Nathan Marsh Pusey: an appreciation.

NATHAN MARSH PUSEY, who died in November 2001, led Harvard University during one of its most illustrious periods--the 1950s and 1960s. In Harvard lore, the official "golden age" of the university was the latter half of the presidency of Charles William Eliot, the Gay 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, culminating in the legendary class of 1910, which counted among its members two future Nobel Prize winners, including T.S. Eliot. (1) It is important to recognize the 1950s and 1960s as a second golden age for the school, however, a unique chapter in the history of American higher education, when a top university clearly understood and dutifully fulfilled its mission to acquire, deposit, and propagate genuine knowledge. It is important to do so, in the first place, to appreciate the accomplishment of Nathan Pusey, and in the second place, to come to terms with the loss that resulted from the student agitations at Harvard in 1969.

Pusey first came to Harvard, as an undergraduate from Iowa, in 1924. His favorite professor was Irving Babbitt, the inimitable teacher of French and comparative literature who won fame as the Neohumanist exemplar of the conservative mind. Moreover, it was Babbitt who directed Pusey to the classics. Pusey took his A.B. and Ph.D., both from Harvard, in that field. Pusey was one of those classicists who found it inadequate merely to study the words and actions of the great men of Greece and Rome: the point was to emulate them in a sphere of action in the present day. Pusey also knew that, as scholarship, his dissertation was rather ordinary. He believed himself cut out for, of all things, university administration.

Pusey soon took up a position at Lawrence College in Wisconsin, where he put together a great books program in the humanities. In the Midwest, he discovered a kindred spirit and mentor in Robert Maynard Hutchins, father of the core curriculum at the University of Chicago. Pusey became a missionary for Hutchins's idea of enacting rigorous, bookish, classics-based curricula at Lawrence College. Through the offices of Hutchins, Pusey was installed as president of Lawrence in 1944. In terms of academic reforms, fundraising, and spokesmanship, Pusey's tenure at Lawrence was very successful. In 1953, at the age of 46, he was tapped to succeed James Bryant Conant as president of his alma mater, Harvard.

Pusey's appointment to that elevated post raised eyebrows, to say the least. Faculty members clucked that, although president, Pusey did not possess the scholarly qualifications to be a professor. Nor was he a Northeasterner. Nor did he come from a distinguished family. The Harvard executives who selected Pusey knew they were taking a chance, but they saw two things in him: he could raise money, and he paid attention to his home institution. Pusey's predecessor, Conant, had exasperated the Harvard board in charge of monitoring the university presidency. Brought in in 1933 to help the university get serious after an Abbott Lawrence Lowell administration that at times befitted the Roaring 1920s, Conant had become utterly preoccupied with government work during the Second World War and its aftermath, spending most of his time in Washington. (2)

Here, Harvard was facing a problem a step ahead of other large research universities in the post-World War II period, in that Harvard at an early date had to deal with the prospect of becoming a subsidiary of government. Harvard chose Pusey in 1953 largely because the institution believed it must be vigilant in maintaining its unique identity against the prerogatives of Washington. In contrast, other research universities over the next fifteen years came to see their extensive dealings with government as validation of membership in the establishment. It was only student agitation, first the Free Speech movement at Berkeley in 1964, then the anti-Vietnam War protests, that made administrations re-think the close ties between the university and government. Conservatives, of course, had been vigorously denouncing the standardization of the university mind, precipitated by ties to government, ever since William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale in 1951. That universities took to heart the charges of the student movements of the 1960s, as opposed to the conservative criticisms of the 1950s, was the crucial fact underlying the crisis of confidence that gripped universities at large in the 1970s and beyond.

