Epilogue: Today and Tomorrow

As of the year 2000, Harvard was stronger academically, financially, and in national and international reputation than ever before in its (and perhaps any university’s) history. The sources of this preeminence— Harvard’s iconic national and international standing; the quality of its students, faculty, libraries, laboratories, and plant; its access to the money that made it all possible—showed no signs of diminishing at the century’s turn: quite the contrary. Old rivals Yale, Chicago, Columbia, Berkeley were not, by common consent, what they once had been. New challenger Stanford was something else again, but could not yet claim equal superpower status. Harvard’s is an archetypal American success story. And a number of other American universities have had comparable trajectories since World War II. That has been the record of the past. The question for the future: will the great American research universities—and in particular, Harvard—thrive in the decades to come as they have in decades past? Harvard’s age, wealth, quality, and prestige may well shield it from any conceivable vicissitudes. But if history teaches anything, it is that every institution, however successful, carries within it the seeds of future trouble. Times, values, social demands change. A century ago, the leading German universities had a similarly dominant position in the world of higher education. That preeminence, to understate the matter, did not last. In 1986, a half century after its 1936 fete, Harvard had another special birthday to celebrate, its 350th. Sesquis are not centennials, and the 350th Celebration (that was its official name; the proper Latin title, “Tercentennial Quinquagesimal,” was a clear nonstarter) did not carry the symbolic heft of the 1936 Tercentary. Still, more than a third of a thousand years of institutional survival was nothing to sniff at. Nor was there a shortage of achievements to commemorate. The Harvard of 1936 had seemed rich and substantial at the time; who could have foreseen what it would be fifty years later?

Nathan Marsh Pusey and the Affluent University

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.”

Managing Harvard

Harvard’s evolution from a Brahmin to a meritocratic university involved alterations in its governance as well as the makeup of its students and faculty. The cozy, we-happy-few atmosphere of the past began to give way to more professional administration. As a chemist accustomed to overseeing a laboratory and working systematically on problems, Conant rejected Eliot’s and Lowell’s style of running the University “largely ‘under their hats.’ ” His close associate Calvert Smith recalled that he devoted the pre-World War II years to seeking “a modus operandi adaptable to the present size and complexity of the institution, which at the same time still fitted in with the traditional precedents.” But the embedded culture of a venerable, decentralized university made change difficult. Looking back in 1952, Conant concluded that administration at Harvard was not very different from what it had been in Lowell’s day. He saw the central administration “as a sort of holding company responsible for the activities of some 20-odd operating companies.” There were occasional ineffective attempts to draw up a Harvard organizational chart, but as Corporation Secretary David Bailey conceded, “the difficulties of setting down complex relationships in black and white have always prevented their being cast in final form.” The University, he thought, “is suffering from acute decentralization.” For all his commitment to institutional change, Conant relied as did his predecessors on graduates of the College with strong institutional loyalties. When he assumed office in 1933, he brought in Jerome Greene to be both his and the Corporation’s secretary. Until his retirement in 1943, this consummate civil servant was Conant’s closest counselor on alumni and other matters. Greene’s successor was A. Calvert Smith, a classmate of Conant. Smith had strong public relations skills, honed by several decades in the wilds of New York’s investment and banking world, not unlike Greene’s background. Soon after he came into office Conant made John W. Lowes, the son of Higginson Professor of English John Livingston Lowes, his financial vice president. But it was not easy to work this new position into the existing Harvard structure, especially with power-seeking Treasurer William Claflin on the scene. When Lowes left for military service in September 1941, Conant told him his position would not exist when he returned.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences

It was in his dealings with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) that Conant’s attempt to create a more meritocratic Harvard met its severest test. Out of this often tumultuous relationship came one of Harvard’s most influential academic innovations: a system for the appointment of tenured faculty that became standard practice in American universities. Conant inherited a faculty that was not necessarily the nation’s best. Because of Lowell’s stress on undergraduate instruction, the number and proportion of tutors and instructors steadily increased during the 1920s. At the same time, many of the best known Harvard professors during the Lowell years—Charles Townsend “Copey” Copeland and LeBaron Russell Briggs of the English Department, Roger B. “Frisky” Merriman in History—were not world-class scholars but charismatic classroom performers. Harvard had only one Nobelist, Conant’s chemist father-inlaw, Theodore W. Richards, before 1934; Chicago had three. Nor did its social scientists compare to those at Chicago or Columbia. The rather small stable of Harvard’s scholarly stars included historian Frederick Jackson Turner and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose major accomplishments, done elsewhere, were long behind them. Carnegie Corporation president Frederick Keppel reported the prevailing view in 1934: “Harvard is still princeps but no longer facile princeps; and the story is current that at one of America’s great universities [no doubt Chicago] it is considered the height of academic distinction to receive an invitation from Harvard and to decline it.” Conant warned early on that the growing appeal of other universities and Harvard’s standardized salary, teaching, and research scales made it “increasingly difficult to attract from other universities and research institutes the outstanding men whom we desire.” The dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was English professor Kenneth Murdock. Though he resented Conant for having gotten the Harvard presidency, Murdock was “quite willing” to continue to be dean if Conant wanted him. Conant did not. He appointed the less assertive George D. Birkhoff (among his qualities were exceptional mathematical ability and a keen anti-Semitism), who stayed in the job until 1939, when he was succeeded by the even more unassertive historian William S. Ferguson. Weak deans meant that Conant was in effect his own dean, deeply engaged in curriculum, student recruitment, and above all the selection of faculty.

