Powerful Presidents Guard Liberal Tradition

In 317 crowded years of existence, the University has consistently had strong presidents at critical times. Harvard's history, probably more than that of any other American educational institution, is marked by the appearance of these result is great university instead of a provincial college.

This system of government by a president and non-resident trustees was initiated at Harvard, and has been uniquely successful here. Executive decision has, time and again, asserted the traditional liberalism of the University. The chronicle of these executives is the story of the University.

Harvard's founders wished to establish a university on the model of Oxford and Cambridge, governed by resident tutors. In 1650, Henry Dunster, the president, the Treasurer, and five fellows of the infant school were incorporated as the President and Follows of Harvard College.

First of the great presidents was John Leverett. Layman and liberal in an of office always before filled by puritan ministers, he refused to see his College turned into a Calvinist school of theology. In puritan-dominated New England, these views were regarded as dangerous. Leverett wanted a liberal arts college; his utilitarian neighbors wished to see their sons taught practical skills.

Leverett apparently never got along with his tutors, from whom Dunster originally intended to make up the Corporation. But when three Corporation vacancies were created by deaths, Leverett filled them with appointments from outside the College. Although strongly criticized by many of the officials of the colony, he received the backing of the Board of Overseers, and from his death in 1724 to the present the Corporation has always been composed of individuals outside the University faculty.

Unitarians

In early New England, the narrowing strictures of puritanism were constantly endangering the College. The election of Samuel Webber to the presidency in 1806 marked the first in a long line of Unitarian presidents. Samuel Eliot Morison writes, "Orthodox Calvinists, of the true puritan tradition now became open enemies to Harvard.... Unitarianism of the Boston stamp was not a fixed dogma but a point of view that was receptive, searching, inquiring, and yet devout; a halfway house to the rationalistic and scientific point of view ..."

The University's reputation for liberalism continued to grow under John T. Kirkland, who followed Webber. But it was Josiah Quincy, president from 1829 to 1845, who most earnestly concerned himself with freeing education from provincialism.

In his History of Harvard University (1340), he wrote: "The duty of considering science and learning as an independent interest of the community, begins to be very generally felt and acknowledged. Both in Europe and America attempts are making to rescue the general mind from the vassalage in which it has been held by the sets of the church and by parties in the state; giving to that interest ... a vitality of its own, having no precarious dependence for existence on subserviency to particular views in politics or religion."

While Quincy and his predecessors kept the University from succumbing to the utilitarian principle--the most practical education at the cheapest price--that had choked many other American institutions, the curriculum remained almost medieval. The function of the Faculty was to hear recitations, not to lecture. Students were forced to follow rigidly restricted curricula, and were made to pick up what they could from the material, virtually without help.

Charles William Eliot, elected to the presidency in 1869, was the driving force that finally reformed this situation, and with it American education. Only 35 years old when he came to office, he had the support of a Board of Overseers and a Corporation convinced of the need for major curriculum revisions.

Elective Plan

Eliot's most significant contribution was the initiation of the elective system despite heated opposition from faculty members who fought to preserve the status of their particular subject in the Old fixed curriculum. The young president attracted the scholars whose presence gave Harvard its eminence.

He engineered the establishment of a graduate school of arts and sciences, again with the aid of the Corporation and against the firm opposition of professors who feared their own incompetence to teach on the graduate level.

"As long as our teachers regard their work as simply giving so many courses for undergraduates, Eliot said, "we shall never have firstclass instruction here. If they have to teach graduates as well as undergraduates, they will regard their subjects as infinite, and keep up that constant investigation which is necessary for firstclass teaching."

Eliot revived the graduate schools of law and medicine. The old guard at both schools were quickly removed and replaced by younger men. At the close of the Eliot regime in 1909, the schools had risen from mediocrity to world fame.

Gentleman's C

The lightning advances under Eliot left many patches of ground to be filled by his successors, Lowell and Conant. The elective system, allowing undergraduates to select any courses they wanted from a rapidly burgeoning catalogue, had made education infinitely more exciting, but it also opened doors to dilletantism. Some students filled their whole programs with relatively easy survey courses from many fields. The "gentleman's C" was the rage. Others, more earnest, took all their courses in the same field.

Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who followed Eliot in 1909, set out to develop traditions of scholarship. concentration for honors was encouraged; ordinary concentrating made a must. At least six of the required seventeen courses had to be in the same field. With the sobering influence of World War I, students began to take their work seriously.

But Lowell's major achievement was not in providing for a student's academic activities; it was Lowell who pushed through the House system that knit undergraduate Harvard into a social whole. Before the houses, there was tremendous difference between the wealthy and the poor, the prep school and the high school alumni. Students on the Gold Coast kept valets; those living in the Yard stoked furnaces to eat.

Harkness Gift

In 1923, when Yaleman Edward S. Harkness offered ten million to build the Houses, Lowell accepted, without so much as consulting the faculty. The faculty, and even the students, were against the plan. But Lowell, like so many other presidents before him, had the support if his Corporation. Dunster and Lowell, first of the seven houses, were completed in the fall of 1930.

With the war and the tension-filled peace that followed, student and faculty interest in world movements reached a peak never before equalled. These were the days when intellectuals began their flirtation with Socialism and Communism.

The University and Lowell himself were under constant fire from the conservative press for allowing such men to remain on the faculty. Lowell was violently condemned for his steadfast defense of Harold J. Laski, instructor in political science.

He stated his own position most clearly in his 1916-17 Report: "The teaching by the professor in his classroom on the subjects within the scope of his chair ought to be absolutely free. He must teach the truth as he has found it and sees it. This is the primary condition of academic freedom, and any violation of it endangers intellectual progress."

When James Bryant Conant succeeded Lowell in 1933, he took over a University in the midst of expansion, but at the same time bound by this nation's worst depression.

Financial needs were his first worry, professional appointments his second. Faced with these problems in an era of big business, Conant was forced to initiate the elaborate decentralization scheme that has made every dean completely re- sponsible for the administration of his own graduate school.

Gen. Ed.

Conant's regime saw the educational pendulum swing all the way back to a curriculum more fixed than any since the middle of Eliot's administration. The restricting factor was General Education, Conant's greatest experiment and probably his greatest single success.

The origination of the National Scholarship Program to attract applicants from the West and South, firmly established Harvard as a national institution.

Like his predecessors, Conant was quick to embrace the principles of academic freedom. The events of the last two years have shown this. Conant has refused to budge under storms of national protest, both as Harvard President and U. S. Ambassador to Germany.

In following Conant, Nathan Marsh Pusey has inherited the most influential and at the same time most fired-on post in American education. For guidance, he may well look, at times, to the past--to the traditions of Leverett, of Quincy, of Eliot, Lowell, and Conant