Not Alone: Leaders in Conversation
Not Alone is a service. It is designed to disseminate the ideas of established, extraordinary academic leaders to inspire, generate conversation and showcase the best in academia and related businesses and institutions. The contributions are short and deal with a single subject, by design.
Not Alone: Leaders in Conversation
In conversation with ... Larry Bacow
In the latest episode of Not Alone: Leaders in Conversation, host Rafael Bras engages in an in-depth discussion with Prof Larry Bacow, one of America’s most esteemed academic leaders, having held prestigious positions at MIT, Tufts and Harvard. The conversation, recorded on Oct 16, 2024, covers a wide range of topics including Prof Bacow’s aversion to titles, his career shaped by mentorship and serendipity, the role of parental influence, addressing public perception of higher education, managing institutional challenges, and the current issues of diversity and inclusion in academia. Prof Bacow also delves into his principles of leadership and reflects on his contributions to initiatives on the legacy of slavery and academic admissions. The episode provides valuable insights for anyone in or aspiring to be in academic leadership.
00:00:00 Introduction to Not Alone Leaders in Conversation
00:00:51 Introducing Dr. Larry Bacow
00:01:29 Larry Bacow's Leadership Philosophy
00:04:32 The Role of Mentors in Larry's Career
00:08:10 Larry's Family Background and Values
00:16:34 Challenges and Reflections on Leadership
00:20:29 Navigating Unusual Career Paths
00:31:44 Challenges Facing Higher Education
00:32:25 Public Perception and Cost Control
00:34:01 Research Mission and Economic Impact
00:36:15 Accessibility and Affordability in Elite Institutions
00:42:06 Governance and Leadership in Universities
00:49:59 Supreme Court Decision on Race in Admissions
00:55:08 Addressing the Legacy of Slavery
01:00:09 Reflections on Anti-Semitism and Discrimination
01:04:15 Concluding Thoughts and Future Optimism
01:07:10 Closing Remarks and Call to Action
[00:00:00] Aileen Christensen: Welcome to Not Alone: Leaders in Conversation, a bimonthly podcast where we delve into the minds and experiences of academic leaders who are shaping the future of higher education. Your host is Rafael Bras, Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Editor of Elsevier's Not Alone newsletter.
[00:00:21] In each episode, he will explore the complex challenges, decisions, and opportunities facing academic institutions today. Whether you're an academic leader, work in academia, or simply want to learn about the latest topics that are top of mind for academic leaders, this series is designed to provide valuable insights and inspiration.
[00:00:42] Please join us as we embark on this journey of conversation, discovery and leadership.
[00:00:51] Rafael Bras: I'm thrilled to have Dr Larry Bacow as our guest. Larry is one of the most experienced academic leaders in the United States. He held positions as Chancellor of MIT, President of Tufts University, President of Harvard. Larry is a native of Pontiac, Michigan. He received a bachelor's degree from MIT and three graduate degrees from Harvard,
[00:01:16] including a PhD and a law degree. Welcome, Larry, to Not Alone: Leaders in Conversation. It's really good to see you.
[00:01:25] Larry Bacow: No, thank you very much for the invitation, Rafael. It's good to be here.
[00:01:29] Rafael Bras: Let me begin, Larry, with your aversion to titles. No President Bacow for you. You insist on being called Larry, and I know that is a really an authentic position.
[00:01:42] Why is that? Why do you feel so strongly about that?
[00:01:46] Larry Bacow: Well, a number of reasons. Partly because the title always precedes you and especially the title of President of Harvard or President Bacow of Harvard University. Part of what I … yeah, I had a hard time with that, candidly. It’s not my own self-image.
[00:02:08] I used to tell my students back when I was in the classroom to call me Larry, my colleagues always called me Larry. And so I decided that when I went to Tufts, I was going to be Larry because that's what I always was. And in some ways, I think it tries to present who I really am, but also to humanize the presidency a bit.
[00:02:29] Rafael Bras: But you're very humble, clearly, and I would describe you, and I've known you for some years, as calm, steady and easygoing — at least on the surface.
[00:02:39] Larry Bacow: Thank you.
[00:02:42] Rafael Bras: But the Harvard Crimson call you once the Gerald Ford of Harvard presidents — a sort of bland, no drama, Obama kind of guy. How do you react to this?
[00:02:54] What do you say to this characterization?
[00:02:57] Larry Bacow: First of all, I never saw that article, so this is news to me, but it's fine. I think I take it as a compliment if I'm being compared to President Obama. I think, part of, one of the challenges of leadership, especially in a university presidency, I think, one of the mistakes many presidents make is they make leadership all about themselves.
[00:03:17] It shouldn't be about the individual; it should be about the institution. I also think that the way you get things done in a collegial organization is that you want people to steal your ideas and claim them as their own. So if you're always out there, out front, saying, follow me, here's where we're going
[00:03:35] in ways that are not inclusive, that don't draw people in so they feel like they're invested in where we're going and how to get there, I think that's often a recipe for failure. So I have absolutely no problem with the characterization. I'd like to think I don't stumble down stairs like President Ford would be inclined to do, but I'm perfectly comfortable with that.
[00:03:58] Rafael Bras: Actually, you gave the answer I would have given, I would have taken it as a compliment. And I'm sure they didn't quite mean it that way, but certainly that's the way I would have taken it.
[00:04:11] Larry Bacow: Well, as we know, we don't get to control what the student newspaper writes. I believe in the free press and the First Amendment.
[00:04:19] Back when I was at Harvard, I defended their right to publish all sorts of things that the faculty would have preferred that I throw them out of school for doing so.
[00:04:29] Rafael Bras: Yes, We'll get to
that later. You have described in past interviews, your career as a series of fortuitous accidents.
