Reflections on THE PUSEY PRESIDENCY

When the naive 18-year-old freshman first stepped foot into Harvard Yard in fall, 1924 nobody suspected that the lowa native, Nathan M. Pusey '28, would someday become president of the University.

In fact, Pusey was much more impressed with Harvard than Harvard was with him. "I had never been East," he recalls. "It was a kind of picturesque New England world I was just enchanted by. It contrasted so much with the bleakness and the plainness of where I grew up."

The Harvard that Pusey first saw was the Old Harvard. He lived on the River his freshman year, in a boarding house his sophomore and junior years, and in the Yard his senior year. He and his friends spent the evenings playing bridge.

But the Harvard that the 80-year-old man remembers best was nothing like the golden University that Pusey knew in the 1920s, but the turbulent school of the 1960s. Students were protesting the Vietnam War and rebelling against the establishment, including Harvard.

In the spring of 1969 things came to a head when Pusey called in the state police to forcibly remove students who had taken over University Hall in protest of the Vietnam War--an action which many say resulted in his early resignation.

Pusey is saddened by the decision but not regretful. "I don't think it was a mistake at all," he says. "It was not done hastily or without thought."

University officials and the president had been watching the rising protests here and at other college campuses. "We had been studying these repeated demonstrations for almost two years, or a year and a half, and watching them grow," he says. "If we let that [the take-over] drag on, it would last weeks or conceivably months."

And so Pusey called in the police, an action which will linger in his memory for the rest of his years. "Although it was going to be painful and very, very difficult and there were going to be many unhappy people, the thing to do was cut it off quick and then for about a week there would be a terrible explosion. But that would be the end of it, and that's what happened.

"You could say it was wise or unwise, and plenty of people said it was unwise. It was a question of what was least bad," Pusey says.

Now a distinguished, silver-haired 80-year-old, Pusey returned to the place where he spent his youthful college days and his more sobering days as president for the 350th celebrations. Sitting in the courtyard of the modern Science Center, which was not completed until after Pusey's departure, the New York resident smiles proudly when he speaks of his twin granddaughters who will enter the College this fall.

Unlike some of the members of his administration, Pusey was always in favor of equal opportunity for women. One summer, he decided to allow women to sing in the Memorial Church choir. On a Sunday in the fall, soprano voices were heard, and it wasn't for days that anyone realized that women were singing. "We got away with that without anyone knowing it," Pusey laughs, attributing his liberal attitude toward women to his Midwestern origins.

The presence of women on campus is not the only change in Harvard that Pusey has witnessed in his lifetime. Although the University decided to employ police in the 1960s to curtail protests, the present administration has seemed loath to take similar measures in the face of protest.

Last spring students protesting the University's $413 million in companies that do business with South Africa built a shantytown on campus. Rather than force a face-off, which could have led to arrests, the University allowed the buildings to remain standing through Commencement, giving them police protection and lighting and allowing the shanties to remain up even during Commencement. Pusey says he doesn't know how he would react to such a situation.

On Thursday night, Pusey got a taste of the modern protest when divestment activists blockaded Memorial Hall during a 350th celebratory dinner. "That seemed to be a relatively small group, and I would suspect a very small percentage were connected with Harvard."

Pusey maintains that the disturbances of the 1960s were caused largely by outside agitators. "You always had the sense that it [a demonstration] was being manipulated by a small number of people who were less interested in the avowed cause than they were in attracting attention," he says.

"To me it was sickening that any young people would think the University was a source of evil. I still can't understand it," he adds.

Pusey never liked outsiders interfering in the University. He campaigned against McCarthy--who later attacked several Harvard professors--back when they both lived in Wisconsin, and Pusey calls the man an "abomination," adding that he was "just amoral, an opportunist."

The years after World War II were ones of deep change. "These demonstrations were just a symptom of the fact that there was a very quick turning of the tide," he says.

But the post-war years were also ones of growth for Harvard. "The public from the end of the war on [was] very high on higher education," he says. It was then that Harvard began to recruit faculty extensively from abroad, internationalizing the University.

The physical plant and student population expanded, as did Harvard's reputation. "I've never gone anywhere I didn't find people with a great admiration and gratitude for Harvard and the things it has done," he says.

Of his presidency, Pusey says, "The period of my administration, I do think, was a constructive period in Harvard history. We made many advances in that period of time.

"It was the best job in the world. It still is," Pusey says. "Except for the last two years, it was nothing but joy. The last two, I must say, were quite unhappy years, and that was because of all the disturbances."

Judging from the applause at yesterday's convocation, when he received a specially-minted 350th medal, and at last night's Stadium show, Harvardians still think highly of the only other living University president.

Rating the administration of his successor, Derek C. Bok, Pusey says, "He's done a remarkable job in the development of the Kennedy School and the whole University, relating it more to public issues."

Looking ahead to the 400th anniversary of Harvard in 2036, Pusey, a Greek scholar, says that the center of the world will have shifted to the Pacific, away from the Atlantic. After having worked for six years with higher education in East Asia, especially with the People's Republic of China, Pusey says, "I feel myself that we have worshipped this Western tradition too long. The Chinese civilization is so much more ancient than ours, and here we look down on them."

"Harvard is already an international university," he continues. "It's outgrown its limitations of geography, space, and culture. It's not going to be a monochrome thing. It's going to be made of many strands--we just can't assume ours is going to be the only one."