The changes of style and sensibility in Harvard’s governance during the last third of the twentieth century had close parallels in the academic realm. The faculty, like the bureaucracy, became more professional, more specialized, more worldly. Nevertheless, in most respects Harvard’s academic fundamentals in the magic year 2000 were pretty much what they had been half a century before. Faculty autonomy, the disciplinary pecking order, the tension between teaching and research, the sheer intellectual quality, range, and vigor of the place: these remained alive and well. Harvard changed more between 1940 and 1970 than it did between 1970 and 2000. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences traditionally was Harvard’s academic core. Medical School administrator Henry Meadow spoke in 1974 of the “religious” feeling that the FAS departments were the heart of the University, their faculty the real Harvard professors. By the end of the century that was a less self-evident proposition. The crisis of the late 1960s, the intellectual and career problems afflicting the humanities and the social sciences, and Derek Bok’s ideal of a more socially engaged and useful University eroded FAS’s privileged place. Yet the College and the Arts and Sciences departments still made the largest claim on the University’s assets and on its public reputation. The FAS deanships of Paul Buck in the 1940s and McGeorge Bundy in the 1950s gave their office a place in Harvard affairs second only to the president. John Dunlop, appointed to stanch the flow of institutional blood after the events of 1969, made way in 1973 for fellow economist Henry Rosovsky, who held the post until 1984 and then came back for a fill-in year in 1990. Rosovsky’s was one of the notable deanships in Harvard’s history, and he played a major role in the University’s glissade from meritocracy to worldliness. Like his predecessors Buck, Bundy, Ford, and Dunlop, Rosovsky had not gone to Harvard College. Unlike them he was Harvard’s first Jewish, and foreign-born, dean. He came to the United States in 1940, a thirteen- year-old refugee from Hitler’s Europe, and went to college at William and Mary.
The Inside-Out Museum/The Inside-Out University