[00:04:40] I certainly relate to that and believe on that. Are they truly completely fortuitous? Are they truly accidental?
[00:04:49] Larry Bacow: Well, I think it's true for most of us. I think a career really in many respects is only knowable in retrospect. On the day you retire, it all makes sense, and you can identify the inflection points which actually led to where you ultimately wound up.
[00:05:05] I never expected to be an academic. I went to law school expecting to practice law. It's a long story how I wound up getting a PhD. I expected to have my first job in government. I had an opportunity to teach for a couple of years at MIT. Two years turned into 24 years. I avoided academic administration like the plague
[00:05:28] for 21 of my 24 years at MIT. So yeah, things just sort of happened. They now make sense and, in retrospect, but they were fortuitous, and I feel blessed that I had interesting choices. It wasn't always clear that they were interesting at the time or even interesting in retrospect. But I do think, certainly on my end, it was not planned.
[00:05:55] I never had any aspirations for academic leadership and certainly not become president of any institution.
[00:06:04] Rafael Bras: But when you, when we think of fortuitous or accidental, it’s something that is completely random from everywhere, but you, like many, have had great mentors.
[00:06:18] Larry Bacow: Yes.
[00:06:19] Rafael Bras: And there's certainly, we would have to admit that mentors and friends and what you do yourself open those doors that then become the fortuitous accidents.
[00:06:33] Larry Bacow: I think that's right. I'd say if there's a — now you're putting me on the couch. If I were to look back, I would say that my mentors always saw things in me that I did not see in myself. And so they kept saying, ‘Here, I think you should do this.’ And this turned out to be pretty interesting in many cases.
[00:07:01] It’s what, one of the reasons why I became an academic was because my mentors thought that I could do it and be a good one. And then, essentially Chuck Vest, who you know well, a former president of MIT, basically plucked me out of faculty, made me Chancellor of MIT. So I do think there are lots of cases where people saw in me things that I did not see in myself.
[00:07:30] And in that respect, I feel very, very fortunate to have had the mentors that I did.
[00:07:36] Rafael Bras: Besides Chuck Vez, you have, stated that Robert Solow, former Nobel Prize winner in economics, quite apropos, given that the Nobel Prize was given to two MIT professors, again, yesterday. He was one of your mentors and so were your parents, very much.
[00:07:58] so. Can you talk a little bit about, what did they do? What did they tell you? Some examples of how did they help you move through and shape who you are?
[00:08:09] Larry Bacow: Well, I think all of our parents are absolutely key to who we wind up being. And I think what I got from my parents most of all was a set of values, which have continued to be a touchstone as I've moved
[00:08:22] through my life and through my career. And they also set really, really important examples for themselves. Both of my parents were immigrants, they were both refugees coming to this country. My mother was a survivor of Auschwitz, the only member of her family, the only Jew from her town who survived the war — 120 transported on the same day, deported to the concentration camps.
[00:08:50] My mother was the only one who came back. My father was born in Minsk. He came before the war to escape the pogroms of Europe. So their experience coming to this country, what this country gave to them, I've always felt privileged to really have lived the American dream. And higher education played a critical role
[00:09:10] in that. So I got that from my parents. I also got from them the, the notion that it's really important to speak up for those who have no voice because they themselves were voiceless at a time. … My mother used to say, after she was liberated by the Russians, that she never felt more alone or abandoned by the world than she did after she was liberated.
[00:09:40] So that's been a really powerful sort of theme, if you will, or motivating force in my own life. And one of the opportunities that I think I've, had as both President of Tufts and President of Harvard is to sort of use the bully pulpit that's been entrusted to me to try and speak out on some of those issues.
[00:10:02] And when I do, it's almost as if I have my parents on my shoulder, whispering in my ear. Bob was totally different. I encountered Bob Solow when I was a first semester sophomore at MIT and, I grew up in Pontiac, Michigan. I was the first kid from my high school ever to go to MIT.
[00:10:22] It was my dream to go to MIT. When I got there, I was just hoping not to flunk out. And I took a class from Bob at the beginning of my sophomore year. And at that point I never asked a question of a faculty member during my first year at MIT as a freshman. And I went up to Bob and I asked him a question after class, and he said, ‘That's a really good question.
[00:10:47] Why don't you come back to my office and talk about it?’ Which we did. And I said, I wanted to learn a little bit more about the subject and do you have any recommendations, a book I could read or whatever? And Bob said, ‘Actually, I'd like to learn about that as well. Why don't we do a reading course next semester?’
[00:11:02] So as a second-semester sophomore, I spent, an hour a week alone with one of the great economists, not just of his generation, of any generation. And then after that, Bob took a great interest in my career. He was sort of the not-so-invisible hand that kept helping me along, encouraging me when I had an opportunity to, when I was finishing graduate school, spend a couple of years filling in for somebody at MIT.
[00:11:31] he said, yeah, I was ready to go work for the government. ‘The government will be there when you're ready to go work for it. It will never look bad on your resume to have spent a couple of years teaching at MIT.’ Well, two years turned into 24 years. Along the way, that first year, I got a call from the editor of the MIT Press saying, we understand you've written an interesting dissertation.
[00:11:53] Do you have a publisher yet? I said, no. Do you mind if we take a look at it? Go right ahead. Who was chairman of the editorial board of the MIT press at that point? It was Bob. So Bob was always in some cases in the background, but also very much in the foreground. And I stayed in touch with Bob literally for the rest of his life.
[00:12:17] He died last year at 99. So a really important person in my life.
[00:12:24] Rafael Bras: That's a great story and so representative of a good mentor.
