Nathan Marsh Pusey and the Affluent University

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morton Keller ◽  
Phyllis Keller
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
American Politics ◽  
College Teaching ◽  
Vice President ◽  
Fund Raising ◽  
Short List ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Carnegie Corporation

on New Year’s Day 1953, James Bryant Conant made known his intention to resign, effective January 23—all of three weeks later. In June the Corporation announced his successor: forty-six-year-old Nathan Marsh Pusey, the president of Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin. Why this wholly unexpected choice? Who was Pusey, and what did he offer Harvard? He came from an old New England family transplanted to Iowa, graduated from Harvard College in the class of 1928, earned a Harvard Ph.D. in Classics in 1935, went off to stints of college teaching at Lawrence, Scripps, and Wesleyan, and in 1944 returned to Lawrence to become its president. This was a small, highly regarded college in Wisconsin, founded in 1847, with strong New England roots. Pusey did well there, recruiting able faculty and taking a public stand against Appleton native Joseph McCarthy when that sinister figure began to hack his way through American politics. All respectable enough; and, it appears, sufficient to secure Pusey a place on the short list of candidates. But enough to make him Harvard’s twenty-fourth president? Lawrence board chairman William Buchanan reported that Pusey had done little fund-raising for the college, and noted his cool personality and lack of popularity with students despite his manifest skill as a teacher. Another member of the Lawrence board doubted that Pusey had the administrative ability required by the Harvard presidency: “He is stubborn and uncompromising.” More weighty was Carnegie Corporation vice president (and Harvard president wannabe) John Gardner’s “serious doubts that he would have the particular leathery quality required to take on the great administrative job which Harvard is.” But positive views substantially outweighed these reservations. An Episcopal church source reported: “Pusey is stubborn at times but it is always a stubbornness on matters of principle and not with respect to his biases.” Another who knew him well said: “He is all mind, character, and perception. He is no promoter. . . . He is as firm as iron. He always succeeds in getting what he wants done. . . . His religion is top flight 100 percent all wool and a yard wide Episcopalian.”

The Moral Individualism of Henry David Thoreau

1985 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 239-253
Author(s):  
David L. Norton
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Informal Group ◽  
Moral Individualism ◽  
Four Books ◽  
American Thought

Henry Thoreau boasted that he was widely travelled in Concord, Massachusetts. He was born there on 12 July 1817, and he died there on 6 May 1862, of tuberculosis, at the age of forty-four years. In 1837 he graduated from Harvard College, and in 1838 he joined Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and others in the informal group that became known as the New England Transcendentalists. The author of four books, many essays and poems, and a voluminous journal, he is best known for the book Walden and the essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, and for the circumstances attending these two milestones in American thought and literature.

The College

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morton Keller ◽  
Phyllis Keller
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Fund Raising ◽  
Student Body ◽  
Professional Schools ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
World War Ii Veterans ◽  
Clothing Style ◽  
Green Book ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Social Style

Even in the age of the imperial faculty and powerful professional schools, the College was at the center of Harvard’s sense of itself. This was evident in the two most significant events of the Pusey years: the great fund-raising effort of the late 1950s, pointedly called the Program for Harvard College; and the upheaval of 1969, in which the largest source of attention (and concern) was the degree to which Harvard undergraduates were involved. After the postwar rush of veterans, Harvard College during the 1950s appeared in many ways to return to its prewar state. Only about a quarter of the students in 1958 were on financial aid. The typical graduate five years out in the mid-fifties lived in a large northeastern city, was married with one child, was a Republican who went to church once a month. Most undergraduates sought to live up to their national billing as the elite of the elite. The dress-down clothing style of the postwar vets gave way to resurgent preppy attire: casually (that is, purposefully) dirtied white buckskin shoes, tweed jackets, green book bags, alpine parkas. “At a distance and even from quite close up,” said one observer, “everyone looks alike.” The prevailing social style was “polite arrogance—spare, dry, cautious, and angular.” Too cool by half, thought a critic: “Even in the unregimented student life of the Yard, there has been a certain failure of nerve, a hint of the youthful generation’s prudence.” The psychological downer of the Depression and the more mature post–World War II veterans temporarily squelched the venerable Harvard tradition of spring student riots. When there was talk of resurrecting that custom, a Radcliffe girl “sniffed scornfully: ‘What sort of riot is it when it has to be planned?’ ” Springtime hijinks returned in the 1950s with a younger, more affluent student body. These had a satirical, selfconscious edge, appropriate to a more intellectual student generation. The first rumpus came in May 1952 when students gathered to welcome cartoonist Walt Kelley, creator of the popular cartoon strip “Pogo.” Confusion and delay turned to streetcar disabling and fights with the police. In April 1961, protests raged through two unruly nights against the administration’s decision to switch to less costly printed diplomas—most inexcusably in English, not Latin.