When Pusey was installed at Harvard in 1953, he knew he had a skeptical faculty on his hands. His first initiative did nothing to win them over. Pusey embarked on a campaign to revivify the moribund and friendless Harvard Divinity School. The university-wide faculty, evolutionist to the core, had enjoyed watching the school slowly die on the vine over the years. The divinity faculty was down to a handful of professors when Pusey took charge. Pusey, a churchgoer, thought that World War II had caught the American intelligentsia flatfooted; impressed by Reinhold Niebuhr, Pusey believed that recent horrors had shown that one must reserve a space for God. Practically, for him, this meant redoubling the endowment and the faculty of the Divinity School. Pusey seems to have won the day by showing that the university could establish ties with new Jewish and Italian money by founding professorships at the school beyond the now traditional realm of skeptical mainline Protestantism. Though Pusey's most famous appointment to the divinity faculty was a world-renowned theologian, Paul Tillich (1886-1965), it must also be noted that the Charles Chauncy Stillman Chair in Catholic Studies was also inaugurated under Pusey's auspices, and the first incumbent of that chair was one of the world's leading historians of religion, Christopher Dawson (1889-1970). (3)

Pusey made peace with the faculty in the mid-1950s, after a fashion, by showing some anti-anti-communist bona fides. The House Committee on Un-American Activities named some Harvard names, and Pusey fired back with a vengeance, winning praise all around. It is to Pusey's great credit that he left it at that. In the main, university men in the 1950s detested McCarthyism for one of two reasons (and there were representatives of both these views on the Harvard faculty): either they believed communism did have worthy prospects, or they found anti-communism declasse. The temptation was great to preen. Columbia, for example, did not stop churning out a sociology of "anti-intellectualism" belittling anti-communism until surprised by building occupations that cancelled a semester in 1968. Pusey's objections to McCarthy, on the contrary, derived from principle: his belief that the university must be kept immune from undue governmental influence, which is what had attracted the Harvard board when it picked Pusey in the first place.

The anti-communism episode over, Pusey essentially told his faculty to go back to their books and to their classrooms. They complied, and in the decade 1955-1965, Pusey led a university at the top of its form. Departments, faculty, course offerings, and so far as one can tell, the classroom experience reached the crest of an historical wave. Course catalogs from the period show departments fully staffed, offering rich diets of surveys and seminars in every sub-field. It was the first time in many decades that the Harvard undergraduate was virtually guaranteed a comprehensive education. Pusey perceived this, and accurately compared the Harvard of 1962 to that which he had entered as a freshman in 1924:

   [T]he character of almost all of the courses has deepened enormously.
   Courses in literature and history now typically deal with more
   constricted periods of time--with limited periods and more
   specialized considerations within them, and with single authors, and
   new methods of approach. There are more advanced courses and more
   people taking them .... Last year almost half the students enrolled
   in graduate courses in mathematics were undergraduates .... (4)

Pusey knew well that the academic experience at Harvard College had never been quite up to snuff, reputation not-withstanding. In the 1940s, the Harvard term had at times dwindled to six weeks to accommodate G.I.s. Under Lowell, the emphasis had been squarely on what today we would call "student life." And even under the great Eliot, the most popular Harvard persona for an undergraduate was that of the indifferent clubman who attended classes selectively.

Pusey's Harvard was the school's first real era of meritocracy, a concept we are none too familiar with today, given ossified affirmative action and post-modern relativism. At Pusey's Harvard, students from across the country who had achieved top records in high school took detailed and substantial classes, making their way through four years via argument, exposition, contemplation, and camaraderie. Under Pusey's direction, Harvard did not take the route of Berkeley, Michigan, and other large "multiversities," for which increases in enrollments meant big increases in class size and the depersonalization of teaching. Instead, Pusey tripled the size of the faculty.

Amazingly, the Harvard faculty would grow not at all between 1962 and 2000. Thus, the student-faculty ratio was lower in Pusey's middle years than at any time in Harvard's modern history. Indeed, it is only now--after four decades of marked increases in enrollments, a faculty constantly tempted away by government service, an administration fixated on eliminating private student associations, and a dismal pseudo-reform from the 1970s by which fully one-quarter of a Harvard undergraduate's career is gobbled up by massive, noncommittal survey classes in "approaches to knowledge"--that the we can appreciate the unique achievement of the Pusey years. They were the one moment in the twentieth century when Harvard succeeded in bringing together the best of instruction and the best of students.

Pusey had an angelic countenance that nevertheless somehow intimidated people. Nicknamed "the bishop from Iowa," he exuded a pious zeal that convinced Harvardians that the university was on the move, and that Pusey was at the reins. He was softened by his popular wife, Anne, and his attendance at athletic events won him a warm regard among students. Pusey remains the last Harvard president to have graduated from Harvard College, and the last to have living quarters in Harvard Yard. During the "diploma riots" of 1961, when undergraduates laid waste to the old place in protest of news that baccalaureate diplomas would no longer be written in Latin but in English, Pusey put his trust in Cicero. He summoned the mob to the steps of his home in the Yard, where he delivered an address justifying the change--in Latin. The rioters had met their match. The quaintness of the episode shows that a decade and a half into the era of democratic higher education, Harvard, under Pusey, was retaining its collegiate character.

