Lawrence Bacow, President of Harvard University

[Music] very pleased to have the 29th president of harvard university larry bakau as our special guest and just to give him a brief give you a brief overview of his background larry is born in detroit grew up in pontiac michigan was an eagle scout among other things and his mother was an auschwitz survivor father was also from uh europe they stay settled there larry went to mit where he was a national sailing champion among other things and after mit he went to harvard where he managed to get three degrees a phd from the harvard graduate school of arts and sciences a uh mpp from the harvard kennedy school and a law degree from harvard university law school harvard law school please and then after that he didn't know what to do but he ultimately got a position uh back at mit as a faculty member and taught there for 24 years rising up to be the chancellor of the uh mit faculty and then was recruited away in 2001 to become the president of tufts university a position he held for 10 years and was widely considered one of the best presidents of the university at that time and then stepped down after 10 years joined the harvard corporation also affiliated with the harvard school of graduate school of education and the kennedy school and then as a member of the harvard corporation he helped participate in the search for the new president of harvard and guess who wound up as the president of harvard larry bakau and uh he was i didn't share the search he did not chair the search committee and uh i didn't pull a dick cheney i was on the search committee and i would say it was clear that there was nobody else really close to larry he got the position and he's now been doing it for five years four years almost my fourth time okay and done a wonderful job and and uh he is uh married to adele who he met on his first day in law school they're married 47 years two sons and four grandchildren right okay so um let me ask you about how to get into harvard so everybody seems to be interested in that i assume you get that all the time so um do people come up to you all the time and say you know my son my grandson my daughter my granddaughter is really qualified they got on the wait list and can you help them get off the wait list and what does it mean to be on the waitlist at harvard it means you have a very modest chance of getting into harvard as a practical matter there are years in which we take nobody off the wait list and because take a few people off the wait list but this year harvard had i think 61 000 applications and you accepted roughly three percent yeah 1950 people to get a class of 1650. and what percentage of people actually accept which is called the yield factor i think this year was uh that works out to be about 84 85 so when they accept a class they know that they're going to have let's say 16 go to some other schools um and those therefore they build that into the acceptance and therefore it's unless more than 16 percent go elsewhere you don't really go into the wait list right well you know we try and and manage things so because there's a certain unpredictability about this so it's not the yield is not the same year in year out and there are years in which uh we go to the waitlist and years in which we don't but i go nowhere near admissions let me be you you stay out of the admissions process right when people ask me um i have exactly the same response and that is admissions is above my pay grade all right so you stay out of that um and the dean by the way has i think one of the toughest jobs at harvard if not the toughest and if i were to muck around in it it would only make his job harder and my job impossible okay so right now uh let's say when i was applying to college i once they asked the dean of admissions when i became the chairman of the board of duke i asked the dean of admissions by the way how did i get into school and he went back and look and said well we accepted 60 of the students in those days so that's how i got in but in the in the let's say 30 40 50 years ago harvard got a lot fewer applications correct and they accepted tend to accept a lot of white men from boarding schools in the northeast i guess how diversified is the class now it's incredibly diverse 20 of our students are pell grant recipients 20 are first gen students meaning that the first of their families to go to college um it's diverse in almost every manner imaginable uh public school representation you know dominates the class it's no longer the reserve of students who went to elite private schools one of the things that's happened i think to all of our institutions is that technology has changed how we do admissions and it's made it possible to reach a lot more students and to give them a sense of what it's like to be a student and so we draw from a much larger potential body of of students as well all right some people say that the elite colleges are encouraging too many students to apply who have no chance of getting in just so it'll make their acceptance rate lower and any comment on that um if you want to understand why acceptance rates have dropped why yields what why selectivity has increased there's a very simple explanation and it's true for almost every institution on the planet that is a selective institution and by the way there are only about 100 selective institutions in the country who accept fewer than 50 of the students who apply and it has again to do with technology so let me ask you a question when you applied to duke how many schools did you apply to i find about seven schools okay and for each one you had to put the paper in the typewriter right right you had to adjust it just right you had to sit there and make sure you didn't make anything i didn't have a typewriter even i just wrote it out longer you were on it okay did you write a different essay to every school yeah that's right there wasn't a common application right there was no common application so there was a real cost to applying to