On the face of it, Harvard's president Drew Gilpin Faust, a Civil War historian and Bancroft Prize winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist, is hugely different from Louis B. Mayer, the cigar-chomping, tough-talking old-time MGM mogul.
Look more closely, though, and a key resemblance between the two emerges.
Mayer in the 1940s operated a centralized studio system that was wonderful for MGM but much less wonderful for movie stars and directors, who worked for relatively low, standardized contract salaries, as well as for outside investors, who had to go through the studios to connect with directors and stars.
A similarly advantageous system for the institution as opposed to its top talent applies at Harvard and other major American universities today. The academic equivalents of Angelina Jolie and Steven Spielberg do not earn a great deal more than their non-star colleagues, and outside money is welcome only in distinctly minor roles like getting a donor's name on a building.
In the university that Faust leads and in the broader American university system, the power, the glory, and not least the money--for Harvard's endowment of $27.6 billion as of mid-2010, reduced though it is from its peak of its few years ago, is hardly inconsiderable--redound to the institution, not to its top talent.
The story of Hollywood since the days of Mayer is the story of talent revolting and earning its market rewards. Stars, directors, and producers get together on a project basis, with a much reduced, though still significant, role for studios.
A similar path is entirely possible for American higher education. If America's leading researchers, most charismatic teachers, and best academic entrepreneurs get together with investors from venture capital firms and elsewhere to market academic programs on a project basis, the power, the glory, and the money left for Harvard and its peers will not be what they are under the current institution-dominated system.
Should the rest of us care about whether Harvard and other universities keep their top talent from getting market returns for their services?
For what it's worth, my sense is that an American university system in which Harvard, Yale, and Princeton occupy the same positions at the top in 2010 as they did in 1910 is overly ossified.
Hollywood under Mayer's studio system made plenty of good movies and some great ones, but the new system with talent rather than the studios in charge has done just as well or better. I'm optimistic that just as much or more truth, virtue, and beauty will be created if academic talent revolts and creates a more competitive American higher education system that takes some of the power, glory, and money away from Harvard and its peers.
My guess is that President Faust would not share my relative optimism about a potential talent revolt. That's fair enough. Harvard for all its flaws has substantial virtues--which I appreciate as a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School--and she would be performing her role as one would expect if she casts herself and the great university she heads as defenders of the forces of reason and civilization against those with a lesser commitment to these values.
But whether Drew Faust sees Harvard as exemplary or as an ossified institution in need of profound change, or perhaps as a mixture of both, she should be thinking about how the very long and apparently secure dominance of American higher education that her school and its peers have enjoyed might soon come to an end.
If she has time to spare for new historical research, I have a suggestion: She should read up on Louis Mayer and his vanished era and reflect carefully on its implications for her job and for Harvard and its future.
