major nations will or should completely cede to the international community decisions that are fundamental to their security. Without judging specific cases, there is clearly a great need for some clarification of "rules of the road" in this area, and if those rules do not come from transatlantic dialogue, it is hard to see where they will come from.
Second, the future of the global trading system. Despite my background, I have said almost nothing about economics this afternoon because I don't think that economic issues are fundamental in thinking about the current situation. Political differences so far have had only mild impacts on business decisions on either side of the Atlantic and my years in government make me doubt that businesses will be a strong source of political pressure on issues that are not primarily commercial. On the other hand, as I look at the global economy going forward with all the uncertainties that lie ahead, one thing is clear - that the prospects for sustained global expansion and all the benefits it brings will be much greater if the project of increased international integration in trade and investment keeps moving forward. History teaches that the chances of the rising Asian powers being successfully accommodated by the international system also depends on what happens to the trading system. And the history of every past trade round suggests that here, too, successful cooperation between the United States and Europe is fairly close to being sufficient for success.
Third, the Middle East. Events in the Middle East over the next decade will be as, or more, consequential for both the United States and Europe than events in any other region. American and European approaches to the Middle East have in recent years not been well aligned, with real differences in view on Israeli-Palestinian issues, on how best to deal with Iran, and of course on Iraq. And yet in each of these spheres it is hard to see how either the United States or Europe will achieve its objectives alone. Indeed, the traditional differences in view between the U.S. and Europe mean that any meaningfully common approaches that can be forged will have that much more legitimacy and impact. Surely, without demonizing anyone in the Middle East, there is much to be gained from serious transatlantic cooperation in this crucial region.
Conclusion
So it is perhaps appropriate that I say all of this in Britain. For as your Prime Minister Tony Blair powerfully explained earlier this week, Britain's destiny lies both with the United States and with Europe. And so, as much or more than any nation, you have a great stake in the transatlantic alliance. So do we all. Let us join in the hope that in responding to a variety of very different threats and opportunities, it will make as great a contribution to Europe, the United States and the world in the first half of the 21st century as it did in the last half of the 20th.
Thank you.



President Lawrence H. Summers' remarks at ACE: 'Higher Education and the American Dream'American Council on Education86th Annual MeetingMiami, FloridaFebruary 29, 2004
As prepared for delivery
Introduction
Thank you, David [Ward, President of ACE] for that generous introduction. I am honored to be here today, representing Harvard before this assembly drawn from the most diverse, expansive, and excellent "system" of higher education in the world. I am grateful for the opportunity to address an issue that I believe is central both to our nation and to our colleges and universities -- the manifest inadequacy of higher education's current contribution to equality of opportunity in America and how we can do better.
I will frame my remarks by noting some of the important changes in our national economy over the last generation, and then discuss issues of access in higher education and their relationship to fundamental fairness. I will conclude by highlighting some initiatives we are taking at Harvard to promote access in the context of broader issues of national policy.
Our national economy has been transformed in recent years. Not quite 15 years ago it was a common joke that the Cold War was over, and Europe and Japan had won. Today, the United States is pulling away, and after two decades of stagnation, family incomes have risen significantly as the economy has been transformed by internationalization and information technology.
The gap in income for going to college has risen from 31 percent in 1979 to 66 percent in 1997. Accompanying this change has been substantial increase in inequality. In 1979, the top one percent of the population earned less than half the share received by the bottom 40 percent. The most recent data suggest that today the top one percent earn more than the bottom 40 percent. Or, to put the point differently, in the same period when the median family income was going up 18 percent, the top one percent of all families saw a 200 percent increase in their income.
Sharp increases in inequality and their relation to education are a serious concern. They are even more troubling when one examines changes in intergenerational mobility. Here the evidence is murky because of the difficulty of matching parents and their children over long periods of time. But the evidence suggests that intergenerational mobility in America is no longer increasing and may well be decreasing.
One recent study found that a child born in the bottom 10 percent of families by income has only one chance in three of getting out of the bottom 20 percent. [Thomas Hertz]. Others suggest that Andrew Carnegie's famous line -- "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations" needs to be revised to five or six generations. [Alan Krueger, NY Times, November 14, 2002].
More inequality, and more persistence of inequality, mean just this: The gap between the children of different economic backgrounds has sharply increased in this country over the last generation.
Higher education and equal opportunity
Increasing disparity based on parental position has never been anyone's definition of the American dream.
