Monro's Altruistic Instinct Influenced Career Change

I.

When John U. Monro leaves University Hall in July, he will not simply be closing out a whole portion of his life.

Ever since he was a child, Monro has had contact with Harvard. His father graduated in the class of '06, and as soon as young John was old enough to understand, he began attending Harvard football games with his father. Even before Monro graduated from the College in 1935, he had started working part-time for the University News Office. That job became permanent, and Monro continued at it until 1941 when he joined the Navy. After the war, he was back in Cambridge and began a steady rise in the Administration. It culminated in 1958 when President Pusey asked him to become Dean of the College.

His decision to depart, then, digs deep into the nature of the man himself. Stepping down from the prestigious post of Dean of Harvard College to become Director of Freshman Studies at an unaccredited Negro College in Alabama contradicts the careful calculations of ordinary minds: the new job assures neither comfort, nor power. Monro will have traded Cambridge, where people often feel they are at the center of the world, for Birmingham, where many people feel out of the way and like it.

Monro is not an enigma, and does not defy analysis. He is a man of several sides; each must be seen to reconcile the apparent contradictions in his behavior.

He is, most obviously, an administrator, and, if his colleagues are to be believed, he is very good--perhaps excellent--at the job. Monro is a tireless worker, comes in early in the morning, and, more often than not, stays late at night. He has established an easy rapport with his fellow administrators; the respect for him is probably a mark of the quality of his work and his style of operation.

But branding a person an "administrator" at Harvard may be consigning him--implicitly--to the ranks of the unacceptable or the inferior: if he is at Harvard and he is any good, why is he in the bureaucracy? The fact is that he may not be any good. There are dull people in the Harvard Administration, just like there are dull people on the Faculty and in the student body; many of them are satisfied with the repetition of their daily jobs and, moreover, probably perform well at them. Like most administrators. Monro can take the routine in hand and enjoyit. There is a certain sense of pride and duty in this: "If I didn do it," he will say, "then Dean Ford would have to do it. "But what separate a good many Harvard administrators from being simply bureaucrats is that they do not stop with this. And Monro--according to his colleagues--is one of these.

His annual reports, by and large as plain as any annual reports, are laced with such words as "adventure." Monro has always grasped for fresh ideas and criticisms of old practices. When engaged in new enterprises, he transmits a sense of excitement and displays vast amounts of energy. A student who has worked with him at Miles College says: "They [the people at Miles] are a little bit cowed by Monro's ability to work hard and accomplish a lot in a short time.... The drive to get things done is paramount."

Monro's capacity to handle the routine and his competence to make difficult innovations were combined no more successfully than when he began to overhaul Harvard's system of scholarships and financial aid. In 1948, he became assistant to Provost Paul H. Buck and two years later moved up to the top post in the Financial Aid Office, a job he held until he became dean. "As the G.I. bill ran out and the World War II veterans got through," explains one former colleague, "it was clear that Harvard was going to have to give more thought to the ways it went about providing financial aid to its students." The problem fell to Monro.

When he finished with it eight years later, he had--along with some others--completely refashioned Harvard's scholarship program, and, in the process, projected his ideas to a national forum. He set up criteria for determining a student's "need" and pushed for the use of a variety of sources to meet the need--loans and jobs as well as scholarships. Many ideas in the Harvard program were borrowed by other colleges or used by a new national organization, the College Scholarship Service. Monro was one of the principal movers behind CSS, set up through the College Board, and he soon became chairman. What CSS did was standardize many scholarship procedures for more than 1000 participating schools. Monro's work amounted to a substantial achievement, a reshaping of a fundamental program that now affects 40 per cent of the College. But his effort was not flashy, and it is this dogged, quiet style that his admirers value so highly.

It is not this style, though, that lies at the heart of Monro's decision to leave Harvard. Something else is more crucial -- something else that his friends describe variously as a "sense of mission," or "absolute monesty," or "uncompromised dedication," or "strong commitment." These terms boil down to the fact that Monro is a profoundly dedicated--and determined--"do-gooder."

This word--"do-gooder"--has acquired a variety of negative overtones, but many of them don't apply to Monro. He is not a temporary meddler in causes, as the word might imply; he is really a permanent do-gooder, a professional. He very much admires people whom he believes have purpose. And his involvement in Harvard, one senses, stems from his belief that the University is an institution involved in long-term and important do-gooding.

When he talks about going to Miles, he speaks in the same terms. Miles is small, understaffed, and strained to capacity; its academic credentials are still shaky--at least when one compares it with more established small colleges, North and South. But Miles also has a strange monopoly: it is the only Negro college near Birmingham. This is very important to Monro. "Here is a college," he says, "that's in a unique position to serve its community."

Monro's vocabulary is filled with nice-sounding words like "community," and, despite his administrator's pragmatism, he shares something with the do-gooder and the reformer -- "vision." "The number of wild ideas he's got is enormous," says a student who has worked with Monro at Miles and clearly likes him. Both as Harvard administrator and a part-time Faculty member at Miles, Monro has been the source of many new schemes. Some of these spring from instinct, from a hasty appraisal of the facts of the situation. They seem plausible at first, but on examination appear full of problems. As a result, Monro must retract some and allow others to slide to a slow death. At times, they make him appear foolish. But some of them dowork, and the suggestion of others prompt reactions.

According to at least one close friend, there is a deliberate technique in this approach. "He's one of the best educators I have ever known.... He starts with a position, and then he's open to dialogue and he revises."