[00:12:30] Larry Bacow: Yeah. And one of the things which I took from that story, Rafael, is that I came to believe that the single greatest predictor of whether or not a student has a fabulous experience in college is whether they get to know at least one faculty member well enough so that they stay in touch with them for the rest of their lives.
[00:12:49] And so during my time at Tufts and at Harvard, I tried to create opportunities, more opportunities for that to easily happen.
[00:12:57] Rafael Bras: Yeah, it is true. Definitely true. This is not the time, but I had similar experiences with a professor at MIT, and I would not be where I am if that person had not almost grabbed me by the arm and said, ‘Do this.’
[00:13:14] So anyway, moving along, and this is going to be a little difficult question, but when you were talking about your parents, it reminded me that you visited the town where your mother was born when you were President of Harvard. You were there with your wife and I think your kids. It must have been very difficult.
[00:13:38] The emotions must have been extraordinary.
[00:13:44] Larry Bacow: It was, it was difficult. The reason I went back is, it's a long story, but the town after 80 years finally decided to recognize and honor the Jews of the town who had perished in the war, and they created this memorial park. And as my sister also went, but we were the only descendants of the one survivor of the town, the one Jewish survivor of the town.
[00:14:12] And so I was invited to speak, and it was emotional. I would say it was also cathartic. But again, it was an opportunity to try and encourage others to give voice to the voiceless. It’s, in many ways if you think back, not just to the Holocaust but most of those times in our history when people have found themselves not just marginalized but in many cases, more than that,
[00:14:47] if you ask, what could have prevented that from happening? And I think, one of the answers at least is that if good people would be willing to stand up and raise a moral voice in response to injustice. And so when I was invited to speak, no, I not only thanked the town for what they were doing, but I said, let us continue to try and raise a moral voice in response to injustice as is being done here.
[00:15:15] And if we are successful, we will save future generations the sad task of memorializing events such as this one.
[00:15:25] Rafael Bras: But it must have been quite a mixture of sadness as well as anger in some way.
[00:15:33] Larry Bacow: No, I didn't feel anger, actually. I wound up learning a lot about my mother's family when I went back — things which I had never known.
[00:15:46] And it, so it was an opportunity to reclaim part of my history that I didn't know anything about or knew very, very little about, and it was also an opportunity and a chance to reflect upon my mother's life. She was really quite an extraordinary woman in many, many ways and to engage with, people
[00:16:12] who themselves really wanted to acknowledge and recognize what had happened and to work in ways to ensure that it did not happen again. That was the whole purpose of this memorial. So I really found myself embraced by the town, and it was easy to embrace them as well.
[00:16:34] Rafael Bras: OK. Finally, do you have any principles of leadership that you follow that you would like to share?
[00:16:44] Larry Bacow: I think all of us in leadership positions develop certain thoughts and concepts. I've already mentioned a few of them. By the way, I always say, I became, I think as you know, a president without having been a department chair or a dean — positions that I studiously avoided during my time at MIT.
[00:17:09] So I always, when asked this question, make a point of saying, you know, I practiced higher education administration without a license. But if … I think a couple of really, really important principles I've mentioned. Make leadership not about yourself but about the organization, about the institution. I think it's, as I've said before, if you want to get things done
[00:17:35] try to have people steal your ideas and claim them as their own. Especially when you're president, you don't need credit for anything, and it's, important to be able to try and listen carefully but also with the notion of where the institution you think ought to go, but try ideas and try to
[00:17:59] Push the place in ways that it needs to be pushed, but in the process, identify people who are natural allies. So I think, I think that's important as a leader. I think it's important to, obviously, surround yourself with really, really good people — but people who are willing to grab you by the neck and tell you when you're about to step in it.
[00:18:24] I think it's important to recognize that people who bring you bad news are your friend. Rare is the problem that gets better over time. And so you need to give people permission to bring you bad news. And you actually have to reward them for doing it. One of the things which I used to do, every week when I met with my direct reports, I would meet with them one on one, and at the end of each meeting with each of them, I would always ask the same question:
[00:18:53] What do I need to know that nobody else is willing to tell? So there are other principles, but I think it's really important to give people permission to tell you what you might not otherwise want to hear. The last thing I will say about academic leadership is that, I think it's important to always understand, in these positions, our job is to enable the faculty to do their best work — their best teaching, their best scholarship.
[00:19:33] That is why we are there. And it it's important that we not be afraid to talk about that. Now there obviously are frequently differences on what it means to do their best teaching, their best scholarship, or how one is going to support that in different ways. But if people understand that you're in the position not because you're seeking to feather your own nest or acquire accolades for yourself but because you're trying to make the place better and to get people to recognize that this is not just your job — it's everyone's job. That's, I think, important. And to convey the notion that leadership necessarily involves managing change because if you're not managing change, you're presiding, you're not leading,
[00:20:22] And you're not making the place better, you're just keeping it where it is.
[00:20:29] Rafael Bras: You mentioned something that is unique, and I want to emphasize and let you expand some more. Your trajectory to the highest levels of academic administration was unusual because you didn't go through the normal chair, dean, provost, etc.,
[00:20:52] in terms of leading academic units. There are very few people that do that. And I imagine that that presented some challenges and maybe some benefits, the way I see it. Can you elaborate?
[00:21:08] Larry Bacow: Well, it's a great question, Rafael. When I got to Tufts, I had been Chancellor of MIT for three years.
[00:21:17] And by the way, back then, I was the first chancellor since Paul Gray. And when Joel Moses stepped down as provost, Chuck Vest decided that he was going to split the job of provost in two and actually let Bob Brown and I divide the responsibilities. I had a job. It's evolved since then.