Going back to the beginning of the Republic, and Jefferson's view that virtue and talent were sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, the contribution of education -- and especially higher education -- to equality of opportunity has been a central concern.
Indeed, 64 years ago, at the outset of World War II, one of my predecessors as president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant, delivered an address at the University of California entitled "Education for a Classless Society." In that speech, Conant cites Lincoln for the proposition that we have as a nation the duty "to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life." And he offered a manifesto for a more just society achieved through equal opportunity in education.
We in higher education and the nation have done much since the Second World War to promote equality of opportunity. We made genuine progress through the happy accident of the GI Bill. By 1947, one out of every two students in higher education was financed by the Bill, and the proportion of young people going to college had almost doubled.
Many feared that the influx of students from a broad cross-section of America would strain capacity and dilute quality, but in fact the opposite proved true. The veterans were particularly motivated and successful students, and the overall quality of higher education improved with expansion. Furthermore, the rising number of educated people ushered in a period of growth and prosperity unmatched in our history.
The success of the GI Bill, and the success of the students it brought into our nation's colleges and universities, had far-reaching impact. Harvard and many other universities substantially increased the resources for financial aid, and a number of leading institutions adopted need-based financial aid policies.
State and local governments invested on an unprecedented scale in constructing campuses that made college pervasively available. And with the passage of the Higher Education Act, the federal government made a major commitment to assure, in the words of President Johnson, that "a high school senior anywhere in this great land of ours can apply to any college or any university in any of the 50 States and not be turned away because his family is poor."
The civil rights movement added yet another dimension to equality of opportunity in higher education. In the Harvard classes of 1957 through 1961, there were seven or eight African Americans -- today that number is seven to eight percent. And every graduating class in America looks very different today from the way it did decades ago.
This evolution in the composition of our student bodies has not happened by accident, by coincidence, or by the invisible hand. It is the result of conscious choice in the public and private sectors, by people determined to bring us to this point. It reflects a choice that institutions make with an awareness of the profound importance of fairness to all -- and with the recognition that what is fair is also effective.
We in higher education can take some satisfaction in the Supreme Court's reaffirmation, in the Michigan case, of our efforts in this regard. That reaffirmation rested on constitutional law. It also rested on a broad coalition that saw the importance of our efforts.
We have a long way to go to make sure that we deliver, in the experience and academic success of minority students on our campuses, on the promise we make at the door. We have a long way to go to close the gap in academic achievement and standardized test scores separating black and Hispanic students from their white and Asian-American counterparts. And we have a long way to go in bringing to bear on the problems plaguing our public schools sufficient imagination, insight, and relentlessness to begin to make a dent.
The challenge ahead
Today, two-thirds of high school students go into some form of post-secondary education, far more than in most industrialized nations.
No doubt, without this progress in promoting access to higher education in the United States, inequality would be even greater. No doubt, without this progress, there would be an even stronger correlation between the socioeconomic status of parents and their children. But surely, given the changes in the United States over the last generation in inequality and its current magnitude, it behooves us to ask whether we in higher education are doing enough. I believe that we are not.
In the United States today, a student from the top income quartile is more than six times as likely as a student from the bottom quartile to graduate with a B.A. within five years of leaving high school. And in the most selective colleges and universities, only three percent of students come from the bottom income quartile and only 10 percent come from the bottom half of the income scale. Let me underscore what I just said. Children whose families are in the lower half of the American income distribution are underrepresented by 80 percent.
These differences cannot be fully accounted for by native ability or academic preparation. Indeed, a student from the highest income quartile and the lowest aptitude quartile is as likely to be enrolled in college as a student from the lowest income quartile and the highest aptitude quartile.
Why do these gaps in attendance and graduation persist? In part, because some students simply cannot afford to go to college. At all but the most well-endowed institutions, many students face high tuition and inadequate financial aid.
In part, because many students never consider applying to certain colleges or universities because they believe them to be out of reach. This past fall we held focus groups at Harvard with students with family incomes under $50,000. We learned that these students often work to make up the parental contribution because they do not want to subject their parents to additional financial stress.
There are also issues that are specific to highly selective institutions. The evidence is overwhelming that binding early decision programs of the kind that some colleges and universities use penalize students in need of financial aid by precluding them from comparing offers in choosing a college. Students fortunate enough to be able to be channeled toward prep courses for the SATs surely show up more favorably at any given level of ability than other students. I would venture a guess that the classrooms of Stanley Kaplan and the Princeton Review are among the least diverse in America.
