glimpses of the harvard past

Glimpses of the Harvard Past

Bernard Bailyn, Donald Fleming, Oscar Handlin, Stephan Thernstrom

Harvard University Press, 1986

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Harvard Presidents

• Four truly notable presidents before the 20th century:– Henry Dunster (1640 – 1654) – John Leverett (1708 – 1724)– John Thornton Kirkland (1810 – 1828)– Charles William Eliot (1869 – 1909)

• And three consolidators:– Charles Chauncy (1654 – 1672)– Edward Holyoke (1737 – 1769)– A. Lawrence Lowell (1909 – 1933)


Curriculum (Through Kirkland’s Time)

• 12 terms, (3 each year), 33 subjects in prescribed sequence.• Ancient languages, analytic geometry, trigonometry,

differential calculus, history, English grammar, philosophy, physics, chemistry, astronomy, political economy, and Bible.

• A few substitutes were allowed (3rd year on): math or another language for Hebrew, a modern language for calculus, natural history for “intellectual philosophy,” a language for the chemistry, mineralogy, and geology requirements.

• All instruction was conducted in recitation form, with students translating, disgorging, or otherwise discoursing on set passages of assigned text when called upon by the teacher.


• New academies: St. Paul’s (1856), Groton (1885), Middlesex (1901) and others prepared the offspring of select families specifically for Harvard.

• In 1870, the college enrolled 7 Catholics, 3 Jews, 0 women, 0 blacks.

• The “annex” (1879), later Radcliffe College (1894) was an accommodation to give women an education equivalent to Harvard’s, without disturbing the way of life that still aimed to make men of boys by involvement in a male network of the culture of learning.


Charles W. Eliot

• "…the young man of 19 or 20 ought to know what he likes best and is most fit for. The community does not owe superior education to all children, but only to the élite….The process of preparing to enter college under the difficulties which poverty entails is just such a test of worthiness as is needed.”

• “The poverty of scholars is of inestimable worth in this money-getting nation.”

• “The world knows next to nothing about the natural mental capacities of the female sex.”

• “Two kinds of men make good teachers – young men and men who never grow old.”


Charles W. Eliot (continued)

• “There are always old radicals and young conservatives.”• “It is hard to find competent professors. Very few Americans

of eminent abilities are attracted to this profession.” • “The inertia of a massive University is formidable. A good

past is positively dangerous, if it makes us content with the present and so unprepared for the future.”

• “The University must accommodate itself promptly to changes in the character of the people for whom it exists.”

• “The president cannot force his opinions on any body. A University is the last place in the world for a dictator.”

• “The future of the University will not be unworthy of its past.”


Irving Babbitt on “the Ph.D. Octopus”*

• Babbitt protested bitterly against the dogma that nobody should be allowed to teach in a college without a Ph.D.– But one may shine as a productive scholar, and yet have

little or nothing of that humane insight and reflection that can alone give meaning to all subjects, and is especially appropriate in a college teacher. The work that leads to a doctor’s degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one’s growth as a man to one’s growth as a specialist. We must be men before being entomologists.

– Note: James, Wendell, Kittredge, Copeland, Babbitt were not Ph.D.’s

*coined by William James


Babbitt (continued)

• If, said Babbitt, instead of demanding original scholarship from a college teacher in, for example, literature, he was chosen for wide reading in the great books and the power to relate these to life, two advantages would follow – the undergraduate would get the instruction he needed to become fully human; and the modern heresy would be exploded that originality in research was the culminating ideal of life, with the corollary that mere assimilation of what was already known was contemptible .

• It was of a piece, Babbitt said, with “our small esteem for the ‘ancient and permanent sense of mankind’ as embodied in tradition, our prejudice in favor of young men and new ideas.”


Oscar Handlin on Harvard

• Scholarship had a realm unto itself, residing in the Public Record Office and other archives, in libraries, in clinics, and in laboratories. Scholars did what they did there, out of concern with the 16th century or with medieval common law or with the use of bismuth as a contrast medium in x-rays.