[00:21:39] It's a different job at the moment. But I had the line responsibilities for a fair number of things at MIT. And I when I became President of Tufts, it's interesting, the only thing I'd ever been president of before in my entire life was the National Honor Society in high school.
[00:21:59] And that held one meeting a year, and that was to elect the officers for the next year. So not a lot of experience as president,. But I realized I thought I was actually well prepared. As you know so well, MIT is an extraordinarily centralized institution — maybe the most centralized academic institution on the planet. In between my time as chair of the faculty and my time as chancellor, I had served on Academic Council, which is sort of the equivalent of the president's cabinet in other places: President, provost, chancellor, the deans, the vice presidents meet weekly.
[00:22:38] I had served on it for five years. I had read every single tenure and promotion case at MIT for five years and participated in those decisions. I had exposure to every single issue that came up at MIT in those in those five years, whether or not it was within a school, whether it was dealing with undergraduate education, graduate education, student life, the curriculum, you name it, research policy.
[00:23:09] My own portfolio was undergraduate education, graduate education. research policy, strategic planning, management of our large-scale institutional partnerships, a whole variety of other things. So I did fundraising. I actually think I had a very, very broad exposure to what happens in a large, complicated prominent research university, in some ways better than, let's say the dean of a prominent school within many other institutions.
[00:23:45] So it turns out, I think I was pretty well prepared. Now in some ways, nothing ever prepares you for a presidency because you're going to encounter challenges that you never could have imagined: I became president of Tufts on September 1st, 2001, and 10 days later, it was 9-11. But I do think that MIT, my experience there, prepared me well.
[00:24:17] Rafael Bras: What's the toughest situation you've ever encountered in each of these institutions, or at least a few of them. I'm sure you encounter many.
[00:24:26] Larry Bacow: Yeah. I mean they differ in, in part because of the time and the challenges of the moment. When I became chancellor of MIT, it was at a very difficult moment for MIT.
[00:24:40] You may have remembered it because you were a very prominent member of the faculty at the time. We had a very talented freshman student who had died tragically in a fraternity hazing incident. And fraternities and sororities played a very, very important role in undergraduate life at MIT. MIT was named as a target of a grand jury investigation, the president was named as a target, the dean of students was named in the death of this particular student.
[00:25:11] I was not in the administration at the time; I came in afterwards. And Chuck Vest basically said to me, ‘OK, I need you to just sort of manage this little, both the investigation — I was a lawyer by training as he noted — but also I had not been in the administration when this death occurred. And I had to deal with that, but then I also had to deal with the reform of a housing system.
[00:25:41] I know it sounded like a minor issue for those who are not familiar with the structure of MIT, but it really went to the core of the culture of MIT, and I had to reform that in the face of massive opposition from alumni and others. That was politically quite complicated.
[00:26:04] Also dealing with grand jury investigation, and then also dealing with, sadly, with the family of the student directly, and trying to resolve the legal issues that the family brought forward. So that was probably the most challenging situation I dealt with it at MIT. At Tufts, 9-11 was a short, intense period, but the biggest challenge, of course, was the financial crisis of 2008, and you remember that, I'm sure.
[00:26:43] I believe you were provost, at the time, were you not?
[00:26:46] Rafael Bras: No, when September 1st, 2008, I landed in UCI Irvine as dean of engineering tight when the market collapsed.
[00:26:58] Larry Bacow: So you recall. And then at Harvard, it was the pandemic. So I always say to new presidents, as well as search committees which are looking for new presidents now for when asked, but what are the challenges the new president's going to face?
[00:27:15] And I always say the biggest challenges that any new president will face could not have been anticipated on the job.
[00:27:23] Rafael Bras: Absolutely. No, I think that is very true. And you have the Chancellor's job, which is not commonly known in many, doesn't exist like that anywhere else, did provide that opportunity, as you well described. You have said in the past that part of good leadership is knowing when to say no to leadership positions also. When do you decline opportunities?
[00:27:51] Larry Bacow: Correct.
[00:27:53] Rafael Bras: Can you give some examples?
[00:27:55] Larry Bacow: Well, I don't want to go into that. But I do think that some of the best career decisions I've made are the jobs I did not take. And yeah, again, I've been blessed. I've literally never looked for a job. They've always come to me. And the only presidential search that I ever entered, if you will, was at Tufts, and I had been approached by many other institutions.
[00:28:27] I didn't think I wanted to be a president. It's a long story about why I decided to have a conversation with Tufts. And at that point I said, look, I'm not a candidate, but I'm happy to talk and learn a little bit more. So I do think it's important not to take a job unless you have an agenda. Never take a job just because it's got a great title; take a job because you know what you want to do with it. And at the time I took the Tufts job, and I had said no to a bunch of other places, which candidly were higher in the food chain,
[00:29:11] but where I thought the challenge there was basically to try and keep them where they were and not sort of slide back. And I had this epiphany that MIT was a great place — it was going to be a great place with me or without me — and there was an opportunity, I thought, to do something really interesting, at Tufts. It was a terrific place, but not a lot had been optimized, and so there was a lot of room for improvement.
[00:29:41] So Tufts appealed to me for that, but there were a lot of other places that said, ‘Oh, would you be interested? Do you want to come talk to us?’ And I just didn't feel right for a whole variety of reasons. And so I said, now a major foundation offered me their job, and then I realized, and again, as provost, as dean, I'm sure you had been in many foundation offers yourself.
[00:30:12] They tend to be pretty quiet places. Then I realized what I enjoyed about being a university president was sort of the retail aspects of the job. I enjoyed spending time with students, spending time with faculty, digging in on issues. And, if you will, running a foundation, it’s almost a wholesale business.
