Former Lowell House Master Dies at 86

It was called the “Experiment”—an early 1970s exercise in co-educational housing that involved the exchange of female students from Harvard’s faraway Radcliffe Quadrangle dormitories with residents from the traditionally all-male houses between the Charles River and the Yard. It was a temporary arrangement—a trial—and, like most experiments, it was supposed to come to an end.

But when the time came, Zeph Stewart, the legendary Harvard classics professor and former Lowell House master who passed away at 86 this Saturday, wasn’t ready to give up the new members of his House’s community.

When the Experiment came to an end, and Harvard decided to adopt coeducational housing more generally, the administration planned to redistribute all the female students among Harvard’s Houses, with no regard for where they had stayed during the Experiment.

But Stewart’s view, recalls former Lowell tutor Michael S. Novey ’65, was that “the Radcliffe students had become part of the Lowell community.”

“That sensitivity informed his approach to being a House master,” Novey said yesterday. “He valued human relationships and fostered them. The result was a vibrant community of tremendous diversity.”

By all accounts, Stewart’s sense of community did not stop at the walls of the House that he led for more than a decade.

Following his summa cum laude graduation from Yale in 1942, Stewart’s decades in academia saw him garner a litany of accomplishments. The achievements ranged from his published work on ancient religion, literature, and philosophy to his review and revival of Harvard University Press’s Loeb Classical Library, which publishes English translations of Greek and Latin texts.

But away from his study, the younger brother of former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was actively engaged in making the parts of Cambridge that he knew more inclusive and welcoming.

According to engineering professor Frederick H. Abernathy, it was Stewart’s leadership that helped make the Experiment’s male-female exchange a reality in the first place.

“The first ones that volunteered to cooperate were Zeph and [his wife] Diana,” Abernathy said. “And that leadership, that first step when people said, ‘This is the camel’s nose under the tent’...that was the first step to cause the gender integration of Harvard.”

Classics professor Richard F. Thomas—who joined the Harvard faculty in 1977, the same year that Stewart assumed the helm of the Classics Department—said he remembered his colleague as a man “who cared about people who were not necessarily in high positions.”

According to Thomas, Stewart would mentor the Latin teachers at the high-schools in the Cambridge area, and he would routinely read and comment on his junior colleagues’ drafts.

Stewart’s wife, Diana, recalled that her husband was one of the last House masters to write recommendations for most of the seniors under his residential watch.

Long after he retired from active academic work, Diana would drive Stewart to the departmental student-faculty lunches that he had instituted during his time as classics chair.

“He had been at Yale a very outgoing person in his class, and he found being a graduate student extremely lonely his first year,” Diana Stewart said. “He always said, ‘If you’re in the humanities, you’re on your own. If you’re in the sciences, you’re in a laboratory working with other people.’ And I think that’s one of the things he worked out, was to have the humanities people work together.”

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu.