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In a tidy office in Appleton, Wis. one autumn day, a lean, brown-haired man sat down at his desk to face an irksome task. Nathan Marsh Pusey was writing his biography for the 25th reunion of his class at Harvard, and it was with much of the agony that H. M. Pulham Esq. went through (“a good deal like something on a tombstone . . . never did like writing . . .”) that he dutifully recorded his life. He noted that he had three chil dren, was president of Appleton’s Lawrence College (enrollment: 800), that “liberal education is my chief concern.” But by the time all that was published, Nathan Pusey’s autobiography was hopelessly out of date.
At Harvard last spring, he put on a scarlet waistcoat and a red, white & blue tie as just one more old grad, 25 years out. But whenever he opened his mouth, reporters jotted down notes, and wherever he went, flashbulbs flared. Nathan Pusey had just been named the 24th president of Harvard University. He was an apparent nobody, plucked out of nowhere, who had never even written a book. His classmates managed to work him into their rhymes: “Nate” was “great,” and so, of course, was ” ’28.” But the rest of Harvard had another chant:
“Pusey? Pusey? Who’s he? Who’s he?”
By last week both Harvard and the nation had come to know him better. In his own quiet way, he had not only won over his faculty, he had also emerged, by virtue of his office and personality, as the eloquent defender of an ancient tradition. The university he heads, across the Charles from Boston in Cambridge, is the nation’s oldest and foremost place of learning. Harvard is the direct descendant of the British college, heir apparent to the German university, an American mixture of both. It was Harvard that, in 1636, transplanted the seeds of liberal learning to the New World, and it has been Harvard more than any other institution that has nourished it and made it grow. Had its founders been lesser men, prey to some of the practical nonsense that plagues many a U.S. campus today, they might have set up a curriculum of Forest Clearing & House Building, with possible electives in Indian Affairs and Musketry. Instead, they made a decision that has set the tone of U.S. higher education ever since. The purpose of their college, they declared, was “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity.”
Against Fundamentalism. Since the advance has never ceased, the modern Harvard and its peers in U.S. education have, in a sense, become the last of the pioneers, operating on a frontier that is never conquered. But as Nathan Pusey has already found out, pioneers are rarely popular. They are threatened from without by those who do not understand them; they are also hampered from within by those who are blind to all but a sliver of the path ahead. For the liberal tradition, therefore, Nathan Pusey has offered not only a defense but a definition. “We are,” says he, “against fundamentalism of all kinds . . . and all kinds of mean-minded thinking that would make man less than he is.” But to this he adds: “Most particularly, we are not ready to fall into the popular, new kind of secular fundamentalism which sees man as a kind of social animal without any religious or spiritual dimension whatsoever.”
Last week, as President Pusey (pronounced Pewsey’) went about his new routine—up at 7, in his office by 8:15—he hardly looked like even Harvard’s idea of a Harvard president. A spare, soft-spoken man, frugal in word and gesture, he presents a front that nothing seems to ruffle, a calm sort of dignity that only now and then unbends for the friendly smile or the quiet flash of humor. Yet his face is scarcely lined, his hair has only a few flecks of grey, and his springy step is more like that of a sophomore late for class than that of a man in charge of nine separate faculties, more than 3,000 teachers and scholars, and 10,155 students, not counting a swarm of Radcliffe girls (“We are not coeducational in theory,” said former President Conant, “only in practice”). He is the first non-New Englander and the second non-Bostonian* ever to achieve his position. More remarkable, he was born and bred in Iowa (a place that Boston dowagers have allegedly been calling “Ohio”). His present position therefore represents quite a leap, for Harvard can still remember the days when the movements of its presidents had an aura all their own. “The President is in Washington,” ran one Harvard communique, “seeing Mr. Taft.”
Blockheads & Sissies. In 318 years, there have been other aspects to the job. “If any man wishes to be humbled and mortified,” said President Edward Hoiyoke on his deathbed in 1769. “let him become president of Harvard College.” The mortification has come in part from the nation, which has always insisted on treating Harvard as a patch of alien soil. As far back as 1722, under the name of Silence Dogood. Ben Franklin was blasting it as a place where students learned little more than how to “enter a Room genteely . . . and from whence they return, after abundance of trouble and Charges, as great Blockheads as ever.” Two centuries later the theme was still the same. “I want to go to Princeton,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Amory Elaine (in This Side of Paradise). “I think of all Harvard men as sissies . . . and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”
Actually, the typical Harvard man is a hard specimen to find—if he exists. A few, in the blues of Count Basie, do “wear Brooks clothes/ And white shoes all the time:/ Get three C’s, a D,/ And think checks from home sublime.” But of all U.S. campuses. Harvard is pre-eminently the land of paradox. It is the home of the Last Puritan and the first New Dealer. It has turned out Autocrats of the Breakfast Table (Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1829), the dinner table (Lucius Beebe, 1927), the atomic table (J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1926), and the timetable (President Walter Franklin of the Pennsylvania Railroad). One of its alumni, John Reed, 1910, was buried in the Kremlin; another was Horatio Alger, 1852, known to his classmates as “Holy”‘ (“I shall have to move,” said he in his first year, “to where there is more respect for decency”).
Abbotts &Zizzamias. Today’s students run the gamut from A (Abbott, Adams, Atwater, Atwood) to Z (Zalecki, Zapata. Zen, Zezza, Zizzamia). The 1.278 freshmen represent 526 different schools, more than half of them public high schools, and four out of every ten students get financial aid. It is quite possible, says Classicist John Finley, to have in one house “the grandson of one of the greatest modern novelists [James Joyce], the grandson of one of the greatest modern painters [Henri Matisse], and the great, “great, great, great, and ad infinitum grandson of God [i.e., the son of the Aga Khan].” But the days of ancestor worship are more or less over, and in point of prestige, the Harvard clubman has become the vanishing American. Once, Theodore Roosevelt, 1880, could happily blurt to the Kaiser that his son-in-law was Porcellian (“A mighty satisfactory thing to be in the Pore”). In 1954, such fathers-in-law are rare.
There are still cliques—of the literary, the fashionable, and the wonks (latterday meatballs). But there is also an amorphous ruck of plain Eugene Gants, one of whom Thomas Wolfe described as “prowling the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a madman.” A student can go through four years at Harvard and never say a word to the man who lives in the room next door. He may never go to a football game, never see the medical school, never sign a petition nor participate in a riot.
Sewers & Stocks. About the only homogeneous group left at Harvard are the seven gentlemen who run its finances as members of the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere. On two Mondays every month, the Corporation (including President Pusey and Treasurer Paul Cabot ex officio) meets and argues out the problems until decisions can be approved with complete unanimity. Yet the Corporation is an empire that includes an endowment of $326 million, bonds in Baton Rouge sewers and Oklahoma highways, an island off the coast of Maine, stocks in every sort of industry from groceries (A. & P.) to beer (Jacob Ruppert) to General Motors.
Even the Corporation’s 170 buildings seem a procession of contrasts. Though the seven collegiate houses (i.e., the upperclassmen’s living quarters) are uniformly Georgian, rising into golden spires out of the clutter of crooked streets, Harvard has sampled the whole history of U.S. architecture, from colonial to Bui-finch, to H. H. Richardson, to Walter Gropius. The unofficial part of the Yard—the shops and stores that rim it—are a jumble all their own. Bookshops and soda fountains jockey for position; haircuts, haberdashery and history are all for sale. There is a pharmacy that once doled out pills to Longfellow and Emerson; there is a bank that has been called the “most literate bank in the world” (among the 100 “books published by our customers in the past two years” it once displayed: James Conant’s Education and Liberty, Arthur Schlesinjer’s Cotton Kingdom, Geologist Reginald Daly’s Igneous Rock & the Depths of the Earth).
