Lowell's Regime Introduced Concentration and House System

"A war with academic tradition," was the way Abbott Lawrence Lowell described his 24 years as president of the University. But in those years, from May 1909 to May 1933, Lowell probably did more to determine the character of the College than any other president in Harvard's history.

Discarding President Eliot's system of free electives, he began the present program of concentration and distribution, tutorial, and general examinations. He fought for the House system and the construction of the first seven Houses. He championed the British tradition of College Fellows until the University was convinced of its merit, and then, when the plan for Harvard House Fellows languished for lack of money, quietly supplied $1.5 million of his own to endow the program permanently.

While guiding the University through the chaotic two decades of the First World War, the roaring twenties, and the slump of the Depression, he stepped up such a building campaign that the College was never without a corps of plumbers, plasterers, and heavy construction workers. Significantly, more University buildings were erected during his administration than in all of Harvard's previous history.

Changed Student Attitudes

Above all, by his academic and administrative reform, he brought about both a major change in the contemporary Harvard student's attitude towards his education and a comparable change in the attitude of the public towards the University.

President Lowell, though, was not only the symbol of tremendous progress in the University; he was a personality. Occasionally irritable, often opinionated, he was, according to Samuel Eliot Morison, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of History, Emeritus, "a man who conversed rapidly and listened little." He pushed incessantly for what he wanted for the University and, as a result, generally got it.

While Eliot, in his 40 years as president, had been primarily interested in unified administration for the whole University, Lowell was concerned with academic reform within the College. The College should be the foundation on which the rest of the University is built, he declared. If the College is "not to be absorbed by the secondary school on the one side and the professional school on the other, we must construct a new solidarity to replace that which is gone."

Even before his election as president, Lowell, professor of Government, took no pains to hide his opinion that the undergraduate part of the University badly needed reorganizing. On numerous occasions he had uncompromisingly opposed Eliot's approval of both the free election system and the three year degree, so that by the time of Eliot's resignation, Lowell had made it entirely clear that he disapproved of the College's present condition.

Election As President

He knew he wouldn't be Eliot's choice for a successor, but then he knew as well that Eliot wasn't doing the choosing. In fact, the chairman of the selection committee asked to consider 24 possible names later reported, "It took about one look at the list to make it clear that the only real candidate was A. Lawrence Lowell." A scant two weeks later, Lowell's election had been confirmed by both the Corporation and the Overseers.

As the Administration had expected, Lowell lost no time in making his policy known. While President Eliot had pleaded in his final report for a sweeping adoption of the three year degree "to save the College," Lowell, in his inaugural address on Oct. 6, 1909, declared, "The most vital measure for saving the College is not to shorten its duration, but to ensure that it shall be worth saving." And from then on, the three year degree was doomed.

Not content with that alone. Lowell immediately went on to further academic reform. Within a year the College had adopted his plan for concentration and distribution, which took first effect with the Class of 1914. Under President Eliot, any student who had successfully completed 16 courses was eligible for the degree. The free elective system imposed no limitations whatsoever upon the choice of courses or their relevance to each other, so that any student who could "cram and pass" 16 times in succession was graduated. Although Lowell had vigorously and consistently attacked the system while Eliot was still in office, nothing had yet been done to change it.

Concentration and Distribution

Lacking any systematic program of education, Lowell argued, students had come to regard course work as "an inconvenient ritual" and to assume that they "could hardly be expected to take true scholarship seriously." It was "clearly unfortunate," Lowell believed, for any student to spend four years in an atmosphere where scholarly interests were so unfashionable.

To remedy the situation, Lowell passed through the Governing Board a program for concentration and distribution which has become the basis of the present program in General Education. Beginning with the Class of 1914, the Administration required that six of the 16 courses for the degree be in a single field and six others spread among three different fields. This, they hoped, would force every student in the College to achieve Lowell's ideal of a scholar--"to know a little of everything and something well."

It would have been uncharacteristic of Lowell to stop while things were going his way, and indeed, he did not. In his annual report for 1908-09 Lowell wrote, "It may be hoped that under the new rules for the choice of electives, some form of general examinations... on the principal field of study will be more commonly required." For the new president, the suggestion was a cautiously worded one, but it was only the beginning. Lowell fully believed that students forgot most of what they had learned in a course as soon as the final examination was out of sight, and he was determined to put a stop to such academic waste.

