FROM THE PUBLISHER
It is the richest, most influential, most powerful university in the world, but at the beginning of 2001, Harvard was in crisis. Students complained that a Harvard education had grown mediocre. Professors charged that the university cared more about money than about learning. And everyone worried that Harvard's outgoing president, Neil Rudenstine, epitomized an unhappy trend: the university president as full-time fund-raiser. Harvard may have possessed a $19 billion endowment, but had the university lost its soul?

The members of the Harvard Corporation, the ultra-secretive governing board established more than three centuries ago, knew that they had to act. And so they made a bold pick for Harvard's twenty-seventh president: former Treasury Secretary and intellectual prodigy economist Lawrence Summers.

Although famously brilliant, Summers was a high-stakes gamble. In the 1990s he had crafted American policies to stabilize the global economy, quietly becoming one of the world's most powerful men. But while many admired Summers, his critics called him elitist, imperialist, and arrogant beyond measure.

Today Larry Summers sits atop a university in a state of upheaval, unsure of what it stands for and where it is going. His allies believe that Harvard needs shaking up and appreciate Summer's blunt language and unabashed displays of power. His foes accuse the new president of tearing apart a venerable institution simply to remake it in his own image. At stake is not just the future of Harvard University, but the way in which Harvard students see the world -- and the manner in which they will lead it.

Written despite the university's official opposition, Harvard Rules uncovers what really goes on behind Harvard's storied walls -- the politics, sex, ambition, infighting, and intrigue that run rampant within the world's most important university.

FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
Welcome to Harvard Yard-or, more precisely, to the president's office in Mass Hall. As Bradley (American Son, 2002, written as Richard Bow) tells it, Harvard found itself in something of an identity crisis at the turn of the new century. Was Harvard still the best school around, or was it being edged out by Princeton and Yale? The Harvard Corporation was worried, so when President Neil Rudenstine retired, it looked for someone who would shake things up a bit. They found their man in Larry Summers, the enfant terrible economist and former Treasury Secretary who became Harvard's president in 2001. Here, Bradley covers everything from Summers's responses to 9/11 and the rise of worldwide anti-Semitism to his attempts to crack down on grade inflation. Readers will even get a peek at his love life.

But Bradley is most energized by the fracas around Harvard's African-American Studies department. The best such department in the country, it was built up by President Rudenstine and Henry Louis Gates Jr., but when Summers came along, he immediately alienated Gates and didn't even meet with him, a powerhouse by anyone's standards, until he'd been seated as president for several months-and, when he did, he was wishy-washy about affirmative action. Then there was the showdown with Cornel West, which made the pages of the Boston Globe and the New York Times, after Summers told West his scholarship wasn't up to snuff, that he needed to stop writing popular books and do some serious work. West was livid, eventually leaving Harvard for Princeton. Gates, too, toyed with switching, though for the time being he's still in Cambridge. Bradley chronicles the West-Gates-Summers battle royal in detail that's sometimes delicious and sometimes, well, mind-numbing. Die-hard Crimson-ites may flock to this, but who else will want to read 400 pages of Harvard insider politics? It's a fluid, solid profile but would have been better as a magazine article.