That's Just Brilliant
As Larry Summers’s stumbles at Harvard demonstrate, our fixation with genius can be just plain dumb.
Even now, no one questions that Larry Summers is brilliant. It’s how he’s always been described—check Google, and you’ll find 457,000 references connecting him with that defining trait. Summers’s brilliance was how, back in 2001, the Harvard Corporation marketed its new president to the Harvard community—one of the youngest tenured professors! Might win a Nobel!—and Summers seemed to agree that his genius was his mandate. He famously told Cornel West what to write about, claimed that economists are smarter than political scientists and sociologists, and proposed that men are smarter than women. Larry Summers was so busy boasting of his intelligence, he talked himself out a job.
Perhaps Harvard’s outgoing president took the cult of brilliance too seriously. He wouldn’t be alone. Maybe because we have grown weary of our anti-intellectual commander-in-chief, maybe because we look at our vapid pop culture and blanch—maybe because so few of us are brilliant—America worships at the altar of genius. We venerate it in Bill Belichick, Steve Jobs, the guys at Google, Stephen Levitt’s Freakonomics, the Moneyball of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, and the journalism of the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell. We try to raise our children to be baby Einsteins. Brilliance is the secular God.
Problem is, we don’t know exactly what genius is—intelligence is easier to quantify than qualify—and we overlook what it isn’t: Diplomacy. Decency. Humility. Emotional acuity. Wisdom. Some brilliant people have enough of those qualities to become great leaders. Some, like Larry Summers, don’t.
Derek Bok, Harvard president from 1971 to 1991, is back while the university seeks a more permanent replacement for Summers. Bok was a fine legal scholar and extremely capable president who now writes books about ethics and higher education. But . . . brilliant? Probably not. As the Harvard Corporation looks for a new leader, it would do well to look at Bok, then Summers, and remember that brilliance is not enough.
Perhaps Harvard’s outgoing president took the cult of brilliance too seriously. He wouldn’t be alone. Maybe because we have grown weary of our anti-intellectual commander-in-chief, maybe because we look at our vapid pop culture and blanch—maybe because so few of us are brilliant—America worships at the altar of genius. We venerate it in Bill Belichick, Steve Jobs, the guys at Google, Stephen Levitt’s Freakonomics, the Moneyball of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, and the journalism of the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell. We try to raise our children to be baby Einsteins. Brilliance is the secular God.
Problem is, we don’t know exactly what genius is—intelligence is easier to quantify than qualify—and we overlook what it isn’t: Diplomacy. Decency. Humility. Emotional acuity. Wisdom. Some brilliant people have enough of those qualities to become great leaders. Some, like Larry Summers, don’t.
Derek Bok, Harvard president from 1971 to 1991, is back while the university seeks a more permanent replacement for Summers. Bok was a fine legal scholar and extremely capable president who now writes books about ethics and higher education. But . . . brilliant? Probably not. As the Harvard Corporation looks for a new leader, it would do well to look at Bok, then Summers, and remember that brilliance is not enough.