Indeed, says Nathan Pusey, one of the first things that strikes a man returning after 25 years is the “omnipresence of the book.” Part of the reason is that the Houghton, Lament and Widener libraries make up the greatest (5,600,000 volumes) university collection in the world. More important is the fact that Harvard is not only a university, it is also a state of mind. Nowhere is the pursuit of knowledge carried on with more intensity.
Persians & Dante. On the undergraduate level, the pursuit begins in the widest possible ways. When the curtain goes up, it is to reveal the entire sweep of Western civilization. With none of the old, narrow surveys, students are required to take at least six broad general-education courses, distributed throughout the humanities and the social and natural sciences. This amounts to a study of giant themes—e.g., the ideas of good v. evil in Western literature, freedom and authority in the modern world, the principles of science. From the start, students read Homer, St. Augustine, Dante and Tolstoy, study the great laws of science and the experiments and logic that produced them. Later, the stage narrows down to the student’s chosen field. Finally (for honors men) comes the senior thesis that might bear the title, “A 13th Century Sermon in Picard on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary” or “The Persians of Aeschylus.”
If students manage to get an education at all, of course, it is not entirely the fault of the faculty. The typical Harvard professor is not notable for his Chipsian qualities, nor is he apt to be an enthusiast for the open house (“Do drop in any time,” said one legendary professor. “Next May, for instance”). He is forever disappearing behind laboratory doors, or vanishing into the Widener stacks. Once there, he is a law unto himself.
Jacobins & Joyce. The Harvard professor’s explorations know neither time nor place, nor government nor business contract. He has written books on Thucydides. the rise of cities, on the Jacobins, Joyce, and juvenile delinquents. He has composed Pulitzer Prizewinning poems (The Conquistador by Archibald Mac-Leish) and music (Symphony No. 3 by Walter Piston). In the person of Harlow Shapley, he has given a new view of the geography of the universe, and through Paul Mangelsdorf, he has helped develop hybrid corn. Of Harvard’s scientists, six have won Nobel Prizes.* Its chemists, biologists, and physicians have invented the iron lung, developed a treatment for pernicious anemia, and through the work of Bacteriologist John Enders, laid the groundwork for a safe polio vaccine. One scientist, the late Edwin J. Cohn (TIME, Oct. 12), made the blood bank possible; another, Chemist Robert Woodward, developed a theory that may lead to the synthesis of terramycin and aureomycin.
Of the university’s professional schools, Medicine is first-rate; Business and Law are in a class by themselves. In wartime, the university as a whole has served as an arsenal. Under the deft management of former Provost Paul Buck, Harvard scientists combined with M.I.T. to make Cambridge the world center for radar research. Others developed the homing torpedo. Out of the psycho-acoustic laboratory came studies in everything from the proper soundproofing of planes to the carrying power of words under battle condition. Chemist Louis Fieser invented napalm for use in incendiary bombs; Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge pushed the button that set off the first A-bomb at Alamogordo.
All this accomplishment is partly due to Harvard’s wealth and prestige. It is also the most obvious and dramatic result of its character. Throughout its entire history, Harvard has followed the pioneer’s way: it is the most diversified, individualistic and nonconformist of U.S. universities. When Nathan Pusey became its president, he was charged with the task of keeping it so—”to pursue, with unremitting vigilance, inquiry into fundamental truths in every field of knowledge, no matter where the trail leads, no matter how unpopular the result.”
“Vile Tendency.” For Pusey’s predecessors, the road has not always been easy. The “colledge” had barely started amid the cowyards of Newetowne (later Cambridge) when President Henry Dunster was forced to resign for holding the view that infant baptism is “unscriptural.” By the time President John Leverett took office in 1708, the college press had come under fire for printing a “popish” book, Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. Leverett himself came face to face with the formidable Cotton Mather, who fulminated at the reading of “plays, novels, empty and vicious pieces of poetry, and even Ovid’s Epistles, which have a vile tendency to corrupt good manners.”