Medical School Tries Generals

Since no undergraduate department would take him up on the idea of general examinations. Lowell turned to the graduate schools. The Medical School was the first to think favorably of his plan and accordingly, in 1911, the graduating class there took the first compulsory generals in University history. The next year the Divinity School followed suit, and two years later, convinced by enthusiastic reports from the two graduate schools, the undergraduate department of History, Government, and Economics began to require generals. Within ten years, President Lowell was able to report with evident satisfaction that all departments except Chemistry and Engineering were requiring some kind of comprehensive exam before awarding a degree.

By 1915, Lowell, who had already established a wide reputation for being anything but complacent, set out on yet another academic crusade--tutorial. One of the most formidable criticisms of his plan for general examinations had been that the average student couldn't pass such an examination without help in preparing it. A tutorial system like that of Oxford or Cambridge was obviously the answer, but the University couldn't afford a staff of new tutors.

Lowell was convinced, however, that the general examinations and tutorial were essential to his overall plan of rousing students from their intellectual apathy, so he decided that since the University couldn't have both quality and quantity in its instruction, it would have quality. Accordingly, as the College budget increased from year to year, he held the number of Courses to a minimum and used the extra money gradually to hire a complete staff of departmental tutors.

Reshapes Undergraduate Study

Thus in the first decade of his administration, Lowell had reshaped the pattern of undergraduate study and laid the foundations for a comparable change in student attitude. With the new requirements for concentration and distribution, tutorial, and general examinations, undergraduates found their academic life substantially changed. The would-be dissipators could no longer expect to graduate on a few weeks of annual cramming and only the very industrious could hope to graduate in three years.

Concrete results of the change became increasingly apparent as the years went on. Throughout the twenties and early thirties, the number of students in Honors increased every year until in 1934, the Honors percentage of the graduating class was just about twice that of the Class of 1915. The number of degrees awarded with distinction rose at a comparable rate. Most important, however, was the change in student attitude.

The deliberate "C-men," for whom President Lowell had always felt particular antipathy, were at last becoming a minority group. Partly by his own example of industry, Lowell had instilled in faculty and students alike a distaste for complacency and intellectual lethargy. The tutor system too had a new premium on individual effort, so that the men who had planned on doing just enough to get by were finding it rather heavy going.

Student Housing Problem

More so than many of his colleagues, Lowell was disturbed by the student housing situation which prevailed when he took office in 1909. Because the enrollment had increased faster than the College's physical facilities, many students were unable to live in College housing. Those who did were little better off than the others, for the College rooms were poorly kept up and equipped with marginal facilities.

Of the students who lived elsewhere, many were poor and lived wretchedly in isolated cold-water flats, blocks or miles from the University. The greatest disparity was between these and the fortunate few--the rich and the "clubbies"--who maintained luxurious private dormitories on the "Gold Coast" of Mount Auburn street. For all but the "Gold Coasters," who ate in their own dormitories, the meal situation was nearly intolerable.

Food Riots in Memorial Hall

All boarding undergraduates were supposed to eat in Memorial Hall, but the consistent overcrowding there led to a series of food riots.

In 1919 the Administration closed Memorial Hall as a dining room, and for the next six years everyone in the University had to "eat out" in the Square, if he were to eat at all.

President Lowell was concerned about about the obvious inconvenience of the existing living arrangements, but he was far more disturbed by the general tendency of students to isolate themselves in stereotype economic and social groups. All the Greater Boston prep school boys were living in one little cluster, all the Cambridge and Boston Latin School boys in another, all the midwestern farm boys in another, and so on. Before making any changes in living arrangements, Lowell wanted to be sure any changes would help to break up and discourage these overly homogeneous groups.

"The key to many of our college problems would seem to lie in the establishment of a series of Freshman dormitories with dining halls," he wrote in 1910. "This... would give far greater opportunity for men from different schools and from different parts of the country to mix together and find their natural affinities unfettered by the associations of early education, of locality and of wealth; and above all it would tend to make the college more truly national in spirit."

Freshmen Halls Give Little Help

Although a total of eight new halls for freshmen were built in the next 15 years, only five of these had attached dining halls (these halls were later converted to Houses), and none of them seemed to achieve the socio-economic sifting Lowell had envisioned. The housing situation had improved somewhat by the late twenties, but was not really very different from what it had been in 1910.