one more school now the marginal cost of applying to an additional school is you hit a button and there's a charge to your credit card and what that's done is it's increased the average number of schools that kids apply to and as a result the schools by and large nobody has really scaled their admissions staff in proportion of the number of applications they've received which means that the application process is less predictable you know for students who are applying and also for the high schools that are sending kids to schools they're not quite sure you know where they're going to get in so the rational thing for students to do is to apply to more schools and this process repeats so we get kids applying to 20 20 schools um which never happened when we were applying to college and um how many schools did you apply to three you got it all along soon i got into two of them oh so warmed up on the waiting list never to be accepted oh and i've kidded the president of brandeis um about this ever since every president of brandeis that i've known wound up on the waiting list at brandeis i said you know okay might have done something with my life all right [Music] all right well okay so a final question about by the way that also speaks to something which i think a lot of people don't understand and that is all these processes there's a certain randomness to that it's you know in terms of why does one kid get in and not another i mean we are blessed all of our institutions with many terrific students who apply but um here's what i don't understand there's so many talented people playing everybody's a a uh first in their class valedictorians and by the way there's a validatory meaning you're first in class because sometimes you have four or five valedictorians in a class well when i was graduating from high school it meant you were first in your class but now it's changed right so everybody's a valedictorian everybody's a all-american athlete all these great how come the country's leadership isn't so great we got all these talented people applying these schools you think these people are going to be so great they're going to help run the country and look what happens i i would disagree with you i'd say you know look at the leadership over the last 12 years of the economic club of washington d.c do i think that's been terrific right okay well can you manage without the harvard degree well mary brady does all the work so um but by the way very serious uh there is an app there's a lawsuit now in the supreme court yes uh challenging harvard's admissions policies can you explain what that's about yeah so basically what the plaintiffs are alleging in this lawsuit is that if we admitted students purely on the basis of merit as they define it as they define it the class would look different than the class than we admit and so here's my response and actually i'm a social scientist so i would like to do an experiment right now all right anybody in this room who's ever hired somebody raise your hand okay thank you very much now how many of you have ever hired somebody without interviewing them without checking their references without looking at their work product in other words how many of you hired people purely purely on the basis of their academic record and absolutely nothing else well you might ask yourself why and the answer is because people are more than their numbers i i read admissions folders for 24 years at mit when i was a faculty member there and you know the kid who came to this country in ninth grade not speaking a word of english who was raised by a single mother who worked 25 hours a week to help support the family and now they apply to mit and this kid only has 760 on his verbal s.a.t score and somebody says well we should admit the kid who has 790 on theirs because there's a material difference between the two now when the kid was 790 had you know one parent who you know went to mit and another one who went to princeton or stanford and went to an elite private school and had all the benefits of tutoring and everything else you know i said this at my inaugural address talent in this country is flatly distributed but opportunity is not and our institutions have to look to find talented kids who in some cases have not had exactly the same opportunities as everybody else does and and we are blessed with an incredibly talented pool of applicants and so we don't just look at grades and sats we could eliminate an entire admissions office if all we wanted to do is to randomly select select from students who had perfect grades and perfect sat scores it would be a far less interesting class if we did that one of the reasons why we embrace diversity is because people learn from their differences and we're trying to construct a class at harvard as not just at harvard we're you know we're fighting this case on behalf of all of higher education and we're doing it together with the university of north carolina at chapel hill because the same plaintiffs have sued them as well because we think that all of us are more than just our numbers and we need to be able to identify kids who have the capacity to do amazing things and who've demonstrated their abilities in lots of different ways and we think that in doing that we need to look at the entire person where they came from what the who they are what they represent and that's that's how we do holistic admissions and in that process race is one factor among many not the deciding factor it's one factor among many there's 40 years of supreme court precedence precedent which establishes that it's okay to consider it as one factor among many and that's what we're fighting to defend so you won in the district court in boston and you're right in the first circuit but now it's before the supreme court and uh the new member of the supreme court about to be a new member has i think said she would recuse herself because on the harvard board of overseers so when you count votes it's going to be tough well she doesn't have to recuse herself from the chapel hill case okay and if we are to prevail in this case assuming that the three liberal justices who voted in the past to uphold affirmative action or race conscious admissions continue to vote in support of us we need two votes from the remaining six justices and even if she recuses herself we still need two votes at that point it's a four-four tie and as you know um the lower court decisions let me ask you um the united states did not have the leading universities in the world i would say in the 1800s maybe germany and maybe england were thought to have the leading universities at some point maybe in the early part of the 20th century or after world war ii the united states kind of went way past the rest of the world what do you think that is due to is it the federal funding of research what is it that made the american universities the envy of the world so if you were to do a survey of the leading universities in the world in the 1930s a bunch of them were actually located in germany none of those would now be in the top rank anymore world war ii changed everything it changed it in part because germany lost a huge amount of academic talent some of which came to the united states some of which never survived the war but the second thing that happened is the partnership that emerged between the federal government and america's research universities at the time that was put together by vaniver bush who was actually the former dean of engineering at mit um and who together with one of my predecessors james conant led the u.s scientific effort in world war ii uh which was profoundly important and influential we think about you know the manhattan project and the atom bomb which emerged from that but you know equally important was the perfection of radar which was a british discovery um but it wasn't all that good and the british shared the primitive radar technology at the time with the u.s and it was perfected actually in the radiation lab at mit but in partnership with the federal government and after the war bush wrote this profoundly influential paper called science the endless frontier which laid out for the future the creation of something that became known as the national science foundation and how the government and academia would continue to collaborate um in the production of basic research and that's you know spawned not just the nsf but nih but a research collaboration which has produced i think the finest universities in the world well the universities are supposed to at their heart teach now a lot of the large universities seem to have professors who spend more time researching because that's how they advance their career rather than their teaching how do you make certain that professors who are famous for winning a nobel prize or something actually still teach well um first of all at all the institutions that i've been at everybody teaches in fact one of the ways that sometimes we lose a faculty member to some institutions is because those institutions offer elite faculty members the opportunities to reduce their teaching loads which we don't do i wouldn't know who you're talking about you would not know who i'm talking about so we believe that if if you're a faculty member at harvard everybody teaches and that was also the rule when i was at mit it was it was true at tufts as well so in a research university and america is blessed with many different kinds of wonderful academic institutions ranging from you know community colleges tribal institutions all the way up to um you know research universities uh but and you can get a great education anywhere but something special happens in a research university and i'm sitting here actually with two of my former graduate students in the audience students ask us questions which we actually can't answer great students do this they challenge us and those questions often become part of our research agenda for the next round of research and we engage our students in that process one of my students went with me to japan on a joint research project that we were working on uh together who's here rusty linder and the the fruits of that research jointly done with students become part of the curriculum the next time around so it's a it's a process which works incredibly well and for i think at the great research universities we look for ways to engage undergraduates um in this process um a wonderful story uh doug melton who's a university professor at harvard is this close to solving type one diabetes okay he's actually taking a leave from harvard to go work at vertex because they've got a cell line that he helped them develop which he needs to work on at the company to finish this off the paper and the patent that has the principal discovery that may someday really cure type 1 diabetes one of the co-authors on the paper was a harvard undergraduate working in doug's lab so that's what happens at a university we expose students to the the joy of discovery it's an amazing process so i i think research and teaching go hand in and glove you know i sometimes describe it as which blade of the scissors does the kind so you mentioned a talented harvard undergrad there are talented undergrads i remember reading bill gates was trying to solve a problem when he was working on microsoft while he was still a harvard undergrad and he couldn't solve a math problem and so he went down the hall to had to admit there was somebody much better at math than him and he got the genius in math at harvard in that class and uh to solve the problem paid him a thousand dollars and i always wondered what happened to that person who was such a genius that bill gates had to ask him and what happened he's a tax lawyer in new york so uh nothing wrong with me a tax lawyer but anyway yeah but he also went to one of his harvard college classmates who realized could do things that he couldn't right so that that person became steve ballmer so so um by the way alan garber was classmates with both you know that right our provost so let me ask you now um when you're president of harvard university yep um you have to spend a lot of time asking people for money and i've often thought that when people get a phd as you have instead of learning foreign languages which is a phd requirement why not teach people how to ask for money because that's what so many faculty people have to do ask for money so you have to ask people for money all the time how do you enjoy that or how do you deal with it and how hard is it to get somebody as you did recently i think mark zuckerberg gave harvard public knowledge 500 million dollars for artificial intelligence and so how do you how do you get 500 million from somebody you just call them up or you just kind of take a lot of you know a couple lunches or what well so when i was at mit and i had to ask somebody for a lot of money for the first time you know tens of millions i went to chuck vest who was the president of the time and i said chuck how do you do it and he said well larry you know i look him in the eye i lean i say you know i get paid to ask people for money um so sometimes that works but i i had an insight back then and um you tell me whether or not this is right or wrong david but you know people reach a point in their life where the really scarce commodity in their life is time and not money right you get to a point where you can pretty much afford to do almost anything you want and for what i've realized is that what many people of means are really looking for in their life is meaning and we have an opportunity to give them meaning in ways that is sort of hard to do on their own we have the the opportunity to give them the chance to fundamentally alter the trajectory of people's careers by enabling people to go to college we have the opportunity to help them support research which has the capacity to change the world and so what i do i i don't see myself as asking for money i i try to have a conversation about how i can give somebody the opportunity to make a difference but does anybody ever so appreciative of that uh giving them that opportunity they do it in the first meeting rarely rarely okay i mean i i actually no because i never ever ever ever ask anybody for money the first time i meet them okay so it's the second meeting mark all right it's you know part of it is is you want to figure out okay where's the intersection between somebody's interests and the institutions priorities where all right where they can get excited about something speaking of money um harvard on its last report had an endowment of about 53 billion dollars maybe because the market's down to 151 billion or something now whatever um but and then other universities have large endowments well but at the in 1900 harvard's endowment was 11 million dollars so why do universities need to have these gigantic endowments what do you do with all that money well the you know the endowment at harvard supports about 36 percent of our operating budget philanthropy in the aggregate supports close to half of it because gifts for current use don't go towards the endowment they get spent on other things and it allows us to do a lot of things it allows us to make harvard free literally free to any student who comes to harvard from a family which has less than seventy five thousand dollars a year in income i don't mean tuition free i mean free tuition room board books fees travel a computer if they need it literally a warm coat and so you know it enables us to do some extraordinary things and we are incredibly blessed at harvard um thanks to generous donors to be able to do some things that others others can't but that's you know it allows us to underwrite research and activities so can you do anything you want with that 53 billion any given year no so the vast majority of the resources contributed to harvard are restricted by the donors so if somebody donates money for financial aid we can't shift it and use it to build a building if somebody donates money um to build a building we can't take that money and say we're going to use it to hire faculty members so um you know uh well the people that run these endowments they're very professional does it upset you that they get paid more than you do no you're the president university and the guy running the endowment gets paid more than you you're okay i'm fine with that okay i mean look it's um the people who run the endowment are competing i'm an economist as well as a lawyer uh you know we compete for talent in a very different market um than we do for university administrators now historically the endowments were tax-free you get money off of them and you don't pay taxes the federal government a number of years ago some members of congress thought it'd be a good idea to tax the endowments what was the theory behind why that's a good idea for the country well what they said was they were going to tax university endowments i'm not making this up to make college more affordable um in in fact i think um there were a group of folks who [Music] thought that academic institutions weren't paying attention to a few things which they thought they should pay attention to and thought this was a way of getting back at them so a number of us and and the number is growing as endowments grow more institutions become subject to the tax uh i think this is bad public policy you know we're a charitable institution we put it in context harvard this year will pay more in federal tax than general motors more in federal tax than ford more federal tax and then chevron i could any colleges uh in kentucky paying the tax uh no and there was one that was under the original formula subject to tax and somehow it didn't get written out of the bill uh in fact um uh all but a handful of schools that were subject to this tax originally were in blue states but to some extent uh what's really what was going on there was the view that some of these large colleges uh are liberal correct and they don't support american values in some ways that to some extent it