The faculty never fully adjusted to Pusey. He lacked a professorial pedigree, he manifested embarrassing thoughts about religion, he was an enthusiast for collegiate sports, and he ran the school imperiously. All of these contributed to a tacit non grata feeling about Pusey among the professors, who still today hold a status roughly equivalent to that held until recently by the English peerage. It also did not help that the presidency of a young and vigorous Pusey meant that his first lieutenant, the faculty darling McGeorge Bundy, would never have the top job. When Bundy left Harvard for the Kennedy administration in 1961, a number of faculty followed. The sense was now palpable that some faculty found Kennedy to be their president.

Pusey's downfall still elicits deprecating tut-tuts from the establishment. A New York Times obituary recalled smugly, "A fight with McCarthy ended well for him, but not one with protesters." (5) Suffice it to say that in the wake of several awkward student protests against the Vietnam War, during one of which a building occupation was undone by the police, Pusey retired in 1971, two years earlier than he had planned to. But it is woefully mistaken to hold that Pusey was overmatched by the student agitators. Pusey's commentary on the escalating protests, 1966-1970, remains one of the most astute reflections on what happened to the American university in the 1960s that we possess. Early on he showed that he was not going to pass the buck. In 1967, he wrote:

  [I]t could be argued we in the universities are in a sense culpable
  [for the "depressing spirit" gripping the country], for higher
  education has been given much public support in recent generations;
  universities have been the recipients of public confidence and trust;
  and it is their purpose to strengthen not to weaken the human spirit.
  (6)

A university president suggesting that more government money may not be part of the solution is a rare thing indeed, particularly during the heyday of the Great Society. Further on in the same piece, Pusey softly chided Harvard's new Institute of Politics: "The Institute's aim is to endeavor to join--strange bedfellows!--learning and politics ...." (7)

With protests becoming more violent in 1968 and 1969, Pusey found these words to describe developments at the university:

  The sobriety of the scholar and the would-be scholar, celebrated in
  all previous ages, seemed simply to vanish. In some places the spirit
  of reasonableness, and the desire to achieve understanding with common
  courtesy, traditional hallmarks of academic life, were sneered at and
  contemned .... Manners suffered .... Fortunately, difficulties of the
  unsettling kind now being experienced on many college campuses have
  remained relatively minor here. I should like to think this is an
  indication of the exceptional good sense of Harvard men and women. But
  who can tell? (8)

On the conclusion of the most violent episode at Harvard, in April 1969, Pusey would write:

  [T]he distressing events of 1968-69 appear to have represented a
  culmination ... of a series of misbegotten attitudes and events which
  began to evolve several years back. [In previous years] I failed to do
  justice to the widespread and varied malaise in both student and
  faculty populations which supported and has continued to provide a
  favorable environment for them [the small group of would-be
  revolutionaries]. (9)

Pusey was very shrewd to observe that portions of his faculty had done their level best to accommodate student radicalism. Indeed, dating back to 1966, faculty committees had overturned disciplinary judgments against student protesters promulgated by the administration. In Pusey's greatest hour of need, the weeks following the "bust" of the building occupation in April 1969, a committee made up largely of faculty would try to make a connection between a "distant" administration and student "alienation."

Of course, there were many faculty who were appalled by the protests and who supported Pusey. But aggregately, during the crises of the late 1960s, the faculty was able to act only in a manner that undercut their president. To be sure, the Vietnam War had few supporters among the faculty--especially after Lyndon Johnson had disposed of the last of the "Harvards" held over from the Kennedy administration. Robert McNamara's declaration in his autobiography that it finally became clear that the war was unwinnable about the time he left office spoke for a number of the "Harvards" who had taken their turn at foreign policy in the early- and mid-1960s. (10) Pusey simply had a faculty on his hands that had made up its mind that the United States was not going to prevail in Vietnam, a faculty that would come close to making common cause with the student radicals when their moment came.

