The Administration: I

Nine years ago Nathan M. Pusey came to Harvard from Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, to become President of an enormous institution built on layer after layer of sedimented traditions. A slow and delicate play of subterranean forces had brought it to its current stature, a vast and complex machinery that it would be foolish to meddle with too deeply. The University might change, but it would have to change more through a process of natural evolution than through administrative decisions initiating and guiding change.

Now, nine years later, and more than a year since Dean Bundy left for Washington, Mr. Pusey's view of Harvard remains essentially conservative. But the last few months have placed him in situations where he has needed to make a number of decisions concerning the University's future.

The most long-standing and troublesome case before the Administration at the moment is the General Education Program. For 15 years the Gen Ed Committee has struggled to relate a set of principles to Harvard, or, failing that, to find new ones. Its position is now especially critical, for the guidelines of the Redbook have been abandoned almost entirely. Advanced Standing, departmental control of existing courses, and virtually indiscriminate creation of new ones, all threaten General Education. Just before he left, Mr. Bundy attempted, in his capacity as Chairman of the Committee on Educational Policy, to give some direction to a program so conspicuously without a policy. His ideas did not happen to please the Gen Ed Committee, but at least they were there. Mr. Pusey's are not, with the result that the Committee and the suggestions of its Chairman have been left stranded and helpless.

Another problem that the former Dean's departure allowed to slip from sight is that of the Visual Arts Center. The Administration planned the building largely because it felt a growing University ought to have one. Exactly who, among those concerned with Visual Arts, wanted it, and exactly what it should be used for were questions not raised at the time. Naturally, a committee is meeting on the center, but can come only to the most preliminary and indefinite conclusions. The Loeb Drama Center showed that the Administration produces purest chaos by permitting a building to go up without examining and specifying its relation to the University, but this painful and expensive lesson remains unlearned.

Mr. Pusey has kept similarly silent on other new projects. A hugely intricate system of divided committees lately agreed to charge him with central responsibility for determining what should be done with Latin American studies at Harvard. As with Gen Ed and the Visual Arts, factionalism and irresolution among the interested parties, and the significance of the program for the University's future, have made the President's role in forming policy a crucial one. Yet Mr. Pusey has said no more of this role than that "the recommendations of the committees would have to come to my desk;" he does not propose to attend any of their meetings, nor to take any action to influence the recommendations he will eventually have to read.

When Mr. Pusey remarked two months ago of the Cheever Report on Federal Aid that "it was purely descriptive; policy will evolve slowly over the next few years;" and two weeks ago of the University's position on civil defense that "We never anticipate" he described the tenor of his Administration all too precisely. Not that anybody can reasonably suggest that the President make all the essential decisions of the next decade this spring. But his reluctance to make up his mind on matters which urgently need direction not only leaves the problems themselves unsettled but the concerned Faculty foundering, fragmented, and confused.

These men were never meant to do Mr. Pusey's job for him. If the President continues to look for sanction in history and tradition, he might remember that powerful and imaginative executive leadership, is of all Harvard's traditions one of the strongest.