The College

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.

The Professional Schools

Harvard’s nine professional schools were on the cutting edge of its evolution from a Brahmin to a meritocratic university. Custom, tradition, and the evergreen memory of the alumni weighed less heavily on them than on the College. And the professions they served were more interested in their current quality than their past glory. True, major differences of size, standing, wealth, and academic clout separated Harvard’s Brobdingnagian professional faculties—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Schools of Medicine, Law, and Business— from the smaller, weaker Lilliputs—Public Health and Dentistry, Divinity, Education, Design, Public Administration. But these schools had a shared goal of professional training that ultimately gave them more in common with one another than with the College and made them the closest approximation of Conant’s meritocratic ideal. Harvard’s doctoral programs in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) were a major source of its claim to academic preeminence. As the Faculty of Arts and Sciences became more research and discipline minded, so grew the importance of graduate education. A 1937 ranking of graduate programs in twenty-eight fields—the lower the total score, the higher the overall standing—provided a satisfying measure of Harvard’s place in the American university pecking order: But there were problems. Money was short, and while graduate student enrollment held up during the Depression years of the early 1930s (what else was there for a young college graduate to do?), academic jobs became rare indeed. Between 1926–27 and 1935–36, Yale appointed no Harvard Ph.D. to a junior position. The Graduate School itself was little more than a degree-granting instrument, with no power to appoint faculty, no building, no endowment, and no budget beyond one for its modest administrative costs. Graduate students identified with their departments, not the Graduate School. Needless to say, the GSAS deanship did not attract the University’s ablest men. Conant in 1941 appointed a committee to look into graduate education, and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., “called for a thoroughgoing study without blinders.

James Bryant Conant and the Meritocratic University

The Harvard that James Bryant Conant inherited when he became president in 1933 was the creation of his Boston Brahmin predecessors Charles W. Eliot (1867–1908) and Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1908–33). Under Eliot, Harvard became a university, and not just a college with some ancillary professional education. As he said of the various fields of higher education in his inaugural: “We shall have them all, and at their best.” The Law and Medical schools became world-class. Major scholars began to be more than an occasional fluke in the faculty lineup. And Eliot was the first American university president to become a significant public figure. No less revolutionary was what he did with undergraduate education. His elective system replaced the former tightly regulated curriculum, a laissez-faire approach to education in full accord with the prevailing beliefs of the Gilded Age. It was also a brilliant piece of educational politics. At one stroke it freed students and teachers from the tyranny of each other’s presence. It lulled the undergraduates into thinking that they were free to choose their curriculum when in fact most of them rushed, lemminglike, into a few massively popular courses taught by faculty crowd pleasers dubbed “bow-wows.” This freed research-minded professors to pursue their work relatively unencumbered by undergraduate obligations. At the same time the social character of Harvard College became increasingly “Brahmin,” in the sense of domination by Boston’s social and economic elite rather than by Unitarian or Congregational ministers. Much of Eliot’s Harvard was seriously intellectual; more of it was socially snobbish. Its faculty consisted of a few major figures such as the Law School’s Christopher Columbus Langdell and Philosophy’s William James and Josiah Royce, and a majority who were gentlemen first, teachers second, scholars (perhaps) third. Its student body, over whelmingly from New England and New York, stretched from earnest Jewish commuters (whom Eliot welcomed) to good-family swells who dwelt on Harvard’s “gold coast” of posh dormitories. But the latter set the social tone of undergraduate life.

