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June 24, 2002, 9:05 a.m. All-American Summers Is Harvard’s president a conservative? By Jason Steorts

n June 6, under an overcast Thursday-morning sky, a crowd of thousands gathered in Cambridge, Mass. for Harvard University's 351st commencement ceremony. From their seats on temporary chairs in Harvard Yard, an expanse of grass and trees amid Harvard's red-bricked Georgian elegance, students and their families looked toward the dais at which the university's professors and administrators — including Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers — sat.

Following custom, the ceremony began with the Star-Spangled Banner. It was then that graduating senior Jason Brinton noticed something amiss: "[A] good dozen of the professors and administrators on stage were either silent or didn't have their hands over their heart or both. Some were from foreign countries, but even adjusting for that, there were a handful of academic leaders up there who wouldn't pledge to the flag or sing the anthem."

But Larry Summers was singing enthusiastically. The display was not out of character. Just the day before, Summers had become the first Harvard president since 1969 to speak at an ROTC commissioning ceremony, and his remarks to the graduating cadets and midshipmen reveal much about his attitude toward both the Star-Spangled Banner and the country whose anthem it is: "It was a thrill for me as it always is to hear the Star-Spangled Banner performed before the ceremony began, and I'm looking forward to the fact that we will be hearing the Star-Spangled Banner tomorrow morning before the Harvard commencement begins, and that is as it should be."

The contrast between Summers's unapologetic patriotism and the stony silence of his colleagues is, in many ways, a perfect metaphor for Summers's relationship with the university he leads. Since the Sixties, when it was a hotbed of protest against the Vietnam War, Harvard has been unable to shed its reputation as a bastion of anti-Americanism. This is, after all, the school that Richard Nixon famously christened the "Kremlin on the Charles." Yet in his freshman year as president, Summers has both demonstrated his own patriotism and encouraged Harvard to follow suit.

The most prominent example is Summers's support for the ROTC. In a round of conniptions over the Vietnam War, the Harvard faculty voted in 1969 to exile the ROTC; later, in 1993, the faculty denied the ROTC university funding on the grounds that the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy discriminated against gays. Harvard's ROTC cadets and midshipmen train at MIT instead, and their program is funded by an independent alumni trust.

Summers has called that arrangement "uncomfortable" and "unorthodox." He has praised the ROTC in public — as at the commissioning ceremony — and in less visible ways: He sent a letter to cadets on Veteran's Day expressing his support, and he asked Harvard's yearbook staff, whose publication does not include student groups that are not officially recognized by the university, to make an exception for the ROTC.

Summers has also left no doubt that he supports a vigorous national defense against terrorism. At his installation last October, he made pointed reference to the Sept. 11 attacks, encouraging his audience to "honor those who defend our freedom and the calling of public service," and to "promote understanding — not the soft understanding that glides over questions of right and wrong, but the hard-won comprehension that the threat before us demands." The latter injunction may seem unremarkable, but many in the audience heard it as a subtle repudiation of the peacenik pacifism that had sprung up just weeks before when 500 students rallied to promote "peaceful alternatives to President Bush's calls for war."

It would of course be a gross oversimplification to identify Summers with conservative politics. He is a self-identified Democrat and a former Cabinet official in the Clinton administration. And while patriotism finds fluent expression in Summers's public statements, he has made little effort to reverse entrenched university policies that seem at odds with his personal sentiments. Summers has not, for example, pressed the faculty to restore university recognition and funding to the ROTC.

But even if Summers is content to leave vestiges of Harvard's leftist legacy intact, campus conservatives can take heart in his opposition to the institutionalization of new bad ideas. Take, for example, his lack of sympathy for the left's perennial grudge against Israel. When asked at a student gathering what he thought of the petition — signed by several prominent Harvard and MIT professors — calling on Harvard to divest itself of holdings in companies that do business in Israel, Summers said, "the suggestion that [Israel's] defense against terrorist attacks is inherently immoral seems to me to be an unsupportable one. It would be one I would be acutely uncomfortable with." Shortly thereafter, his office released a statement saying that Harvard would not divest.

For Ivy League conservatives, that was an important victory — the first, one hopes, of many to come during Summers's tenure. Larry Summers may not count himself among conservatives, but he listens to them when they are right. In a place filled with liberal ideologues who talk about the U.S. and the war on terror with thinly veiled contempt, Larry Summers is a welcome presence indeed.