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 Love Story to Legally Blonde, Harvard abounds in American popular culture. Partly this is because the university produces many creative, ambitious, and occasionally dysfunctional graduates whose Cambridge experience provides a natural subject for their work. It's also because the campus is so picturesque, so resplendent with timeless red brick, graceful bell towers, and sleek sculls gliding along a sparkling Charles River. This is cinematic stuff. Setting a story at Harvard conveys history, power, and tradition; Harvard raises the stakes. Little wonder that thriller writer Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, made his hero, symbologist Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor. The label gives Langdon instant credibility.

Nevertheless, much of the literature and film featuring Harvard casts the university in a critical light. Consider perhaps the most famous Harvard drama. In Erich Segal's 1970 novel Love Story (the film of which is screened for Harvard freshmen every fall), the university comes across as a cold and uncaring place, aesthetically impressive but officially hostile to the romance of Harvard man Oliver Barrett IV and Radcliffe student Jenny Cavilleri. They fall in love at Harvard, but certainly not because of it. Love distracts from work.

In The Paper Chase, the 1973 film about a law student who falls in love with his august professor's daughter, Harvard is a place where excellence takes root not because of its culture of competition, arrogance, and frosty interpersonal relations, but despite it. Then there's 1997's Good Will Hunting, the tale of a working-class math genius who falls for a Harvard undergrad. In that film, the typical Harvard student is presented as pompous, effete, and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Other, less good movies present Harvard still more cynically. In 1986's Soul Man, the only way a young man can afford Harvard is to pretend that he's black in order to win a scholarship. And in the 2002 comedy Stealing Harvard, a well-meaning uncle attempts to pilfer $30,000 so that his niece can pay Harvard's costs.

In the realm of nonfiction, there is a sizeable genre of "I spent a year at Harvard" books—memoirs of the law school, medical school, divinity school, and so on. In theme and structure, such chronicles -- such as Scott Turow's One L -- constitute survival narratives. A year at the Harvard Law School is the academic equivalent of surviving a plane crash in the Peruvian Andes or being stranded on a deserted island with only a beach ball for company. As in most Harvard-themed works of culture, individuality is in short supply, spontaneity prompts rebuke, and love is an endangered emotion.

Harvard's administration devotes enormous amounts of time, money, and energy to generating more positive media coverage. The university seems to have more press secretaries than Congress, and they spend as much time shooting stories down as helping them get written. Much of their job involves getting faculty members quoted in newspapers and magazines on issues related to their expertise, and at this they are remarkably successful -- helped, no doubt, by the prevalence of Harvard grads in the press. Some years back, a writer working on a book about Harvard asked a group of researchers to count the number of instances in which the New York Times cited Harvard over a period of several months. They expected the number to be large, but even to their surprise, they found that the Times mentioned Harvard more than all other universities combined.

Of course, Harvard doesn't rely on outside press organizations to advertise itself.

The former executive editor of George magazine, Richard Bradley is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and the New Republic. A graduate of Yale College who received his A.M. in American history from Harvard, Bradley lives in New York City.

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