yay, got a new email
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/02/harvard-names-lawrence-s-bacow-as-29th-president/
Impressive credentials. Both he & his spouse have outstanding backgrounds.
He’s very bright, a gifted university president and both he and his wife are fabulous people. I don’t know that they could have done better.
A very unsurprising choice, except maybe for his age. He feels a little bit like a placeholder (but then so did Drew Faust).
Some people I work with often are close to him (for reasons I can’t remember). According to them, he was a top prospect to replace Larry Summers in 2006, but he took a Sherman and refused to be considered as a candidate. At the time, he reportedly considered the presidency of Harvard an impossible job, because the institution was so decentralized and there were so many different power bases. Obviously, there has been a systematic effort to recruit and to groom him over the past decade or so.
Faust was a caretaker (she smoothed out political conflicts and didn’t do too much of significance other than on the gender/racial frons as far as I can tell… Bacow is much more strategic and definitely didn’t need this job, so while he is an insider, he would only take this on to be strategic. I’m a little surprised he took the job, but I would expect a period of listening and then coalition-building toward meaningful goals.
It’s hard to imagine how any president could do something really strategic and new with an institution as big and as unwieldy as Harvard in less than a decade or more, and it’s not credible that Bacow is really going to remain in place a decade from now. Plus, Harvard is still nowhere near completing Summers’ big strategic commitment to expand into Allston. Bacow could possibly scuttle that, but it would be hard for him to replace it with anything. He’s certainly a competent (and strategic) manager, though, so he may be the perfect person to get Allston done.
I thought he was going to be the oldest president in the Ivy League within a year of taking office, but I checked and it turns out both Gutmann and Bollinger have been extended to 2022. Both of them have already been in place for well over 10 years (13 and 16 years, respectively), and they are just arriving at the victory lap stage of their presidencies. There is a notion out there that the natural length of university presidencies is 10 years, but I don’t see so many tremendously successful 10-year presidents out there. Is Bacow really going to make it to 80 or beyond as Harvard’s president? (That said, Bacow was certainly seen as a successful 10-year president at Tufts. As was Anthony Marx at Amherst, with only 8 years. I wonder if Marx is punching any walls over this. This would have been his time.)
On rereading, my prior post is probably too presumptuous. Bacow is a top-shelf choice, as he was 12 years ago. It looks like he has been being groomed for this for years. The straightforward implication from that is that he is likely to be a good leader with a lot to offer, not a placeholder for anyone else. And it’s heartening to see someone older than 65 hired to do an open-ended, long-term leadership job. (At least someone who seems qualified for the position, )
I too was surprised to see them appoint someone that old, but then I watched the interview and concluded that he may be the most youthful 66-year-old I’ve ever seen: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jaD92v4jMDs
Just to add a current student’s perspective, I think he’ll fit in well. I recently saw him at one of the undergraduate dining halls meeting with and having dinner with students completely unannounced, asking for their thoughts on different topics and challenges that administration have to deal with and also general student life. I was extremely surprised to walk into my dining hall and had a bit of a double-take to see him so relaxed and chatting so casually with the students - it felt as though he was already a very natural part of Harvard - I hope he makes it a regular event. I have to say, I never saw Drew Faust doing half as much to integrate with the student body.
Talking to him, he seemed like one of the most genuine and kind people I’ve met at Harvard - I was very pleasantly surprised.
Bacow is an avid runner. He has run the Boston Marathon several times and started the President’s Marathon Challenge at Tufts. He would go on morning training runs with students. He also would have the seniors over for dinner at the president’s house. He was very engaged/visible/accessible to students.
Harvard is quite a bit bigger than Tufts, but I’m betting that he will still be accessible. Don’t hesitate to approach him - he is both friendly and “down to earth”.
I think you are going like him, everyone I know at Tufts did.
Went to the inauguration of Larry Bacow a couple of days ago. Lots of pro forma stuff – almost a coronation which is interested because they all commented on how modest Larry Bacow is (and he tells everyone, “Call me Larry”). I’d say he’s both quite confident and modest. Saw lots of folks I know and some I don’t – I said to my wife, “Doesn’t that guy two rows in from of me look very much like John Lithgow?” He did because he was.
There were two moving parts of the inauguration. First, his speech really went to his theme of the transformative effect of education and more importantly the reason he took the job, to advocate for effective higher education in this country at a time when it is under attack in a variety of ways. I don’t think he mentioned, because it was mentioned earlier, that his mother survived Auschwitz and his dad was a refugee from Eastern Europe who escaped to avoid pogroms, but it is relevant to his talk and the poem I’m going to mention below. Here is a video of the whole ceremony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XlDUyfTHj4. His speech starts at about 1:41:48.
The high point of the day was a big surprise. A poem written and read by Harvard junior Amanda Gordon, who has been named something like national youth poet laureate. She received a standing ovation. I did a little research and she is an African-American woman raised by a single mother in LA who was born prematurely and had learning disabilities including a speech impediment. She attended a school that gave no grades. From her poem and a couple of interviews I saw, Harvard’s adcom made a good decision. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdAHu4ozQKc. I’m no expert on poetry but this was somehow moving and impressive and the audience seemed to agree.