Under President Edward Holyoke (1737-69), the Overseers demanded an investigation of tutors suspected of “holding dangerous tenets,” and in 1747, citizens began agitating for an oath of loyalty to Calvinism. After Harvard turned towards Unitarianism, the Calvinist Boston Recorder threw up its hands in horror. “Can the pious parent,” it demanded, in words that were to have their echo in the 1950s, “be willing to send a beloved son to a college where he will be exposed to the snare of these fatal errors?”
“Glass Hive.” As the century wore on, the college became the very hub of a flowering New England. Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Dr. Holmes were all professors. Emerson was often on hand to lecture. Nevertheless, whatever the college did, it aroused howls of protest. In 1850, a committee of the General Court of Massachusetts, carried away by an enthusiasm for vocational courses (“specific learnings for a specific purpose”), denounced Harvard’s curriculum for being too intellectual. “We work in a glass hive,” moaned President Josiah Quincy. Nonetheless, he managed to keep the hive free of all “subserviency” and “above those [regions] in which the passions of the day struggle for ascendancy.”
Through wars and panics and all the passions they bring, Harvard’s theme never changed. The age (1869-1909) of Charles W. Eliot, “straight and solemn as Hamlet’s Ghost,” was a golden age for the university, when such men as William James, Josiah Royce and George Santayana flocked to its faculty, and colleges and universities across the U.S. fell all over themselves trying to follow its lead. Eliot’s free-elective system had its day; then came squirish Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1909-33) to introduce fields of concentration. But out of the classroom it was a time for being wild-eyed. Such hot-blooded undergraduates as Walter Lippmann started a Socialist Club, the Harvard Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, a club of single taxers. Such others as Robert Benchley went out for the Lampoon, whose halls resounded with startling cries (“FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! RAPE! RAPE! RAPE! Don’t shoot! I’ll marry the girl! My name is John P. Marquand!”). World War I brought shrill demands for the scalp of German Psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, and the ’20s brought more of the same for Socialist Lecturer Harold Laski. In both cases, President Lowell firmly planted his feet. “If the Overseers ask for Laski’s resignation,” said he, “they will get mine!” In such a time, Nathan Pusey, a shy, quiet freshman, arrived on the Cambridge scene. He had been only a year old when his father died, and his mother had supported her three children by teaching school in Council Bluffs, Iowa. To help with the family finances, Nate had a paper route, worked as a bank runner, was al ways on hand to help for a fee when the circus came to town. At night, seated at the big kitchen table, he listened by the hour while his mother read Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels and the Waverley novels.
In high school he made straight A’s. He wrote for the student paper, the Echoes, and though a chronic mumbler, became a star of the debating team. At the end of his junior year, the high-school annual predicted that he would end up as a “Virgil teacher.” His senior-class prophecy upped him to “editor of the Toonerville Times.”
Hoots & Howls. In spite of his 32 high-school A’s, Nate Pusey found himself totally unprepared for Harvard. Since he had never seen a rowing shell, he decided to go out for the crew. “I rowed on the machines, went out in the barge, I got into a shell. Then the river froze, and that was the end of my rowing career.” When H. L. Mencken’s Mercury wa,s banned in Boston, he marched around Harvard Square, “hooted and howled” with the best of them, denouncing the censor’s ban. But mostly, Nate Pusey spent his time in Widener, reading.
Under spry little Professor John Livingston (Road to Xanadu) Lowes, he drank his fill of 19th century literature. With Tutor Conrad Aiken, ’11, he discovered for the first time the world of contemporary writing. But of all his teachers, it was Irving Babbitt who influenced him most.
