Lawrence H. Summers paced uneasily in the basement of the president’s mansion six years ago, rehearsing his installation speech for the final time.

As the minutes ticked away before his prime-time address, his 11-year-old twin daughters brought their nervous father a sheet of paper. Looking down, expecting to see his first words—“I accept!”—Summers instead found a new draft penned by his children: “Harvard is good. Harvard is great. Let us go forth and educate,” he recalled this week.

Today, University President Drew G. Faust has her work cut out for her to match the eloquence of those 11-year-olds. Behind Faust, on the steps of Memorial Church, will sit the last three men to speak on this occasion: Summers, in 2001; Neil L. Rudenstine, in 1991; and Derek C. Bok, in 1971. Each brought his own style and purpose to the inaugural stage, melding his vision for the institution with the weight of Harvard’s history and the tensions of the moment.

Bok’s speech, less than 900 words long, would be dwarfed by the grandeur of Rudenstine’s and the exuberance of Summers’. Delivered to just 110 people in the grand Faculty Room of University Hall, Bok’s reserve hinted at the tumult that had occupied the University—and that room itself—only a few years before.

“I didn’t think it was a very good time [for speeches] given all the unrest and disaffection of the time,” Bok said recently. “I tried to keep it as simple as I possibly could.”

Twenty years later, with the installation of Rudenstine, the ceremony returned to Tercentenary Theatre and the pomp of years past. (But not quite: The 1909 inauguration of A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, included students marching from the Yard to the Stadium carrying torches and wearing red sashes.)

In his speech in 1991, Rudenstine called Harvard “venerable,” “magical,” and “enduring.” The former Princeton provost said this week that he used that occasion to respond to the conservative assault on the academy in the 1980s. Much of the speech was a history, tracing the ideas of American education that gave birth to the research university of the late 20th century.

“I wanted to say how we got there,” Rudenstine said of the speech. “Probably more like Derek Bok than Larry or Drew, I had in some sense lived through a lot of this history.”

Rudenstine said he deliberately did not mention the impending capital campaign (Rudenstine would raise $2.6 billion for the University during his decade at the helm).

Rudenstine’s address also held a seemingly prophetic warning for his successor, Summers. “We can be civil without being simply innocuous,” Rudenstine said. “We can be controversial and provocative without necessarily declaring open season on those who disagree with us. The way we talk to one another, and the tone we use in argument or debate, will often be as important as what we actually say.”

Where Rudenstine searched through history, Summers grabbed the moment. In October 2001, that moment was Sept. 11.

“I think more than some I tried to situate my speech in its moment,” Summers said. “I was trying to strike a rather firm, young note.”

Rudenstine quoted William James; Summers echoed Bob Dylan. “Our most enduring tradition is that we are forever young,” he said.

The address had a cadence and certainty more associated with the State of the Union than a lecture hall. And it had a specificity that Rudenstine’s lacked, more clearly setting out Summers’ agenda.

In perhaps his most memorable effort, Summers called for greater engagement in science, as the University continued its expansion into Allston.

“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 to acceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome or the meaning of exponential growth,” he said.

The standard for today’s address will most likely not be set by Summers’ daughters but by someone else.

“Everyone has tried to craft an inaugural address in the spirit of Charles William Eliot’s great address,” said Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes, who teaches a class on the history of Harvard.

In that speech in 1869, the man who would become Harvard’s longest-serving president set the course for the modern University, calling for a move away from its strict colonial roots.

Faust, a historian, read Eliot’s speech to prepare for her own. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it, trying to get a sense of what the genre is,” she told The Crimson this summer. “I wanted to see what people imagine as an inaugural address.”

But Gomes offered a bit of a warning: “There’s only one Charles William Eliot. There’s only one Eliot inaugural, and we’ve had generations of efforts to try to equal that, and none have, so they should stop trying.”

—Claire M. Guehenno and Laurence H. M. Holland contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Samuel P. Jacobs can be reached at jacobs@fas.harvard.edu.