[00:30:33] You're working to others’ ways, that you dealt when you're a university president. So knowing yourself, knowing what makes you tick, not going after something just because it's, as I say, it's got a fancy title. And I certainly wasn't looking to be president of Harvard. It's the last thing I wanted to do. But I — and you probably know the story of how I was on the Harvard Corporation.
[00:30:58] I was a member of the search committee that came to a point in the search where the faculty involved in the search turned to me and others. And I agreed to do it out of a sense of service at the time in which I knew it was going to be very, very difficult for higher education and, the Harvard president is sort of granted the opportunity to speak on behalf of all of higher education.
[00:31:24] I felt especially given the role that higher education played in my own life, that this was really a call to public service more than anything else.
[00:31:36] Rafael Bras: Talking about higher education, this is something you have thought a lot about and, many of us have. Higher education is losing its
[00:31:47] public respect, its standing among the public for a variety of reasons. How do you see that moving forward? Can we recover the respect and the admiration that the public used to give us?
[00:32:09] Larry Bacow: It's a great question. Again, Rafael, I think we have to. And we certainly have to try, whether or not we're successful. Invite me back 15 years from now, and I will tell you, unfortunately, my crystal ball broke a while back.
[00:32:25] I think this has been long and coming. In fact, I gave the Clark Kerr lectures at Berkeley in 2017, and I talked about precisely this issue — that I thought that you're in danger of losing all support for public or much of our support for public higher education, in part because of our inability to control costs.
[00:32:46] And there was public anger over rising tuition, cost of higher education. It's become more complicated since then, in part because the country's become more divided. We've become an easy sort of target, I think, for certain groups that have their own political agendas. We've seen that play out last year.
[00:33:06] I think that's problematic. But I also think that it's important to recognize that much of the criticism of higher education tends to be viewed through the lens of undergraduate. I always say that the country basically hates the way we do undergraduate education but actually loves the research mission, of higher education.
[00:33:31] So we get criticized — in many cases, rightly so. Both parties think we're too expensive. Both parties don't like what we teach for very different reasons, how we teach. Both parties are critical of how we prepare students for the world that they will inhabit. Now, I happen to think they're wrong, but it is an issue we need to confront.
[00:33:56] But these. are focused on undergraduate education. Now, if you take a look at the research mission of the university, every president who's ever tried to cut the NIH budget or the NSF budget has seen Congress not only restore the cuts, but actually increase both of those budgets. And the world loves the fact that we create these technologies and develop, treatments and therapies for dread diseases that not only improve the lives of people but also create, huge economic opportunity and jobs.
[00:34:35] I always said, actually when we were both at MIT, that if MIT were willing to move and you had an auction for where we were going to go, there would be bidders from all over the world and all over the country as well. So on this issue, let me quote, a former Harvard colleague, Pat Moynihan, who became a United States Senator.
[00:35:06] Pat taught in our government department for many, many years, and his particular interest was in cities. And one thing that Pat once said, which I thought sums up this point quite nicely, he said, If you want to build a great city, first build a great university and then wait a hundred years.’
[00:35:30] If you look around the world, around the world, it's difficult to identify any place in the world where there is a great research university, where the area around it is not flourishing economically relative to the broader community or country or region in which the university is located.
[00:35:52] And I think actually people understand that about our institutions. So they love that. They don’t like how we educate students, how we admit students as undergraduates, what we teach them, the cost of doing so. That's where I think we need to do better.
[00:36:14] Rafael Bras: Yeah, on the issue of costs, and this is a sort of a complex question in a way, is the question of accessibility and affordability,
[00:36:27] and when we look at publics and privates, that is played differently. You have led, or you have been a leader, and for that matter, so have I, in universities that are quite unique. They're the drop in the bucket relative to the education of the majority of the people in the country. How — and we try very hard to quote you at one point saying, ‘We want to be elite but not elitist.’
[00:37:06] It's really difficult to do.
[00:37:08] Larry Bacow: It’s become a dirty word except when applied to a quarterback. OK to be elitist when you're looking for an elite quarterback. But in other cases, you're absolutely right. And of course, in the case of Harvard, Harvard is the definition of elite.
[00:37:28] Rafael Bras: Yeah.
[00:37:28] So to me, that presents a real issue because maybe you can expand. Harvard and large universities, particularly the Ivy's, are need-blind. They will provide if you get admitted, but the percent that gets admitted is really small.
[00:37:48] Larry Bacow: It's not just the percent that get admitted.
[00:37:51] The percent that get educated at the 100 selective institutions in the country is quite small. People fail to recognize that there are only about 100 institutions in the entire country that admit less than half the applicants who apply. And the vast majority of students who are educated in this country are educated in large publics, regional publics, and the world actually I think would be a far better place if it paid less attention to the Harvards of the world.
[00:38:24] But that is where the attention tends to be focused. So I do think that gives the, if you will, elite institutions a special responsibility to try and address some of these more challenging issues. In my Clark Kerr lecture, which was entitled ‘The political economy of cost control on the university campus,’ I tried to explain why costs rise faster than inflation in higher education.
[00:38:56] I tried to explain why our inability to gain control of those costs would put all public support of higher education at risk, and predicted that we would see attempts to tax our endowments to restrict our charitable status for purposes of tax exemption, a variety of things like that.
[00:39:23] But most importantly, what I try to do is I try to explain that one of the reasons that made it so difficult to rein in and control costs is that there was no natural constituency for cost control on a university campus, including ironically, the parents have students, who once kids were admitted, all they wanted was more.
[00:39:43] So I could go on in more depth about that, but I do think it's a very, very challenging and difficult issue to confront. There's some technical reasons why costs rise in any sector of the economy where productivity growth lags, that for the economy as a whole, costs will rise faster than inflation.