“War in the Cave.” Bluff Ohioan Bab bitt seemed a mart out of his time. Causes were bursting all about him, and the only kind of conscience that seemed fashion able was the social kind. Rolling a pencil between his hands, Babbitt spoke of the “inner obeisance” that man must have “to something higher than his ordinary self.” He despised the new ethics that was based entirely on the assumption that the only “significant struggle between good and evil is not in the individual but in society.” In one sense, Irving Babbitt almost blasted Nathan Pusey’s academic career. His broad humanism gave his pupil such a contempt for narrow scholarship that Nate told his classmates after graduation, “If you ever catch me around here again, you can shoot me.” He tried to get a job in publishing, but wound up teaching at the Riverdale Country School for boys, just outside Manhattan. There, during the long hours of dormitory duty, he taught himself Greek. He also talked philosophy, art and the classics with Fellow Teachers Victor Butterfield, now president of Wesley an University, and Sterling Callisen, now dean of education and museum extension of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The result of all the talking: all three decided to go back to the academic life as students.
Books & Men. Back at Harvard, Pusey eventually turned out a Ph.D. thesis on 4th century Athenian law. Meanwhile, he took two trips abroad, traveled in Greece, explored the cathedrals and palaces of Rome. In 1936 he married a trim Bryn Mawr graduate named Anne Woodward, whom he had once tutored in algebra back in Iowa. By that time he had begun “teaching my way across the country”—at Lawrence. Scripps College in California, and Wesleyan.
Wherever he went, he was a success. Though never a flashy lecturer, he had an enthusiasm for books and men, and his enthusiasm was contagious. Once at Riverdale, the pupils of the lower school suddenly broke into a commencement exercise to deliver an unprecedented tribute: “We of the eighth grade want to express our appreciation to Mr. Pusey for giving us our love of literature.” “He was without question,” says President Henry Wriston of Brown University, then president of Lawrence, “the most brilliant young teacher I have ever known.”
Transforming Minds. In 1944 Pusey went back to Appleton as president of Lawrence College. By that time he had come to the conclusion that a whole dimension was missing from U.S. education. Like his old Professor Irving Babbitt, he felt that “too many modern teachers commit the error of teaching students to see the evils and shortcomings of society without at the same time pointing out the evils that exist in them [selves].” The purpose of liberal education was not merely to impart knowledge; it was also to “transform personality by transforming minds … But they [cannot be] transformed … by materials that do not peak directly to the human soul.”
While the Harvard of President James Bryant Conant was placing the official tamp on general education, President Pusey of Lawrence was deepening his own curriculum in his own way. For one thing, ie started a freshman-studies course in which scientists, sociologists, economists, historians and men of the humanities studied and taught great books together.
‘Not the scientific exploration of things.” Pusey warned, “not the scientific examination of the behavior of groups of people, but the living, vivid acquaintance with the adventures of the human spirit —this it is which especially can stretch the humanity that lies in a man . . . and needle it into its fullest growth.”
Good Old-Fashioneds. For nine years Nathan Pusey, his wife and three children lived happily in Appleton, and each year the college prospered more. Eventually, Pusey could report to his trustees that three new buildings had risen on the campus, that his budget (balanced) was up from $638,000 to $1,132,000, that since 1942 total assets had climbed 60% to $6,240,000, and that the average faculty salary was up from $2,500 to $4,483. Then one day in the spring of 1953, Nathan Pusey got a wire from a banker in Manhattan. Its net: Come to New York for a conference. For months he had been hoping for a donation from that particular banker, and he was therefore delighted. But when he got to New York, he found that the banker had arranged a lunch with three members of the Harvard Corporation. Lunch lasted for more than four hours, and Pusey went back to Appleton without his donation.
There were other members of the Corporation who “happened” to drop by Lawrence. (“No need to worry,” one reported back. “Pusey’s old-fashioneds are as good as any in Boston.”) And it was not long before Pusey guessed what was up. Finally. Dr. Roger I. Lee, senior fellow on the Corporation, telephoned Harvard’s decision. “What were you doing when you got the news?” a reporter asked Mrs. Pusey. “What do you think a woman does on Monday?” “Not the wash?” “Certainly,” said Mrs. Pusey.
