BOOK REVIEW : 11 Years of Shoving Harvard Uphill

The University, an Owner’s Manual by Henry Rosovsky (W.W. Norton: $19.95; 299 pages.)

At the end of the ‘70s, when Harvard University launched a drive to substantially increase its already massive endowment, all the stops were pulled out. There was a twisting of alumni arms on a scale never seen before. Among the really high-torque operatives was Henry Rosovsky, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences and the university’s chief academic administrator.

An early arm was that of John L. Loeb, a prominent New York financier and philanthropist. For the occasion, President Derek Bok came along; Loeb treated them to hamburgers at the Four Seasons. It was gastronomic Harvardry--provident chic, that is, like using a worn Vuitton bag to carry your cheese sandwich. In his memoir, “The University,” Rosovsky recalls:

“As the conversation gently evolved towards specific dollar amounts, our host inquired: ‘Are you asking me for $5 million?’ I replied: ‘Not quite, sir. My hope is that you will agree to give $10 million, so that others would be inspired to give $5 million.’

“Henry,” Loeb said, darkening, “that comes close to chutzpah.” Abruptly, he asked whether Rosovsky knew how to spell the word. (One thing you get in exchange for multimillion benefactions is the right to grill a Harvard dean on his spelling.)

But if knowledge is power, then it was time for No. 1 to strut his stuff. “Suddenly, the president of Harvard University snatched the napkin from my hands,” Rosovsky continues, “and printed CHUTZPAH in large block letters on the paper and gave it to Mr. Loeb.”

A few days later, Loeb sent word he was good for about $9 million. “We had established that the value of chutzpah is approximately $4 million,” the writer concludes.

It is witty, urbane, a touch cool, a touch smug, a touch fierce, and it ends with an academic flourish in Prof. Rosovsky’s own field: economics. And underneath there is a winning glee in the entire operation and, above all, in telling of it.

These are the marks of Rosovsky’s engaging account of 11 years spent shoving Harvard uphill. It’s hard to do when your shov-ee hasn’t the least doubt that it already is on top. In general, Rosovsky thinks so too, but he gives us an account of the diplomacy, finagling, and intellectual judo--you use your partner’s lunge to keep him pointed the right way--to patch the holes and minimize the slides.

Rosovsky has dean-like things to say about the advantages for undergraduates of university-colleges such as Harvard, with big research and graduate programs, as against the small liberal arts college (more stimulation). We hear about Harvard’s core curriculum--a means of broadening a student’s program by replacing general education courses with a series of highly focused specific ones. Some of it sounds like a speech or a position paper; some of it is.

When Rosovsky, like his core curriculum, gets away from generalities and down to particulars, the book shines. He gives us a composite of a well-packed dean’s day. Among its events is the discovery that his plan to save money by reducing the painting of classrooms would mean laying off painters; and, under union rules about seniority, those laid-off would be black. Painting will proceed as scheduled.

Everything is linked to everything else. His financial assistant insists tuition must be raised; this will mean anguish and higher outlays for scholarships. We get one of the Rosovskyisms that stud the book: “I know that few decisions have to be made immediately and that it is best not to make them in a macho frame of mind.”

An economics professor comes in to complain that his pay raise is only 1%. Rosovsky takes pleasure in proving to him that the correct figure is 6%. A delegation of Jewish students brings 3,000 signatures to protest the holding of commencement during a religious holiday. Rosovsky is unimpressed: “In our community, thousands of signatures can be obtained in a few hours for nearly anything.” More to the point, he has obtained in advance rabbinical advice to back him up; it helps, he adds, that he is Jewish.

He has to speak harshly to a professor who refuses to meet with his classes, complaining that his students are “inauthentic.” Later, painfully, it turns out that the man has lost his mind and has to be retired on pay.

Harvard has no special dispensation in the competition for talent. It has to sweat. The chairman of the chemistry department sends over a note from a Nobel prize winner in Britain who had been asked to comment on a list of names for a vacancy. “With the reputation you have got for treatment of the branch of chemistry that has most rapidly developed over the past 30 years . . . any of the distinguished gentlemen on your short list would be as mad as the proverbial March hares to leave their cushy nests, particularly those who have been spurned by Harvard in the past.”

It is a reflection of the most important battle Rosovsky fought during his tenure: getting fresh blood. There are Harvard departments that resist virtually any possible candidate. The philosophy department, he writes, is so highly rated it suffers “the classic pathology: the inability to find anyone worthy of joining its ranks. It is in imminent danger of becoming a club of old gentlemen, more exclusive with every retirement and death. In my imagination, I picture the department with only one member: a patriarch holding a gigantic bag of black balls.”

Accordingly, Rosovsky sets aside an hour and a bottle of the best sherry to woo a brilliant young philosopher from a Midwestern university who has managed to crawl out of the black ball sack. There is a high salary, a job for the wife, a housing allowance and a small slush fund.

Rosovsky has provocative things to say about tenure, about the pleasures and pains of being a professor, the hard path for the young Ph.D., the peculiar strains, balances and imbalances of power in a university, the envy and rivalries that develop. “Universities and colleges are schools for adults,” he writes, “and the requirements of schooling and adulthood can be difficult to reconcile.”

It is appropriate that the book concludes with an exchange of letters with John Kenneth Galbraith. (The latter responds to Rosovsky’s all-points instruction warning against romances between faculty and graduate and undergraduate students. He had committed such a fault decades ago, Galbraith confesses, and was still happily married to her; what did the dean advise? Discretion, the dean replies.)

Rosovsky, who held his job longer than anyone since World War II--he lets us know this--before deciding to return to teaching, much resembles Galbraith in his style, graceful and with a deadly understatement.

Friday: Elaine Kendall reviews “Fling and Other Stories” by John Hersey.