ONE PERSPECTIVE: Fair Harvard

By Stephen B. Young The Daily Record Newswire A bet today on who will be our major party candidates for the presidency this year would likely have one Harvard Law School alumnus pitted against another. The financial face-off between the 1 percent and the 99 percent also occurs in our politics: Our national power structure is skewed toward graduates of a few elite universities and professional schools. President Barack Obama and his wife are graduates of Harvard Law. Mitt Romney has a degree from the Harvard Business School as well as a Harvard Law degree. George W. Bush was a Yale undergrad and had a degree from the Harvard Business School. John Kerry was at Yale for his undergraduate studies, and Al Gore got his bachelor's degree at Harvard. Larry Summers, who ran Obama's economic team through the collapse of Wall Street and the "great recession of 2009, 2010 and 2011," was a Harvard product -- as was Barney Frank, chairman of the House Finance Committee and co-author of the remedial Dodd-Frank Legislation. Harvard graduates are dominant on our federal Supreme Court, while the chairman of the Federal Reserve System was a Princeton professor. Now, to be sure, there are many in positions of high office who did not graduate from Harvard or any other Ivy League university, but I call your attention to Harvard to make a generic point about the collapse of our national capacity for leadership -- and because I know it very well. My point is simply that our elite universities and professional schools do not produce leaders. The country is suffering from a leadership deficit but seems to have nowhere to turn to find real leaders. So in lieu of the real thing, we go for the appearances of fame and paper credentials. I read into both the Tea Party and the Occupy movements a cry for moral leadership -- not for more managers, not for more technocrats, not for those who rise according to their resumes and will not in any event risk a hit to their reputations by speaking or acting outside their area of expertise (or even by raising their voices and taking a stand within it). Many voters want something more -- something more visceral, more of a "damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead" character -- in those whom they would readily follow as leaders. Obama's cool professionalism and his restraint in deferring to experts have given rise to disappointment among many voters, and not only on the progressive left. People believe that the country is drifting, that it has no motivation to do great things anymore, and this worries them. They do not see the president stepping up to the challenge of giving direction; he is all tactics and little strategy. But that is what they train you to do at Harvard Law School. I know; I was there. I even helped build the school into what it is today. In 1978 Al Sacks, then the dean of the law school, asked me to come back and help him reshape the school for a new generation of post-Vietnam War protesting baby boomers. And that I did. Back then I very much believed in the contribution Harvard Law School could make to our country and I wanted to see the school succeed for its students. What we did, really, was mostly to respond to student emotional demands to boost their resumes. They wanted credentials to take out into the world and use as a means to find high-paying or otherwise important jobs that they could parlay into membership in the American elite. What I was less aware of at the time was their lack of appetite to serve genuinely. Their service ethics could not in many cases be divorced from a strong sense of self-promotion; they assumed they had gold stars on their foreheads, that they had already been anointed in having been selected to enter Harvard, so that they emerged deserving superior roles in our society. But the professors prepared them for status by teaching sophisticated technique, not values and leadership. The skill imparted by Harvard Law School is rigorous analysis of small points, sensitivity to key words and phrases, making fine distinctions between factual situations or conceptual categories: in short, how to "lawyer" human truth. Students learned to position themselves well at the drop of a hat. They could come up with reasons for most any outcome. Many students became emotionally servile in some deeply hidden recess of the mind as they prepared to move up our political and business hierarchies. They were comfortable with the rule "To get ahead, you go along." Harvard's rouser -- Fair Harvard -- has the following lines: As the world on truth's current glides by, Be the herald of light, and the bearer of love, Till the stock of the Puritans die. I'm afraid that this old aspiration for Harvard no longer appertains. The stock of the Puritans has died in our time. Just recently James Fallows had a long article in The Atlantic apologizing for Barack Obama's having disappointed many of his progressive supporters while Ryan Lizza wrote along similar lines for The New Yorker. Fallows went to great lengths to explain that the work of a president is really like that of a corporate lawyer, both roles being constrained by the rules of the game and beholden to clients. Lizza's review of White House memos and policy papers shows Obama acting as the proficient in-house corporate lawyer -- reading everything closely and writing down observations and corrections to what his staff had drafted, and not spending much time stretching the edges of policy envelopes. He lawyered health care reform (2,000 pages of legislation) as well as some limited restrictions on Wall Street selfishness (over 1,000 pages of legislation with more pages of rules to come), and military strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan. My reaction to both Fallow's and Lizza's descriptions of Obama as a work-horse but incrementalist president was to conclude that he had learned well the Harvard Law School approach to decision-making. So well, in fact, that he had become president of the Harvard Law Review, a distinction indeed in that environment. The corporate-lawyer-like Obama approach to the presidency left him vulnerable to perceptions from the right that he was soft, an inept defender of American interests in a world filled with nasty and unfriendly people, and that he was a "socialist" -- more of a European than a free-spirited American, more a believer in big government and the nanny state than in individual character and achievement. In 2008 a friend of mine in Mankato was approached to take an important role in Romney's Minnesota campaign organization that year. He went to Boston for a private session with the governor all prepared to get excited, sign up, and go rushing off to raise money and line up caucus delegates. But he returned to Minnesota deflated. Romney, he told me, was only a manager. Romney's excitement in running for the presidency was to "get his hands on the machinery of government." Once he had the data, he could set things right, tinkering here and there with the machine. It was clear that Romney had not read Richard Neustadt's seminal 1960 book on presidential weakness, naturally titled "Presidential Power." As Jimmy Carter before him had learned to his disappointment, the presidency is not about management at all, but "leadership." The American people are waiting for someone other than Godot; they are disenchanted and discontented. Management all by itself has no cure for such distress. The old colonialist Rudyard Kipling had expressed it differently. He put leadership over management when setting forth his recommendations in his once-famous poem "If": If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master; If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools... If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, 'Or walk with Kings -- nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son! Published: Tue, Feb 21, 2012