Brahmin Ex Officio. Since then, installed in the 28-room presidential mansion, Harvard’s new President Pusey has been learning fast what it is to live in a “glass hive.” He has explored Harvard’s laboratories and museums, and from the wall of his colonial office, Duplessis’ Benjamin Franklin looks down upon a man who with almost incredible composure has made the jump from a $1,132,000 budget to one that exceeds $36 million.
To Harvard he is perhaps the most ubiquitous president the university has had in years. He has had dinner at the houses, has answered students’ questions on everything from Christianity to the fate of the dormitory biddies. He has popped up at poetry readings and concerts, and at a great reception at Boston’s Gardner museum, he has been initiated into Boston society—for every Harvard president, if not Brahmin-born, at least becomes one ex officio. Even his Sundays are jammed with activity. A devout Episcopalian, he attends 9 a.m. service at Cambridge’s Christ Church, 11 a.m. service at the Memorial Church, and, in the afternoon, there is often open house.
Gain & Loss. Beyond Harvard, he has played senior defense counsel to the academic world, for “if there is anything education does not lack today it is critics.” While at Appleton, he was a sponsor of a campaign pamphlet against his fellow townsman Joseph McCarthy. The junior Senator from Wisconsin has apparently never forgotten him. “Harvard’s loss,” said McCarthy of Pusey’s election, “is Wisconsin’s gain.” Then he proceeded to paint a picture of the university as a “privileged sanctuary for Fifth Amendment Communists … I cannot conceive of anyone sending their children anywhere where they might be open to indoctrination by Communist professors.”
It was all an old story to Harvard—as old, indeed, as the whole university tradition. The concept of academic tenure is a delicate one that has grown up partly because the teacher has historically been a favorite target for attack. It is simply another way of saying that a man’s mind cannot exist half slave and half free, that if a scholar is to operate effectively on the frontiers of his field, he must also be accorded the rights of any other citizen to differ and dissent outside that field. Harvard has refused to fire four teachers who invoked the Fifth Amendment because they are not now members of the party, have never been found guilty of espionage, and have never tried to indoctrinate their classes.
The New Note. During his own career, President Pusey has done more than play guard to a tradition. It was in another role that he took himself over to Harvard’s languishing Divinity School one day last fall as the first president since Eliot to deliver a major address there. He severely criticized the old idea that society can be a substitute for God, that knowledge and good works are enough, that anything can be solved “by escaping into a formless empyrean of good will . . .” Said he: “This faith will no longer do … Events of the 20th century have made its easy optimism unpalatable . . . It is leadership in religious knowledge, and even more, in religious experience … of which we now have a most gaping need.”
Those words have struck a note that has long been unfamiliar in the academic world. Today the U.S. university has fallen heir to much that once belonged to her peers in Europe. In the ’30s, Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead was challenging it to “rise to its opportunity, and in the modern world repeat the brilliant leadership of medieval Paris.” If the U.S. university does rise, says Nathan Pusey, it will not be by curtailing its pursuit of truth, “no matter how unpopular,” but by carrying on the pursuit more fully.
“Christopher Fry said recently that ‘affairs are now soul-size.’ The American colleges must recognize this fact and remember again that the true business of liberal education is greatness. It is our task not to produce ‘safe’ men, in whom our safety can never in any case lie, but to keep alive in young people the courage to dare to seek the truth, to be free, to establish in them a compelling desire to live greatly and magnanimously, and to give them the knowledge and awareness, the faith and the trained facility to get on with the job. Especially the faith, for as someone has said, the whole world now looks to us for a creed to believe and a song to sing. The whole world . . . and our own young people first of all.”
*The first: John Kirkland (1810-28), bora near Little Falls, N.Y., but reared in Massachusetts.
*Theodore W. Richards, chemistry, 1914; George R. Minot and William P. Murphy, medicine, 1934; Percy W. Bridgman, physics, 1946; Edward M. Purcell, physics, 1952; Fritz A. Lipmann, medicine, 1953.
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