John Monro, the do-gooder and the administrator, may suffer because of the paradox. To some he often seems to strain under the shackles of his position. One member of the Harvard Policy Committee, on which Monro sits as one of five Faculty members, left after a year of informal contact with the dean convinced that he had had his share of utopian educational ideas. "I got the feeling that without the constraints of being Harvard's dean, he pursue a radical education."

But if Monro feels these pressures, he also uses his position to advantage. As Dean, he has pushed many new social projects, and over and over again--in reports and conversations--he emphasizes their importance. He lobbied intensively and successfully this year for a University subsidy for Phillips Brooks House. When two civil rights activists came to him several years ago to seek help for a weekly Negro newspaper--the Southern Courier--he lent his support and supplied money from a special College fund for civil rights. He has done the same for other students.

His friends, who admire his way of combining pragmatism with altruism, explain his decision to go to Miles this way:

"Other people would go out and make speeches, but not John. He's just going down there."

II.

The position John Monro has held for the past eight years is very difficult to define. It sounds impressive, but its power and prestige are ambiguous. Unlike Yale, where the Dean of the College is an academician who presides over both the scholarly and social sides of undergraduate life, the Harvard dean does not share both roles. The College at Yale is more a more distinct academic unit than it is at Harvard; here the College and the Graduate School merge, and the man in charge is clearly the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

"There are differing views on the Dean of the College," a close student of Harvard's bureaucracy and politics observed recently. "Should he only be a dean of students concerned with disciplinary problems and personal matters, or should he pursue a major role in educational development?"

Monro, without question, adopted the second role and slowly expanded the scope of his office. As dean, he had at least three separate constituencies to which he had to appeal : the student, the Faculty, and the Administration (his colleagues in the bureaucracy, and the President and the Corporation). His supreme achievement, many feel, has been his ability to accommodate all three elements without slighting any of them.

Monro thinks not infrequently like a politician. He defines his own role on a day to day basis, and performs a rough calculus of what he can and cannot do in a particular situation.

The constraints he works within are considerable. First, the scope of his office was traditionally limited, with social and disciplinary problems receiving most attention. The image of the office--because it is separated from the academic side of the University--suffers in the eyes of both students and Faculty. At the same time, there is always some fear about the Deans' office "moving in" and taking over control of different aspects of undergraduate life. The dean, according to one top administrator, "can't be a big, flamboyant figure--he has to work quietly...." In addition, Monro had a personal handicap; he doesn't have a Ph.D., and this is said by some to hurt him.

But he also has assets. The dean sits on innumerable committees, ranging from the Administrative Board, where he is chairman, to the Committee on Athletics. Others include: the Committee on Educational Policy (he is a non-voting member), the Faculty Committee on Phillips Brooks House, the Committee on the House, the Admissions Committee, the Committee on Graduate and Career Plans, and the Committee on the Bureau of Study Council. This kind of representation gives the dean platforms where he can be heard, and , equally important, makes him privy to information in a number of different subjects. It is a specialized brand of knowledge that few other people have time to collect.

Monro adds to this his own stamina and omnipresence. One high member of the Administration, who has been preoccupied with academic policy questions, often consults informally with Monro late in the evening: "It would never occur to me that he wouldn't be there [in his office] working." Monro also benefits from an exceptionally close relationship with two of the most important men in the University -- the President and the Dean of the Faculty.

It is hardly surprising that Monro and Pusey work well together, for it was the President who originally chose Monro for the job. Pusey lets the dean run his own shop. "For Mr. Pusey," Monro said recently, "the name of the game is stability--he doesn't panic, he doesn't lose his cool...and he doesn't needle you and tell you what to do." Monro appreciate this freedom, and, in a sense, he understands that it must be reciprocated. He rarely oversteps his bounds. He offers his opinions, but can be counted upon to carry out a decision in which he had little part. Had he attempted to compete with other Faculty or Administration members for a more dominant role, he might have been less effective. What could have been a rough relationship with the Dean of the Faculty, for example, has turned out to be an easy collaboration.

Monro's great strength--the thing that made all htis work--is his personal approach to problems and the way he comes across to people. "John Monro was always there, and he enjoyed talking and turning over ideas," says one administrator. A Faculty member put it this way: "He tries to absorb as much as he can and give people different perspectives. He has a quality of engaged detachment." Monro could talk to people for hours without tiring or abandoning the conversation in frustration. "The first time I went in to see him," recalls one student, "I expected to stay for about ten minutes. Instead, I ended up staying for about 50 and slinging the bull on just about everything." The story is not uncommon. Monro has opened up his office to many students, especially in his last years. In fact, at times the conversation drags on and he unrealistically assumes the attention of his listeners. Some people listening to Monro on the phone, have been able to put down the receiver and engage in another conversation for a few moments without Monro noticing.

It was his patience, his durability, his tolerance that many Faculty members admired in the handling of the McNamara incident and the planning for the Goldberg visit in February. Monro talked for long periods with members of SDS, and many Faculty members give him a major part of the credit for heading off a real confrontation. A more impulsive man, they say, might have provoked serious trouble.

Nevertheless, it is very difficult to find a single project which Monro has personally proposed and pushed through during the last four or five years. His influence is more communal. "It's kind of a team operating back and forth," says one administrator. The meaning of this is not easily deciphered; Monro, it can be assumed, has been heard on most issues.

What he seems to have done, however, is construct an informal, ad hoc framework to get things done. He