was driven by that well there was the view that we leaned too far the la to the left and the tax was constructed disproportionately to tax institutions um in liberal states now bill buckley was running for pres for mayor of new york i think in 1966 or something like that and he famously said he'd rather be governed by the two first 2 000 names in the boston telephone book than the harvard faculty what do you think about that is that unfair to the harvard faculty grossly unfair to the harvard faculty um you know it's it's fun to poke fun at harvard and lots of people do um but you know i'm incredibly proud of our faculty and you should be too uh show of hands how many either got the pfizer or modern vaccine in this room excuse me the johnson and johnson or modern vaccine johnson or johnson and moderna both of those vaccines came out of harvard medical school labs dan baruch's lab for the johnson johnson vaccine and derek rossi's lab for the moderna vaccine we do a lot of good stuff for the world and i'm proud of it and it's done by our faculty now let's talk about what undergraduates do uh when my what about let's say drug use is that a big problem now in college campuses i mean hard drug use or marijuana soft drug use i guess you call it well you know marijuana has become legal in many states um in the country including in massachusetts i would like to tell you i would be shocked if i told you that some students use it i i the big issue on not just our campus but most college campuses is alcohol far more than than drugs and now to legally drink in this country you need to be over 21 correct are the harvard college students obeying that uh know the answer when i was at tufts i signed on to an initiative by a group of college presidents that suggested that we have a serious conversation in this country about returning the drinking age to 18. um i think it was 18 when i went to college and it allowed alcohol to be served at functions by adults in many cases with faculty presence and others to be able to have adults model responsible drinking in the presence of students students when they were drinking alongside responsible individuals were far less likely to drink to excess and what it's done is that it's driven all the drinking underground and it's been i think um unhealthy and but alcohol abuse as opposed to drinking how bad is that a problem well i mean we you know the first semester of every fall is a dangerous time on college campuses because you get students in some cases who've never been you know exposed to alcohol in any way and they're now placed in an environment where a number of their friends are drinking and unfortunately many students want to fit in and they feel like this is what they need to do when they fit in and until they learn how to control it they're at risk and we try and protect them and warn them but it's um it's a big challenge right at every academic institution i've been affiliated with and that's not just harvard mit and tufts but i also served on the board of a liberal arts college for for ten years what about mental health problems there are a fair number of suicides at every major university every year i think and other mental health issues how serious a problem is that now for undergraduate harvard or graduates as well well suicide is the second leading cause of death for people 18 to 25 years old in this country okay so first let's establish a time baseline whether they're in college or not so it's it's a serious issue mental health is a serious issue on every college campus and here i would tell you it's in part due to our success as as a society in developing therapies which allows students who suffer from various debilitating mental uh cond you know health issues or mental illness to actually make it to college used to be that if you suffered from depression attention deficit disorder certain anxiety disorders you would never make it to a place like ours but now we have drugs to treat these kids and you know they were always very smart and they succeed and they get to our institutions now they get here mom and dad are no longer around to say david have you taken your meds um right they're exposed to other things and sometimes they're much more fragile now one of my daughters was an undergraduate at harvard as a freshman and she told me i said what course are you taking should take i'm taking a course in human sexuality i said well isn't college a course in human sexuality why do you need to take a course in it um she got an a plus but uh i would say i thought she was going to say it's because you go to college to learn things that your parents never taught i guess that's it so um so is uh i don't know if i the right way to say it but is sex a big problem on college campuses or sex harassment is a big problem you know um i think uh students i know this will come as a shock to don't talk to me about their sex lives okay really and i don't hear them complaining about it to me either so i i don't go there the famous uh head of berkeley clarke obviously said that the college president or university president's main job is to get parking for the faculty uh football for the alumni and sex for the students and if you do take care of that you'll be a good president yeah the parking is really tough right that's the hardest part okay so um you um had to deal with one of the most serious health issues uh our country's had in recent years as the president apart which is covent what did you do and you had coven twice yourself so what's it like to have covid while you're trying to run a university and how did you run harvard when you had covet and when you were isolated from everybody else even when you didn't have covet because the campus was more or less shut down for a while so one of the advantages of being president of harvard is that you have access to some of the world's foremost authorities in almost any field our faculty and in the case of covid um we have some of the world's leading experts on virology epidemiology