[00:40:06] It’s called Baumol’s cost disease. It's also the reason why opera and theater tickets always rise faster than inflation. It's the reason why tickets to sporting events — the productivity of baseball players has not improved in the last hundred years. It still takes nine players on the field to produce a baseball game playing against nine others.
[00:40:33] So in economic terms, productivity is only output per unit of labor input, unlike so many other things where productivity has increased enormously over the same period of time. So that's the technical reason, but there are political reasons why it's very, very difficult to control costs.
[00:40:50] And interestingly, if you take a look at public universities, and you've spent now a considerable amount of your career in public institutions, having spent the first part in private institutions, public institutions have actually done quite a decent job of controlling costs. Tuition has risen enormously because we've withdrawn public support.
[00:41:11] So I don't know what the numbers are at Georgia Tech. I talked to my counterparts when I gave this lecture while I was giving it at Berkeley, so I talked to Bob Birgeneau, who was chancellor at the time. And it was not too long ago, Berkeley received about 40% of its revenue from the state of California,
[00:41:29] and last time I looked, it was down to 11% or 12%. So if you withdraw state support, you basically just shift the cost burden from the state, where it's broadly distributed, to students and their families. So that's the distinction which economists like to draw, like myself, between cost and price.
[00:41:49] So the costs actually were well controlled. The price increased because of how those costs were born. The burden was shifted.
[00:42:06] Rafael Bras: Let me shift a little bit to some tough questions or issues you have faced or know about. One of the things that is clearly evident is that the line between the leadership of the university and the line of governance in terms of trustees, the donors, regents has been blurred. And that is particularly true and very clear nowadays with the attacks
[00:42:43] by some of those groups to university presidents, many women who are underrepresented minorities, leading around the protests of Gaza-Israel war.
[00:42:59] There's a question, where are we going to get to? And furthermore, in the particular issue of Gaza-Israel, as a Jewish man, you must have very much struggled with the situation facing the president of Harvard at the time, as well as many other leaders. Could it have been done differently?
[00:43:25] Larry Bacow: Well, hindsight is — everything comes into sharper focus in the rear-view mirror. And I'm sure if you were to talk to our presidential colleagues, they would tell you, sure, there are things that they could have done differently or better. And if I look at my own experience as president, whether or not at Tufts or MIT or even when I wasn’t president, but going back to my time in senior leadership at MIT, excuse me, as president of Tufts or Harvard, going back to my time as chancellor of MIT, I made mistakes, things that I would have done differently with benefit of hindsight.
[00:44:00] So I don't want to speculate on what they might have done or should have done. Their job is hard enough without having me tell them what I would have done. And who knows what I would have done in real — But I do think that we're at a point now in which it's important actually for academic leaders to stand up and to declare, I think quite publicly, that we are responsible for these institutions,
[00:44:38] we are going to manage them and run them and with input from others, but we're not going to be bullied to do things which we don't think are right. And sometimes that involves a willingness to bite the hand that feeds you. Now, one of the things which makes being a college or university president extremely challenging is that everybody who went to college thinks they can run one.
[00:45:00] And in fact, I found when I came to Tufts that I had to do a serious job of educating my board as to what it takes to make a research university better. If quality is determined by the quality of our teaching and the quality of our scholarship, you need to know and understand something about the production function that produces great teaching and great scholarship.
[00:45:30] And I don't mind sharing this with you because I told them at the time, I said, ‘What most of you understand about Tufts came from having been students here 20, 30, 40 years ago, and in many cases, undergraduate students. And now they were fiduciaries with the responsibility for education,
[00:45:54] Both graduate, undergraduate and professional, in seven schools on three campuses, and the production of knowledge because we're a research university, and clinical care since we operated a medical school and a dental school and a vet school, which had affiliated hospitals and the like.
[00:46:12] And I said to them, ‘This is like putting somebody on the board of bank of America where all they know about banking is that they had a passbook savings account and belonged to a Christmas club 30, 40 years ago.’ And I said, ‘To be a good trustee, you're going to need to learn and understand how an institution like this actually works.
[00:46:33] And I also said, ‘And by the way, we're going to put people on this board who have subject matter expertise.’ So we agreed as a matter of custom (we didn't amend the bylaws) that at any point in time, 10% of the members of the board would be fellow academics, usually with Tufts affiliation, but from other institutions.
[00:46:52] And I think that as the board came to understand and appreciate the complexity of managing not just multiple constituencies but also managing a very complex objective function where everybody did not necessarily agree what the objectives were — that it was harder than it looked from a distance.
[00:47:17] And I think at least with respect to our own boards, and in some cases with donors as well, we need to be willing to sort of say, ‘Wait, step back and let us really help you understand what it takes to make a place like this better. There are misperceptions about the power of the president to do things.
[00:47:39] My job would have been a lot easier if I could have fired faculty members, thrown students out of school on my own. But as you know so well, that’s not the way the process works at an institution.
[00:47:52] Rafael Bras: I think you'll describe what needs to be done, but I think we agree that over time, that line, that separation, that understanding as you will present it, has been lost.
[00:48:08] Larry Bacow: So, you asked about leadership principles before. Now, I left out a really important one. I always tried to make my problem other people's problems. So it's very easy to be an advocate for a decision if you never have to take responsibility for the decision. You know this.
