Harvard University is synonymous in the American, and the world’s mind with excellence and with power. Most corners of the global village regarded the passage of the US Presidency from George W. Bush to Barack Obama as a profound change. But in Harvard terms it simply represented a transfer of authority from a graduate of its Business School to an alumnus of its Law School.

This odd coupling, with a common academic root, was hardly unique in the annals of America’s oldest and wealthiest university: Presidents John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy; Vice President Al Gore; and the current Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, feature among its graduates.

Under the American constitution, of course, presidential power is strictly limited to two four-year terms.

But as a South African student Joel Pollak, currently completing his legal studies at Harvard wrote to me recently, the potent apex of the judicial branch – the US Supreme Court – whose members enjoy life-time tenure has a current Harvard majority: “five of its nine members are graduates of its law school – a powerful, and telling, majority.”

In 2007 I was gifted (not too strong a word) with an appointment as a Fellow of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, one of the university’s 10 graduate schools. They jostle for space on the 1.5-kilometre campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, alongside the majestic Charles River, which divides this town from historic Boston.

Although housed in a graduate school the institute, which was established after his assassination as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy, promotes public service by undergraduates, or students of Harvard College as they are referred to, by sponsoring non-credit courses, study groups and internships in the public sector. It is perhaps fashionable these days to pile on the pressure of deconstruction – and it is always fun to pull down mighty Harvard as a sort of American broederbond writ very large.

McGill University resident business school maverick, Henry Mintzberg recently pointed out in The Economist how Ford’s Robert McNamara (whose disastrous tenure as one of “the best and the brightest” Secretaries of Defence led to the escalation of the Vietnam War); and Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling (whose name became a synonym for corporate criminal greed in the pre-Madoff days) were both near the top of their class at Harvard Business School.

But they, alongside the more recent case of George W. Bush, turned out to be lousy leaders. Philip Delves Broughton, a former Daily Telegraph journalist and a Harvard graduate himself, has recently written a tell-all book about his HBS experience, Ahead of the Curve, citing Harvard MBAs as “Masters of the Apocalypse”. My own exposure to the business school, an impressive modernistic architectural pile across the river from the School of Government, whose upmarket country club campus appearance was mightily assisted by a whopping $1-billion endowment from Bloomberg, was strictly culinary.

For a mere (and heavily subsidised) $10, I could feast like a gourmand on an international culinary buffet, more befitting a six-star hotel than a university canteen. So I cannot critique the critics of the business school.

But my four-month tenure in the fall (autumn season) semester at the Institute of Politics gave me a very different, and mostly positive, perspective. If it is possible to have a formative experience at the age of 50, then this was it.

370 years

No doubt because of its immense wealth and standing, 370-year-old Harvard can do things most other institutions of higher learning can simply dream of. Even after last year’s financial meltdown, its endowment of $28bn makes it the wealthiest university in the world and ranks it second only to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as the richest non-profit organisation on the face of the earth.

Just to give a local perspective: the Harvard endowment is worth double the total combined national and provincial education budgets for the whole of South Africa. A very small portion of this largesse enabled the Institute of Politics to appoint six resident fellows per semester, accommodate us in considerable comfort in custom-built apartments, and allow us to fly in weekly guests for the seminars or workshops we provided for the undergraduate students, each of whom attended with startling regularity (given that there were no academic credits for attendance) and with concentrated interest.

Although there was considerable interest in my series on “Development and Democracy in Africa”, I had little doubt that the keen participation was more of a commentary on the intellectual DNA of the average (although they are, in fact, supremely above average) Harvard undergraduate.

Admission to this gold-standard of American universities is highly prized and the entrance levels are so supremely competitive that, generally, fewer than 8% of first-year applicants who meet the stringent academic entrance requirements are granted a cherished berth.

Recruitment strategy

The Dean of Admissions explained at one of our weekly fellows’ luncheons how the university scoured the continental United States, and to an extent the world, to ensure that its undergraduates were suitably diverse, not just in demographic terms, but on a dizzying balance of interests which spanned every attribute from orchestral ability (the world acclaimed cellist Yo-Yo Ma is on the star-studded faculty) to geography (“we found we were attracting too few students from Texas, so we went ‘down there’ to recruit them from high school”, was how he put it). Much of this desire to improve the cultural mix is a conscious effort to repair the discriminatory patterns of the past and to rebut the caricature of the university as a redoubt of the Boston Brahmin elite class, which indeed was a fair working description of its admissions policy until well into the 1960s.

The university annals record, for example, how the surge of Catholics and Jews led in 1922 to the imposition of a Jewish quota, which in turn led to the establishment of nearby Brandeis University where Jews could gain admission sans restriction.

And such discrimination was not confined to religious minorities. A “secret court” led by then Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell expelled those believed to be gay, and even as late as the 1950s, the Dean of Admissions was recorded as “seeking better ways to detect homosexual tendencies and psychiatric problems” in prospective students.

In those far-off days, women students were housed in a sister school, Radcliffe College.