infectious disease public health so very early on i formed the university coronavirus advisory group and actually some of the original members of that group are now working in washington um but so we made decisions based upon the best scientific evidence that we could and we tried to make them early and and deal with a problem which candidly at the beginning of this crisis we had no idea we would still be dealing with it two years hence adele and i did get coveted very early on actually a few days after tom hanks and his wife got it and i sent an email out to the entire community saying that we had it in part because i wanted them to take this very very seriously back then we were actually sick we were in bed for about 10 days fortunately we recovered second time wasn't nearly as bad it was almost two years to the day later than that by the way cute story when we were lying in bed this is a strange thing about being president of harvard we were lying in bed sick with covid watching cnn i just sent this email out to the community and what do we see on cnn anderson cooper announcing to the world that we had covent that was an out-of-body experience i have to tell you especially for a kid growing up in pontiac michigan you know it's like wow so you know you've arrived when you're yeah yeah so we got shoved off the uh but for a year you were isolated from the faculty and i thought you told me once that you had basically stayed in your house for a year and didn't see faculty members live yeah well we were all it wasn't just us almost every college and university and not just colleges and universities i mean you always run carlisle remotely as far as i can tell but you know the good news is that we had this pandemic the good news if we were going to have it is that we had it in 2020 we didn't have it in 1980 because just imagine what it would have been like dealing with this without the internet without zoom without the capacity to communicate in so many ways made possible by technology and so you know like every other university and college around we pivoted very quickly to remote instruction we figured out how to do a lot of things that we didn't think we were able to do now uh harvard is known for many things but people don't realize i think you have more athletic teams than any other university in the country at 43 42 of our state boards okay why do you need that many it's a really good question um you know uh we have not added any on my watch okay but uh it's look it's it's a place that students excel at all sorts of different things and they we probably have more clubs you know more student activities than anybody else the harvard student body is extremely diverse and people do all sorts of things at a very high level including athletics but ncaa right now you have some schools that really sort of more or less pay the athletes to play and they're only there for a year or so um how do you get in the end you're in the ncaa but you're competing in schools that have athletic scholarships that people that are dealing with well to some extent you have your basketball coach came from duke but uh correct but so how do you uh square all this with the idea there are students and then they're really athletic people who are not really students well our student uh you know our our students who happen to be athletes are also extraordinarily good students and you know they understand when i speak to them i i make a point of telling them and i was i was an athlete in college as well but i said you know what defines you is not the fact that you're an athlete at harvard what defines you at harvard is that you're a student at harvard and as i said every student who we admit does something amazingly well in some cases it's play the violin in some cases it's poetry amanda gorman that's a good example you know we have students who are thespians we have students uh who are you know are olympic athletes students do all sorts of things everybody in addition to being a great student has something else in their life um you know whether or not it's chess or something else that they do amazingly well and that happens and our athletes fall right in there but we get by the way we give no athletic scholarships at harvard not just at harvard that's what it means to be a member of the ivy league people don't understand the ivy league is just an athletic conference but what defines it as an athletic conference is that we give no athletic scholarships only scholarships based on need but how important is it to win the harvard yale football game is that that important to you or not so much it's important and recently harvard corporation signed onto a report that you had authorized to be compiled relating to the fact that harvard had been involved with slavery early on its history can you explain what the report said and what you're doing about that so you know for most of us who grew up in the north the perception is that slavery was a southern institution and that it was the northern abolitionists who got rid of it in fact slavery was legal in massachusetts until 1783 at that point harvard was 147 years old and to put that in context that's older than stanford is today all right so harvard was well established and the new england economy um relied heavily heavily on textiles which relied upon the cotton trade in the south the new england merchant banks in many cases financed that that trade and financed in some cases the slave trade we had a history that had lots of entanglement with slavery and we had never interrogated that history we had never really come to grips with it and my colleague drew simmons at brown when ruth became president of brown ruth and i became presidents basically exactly the same time ruth at brown and i was a tough so we became very good friends ruth was the very first college president who was brave enough to say brown needs to understand its connections uh to slavery and launched an initiative there when she when they published their report there was a faculty member