[00:48:24] And so I would often sort of say, ‘Look, here are the real choices, OK? And we need to consider the real choices, not those that just optimize over one dimension.’ And so I would push back on people. I'd push back on donors, I'd push back on my own board, I'd push back on the faculty. I would not hesitate to say to a dean who came into me and made a passionate argument or something, I'd say, ‘You know, Rafael, you've made a really good argument,
[00:48:52] and if I were sitting where you're sitting, I don't think I could make a better argument. But I'm not. So let me tell you why I did what I did or why I didn't do what you want me to. And if you could look me in the eye and tell me that if you were sitting where I'm sitting, you would do something differently,
[00:49:08] now we've got something to talk about. But if all you're saying is do this because it locally optimizes over my preferences, I'm sorry, I can't do that. Now, if you always feel like you're getting the short end of the stick, you need to come back and we can talk because my job is to enable you to do your best work.’ But also, I think it's important to say that to various constituencies at times and to be willing to speak truth to power, to make your problems their problems.
[00:49:37] And I tried to work and operate that way throughout my time at university.
[00:49:44] Rafael Bras: Here, I hope that your message comes through loud and clear. Let me move to your courage. You have dealt with some really difficult issues in your various roles and certainly in the last few years at Harvard. One of them was the Supreme Court decision
[00:50:04] against using race as a factor in admissions. Harvard took a very strong position, defended itself, won most of the time but lost at the end. In that, and the end result, like many have predicted, is that many institutions, many of the top institutions, public and private, have seen, to some degree, some drop in the number of underrepresented students coming in.
[00:50:36] Where do we go from here? What are your thoughts on the future and, let's say, on the harm that this could have or is causing.
[00:50:51] Larry Bacow: Another great question. I think the issue is actually much larger than college or university admissions. The battle was fought there first, and we're now seeing the same folks who brought the case digging in against other issues in terms of consideration of race in other forms.
[00:51:12] And this comes at a time in which I think, a nation which previously viewed the American dream as one which sort of welcomed people with vastly different backgrounds from all sorts of different places to this country — and saw the nation as creating opportunity for others — now takes a much narrower view and a much more limited view.
[00:51:44] I don't know whether or not that's going to be steady state, or are we going to see the pendulum swing back? You're an immigrant. I've told you I'm a child of refugees. I suspect we both have a view of the role that immigrants or people who may not look the same as everybody else, or people who have traditionally been seen as minorities or underrepresented groups in one form or another, what they have to contribute.
[00:52:15] My own view, and I made this perfectly clear in the admissions lawsuit, is that we will never succeed in accomplishing as much if we sample from a small slice of the distribution of talent than from the entire distribution. And that was why it was important for us to look broadly for talent.
[00:52:42] I think and I suspect that it's an issue in which you and I probably see the world similarly, that we are all more than our numbers, that talent may be distributed broadly, but opportunity is not. And the numbers that we actually measure, that people would like us to measure, tend to in many cases be highly correlated with opportunity and not talent.
[00:53:13] In the admissions lawsuit, what I would speak to, especially alumni groups and others who would sort of say, ‘Well, if you admitted people purely on the basis of merit, wouldn't your class look very different?’ And my response was, ‘Well, it depends upon your definition of merit.’ And I'd say, ‘Let's gather some data.’
[00:53:31] And I would ask these groups, how many people have ever hired anybody? Every hand would go up. And I'd say, ‘Great, how many of you have ever hired people without interviewing them, without checking their references, without looking at their work product, without looking at their experience?’ And no hands would go up.
[00:53:46] I'd say, That's really interesting. Why didn't you just hire people based upon who had the best grades from the best school?’ And the answer is that we're more than our numbers. And if that's true when people are coming out of school, it's equally true when people are applying to these institutions.
[00:54:03] And so what we looked for were talented students who could succeed, and those are the only ones that we admitted. And I think what we see now is an attempt to really narrow the definition of what it means to be quote qualified, narrow the definition of who is an American, who should have the opportunity to come to this country in search of opportunity itself.
[00:54:35] I find that quite sad, and I think it's important that, people like us, who are privileged to have lived the American dream, continue to advocate for it and to advocate for opportunity for others. I hope the pendulum will swing back, but time will tell.
[00:54:55] Rafael Bras: Absolutely, yes. And as something you said, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
[00:55:00] Admissions is just one view on a much broader national discussion. Another difficult decision you've made and issue you faced at Harvard was the legacy of slavery. You started the Legacy of Slavery initiative at Harvard to try to discern and explain and understand: How did the institution that has been around for 380 years benefit from that practice?
[00:55:42] I guess the question I have for you, given that we cannot rewrite history: What do we gain? And what do you think is the long-term benefit of that action?
[00:55:59] Larry Bacow: So I think it was important for us to examine our own history, our entanglements with slavery. Harvard was founded in 1636. Slavery was legal in Massachusetts until the Constitution was adopted in 1783.
[00:56:15]So it was almost 150 years in which, slavery was legal in this colony, at least in this state, or when it finally became a state. So I think it was important for us to understand that in a context in which the nation continues to wrestle with its legacy of slavery. And the question in my mind was: What are the responsibilities of one of the foremost institutions of higher education in the country in addressing the nation's legacy with slavery?
[00:56:55] How do we do a better job of ensuring that those who are descendants and others are not continually burdened going forward by that legacy.
[00:57:12] How do we address issues of income inequality, wealth inequality, under-representation in the professions and a whole variety of things that still can be traced back to what's been characterized as the nation's original sin. And so it was by examining our own connections to be able to sort of say, what's our responsibility? And then saying, how do we commit the resources of the university through its teaching and scholarship — not through the payment of reparations, the word reparations does not appear in the report, but through our own teaching and scholarship — to be able to begin to address these longer-term issues.
[00:57:56] I used to say that I thought that Harvard needs to be involved in every major issue confronting society, whether or not that's climate change, something that you've done a huge amount of work on in your own scholarship, whether or not it's issues of inequality, whether or not it's issues of public health, you name it, educational opportunity. We should be making a contribution.
