Reischauer adds that his ties to the national press corps increases his public visibility when he speaks out.

The upshot has been a slew of fawning national media attention, from what Summers acknowledges was a flattering New York Times Magazine profile, lauding his bold activism on campus, to puff question-and-answer pieces in Time and The Wall Street Journal, to a spate of other positive stories on the curricular review and other Summers issues.

Toiv says Summers’ high profile is not historically unusual for a school like Harvard.

“He had a head start as a public figure, and that fits very well with the traditional role of Harvard presidents [who] have used the bully pulpit to speak out on issues relating to higher education as well as other important national issues,” Toiv says. “Harvard has had this traditional role because Harvard is Harvard.”

REPUDIATING RUDY?

Summers does not just present a marked contrast to the more internally-minded Rudenstine, but he also towers above most of his presidential peers in stature. While Rudenstine maintained a low profile on Mass. Ave., Summers developed a high profile on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“If you stopped random people on the street in Washington or in New York and asked who was the president of Harvard and who was the president of Stanford and Yale, I’m sure Larry’s name recognition would be 10 times any of the other presidents,” Reischauer says. “People know who he is, respect the job he did in Washington—even those who disagreed with it.”

Only a few university presidents—like Summers and Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger—have national name recognition.

And the fact that Summers and Bollinger were two of the four finalists in Harvard’s 2001 presidential search is no accident. Some members of the search committee had decided they wanted a president better suited to the limelight than Rudenstine and his peers.

“Some members of the [Harvard] Corporation during the search process thought that it would be a desirable feature, not a necessary one, if the president were to speak out, use the bully pulpit more than other presidents have,” says one well-informed administrator.

Robert E. Rubin ’60—a close Summers friend, his former boss at the Treasury and a Corporation member who has been appointed since Summers’s selection—says that he thinks Summers was chosen because as “Harvard faced a new century,” the Corporation wanted it to do so “with a president who was going to engage with the issues that Harvard has to deal with now.”

“They knew what they were getting,” the administrator says. “They expected Summers to be more outspoken than any other president.”

Georgetown Law Professor Daniel K. Tarullo, who has known Summers since their time on the Dukakis campaign and later as a colleague who advised former President Bill Clinton on economics, says that he “had assumed that the Corporation would not offer the presidency to Summers unless the Corporation had wanted a broad-ranging president who would be a leading figure in American education.”

“Why would they want a man who had expanded the scope of every job that he had been in...unless they wanted a president like that,” Tarullo says. “It seems that has been exactly what they have gotten.”

Professor of Economics Lawrence F. Katz notes that in recent times, the Harvard president’s role has fluctuated between public figure and internal administrator, noting the prominence of former University Presidents James B. Conant ’14 and Derek C. Bok compared with the relative obscurity of Nathan M. Pusey ’28 and Rudenstine. He added that the Corporation was aware of Summers’ “long history of being engaged with political issues” when they chose him.