Royall Tyler

2022 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Military Service ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Royall Tyler ◽  
Bachelor Of Arts ◽  
May Day ◽  
Comic Drama

Royall Tyler (b. 1757–d. 1826) was born to a prominent merchant family in Boston and came of age in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. He entered Harvard College in 1771 and earned his bachelor of arts degree three months after the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. Tyler then enlisted in the Revolutionary Army, although he remained in Boston and Cambridge studying law. His active military service seems to have been limited to serving as a brigade major during the unsuccessful 1778 attempt to capture Newport, Rhode Island. As the war continued, Tyler earned his master of arts degree from Harvard in 1779 and engaged in a failed courtship of Abigail Adams, the daughter of future president John Adams. After the war, Tyler became involved in the suppression of Shays’ Rebellion in 1786. When Daniel Shays fled to Vermont, Tyler was assigned to negotiate with authorities in New York, which still laid claim to the territory, to ensure that the rebel did not find safe harbor. In New York City Tyler launched his literary career; in April 1787, The Contrast began its run in New York as the first professionally produced American comic drama and one of the first successful American plays. Months later Tyler produced a second play, May Day in Town, that is no longer extant. In 1790, Tyler returned to Boston and married Mary Palmer, who would later publish the first American manual for infant care. They relocated to Vermont, where the couple remained for the rest of their lives. In the years to follow, Tyler published numerous poems and essays, including a popular series of essays in collaboration with Joseph Dennie under the title of “Colon & Spondee.” In 1797, Tyler published the novel The Algerine Captive, which achieved moderate success and was one of the first American books to be republished in Great Britain. In the 1800s and 1810s Tyler served for six years as the chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and launched a failed bid for the U.S. Senate. He completed several new plays, including his biblical dramas and the epistolary satire The Yankey in London (1809). At the time of his death in 1826 he was rewriting the first half of The Algerine Captive as a New England picaresque titled The Bay Boy, which would remain unpublished until 1968.

The Geological Sciences at Harvard University from 1788 to 1850

1988 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford Frondel
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Harvard Medical School ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Scientific School ◽  
Chemistry Department ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Natural History Collection ◽  
Main Period ◽  
Geological Sciences

Formal course instruction in mineralogy and geology began in Harvard College in 1788 with Benjamin Waterhouse. He also assembled in the 1780's a reference and teaching collection of minerals, rocks, and ores—the first natural history collection at Harvard—that, following a gift by an English friend, J. C. Lettsom, became a cynosure of the College. Following Waterhouse's dismissal in 1812, the instruction was carried on by John Gorham until 1824. Waterhouse, his colleague Aaron Dexter, and Gorham all were professors in the Harvard Medical School, established 1782. The latter two men successively held an endowed chair therein, the Erving Professorship of Chemistry and Materia Medica. They produced some notable graduates: Parker Cleaveland in 1799, Lyman Spalding in 1797, Joseph Green Cogswell in 1806, John White Webster in 1811, John Fothergill Waterhouse in 1813, and Samuel Luther Dana and James Freeman Dana in 1813. Following years of futile effort by the Administration to establish a professorship of mineralogy and geology, with Cogswell as the selected candidate, the instruction in mineralogy and geology fell to John White Webster in 1824 in the Chemistry Department. The Erving Professorship also passed to him, with a change in title to Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy. Webster's death in 1850, following his conviction for murder in a famous trial, terminated the first period of development of the geological sciences at Harvard. In this period, in spite of the early start by Waterhouse, Harvard lagged much behind the developments at Yale and other colleges in New England and beyond. The main period of development of the geological sciences at Harvard come in the latter 1800's. It was a consequence primarily of the founding of the the Lawrence Scientific School in 1848, with its emphasis on the applied aspects of the sciences, the appointments of Josiah Dwight Whitney and Raphael Pumpelly in 1865 and 1866, respectively to a School of Mines and Practical Geology endowed as a sub-unit therein, and the appointment of Josiah Parsons Cooke in 1850 as successor to Webster in the Chemistry Department.

Review Article: “American Religious Thought of the 18th and 19th Centuries”

1989 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-217
Author(s):  
Mark A. Noll
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
New Haven ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
College Library ◽  
Garland Publishing

Perry Miller, with characteristic lése majesté, told readers of his New England Mind that, if they wanted to see his footnotes, they would have to make a pilgrimage to the Harvard College Library (The Seventeenth Century [New York, 1939], p. ix). Times have changed, and at least some scholars have become more accommodating. Bruce Kuklick, for example, not only provided notes for his “New England Mind”—the superb recent study Churchmen and Philosophers from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, 1985)—but now, through the good offices of Garland Publishing, has made available many of the sources to which those notes refer in American Religious Thought of the 18th and 19th Centuries: A Thirty-two Volume Set Reprinting the Works of Leading American Theologians from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey and including Recent Dissertations (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), $2,290. Kuklick and Garland deserve highest commendation for rescuing from unwarranted obscurity the authors and works reprinted here. The set's title may be inaccurate, and one may quibble about the exact lineup of books and articles included, but these volumes remain a magnificent achievement.

scholarly journals INTERVIEW WITH ROGER E. STODDARD

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-140
Author(s):  
Daniel J. Slive
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Historical Collections ◽  
Brown University ◽  
Rare Books ◽  
College Library

Roger E. Stoddard will retire in December 2004 as Curator of Rare Books in the Harvard College Library after four decades of service in the Houghton Library. To commemorate this event, Stoddard curated an exhibition in Spring 2004 titled “RES Gestae: Libri Manent: A Curator’s Choice of Books Purchased for the Houghton Library from 1965 to 2003,” which explored many of the collecting areas he pursued at Harvard. Acquisitions for Historical Collections, a symposium in the curator’s honor, was also held at Harvard in March 2004.1 Born and raised in New England, Stoddard attended Brown University and received his bachelor’s . . .

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