As for the students themselves, a group that heretofore had admired Pusey, they were the product of demographic and cultural shifts that were some of the most pronounced in Harvard history. During Pusey's season in the sun in the mid- and late-1950s, the average age of Harvard undergraduates was in the early twenties, and as many as ten per cent were married. These high figures--probably the highest in the school's history--were the result of young men delaying college for military service, as well as the early marriage rates typical of the immediate post-war period. By 1969, the average age had dropped to 19, close to the historical norm, with very few married students. As previously noted, the faculty had grown in size dramatically from Pusey's time as an undergraduate in the 1920s until peaking in the early 1960s. Institutes sponsoring fellows at mid-career had been established in great number between 1955-1965. Thus, for the first decade or so of his administration, Pusey was dealing with a university holding an exceptionally high proportion of mature people. This situation had changed markedly by 1969.

Moreover, the mentality of Harvard undergraduates was undergoing a sea change in the late 1960s. Students were beginning to develop problems with the meritocratic culture regnant at the school under Pusey. Yearbooks and student newspaper articles from the time reveal that, as the 1960s wore on, the "traditional" Harvard student--the upper-class boy who "prepped" at a boarding school--was having a difficult time getting by at the college, for all the bright boys from the provinces and the public and Catholic schools. It appears that as a result, the old "Harvard indifference" resurfaced--in the form of students trying not to show interest in worldly success. By and by, this "indifference" morphed into radical activism. We have the beginnings of a statistical correlation between manifestations of ennui from identifiably "traditional" Harvard students and both "dropping out" and the push for the "movement" at the school. (11)

What is more, the more ambitious students among the would-be radicals perceived that Harvard (and its graduates) stood to lose standing within the baby-boom generation if no radical activity of any consequence were to occur at the school. Berkeley had had its Free Speech movement, Michigan its Port Huron, Columbia its '68. Machiavellian Harvard students had to worry that they risked losing credibility among their peers if the school remained placid.

Indeed, in this regard, it is most interesting to review the actions of Yale president Kingman Brewster, who in 1970 paraded his support for the Black Panthers on trial in New Haven. Yale had to that point been one of the few elite schools with an almost completely blank record with respect to the "movement." (12) Brewster was, of course, rewarded a few years ago with glowing obituaries, and before that with the plum ambassadorship to the Court of St. James. Pusey, in his retirement, became the man nobody wanted to know.

To be sure, Pusey had his shortcomings as president: he devoted inordinate attention to an unnecessary art program; he could not say no to proposals for buildings in the International Style; and when all is said and done, just how much of a contribution did the generation of Harvard graduates from the Pusey years really make to the betterment of American life? Still, it is a considerable mistake to classify Pusey with the naive "good liberals" in power in the 1960s who were flummoxed by radicalism. There is an enormous gap between Pusey and, say, John Lindsay, the put-upon mayor of New York at that time. Unlike Lindsay, Pusey was a man of real accomplishment, accomplishment that with time appears more distinguished, if however more difficult to replicate. The obituaries for Nathan Marsh Pusey should have read: He guided America's premier university to one of the highest points in its history.

(1.) See Donald Fleming's droll "Harvard's Golden Age?" in Bernard Bailyn et al., Glimpses of the Harvard Past (Cambridge, Mass., 1986). (2.) See James Hershberg, James B. Conant: From Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (New York, 1993). (3.) For details on the events of the Pusey years at Harvard, see Morton and Phyllis Keller, Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University (Oxford, 2001). (4.) Report of the President of Harvard College and Report of the Departments, 1961-1962 (Cambridge, 1962), 6. (5.) New York Times, November 15, 2001. (6.) Report of the President, 1966-1967, 30. (7.) Ibid., 5. (8.) Report of the President, 1967-1968, 5-6. (9.) Report of the President, 1968-1969, 5. (10.) Robert McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York, 1995). (11.) These findings emerged in student work in a seminar at Harvard on student life in the 1960s conducted by the author in 2001 and 2002. (12.) See Roger Kimball, "The Liberal Capitulation," The New Criterion, Vol. 16, No. 5 (January 1998), 9-11.

BRIAN DOMITROVIC, who received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, teaches history at Slippery Rock University.