Full circle

The wheel has, of course, turned full circle today. A surge of minorities, working class and female undergraduates has transformed the campus.

The politics of the university has been transmogrified from a country club conservative republicanism of the 1950s to a bellwether of liberal-left orthodoxy. Richard Nixon, who detested the institution, in part because of the complexity of his envy for the Kennedy clan, referred to Harvard as the “Kremlin on the Charles”. While an exaggeration, a survey in 2004 by the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson (which extraordinarily, for a student rag, is published on a daily basis), found that its undergraduates preferred Democrat John F. Kerry over George W. Bush by a margin of 73 percent to 19 percent.

Current senior Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers was forced out as its president shortly before my arrival at Harvard for his politically incorrect views on gender demographics in academia. His replacement, installed at an impressive ceremony I witnessed outdoors in the pouring rain, is historian Drew Gilpin Faust, the University’s 28th, but first female head.

Given the difficulty of gaining admission, it is perhaps unsurprising that its students are so positive and purposeful, and so intellectually curious and competitive. But what I was unprepared for was their deference for authority and respect for institutions and titles.

Given that practically the entire political and intellectual universe (I attended lectures on campus by Mikhail Gorbachev, Nobel prize winner Muhammad Yunus, and sat in on classes for undergraduates presented by such academic rock stars and permanent faculty members as historian Niall Ferguson, philosopher Michael Sandel and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker), passes through Harvard Yard, it would be reasonable, perhaps, to expect a blasé cynicism among this pampered elite. Not a bit of it, in my experience.

In fact, Harvard undergraduates struck me as almost naïve in their expectations of senior leadership and their own power to do good in the world. And if, indeed, the business school cultivates the culture of corporate and private greed and excess, then the school of government was appropriately Kennedyesque in its belief that “politics matters” and that the “public good” is not an oxymoron. Of course, interfacing with the students was only part of the purpose of my fellowship.

I also had an opportunity of exposure to the extraordinary intellectual giants who comprise much of the faculty.

Fellow-fellows

My fellow-fellows (I was the only non-American) were drawn from the upper ranks of American politics, public policy-making and journalism. We soon became close friends and I learnt a great deal from my interaction with them.

One of my colleagues, Meghan O’Sullivan, arrived to join us directly from her time in the White House as Special Assistant to President George W. Bush on Afghanistan and Iraq.

She expressed in her cool and articulate way the real-time, as opposed to academic, environment in which often hugely consequential decisions are made; “The essence of being a policy-maker is making decisions with real consequences, with imperfect information and with too little time.”

I scratched down her words on the back of a paper napkin at one of our dinners and told her that while the decisions made in the White House were of greater reach than any to emerge from the parliamentary office of South Africa’s opposition leadership, my 13 eventful years of leadership from which I was then detoxifying at Harvard were a sort of personal testimony to the accuracy of her description.

SA brings up the rear

Joel Pollak, who apart from being one of just 21 South African students (Africa brings up the rear in international admissions at Harvard, providing just 177 of the 3 913 international contingent there), once served as my parliamentary speechwriter. He certainly was a whizz at research and I was struck by his recent communication to me that, in his reckoning, the 16 million holdings in the Harvard library system are “the crown jewels among Harvard’s many research facilities and laboratories”. Unsurprisingly, this ranks as the largest academic library in the US and the fourth biggest mega-library in the world. This certainly helps secure and moor its intellectual foundations, as do the galleries and museums that dot the campus and which contain treasures from the Italian early Renaissance to the most extraordinary collection of glass botanical models, each anatomically perfect, that you will ever witness.

But while the students work exceptionally hard and the academic faculty feverishly publishes and pontificates, there is also the serious business of leisure. There are the university’s world-class regatta teams that compete on the Charles River, and the coveted Harvard “letter” awarded to football jocks (yes, there are a few here, even though there are no athletic scholarships).

For the less athletically gifted, such as this writer, there was the pleasure of the Malkin Athletic Center (“The Mac”) situated a stone’s throw away from our apartment, which puts the most upmarket Virgin Active gym to shame – with its Olympic-size swimming pool, indoor cycling studio, two cardio rooms and each treadmill fitted out with a personalised television set. All this for a minor price tag of just $15 per month.

Given that the average American not yet in liquidation has to mortgage his or her home to pay university fees anywhere in America, Harvard’s price tag at $43 000 a year ranks it as one of the more expensive options. But, like the gym and the food, it’s heavily subsidised.

Great wealth to good purpose

Most students receive financial assistance and when I arrived at Harvard, the child of a family earning $60 000 or less a year paid no tuition fees at all; by the time I left, four months later, a family income of $200 000 a year was sufficient to enable the feepayer to receive an 80 percent rebate. Thus, at least, the university’s great wealth is put to good purpose.

The recent “made in America” financial crisis that has spawned a global recession is doubtless a reason to question the power of America’s example and this example of America’s power.

But if you want a reason to believe that the intellectual energy of the world will still have, in part, an American, or at least a Boston, accent then you need look no further than Harvard Yard.


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