The College

What place did Harvard College have in the modern University, with its expansive central administration, research-driven faculty, ambitious and high-powered professional schools? A much more important one than this litany of potential threats might suggest. The College remained the most conspicuous and prestigious part of the University. It produced the most generous donors; it outclassed its rivals in attracting the most sought-after students; it exemplified Harvard in the public mind. And it shared in the worldly ambience of the late-twentieth-century University. For decades, Harvard College admissions was a battleground over who would be accepted and on what grounds access would be granted. The admission of Jews was a touchstone issue in the conflict between the Brahmin and meritocratic impulses from the 1920s to the 1950s. Then another problem came to the fore: how to choose a freshman class from a swelling number of qualified applicants. As selection became ever more complex and arcane, the sheer size and quality of the applicant pool enabled the dean of admissions and his staff, rather than the faculty, to define the terms of entry. The result was that classes were crafted to be outstanding in more than purely academic-intellectual terms. Intellectual superstars were a small group of near-certain admits. After that, a solid level of academic ability set an admissions floor, above which character, extracurricular activities, artistic or athletic talent, “legacy” status, and geographical diversity figured in the admissions gene pool. After the 1960s, diversity came to embrace race and gender. Chase Peterson, who was dean of admissions during the tumultuous years from 1967 to 1972, thought that during his time the criteria for selection broadened to include tenacity, perseverance, having learned something deeply and well, social generosity, intellectual openness, and strength of character. A statement on admissions desiderata in the 1990s included “honesty, fairness, compassion, altruism, leadership, and initiative” and stressed: “We place great value in a candidate’s capacity to move beyond the limits of personal achievement to involvement in the life of the community at large.” One of Dean of Admissions Wilbur Bender’s 1950s ideal admits, a “Scandinavian farm boy who skates beautifully,” had better have headed his local skating club or taught skating to inner-city youth if he hoped to get into Harvard at the century’s end.

The Professional Schools

Harvard’s graduate and professional schools were where the tension between social responsibility and teaching the technical skills demanded by a complex society most fully emerged. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the traditional Big Three of Law, Business, and Medicine continued to dominate the Harvard professional school scene (though the Kennedy School of Government was coming up fast). From 1940 to 1970, they and the smaller schools took on their modern configuration: meritocratic, intensely professional, intellectually ambitious. From 1970 to 2000 they faced a variety of internal challenges to that academic culture, as well as constant competition from their counterparts in other universities. After he became president in 1971, Derek Bok devoted his first annual report to Harvard College, his second to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. This was not surprising: the closely linked College and Graduate School were Harvard’s traditional academic core. What, he asked, was GSAS’s essential mission? Now as before, it was to train scholars and add to basic knowledge. But the Graduate School was in trouble. One problem was student attrition. Up to half of those who entered failed to get their Ph.D.s, compared to a drop-out rate of less than 5 percent in Law and Medicine. The fault, Bok thought, lay in the lack of structure in many doctoral programs, and he prodded the faculty to do something about that. Another concern was the Ph.D. job shortage. Nonscientists had to be ready to have careers in colleges, not just in research universities. That meant that the Graduate School would have to teach its students how to teach. At his urging in 1976 the Danforth Center for Teaching and Learning (renamed the Bok Center in 1991) was set up to tend to the pedagogical instruction of graduate students.1 Declining academic job prospects cast the longest shadow over GSAS in the 1970s. More than 1,000 students entered in the peak year of 1966–67; by 1971–72 the number was down to 560. The humanities were particularly hard hit: the 1975–76 entering class in English Literature was 16, compared to 70 a decade before.

Governing

As soon as he became president, Bok set out to modernize Harvard’s central administration. His first move, recruiting a core of professional administrators, met with universal approval. In principle the administration simply provided services: financial, legal, health, information technology, food, real estate, personnel, development, government relations. But in practice this meant replacing Conant’s and Pusey’s low-keyed central “holding company” with a much more assertive, take-charge body of managers. As the number and agendas of the new bureaucrats grew, so did the tension between the faculty and the administration, between the more centralized direction of the University’s affairs and the venerable each-tub-on-its-own-bottom Harvard tradition. When Bok took office, the Harvard Corporation consisted of two recently elected academics, Charles Slichter of Illinois and John Morton Blum of Yale; two lawyers, Bostonian senior fellow Hooks Burr and Hugh Calkins of Cleveland; Socony-Mobil executive Albert Nickerson of New York; and Harvard’s treasurer, State Street banker George Bennett. By the time he left in 1991, all of them were gone, replaced by a heterogeneous mix ranging from Boston-New York businessmen (Gillette CEO Colman Mockler, Time publisher Andrew Heiskell, venture capitalist Robert G. Stone, Jr.) to Henry Rosovsky, the Corporation’s first Jewish fellow and its first Harvard faculty member since 1852, and Washington lawyer Judith Richards Hope, the first female fellow. Brahmin Boston had no representative on the Corporation that Bok bequeathed to his successor. During this time, too, three new treasurers came in quick succession: George Putnam, another State Street banker; Roderick MacDougall, a Bank of New England executive; and Ronald Daniel, a former partner in the conspicuously non-Old Boston consulting firm of McKinsey and Company. Across the board, old boys gave way to non-Brahmin newcomers. As both Harvard and its bureaucracy grew, the Corporation became more detached from the mundane realities of University governance. Streaming in from points south and west, the fellows met every two weeks on Monday mornings for a heavy schedule of reports, discussions, and meetings with the president and his chief administrative officers.