at harvard a historian sven beckert who became interested in the subject and actually we were talking about what it means to teach and do research taught a freshman seminar in which he had his freshman begin to explore harvard's connections to slavery that was the beginning of this inquiry and when drew faust was president my predecessor drew's a civil war historian she continued this inquiry and discovered that a number of of our predecessors had owned enslaved people who worked on the harvard campus and john lewis came to harvard and together with drew they installed a plaque at wadsworth house which is the second oldest building on our campus where president wadsworth lived it was the president's house way back then and he owned enslaved people who worked in service to him in that building and we commemorated that and so what i did is i appointed a committee to try and do a full understanding and reckoning of our entanglements with slavery and not just up until 1783 but what happened after that because we often celebrate certain things at harvard and certain contributions that we we've made but i thought if if we really stand for veritas if we stand for truth then we need to reconcile with our past as painful as difficult and as complicated as that was the committee which was chaired by the dean of the radcliffe institute tamiko brown nagin who is both a historian of the civil rights movement just has a fabulous new biography of constance baker motley out but also a constitutional law scholar at harvard law school tamiko chaired it they wrote a 130 page report which is a serious piece of scholarship 740 footnotes that documents not just the extent to which enslaved people worked on our campus in some cases the degree to which some of our early benefactors owed their wealth uh to this institution of slavery but also to the way in which some harvard faculty through their scholarship um gave credence to views of what became known as race science eugenics and other things and and the report then also documents um what happened over time in the jim crow era and how long it took harvard to really open its doors widely right uh to descendant communities so yeah you've allocated on the report 100 million dollars to kind of address the challenges that come about from that is that right correct um it used to be the case that um harvard would see its big rival being yale and football maybe you still have the rival we discussed but if you think you're as a major competitor to harvard today is it really mit or is it stanford or is it still yale you know we have many competitors um in lots of different ways uh and we pay close attention to what's going on at lots of institutions one of the reasons i think you asked earlier about the rise of american institutions relative to the rest of the world one of the the things that makes higher education as good as it is in the united states is the diversity of institutions they come in all shapes flavors and sizes and we compete we all compete with each other we compete for students we compete for faculty we compete for resources we compete for mind share and that competition breeds innovation so we pay more attention to some institutions and to others but you know we're mindful of what what everyone does and in different fields we compete with different places but the big the big change that's occurred over the last 25 years is we actually have far greater competition now for students with mit than we ever used to but no there is no college or university of the united states who if somebody gets into that school and harvard a majority go to the other school right so majority always go to harvard majority always go to harvard but we don't take that for granted so would you well i'll steal a good idea anywhere i can find it would you rather is it more enjoyable to address the faculty of harvard or the student body at harvard yes they're both enjoyable so when you so for example you have a lot of faculty members who've won nobel prizes and i assume that they think they're very smart they want a nobel prize do they come to you with ideas and tell you look i won a nobel prize and this is my great idea and you have to tell them you're not that smart because that idea isn't so great no i mean look we have one of the nice things about being at a great university is that we try to operate on the principle of best idea wins and it doesn't make any difference what rank you are in fact or even whether or not you're a faculty member i i noted in doug's paper you know it was an undergraduate who actually made one of the key insights that led to that paper so um you know we are we're blessed with these extraordinary students and extraordinary faculty and when we recruit faculty we offer them the opportunity to work with great students when we recreate recruit students we offer them the opportunity to work with great faculty so you know it's a virtuous circle that brings them together but you know my job i think the job of any university administrator is ultimately to enable our faculty to do their best work their best teaching their best scholarship and so i spent a lot of time listening to the faculty so what's the greatest pleasure of being a president harvard and what's the biggest downside to being the president of harvard other than participating interviews like this so look it's it's an incredible privilege to be able to represent and speak for an institution that you know on the day the declaration of independence was signed was 140 years old you know that is you know helped to bring the country literally into being that continues to be a place that transforms lives either the lives of the people who are fortunate enough to attend it or the lives of people who work there or the lives of people who are influenced by the work that's that's done of the place so that's an enormous pleasure i mean and one of the things candidly that was really really hard about the pandemic is for a year and a half almost i saw very few students