At Harvard and at Shaw, Mr. Summers cultivated a small circle of financial professionals - particularly hedge fund managers - to serve as an informal brain trust.

Should the network become a collection of proprietary islands accessed by devices controlled remotely by their vendors, the internet would lose much of its “generativity”, warns Harvard’s Mr Zittrain.

That is the provocative question posed by an outsider SLATE of candidates running for the Board of Overseers at Harvard, which helps set strategy for the university.