Larry Kramer: ‘Some constraint makes for a much better debate’

When working with a grief counsellor after the death of his wife, Larry Kramer was told the conventional wisdom was to try to keep the rest of your life as steady as possible, with no major changes in the first few years.

Instead, he now finds himself sat in an office far from home, having taken over as vice-chancellor of the London School of Economics (LSE) less than a year after the passing of his spouse, the artist Sarah Delson, from ovarian cancer.

Professor Kramer had not only never lived in the UK before, but had also been out of academia for more than a decade after leaving Stanford Law School to run the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 2012.

When LSE called out of the blue to talk about the job, he said his first instinct was to refuse, but then the idea of taking it slowly began to make sense.

“I hadn’t gone looking for it to change or fix something and, as I talked to the counsellor, I realised this was an incredible opportunity that does not come along very often, particularly for someone at my stage at life,” he said. “I knew I would be back to myself at some point and, if I had passed it up, I would be really sorry.”

LSE agreed to a staggered start, but university leaders can only be protected from the stresses of the role for so long, and one of Professor Kramer’s first acts in charge was to oversee the eviction of a pro-Palestine protest camp that had been set up inside a campus building.

He said LSE would always support the right to protest until it was disruptive of major school business and prevented others from doing their work.

“That is not a hard line to draw…It is hard because they [student protesters] feel strongly and we won’t always agree with what they want us to do, but that is a different question,” he reflected.

Still, the backlash he faced was tame in comparison with counterparts still in the US, as his predecessor at LSE, Baroness Shafik, who took over at Columbia University only to leave after being criticised from all sides over her handling of similar protests, discovered to her cost. So is it harder to be a university president on the other side of the Atlantic?

Speaking even before the re-election of Donald Trump, Professor Kramer said his home country had always been a “little more exaggerated and raw” than the UK, in part due to its “Wild West libertarian speech doctrine”.

“When [former University of Pennsylvania president] Liz Magill was asked: ‘What would you do if somebody called for the genocide of the Jews?’ she hemmed and hawed because under US first amendment law that’s protected speech,” he said.

“Here you would say, ‘Well, that’s illegal’, and it’s that difference that then tends to run through the culture and, I think, create a different discourse. It is one of those classic examples where constraints free you; a little bit of limitation makes for a much better debate.”

Although he said he saw similarities in the faculty and students, the other big differences between the US and UK systems, according to Professor Kramer, were in regulation and – crucially at the current moment – funding.

“It is a kind of miracle how good UK universities are, given the way in which they have been resourced over the years,” he said.

“Now is a particular crisis but, even before that, the ability to do new things and change and adapt and grow is just different.

“That was always a constraint. What has been amazing – not just about LSE, or Oxbridge or the top universities – is just how good they have been in finding ways to maintain excellence.”

Although it was “arrogant to say LSE is cushioned from it”, the institution was “at the moment OK”, said Professor Kramer, due to its “long and well-established practice and reputation outside the UK”.

This global mix of students was not something found at any university in the US, he said, and was something he was keen to protect.

But one of the things he wanted to do in post, he said, was to run a need-blind admissions process. “I would like to be in a position where the students who can come here to get this education are the ones that can make the most use of it and not have that limited by who can afford it,” he said.

Another aim, said Professor Kramer, was to ensure that research was both geared towards the important challenges of the time and did not just stay within the institution’s walls.

“When I started in teaching, the membranes between what was going on in the world and what was going on in scholarship were pretty thin,” said the legal academic. “If it was pretty good and relevant or spoke to problems, the scholarship could make its way out.”

THE podcast: what to do when the principles of free speech are tested

Now, according to Professor Kramer, the “noise” of wider society made this increasingly difficult, with a fragmented media pulling political actors in many different directions.

“It has become much harder to think about a problem in a way that should at least be of interest across the political spectrum, even if one side likes it more than the other,” he said.

Universities were also, along with many other traditional institutions, suffering from a loss of confidence, Professor Kramer said.  

“People don’t think of them in quite the same way, so we have to rehabilitate that sense. The best way to do that is by getting the work out there so people can see what it is.”

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com