and faculty in person that was that was really quite hard um but you know what's the greatest challenge of being president of harvard uh you know there's maintaining my waistline because i sometimes joke that i my real title is not president it's university stomach i eat in service to harvard um the piece of the job serious comment that i dislike the most is being a public person okay so um let me ask you with respect to um harvard generally what is it that you think harvard's brand name has done or to american higher education it's it's become what is it that made harvard so much i'd say better known and might be more prestigious than other universities is it something it did in the last 100 years because 100 years ago people would say yale at harvard probably equal now many people would say harvard is is just a better known university yale is a fabulous place i mean it's extraordinary university and again there are many great universities in this country i actually think that i had an epiphany my first year as president of harvard and that is it was actually in a conversation with the president of the university of chicago and i remember saying to bob zimmer that when i was at tufts i spent a considerable amount of my time during my 10 years at tufts trying to get people to pay more attention to the place at harvard i do exactly the opposite i think actually the world probably pays too much attention to us there are a lot of great institutions right so if you go to some place that doesn't somebody doesn't know you cocktail party or somewhere you know and you and somebody asks you what you do and you say i'm the president of harvard what's their immediate reaction i never give that answer you never you never you what do you say never i'm an academic you don't say just i wouldn't be able to resist saying president harvard that'd be pretty good problem is is that if that's what you do all the conversation is going to be about harvard for the rest of the evening and i spent enough time talking about harvard so what do you do to relax i mean you have do you have you used to run marathons i guess you don't have a lot of time for that now do you yeah i still run i don't run marathons anymore but i still run i still like to sail um i i used to be a voracious reader i still read a lot but now almost everything i read is for work someday i'll get back to reading books for pleasure so and what about sailing you sail anymore i still sail um i love to sail it's a i often say after my wife and kids sailing is my passion and they sometimes dispute my ordering of priorities so now you have two sons are they in academic world are they no they're in something important like finance not in private equity but uh did they brag about their father when somebody says what do your father do they always say he's president harvard or they never mention it they never mention it they they also never mention it in fact i'll tell you if i can a cute story i don't know if i ever mentioned this to you but um my youngest son always wanted to learn how to fly uh and from the time he was a little kid and he joined a flying club where you get access to to planes and he became buddies with another young man and they would fly together frequently and they did this for several years and one day his buddy said they were supposed to fly on the weekend and uh his his friend said i can't fly i i i gotta go to i can't remember where he's going kansas city my son said what are you doing there's i'm going to the final four my son said you are how'd you get tickets and his friends sort of said well um you know each of the teams in the final four gets allocated some tickets and uh my dad works at one of these institutions anyway make a long story short he finally admitted that his father was president of the university of michigan and my son sheepishly admitted that his father was president of harvard and they had been flying for years really one of them knew it so wow okay so they didn't know each other they didn't know what their fathers did yeah they don't who talks about what their fathers do but when you go to sporting when you go to fenway park you watch the red sox sometimes yup um do people come up to you and say my son or grandson deserves to go to harvard and can you interview him or can you help him or do you ever get that it's been known to happen and what what do you say it's above my pay grade so you don't do that no i don't go anywhere near admission and uh today if the president united states said to you i'd like you to serve in the federal government at some point would you ever do that i think i look i'm i don't think that's going to happen i think when the president of the united states calls you and asks you something no matter who the president is you have to consider it seriously as an opportunity for service but i i have a day job at that moment and final question john harvard got a great university named after him he did for a very modest gift um what did he actually give and you think it was adequate for the you know um i mean it wasn't really he didn't give that much i thought well he gave half of his estate and his entire library um so it was not inconsequential but remember nobody had heard of the place back then it had been around for two years hadn't yet graduated its first class so it was a pretty speculative investment okay so worked out well for him and so far so far okay larry i want to thank you for taking the time and for their job at harvard i should have said i'm on the harvard corporation board and work with larry and um i thought that larry i think larry's on a spectacular job i thought he was a perfect person to be president of harvard and i'm glad to see that you're still president harvard and you're doing a great job so thank you well thank you very much david

Channel: The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

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Id: aoiHmUfmNuc

Length: 53min 39sec (3219 seconds)

Published: Wed May 18 2022