Bundy Made Deep Impact During 7-Year Term

Shortly after hearing of McGeorge Bundy's Washington appointment, a senior Faculty member who was at the University long before the 41-year-old Dean's seven year reign remarked sentimentally: "It won't be easy to imagine Harvard without Mac."

Possibly Harvard will be able to get along well without Mac, but the remark manages to show something of the way in which Bundy in the last few years seems to have grown larger than his job, and has wielded the Dean's powerful mace with an influence unusually strong.

It is astonishingly difficult to measure this influence with any precision. Personally, Bundy has impressed most of those who have talked to him in his curiously uncomfortable office in University 5 with his evident air of competence, his brilliance and originality, and his capacity to impose on even the most bizarre subjects a remarkable clarity. Yet Bundy qua official, in releases, interviews, public announcements, and even profiles, appears a mysterious force that obviously moves, but rarely talks.

In the spring of the academic year in which he was appointed Dean at the age of 34, Bundy began to demonstrate this combination of effective action and on-the-record silence. The year before (1953), as an associate professor of Government, he had been the University's representative on the six-institution committee that produced the Blackmer report recommending advancing qualified incoming students beyond Freshman courses and perhaps beyond the Freshman year itself into Sophomore Standing.

In February 1954, now Dean of Faculty and consequently chairman of the Committee on Educational Policy, he drafted a report asking for substantially the same measures, along with course reduction and opportunity for independent study for capable Honors Seniors. Two weeks later, despite the objections of three CEP members (one of whom said emphatically that "liberal education should not be viewed as a prison term with a quarter off for good behavior") the proposals went before the Faculty.

At one point during the interim, according to the CRIMSON, "The Student Council Steering Committee went to Dean Bundy to ask him to delay Faculty approval of the Advanced Standing program. But when Bundy told them what the plan was about they decided to withdraw their request." Faculty who opposed the Sophomore Standing clause early in the meeting also never had a chance; it passed very comfortably.

Nothing Bundy engineered afterwards was quite so conspicuously dramatic. Still, at moments one could see the same sure touch of the capable administrative head of a Faculty that, like all faculties, is only peripherally interested in administrative affairs. Last spring, for example, when professor Franklin L. Ford told a meeting that he could not see how a report on Admissions policy might be very useful, Bundy appointed him chairman of the committee that was to write such a report.

In the six years between these springs, a good deal was happening to the University. Inspired by (among a plethora of influential supporting ideas) Bundy's entreaty, "We must attract, entice, drive, pull, or poke leading men and women students into the graduate schools," the Faculty passed programs for a five-year Bachelor of Science and a six-year Bachelor of Architecture.

In late 1956 President Pusey inaugurated the Program for Harvard College, and Bundy quickly chaired the important committees in charge of spending the $83 million that the Program collected by last year. Before this, Pusey decided that the Faculty should seriously consider the problem of expansion. He created a Committee on Appointments, Promotions, and Retirements, a Committee on Compensations, a Committee on Undergraduate Costs. Bundy chaired them all.

By his willingness to consider new ideas about educational policy Bundy has achieved much of his reputation as a fine administrator. The idea of Freshman Seminars, for instance, excited him immensely.

An anonymous donor gave, the Faculty approved, and besides finding himself the chairman of still another committee (on the new Loeb Drama Center), Bundy added to University 5 and the Lowell Lecture Hall--where he gave Government 185--a small seminar room at 8 Prescott Street. "You can't possibly understand American Foreign Policy," he told his group once, "without having read Henry IV." At the end of his first year of the Seminar, even students skeptical of the value of specializing heavily in the Freshman year were delighted to have had the chance to meet weekly with McGeorge Bundy.

With such a record of subtle achievement, Bundy will be unable to avoid becoming a legend while working only 500 miles away. It's not at all easy to imagine a Harvard without Mac.