• They required no justification for what they did. But by doing what they did for its own sake they also developed cultural attributes and knowledge widely applicable in the society in which they lived.

• And involvement in the same community with them enriched the students – even those without direct contact with them.


Oscar Handlin (continued)

• Hence the university devoted its resources to libraries and laboratories which the undergraduates might or might not use but which their scholar-teachers required.

• It was immensely significant for the freedom of learning in the United States that Harvard absorbed those costs as part of the price the community paid for educating its youth.

• The pursuit of knowledge also guaranteed the University’s excellence. The young men and their teachers quietly assumed that their Harvard was best – not only by virtue of its age, certainly not only for its wealth, but for its scholarship, however remote the share of any individual in it.


Handlin on Eliot

• The great achievement of Eliot’s Harvard was to implicate a significant sector of American society in support of its high culture.

• By the end of Eliot’s administration Harvard had fused two elements in the culture it defined and transmitted: the inherited conception of a liberal gentlemanly education, now however available to students of every degree, had merged with that of scholarship, ever evolving as knowledge accumulated.

• The professors became clergymen without churches.


Handlin on Sedgwick on Values

• The editor, Ellery Sedgwick (class of 1894) asked: “What does a boy carry away from college?” and answered: a set of values. The boy had lived in a community free from the grosser inequities of the world, a society of scholars to whom learning was its own ample return, a republic where the crown of olives was the unmaterial reward.

• And if the young graduate was wise as well as knowledgeable, his diploma would tell him that in all this world there was no such reward as learning to understand.


Chronology

• When Eliot took office in 1869 the faculty numbered 21. When he left office in 1909 it had expanded to 123. In 1963, it consisted of 452 permanent and associate professors, and the count had risen to almost 700 in 1983. Cambridge (a manufacturing city) grew from about 2,000 in 1800 to 52,000 in 1880 and 92,000 in 1900.

• Before the Civil War, Harvard was largely “a seminary and academy for the inner circle of Bostonians.”* In the 20th century, John Reed (class of 1910) noted that “all sorts of strange characters of every race and mind, poets, philosophers, cranks of every twist were in our class….No matter what you were or what you did, at Harvard you could find your kind.

* George Santayana


Epilogue

• Often the University has been on the defensive, as if it could no longer take its existence for granted, as if its activities were not valuable in themselves but required justification by social utility. There is a genuine concern that scholarship has to prove its worth not on its own terms but by service to the nation and the world.

• But the worldwide recognition of Harvard’s greatness already marked in Conant’s years (1933-1953), indeed even in Eliot’s years, has survived; and that recognition rests on the fruits of scholarship. Concern with learning did not wither, and the pilgrim people who erected the college would not have felt themselves total strangers in the University 350 years later.


1656 – 1755

1656 Increase Mather1678 Cotton Mather1680 John Leverett1728 Josiah Quincy I1732 John Winthrop1740 Samuel Adams1748 Artemas Ward1749 Robert Treat Paine1754 John Hancock1755 John Adams


1763 Josiah Quincy II (“The Patriot”)1767 Increase Sumner1768 George Cabot1787 John Quincy Adams1789 John Thornton Kirkland1790 Josiah Quincy III1793 Francis Cabot Lowell1814 Thomas Bulfinch1817 John Lowell1821 Ralph Waldo Emerson

1763 – 1821


1821 Josiah Quincy IV1825 Charles Francis Adams Sr.1829 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.1837 Richard Henry Dana1837 Henry David Thoreau1838 James Russell Lowell1839 Edward Everett Hale1844 Francis Parkman1845 Rutherford B. Hayes1845 William Morris Hunt

1821 – 1845


1846 Charles Eliot Norton1852 Horatio Alger1853 Charles William Eliot1854 Charles Russell Lowell1855 Phillips Brooks1855 Robert Treat Paine1856 Charles Francis Adams Jr.1857 William H. Fitzhugh “Rooney” Lee1858 Henry Adams1859 Charles Sanders Peirce