Then the unexpected happened. One day late in 1928, Edward S.Harkness, Yale '97, walked into Lowell's office and offered him $3 million to build an "Honors College," with a resident master and tutors, for members of the three upper classes. Because Yale had spurned Harkness's offer, Harvard became the fortunate recipient.

Lowell not only accepted the offer, but announced it immediately to the Governing Board who in turn were so enthusiastic that Harkness decided to increase his gift to $10 million, thereby providing for seven Houses. Three of these were to be built entirely new, the other four from existing freshmen houses by the River.

Surprisingly enough, undergraduates were generally displeased with the plan. The "clubbies" and "Gold Coasters" reputedly shuddered at the thought of mixing with the majority; the CRIMSON attacked the proposal as arbitrary and disrupting; the students living in the Yard feared such a change would leave them disoriented.

Lowell Liked Controversy

Lowell's regime brought reform to both the housing and the academic programs for undergraduates. But despite his preoccupation with College reform, Lowell never forgot the University's relationship to the "outside world." The same conviction which made him fight to restore an atmosphere of intellectual excitement within the College, made him fight to keep the University in close contact with the "outside." Above all, he believed that complacency could lead an institution only to decay. Lowell, who liked some controversy because it kept issues alive and people alert, wanted to make Harvard not an ingrown "ivory tower," but a lively and intelligent force in contemporary America.

At times this position seemed risky; often it was nearly untenable. But Lowell always maintained it, and especially so after 1919 when he published his now-classic interpretation of academic freedom. In the middle of the Boston police strike of that year, Harold J. Laski, a young government instructor at the University, became somewhat carried away with his own enthusiasm in addressing the striking policemen's wives. Exuberantly, Laski praised the uprising as an example of pluralistic liberty in the finest tradition.

He had hardly finished when conservative Bostonians rose in protest, denouncing him as a traitor and a Bolshevik, accusing the University of supporting the strike and mob rule, (Harvard had actually sent about 200 students to help fill temporary gaps in the force) and demanding that Laski be immediately removed from his instructorship.

Upholds Academic Freedom

Brooking severest criticism, Lowell adamantly refused to remove Laski. "Knowledge can advance... only by means of an unfettered search for truth on the part of those who devote their lives to seeking it...," he said "and by complete freedom in imparting... the truth that they have found. Either the University assumes full responsibility for permitting its professors to express certain opinions in public, or it assumes no responsibility whatsoever, and leaves them to be dealt with like other citizens by the public authorities." The University steered always by the latter course under President Lowell and consequently left its faculty free to say whatever they wished, provided they did so as independent citizens rather than representatives of the University.

"At a time when discussion was being muzzled and the free expression of opinion stifled in many American universities," Morison had said in discussing the Laski incident, the Lowell Administration "acted so as to make every member of the teaching faculties feel that he could teach, write, and say what he believed to be the truth, with due regard to decency in utterance and appropriateness in occasion. No reasonable man could breath the air of Harvard at this time and not feel free."

Society of Fellows

Lowell's last innovation was the Society of Fellows, finally established just before he resigned in 1932-33. Ostensibly the Society was different from his earlier projects because it involved only a small and academically exclusive group instead of all the undergraduates or all the faculties. But fundamentally, it was designed for the same purpose as the other academic reforms--to recreate intellectual excitement in the College.

In his report to the faculty for 1930-31, Lowell had urged the establishment of "a Society of Fellows, composed of a limited number of the most brilliant young men that can be found... Such an atmosphere should carry intellectual contagion beyond anything now in this country," he said. "To be thoroughly effective the Society should be well endowed, but where conviction of value is strong and enduring, the means are sometimes forthcoming." Indeed they were, and from no one other than Lowell himself, so that in little more than a year, the first group of Junior Fellows was established in Eliot House.

Lowell was personally more involved with the Society of Fellows than with any of his other projects for the College. Not only did he create and endow the Society; he supervised its operation and kept in close touch with its members, even after he had resigned the presidency, until his death in 1943. To him, the Society was the culmination and the end of his campaign to restore intellectual excitement to Harvard.

And his campaign really was over. His "war with academic tradition" had been in large part won. The academic reforms he demanded in his inaugural had become realities, the Houses he envisioned had been built, and the academic freedom he championed had been established. Whether he had changed student attitude or the character of student society as much as he liked to believe is debatable; that he had changed the face of Harvard is not.