[00:58:24] And I thought this was a good way of understanding the depth of our engagement that we needed to address or determine as well as ideally laying out a strategy and approach for what role we might play going forward.
[00:58:43] Rafael Bras: Let me move that concept to a related issue. I'm going to quote from your mentor, Robert Solow, talking about Harvard economics.
[00:58:57] And there's a history that I will quickly summarize. He said, you could be disqualified for a job if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian, so what chance did a smart Jewish Keynesian have? And it reflected a time at Harvard that started in the 1920s when quotas were established to keep the number of Jewish students down purposely.
[00:59:29] And that continued until quite late, in fact, the time when you could argue that the extraordinary Department of Economics that you studied in at MIT was a legacy of all these extraordinary economists of Harvard — Jewish economists — moving to MIT: Samuelson, Solow, et cetera, et cetera.
[00:59:57] So why not argue that you should have also a Legacy of Jewish Discrimination initiative?
[01:00:09] Larry Bacow: Well, I think the fact that, first of all, your characterization of history is correct. One of my predecessors, Lawrence Lowell, was the first to institute quotas on Jews for exactly the reason that you said.
[01:00:26] This is a case where, sadly, much of the rest of the nation followed Harvard. So you see similar quotas at most of the elite institutions, I think all of them, at the time. We've come a long way since then, and it would be difficult to, I think, argue — I don't mean to say that there are not issues of anti-Semitism:
[01:00:53] Our colleges and universities are microcosms of the world that we live in, and just as antisemitism is on the rise in the world, in the country, you will also find it on the rise on campuses, and we absolutely need to push back. But I think certainly Jewish scholars are well represented right now
[01:01:17] in all of these institutions. And there was a time when I was president of Harvard by early years at which the presidents of a majority of the Ivy league where Jewish, as were the presidents of the University of Chicago, MIT. So I think we're looking at a different situation in terms of the legacy of anti-Semitism in higher education than we are with the legacy of slavery more broadly.
[01:01:51] And it's also true, I think, that fortunately, those of us who happen to be Jewish are now well represented in all the professions, and you will not find the disparities that exist, let's say with respect to those who are descendants of slavery, with those of us who are Jewish and the discrimination that existed in the ‘20s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, that was institutionalized then.
[01:02:23] So I do think they're different situations. I don't mean to suggest we don't need to push back against anti-Semitism. Absolutely we do. As somebody who had no family on my mother's side — literally none — because of anti-Semitism, I would be the last to argue against it.
[01:02:43] Rafael Bras: I would agree. In your career, your extraordinary career, I would be amazed if you cannot come up with incidents —
[01:02:55] I'm not asking you to give them — where you felt you were discriminated, that you were suffering bigotry. That still remains.
[01:03:09] Larry Bacow: Honestly, I don't feel like I was ever personally a victim. Now, I will tell you that when I became president of Harvard, absolutely I received, anti-Semitic emails and things like that from people.
[01:03:31] But I also received death threats from others just because I was president of Harvard. I mean, if you're going to be president of Harvard, you're going to be faced with that. It just comes with the territory. But fortunately, the threats were few and far between
[01:03:52] that were directed at me more broadly. And maybe I got one or two anti-Semitic messages at times, but that was among many angry messages I got from various people that I would characterize in many cases as being crazy.
[01:04:14] Rafael Bras: Very good. Well Larry, I think we could spend hours. I certainly could spend hours talking, but we don't have hours, and I really want to thank you.
[01:04:22] I want to state clearly that I admire your leadership and your approach to leadership, greatly. You have been quite a servant leader to the nation and those that know you really appreciate your values and your integrity. It's been 50 years since we both graduated — Class of 1972 at MIT — and it's really been an honor to be your friend.
[01:04:53] Now, you mentioned earlier, maybe we can do this 15 years from now. I hope you're right.
[01:05:00] Larry Bacow: But, you know, Rafael, you and I both took 18.01 and 18.02. It's 52 years.
[01:05:12] Rafael Bras: That is correct. That is correct.
[01:05:15] Larry Bacow: Yeah, we both — you're a better mathematician than I, but at least we can both add and subtract.
[01:05:25] For the record.
[01:05:26] Rafael Bras: For the record.
[01:05:28] Larry Bacow: And our class contributed much to the leadership of MIT and elsewhere, as you know.
[01:05:36] Rafael Bras: Yeah, indeed, it was, there were interesting times, with all sorts of, social issues going on at the time, very different from the ones now. Vietnam and what is going on now are not quite the same thing.
[01:05:54] Larry Bacow: No, they're, not. But I always point out to people who will say, ‘Has it ever been this bad on a college campus?’ and say, ‘The nation has been divided before. In fact, arguably even more divided. All you have to do is to take a look back at the ‘60s — the 1860s and the 1960s — and in each case, ultimately, we came back.
[01:06:19] Together, we had to fight a bloody civil war in the 1860s, and in the 1960s, I would say it took at least 20 more years for us really to try and move beyond that. Hopefully, it will do better this time, but I don't think you can be a leader without being an optimist because you have to be able to believe that the future is going to be better than the present.
[01:06:44] if you're going to get people to follow you. And I guess I'm still an optimist: I still believe in the nation, and I still believe in the role of higher education. So thank you for the opportunity for the conversation. I appreciate it very much, Rafael. And thank you for your leadership as well.
[01:07:00] Rafael Bras: Thank you so much, Larry. Hope to see you soon. Take care.
[01:07:04] Larry Bacow: Take care.
[01:07:10] Aileen Christensen: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Not Alone: Leaders in Conversation. We hope this discussion today sparked new ideas and left you with plenty to think about as you continue to lead in your own institution. If you found this conversation interesting, insightful, or thought provoking, please share this episode with your colleagues, peers and friends.
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