A New Harvard History

It is not self-evident that Morton and Phyllis Kellers Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of Americas University will have a particularly broad audience. An incredibly detailed and deeply researched look at the players and issues of the last 70 years of Harvard history, the book will certainly appeal to the core of Harvard insider-elites, institutional historians and over-eager student journalists who hungrily devour every line of copy or print that references fair Harvard. The authors are perfect for this audience; he is Spector Professor of History at Brandeis, while she is a Harvard insider in the flesh, a former associate dean for academic affairs at Harvards Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

But can these Harvard history nerds really generate the sales figures to support publication in todays tough economy? Perhaps. There are enough living alumni who will happily purchase the hardcover edition to grace their coffee tables. But just how interested is the rest of the world in Harvard?

The authorsand clearly the publisherthink that interest in Harvard, and its history, is broad. In their prologue, the Kellers observe that Harvard is seen as the r-university: the worlds leading repository of higher learning, and the social and economic power that comes with it. Harvard, they aptly point out, is held as a symbol of American higher education to be both rallied around and railed against by thousands. They quote Clark Kerr, the legendary ex-Chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley: Somebody needs to know everything about each college and university but only about Harvard does everybody need to know something.

It is this conviction that really drives the Kellers book. Secure in the notion that Harvard is Harvard, the Kellers dont set out to write a book that connects developments at Harvard to developments in the world at large, or tries to document the effects Harvard has on the world through its graduates, its researchers or as an institution. While the Kellers dont deny that the story of modernization at Harvard is informed by modernization on a national scale, they limit themselves from the start to events inside the ivory tower. In dealing with the turbulence of the late 1960s, for example, the Kellers focus is not on how the activists at Harvard resembled and differed from radicals across the country, but rather on the effects of the turbulence on the governance and character of the institution.

With this constrained focus, the Kellers come to the somewhat structurally rigid conclusion that two changes separate the last 70 years of Harvard history into three distinct eras. First, under the direction of University President James B. Conant 14 (from 1933 to 1953), the University transformed from the Brahmin university of the first third of the 20th century to a meritocratic one. Relying on demographic shifts and the detailed dissection of many of the controversies and developments of the 1930s and 1940s, the Kellers show how the University increasingly embraced the ideal of the best and the brightest, even when it came into conflict with Harvards tradition of catering to the social elite. The authors then turn to the presidency of Nathan M. Pusey 28 (1953-1971). They attempt to show how meritocracy at Harvard was continued and further refined and at the same time tell the story of the stresses the newly meritocratic University felt and the turbulence it encountered. Finally, they turn to discuss what they call a shift toward worldliness over the course of the last third of the century. The Kellers address the developments of the past two presidential administrations and argue that Harvard has turned its focus to the growing importance of racial, gender, and cultural diversity and has exhibited an increased involvement in the world outside.

The most convincing aspect of the Kellers thesis, and as a result the book, concerns the shift toward meritocracy. For many it is a matter of conventional wisdom that at some point Harvard decided to desnootify itself at least a degree or two and put excellence above family name. The Kellers present the story of how this change came about in painstaking detail. They offer a vivid picture of how the University functioned as these changes washed over it in waves.

The Kellers also have some interesting details about meritocracys continued struggles. Three times the economic department had a chance to tenure home grown economic hot-shot, Paul Samuelson. In at least two of the cases, the Kellers argue, anti-Semitism played a role in the negative decisions. Samuelson went on to create one of the countrys most powerful economic departments down the river at MIT, and in a final irony not explicitly noted by the authors, has lived to see his nephew Lawrence H. Summers become the Universitys first practicing Jewish president this year.

The one difficulty that arises in this first section of Making Harvard Modern is minor, but it grows more serious as the book continues. This is the fact that not everything the authors present fits within the framework of their thesis. In some ways this is a testament to the depth of the authors research. In each section, the authors survey the broad categories of governance, the faculty, the college and the professional schools, describing the key issues that pertain to each of these areas. This makes for a comprehensive and thorough account, but it also means that the continuing problems with the Sanskrit department are discussed three times. The problem, though, is that these issues have little to do with meritocracy or worldliness, and the Kellers have to stretch to maintain the focus on their argument.

The problem of fitting the events to the main themes becomes more serious when it comes to the discussion of the crises of the late 1960s. The Kellers do not really assert that the takeovers of University buildings grew out of inherent failings of the meritocratic University. Nor do they make a clear enough case for how the events bring about worldliness. They do a good job of describing the causal relationship between the takeovers and the shifts in the Universitys administrative culturethe professionalization of its governance. But the turbulence seems disconnected and the foundation of the case for a new institutional culture post-1971 is shaky.

It is somewhat appropriate then that the authors title the section on the presidencies of Derek C. Bok and Neil L. Rudenstine A Buzzing Confusion. Though a reference to William James description of how the mind is organized, it also describes the authors difficulty with projecting this concept of worldliness over the developments of the period. In a way, worldliness makes good sense. Taken to mean the internationalization and outward looking nature of the university, the demographics and the anecdotal evidence are fairly solid. Taken to mean a focus on diversity, political correctness and similar shifts, worldly Harvard is something that students today live with, and that can be traced back through the battles of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Taken to mean political activism, one only needs to look at the events of the last year to realize that students are fundamentally different even 30 years after the takeovers of 1969. The problem comes when worldly is forced to mean all of these things simultaneously, stretching the definition, and exceeding the evidence that says that a new institutional culture on par with the culture of meritocracy has emerged.

But the fact that the evidence is too broad to fully support the Kellers thesis by no means diminishes the books value as a piece of scholarship. The research synthesizes once confidential Corporation and presidential papers, interviews with all of the major players still living and Phyllis Kellers insider knowledge into a comprehensive account of nearly every issue and development over the last 70 years. This is one of the first times that the more recent history of Harvard has been addressed, and the book will serve as a good background read for anyone looking more closely at any one facet of the University (such as the difficulties of the Visual and Environmental Studies Department or the colossal failure of the Universitys Medical Area Total Energy Plant (MATEP)). Despite the problems the Kellers have making everything fit within their argument, Making Harvard Modern uses thorough and solid research to tell a fascinating story.

Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of Americas University

by Morton and Phyllis Keller

Oxford University Press

640 pp., $35