1846 – 1859


1859 Henry Hobson Richardson1861 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.1863 William James1863 Henry James1864 Robert Todd Lincoln1869 Francis Greenwood Peabody1871 Henry Cabot Lodge I1877 Louis D. Brandeis1877 A. Lawrence Lowell 1880 Theodore Roosevelt

1859 – 1880


1885 William Randolph Hearst1886 George Santayana1888 George Herbert Mead1889 J. Pierpont Morgan Jr.1889 Henry L. Stimson1890 W. E. B. DuBois1893 Learned Hand1894 Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.1896 Sidney B. Fay1897 Gertrude Stein

1885 – 1897


1899 Robert Frost1900 Paul Sachs1900 Wallace Stevens1904 Helen Keller1904 Franklin Delano Roosevelt1906 Felix Frankfurter1907 Maxwell Evarts Perkins1907 Harry Elkins Widener1908 Samuel Eliot Morison1909 T. S. Eliot

1899 – 1909


1910 Walter Lippmann1910 Alan Seeger1912 Conrad Aiken1912 Joseph Patrick Kennedy1913 Robert A. Benchley1913 James Bryant Conant1913 Norbert Wiener1914 John P. Marquand1914 Leverett Saltonstall1914 Sumner Welles

1910 – 1914


1915 E. E. Cummings1915 R. Buckminster Fuller1915 Christian Herter1915 George Wilhelm Merck1915 Henry A. Murray1916 John Dos Passos1918 Dean Acheson1919 Gordon Allport1919 Archibald MacLeish1920 Malcolm Cowley

1915 – 1920


1920 Alfred C. Kinsey1920 Susanne Langer (née Knauth)1920 Isoroku Yamamoto1921 Paul C. Cabot1922 Thomas Wolfe1923 Granville Hicks1924 Adlai Stephenson1924 Henry Cabot Lodge II1924 James Gould Cozzens1924 Walter Piston

1920 – 1924


1925 Stanley Marcus1925 J. Robert Oppenheimer1927 F. O. Matthiessen1928 Edwin Land1928 Nathan Marsh Pusey1929 Harry Andrew Blackmun1929 John King Fairbank1929 Alger Hiss1930 Elliott Carter1930 Philip Johnson

1925 – 1930


1930 Lincoln Kirstein1931 William Joseph Brennan1931 Paul Freund1931 David Riesman1931 B. F. Skinner1932 James Agee1932 C. Douglas Dillon1932 Willard Van Orman Quine1933 Barbara Tuchman (née Wertheim)1933 Wilbur Mills

1930 – 1933


1934 Ralph H. Bunche1934 Archibald Cox1935 Daniel Boorstin1936 William Burroughs1936 Robert K. Merton1936 David Rockefeller1937 Robert Lowell1938 Pete Seeger1938 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.1938 Theodore White

1934 – 1938


1938 Caspar Weinberger1938 Robert Burns Woodward1939 Howard Aiken1939 Leonard Bernstein1939 Robert S. McNamara1939 Edwin Reischauer1940 Oscar Handlin1940 John Fitzgerald Kennedy1940 Alan Jay Lerner1940 William Proxmire

1938 – 1940


1940 Donald Regan1941 Jerome Bruner1941 Elliot Richardson1941 Paul Samuelson 1942 William French Smith1943 Thomas S. Kuhn1943 Norman Mailer1945 Pierre Elliott Trudeau1948 Kingman Brewster

1940 – 1948


1948 – 1951

1948 Robert Francis Kennedy1948 An Wang1949 John Hawkes1949 William H. Rehnquist1950 Robert Bly1950 Henry Kissinger1950 Richard Pipes1950 James R. Schlesinger1951 Adrienne Rich


1953 Bernard Bailyn1953 Bernard F. Law1954 Derek Curtis Bok1954 John Updike1955 Noam Chomsky1955 E. O. Wilson1956 J. Carter Brown1956 Edward Moore Kennedy1958 Aga Kahn

1953 – 1958


1958 Ralph Nader1960 Elizabeth Dole (née Hanford)1961 John Davison Rockefeller IV1971 John Paul Gillis1971 Yonatan Netanyahu (1967-68)1976 Yo Yo Ma

1958 – 1976

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