Many very talented students from low and middle-income families cannot compete with their more affluent peers in the apparent level of cultural or athletic extra-curricular pursuits reflected in their college applications. Whatever the reasons, the degree of inequality in access to higher education is a problem that must be addressed:
It is more urgent than ever before because the economic impact of going to college in general, and going to a more selective college in particular, has never been greater, and some research suggests that this impact may be greatest for the poorest students.
It is more urgent than ever before because one in five American children now has a foreign-born parent, and the children of immigrants are twice as likely to be poor.
It is more urgent than ever before because our nation's competitiveness depends ever more on the quality of those who graduate from our nation's universities and colleges. And only by assuring access to everyone can we maximize the quality of our nation's college graduates.
And it is more urgent than ever before because excellence in education depends on diversity. If our college graduates are to learn all they can from each other, we must assure that they come from a truly wide range of backgrounds.
These are not just abstractions. I think of a young woman at Harvard who came from a refugee camp on the border between Cambodia and Laos when she was two, and whose parents worked in an L.A. laundry. In the summer before last, she went back to that refugee camp to help.
I think of a young man who came to Harvard last year from Hialeah High School, right near here. He came to this country when he was twelve not speaking a word of English, and came in third in the Florida debate championships just a few years later.
These stories are multiplied many times over. They could be multiplied many times more if we as a nation were fully redeeming our commitment to equality of educational opportunity.
A new initiative at Harvard
In this spirit, we are announcing at Harvard a new initiative to encourage talented students from families of low and moderate income to attend Harvard College. The program has four major components:
1) Financial aid: Beginning next year, parents in families with incomes of less than $40,000 will no longer be expected to contribute to the cost of attending Harvard for their children. In addition, Harvard will reduce the contributions expected of families with incomes between $40,000 and $60,000;
2) Recruiting: The College Admissions Office has intensified its efforts to reach out to talented students across the nation who might not think of Harvard as an option and make sure that they understand Harvard's long-standing commitment to enrolling students from a wide range of backgrounds and regardless of financial circumstances;
3) Admissions: Harvard is reemphasizing, in the context of its highly personalized process of admissions, the policy of taking note of applicants who have achieved a great deal despite limited resources at home or in their local schools and communities;
4) Pipeline: Harvard recently announced the establishment of the Crimson Summer Academy, an intensive summer program for academically talented high school students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds in the greater Boston area. Each student will participate for three successive summers, beginning after ninth grade, receiving encouragement and preparation to attend a challenging four-year college or university.
We want to send the strongest possible message that Harvard is open to talented students from all economic backgrounds. Too often, outstanding students from families of modest means do not believe that college is an option for them -- much less an Ivy League university. Our doors have long been open to talented students regardless of financial need, but many students simply do not know or believe this. We are determined to change both the perception and the reality.
We have also taken steps at the graduate level to assure that students who wish to pursue careers in public service are not deterred because of finances. Last year we established a $14 million Presidential Scholars program to fund top master's and doctoral students choosing careers in fields such as education, public health, and government service.
Harvard is fortunate to have the resources to undertake these programs. But as one institution, we are a very small piece of the puzzle.
The Higher Education Act is on the table for reauthorization this spring, and there is clearly much work to be done. The trends I have described today are not unrelated to the fact that we have allowed the purchasing power of the Pell Grant to decline for the last thirty years by 11 percent in real terms, relative to overall price increases at private institutions of 150 percent; that we have moved from grants to loans as the primary vehicle for federal financial aid; and that state legislatures have slashed operating support for universities, sending tuitions higher, while diverting scarce grant resources to merit aid.
It is not the work of one bill, or one administration, to restore higher education to its full force as an engine of equal opportunity. Plainly there are many new priorities on our national plate -- homeland security, the war in Iraq, nation building, to name a few.
But we need to understand, as we did after World War II, that education is not a discretionary expense; it is a necessary investment in the future of the next generation and, thus, in the future of the nation. We need to support programs that work with children from a very early age to make sure that they set their sights high and have the preparation to succeed in college and meet challenging goals. We need to reverse the questionable allocation of national resources that results in greater, not lesser, inequality.
In short, we need to recognize that the most serious domestic problem in the United States today is the widening gap between the children of the rich and the children of the poor, and education is the most powerful weapon we have to address that problem. Let us make sure that the American dream is a possible dream for every child in the nation.
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