Education: Mr. Lowell

In his mansion in Boston's Back Bay last week died Abbott Lawrence Lowell, 86. "Harvard College, as it stands today, is to a large extent his handiwork," said his successor, Dr. James Bryant Conant. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, for 24 years Harvard's president, himself largely represented what both admirers and detractors meant when they spoke of Harvard, Boston, and the New England cultural tradition.

For the forefathers of this Boston Brahmin two Massachusetts mill towns are named. His older brother Percival discovered the canals of Mars and the planet Pluto. His younger sister was the cigar-smoking poetess Amy. At Harvard young Lawrence was a brilliant student of mathematics and never lost a foot race. Still proud of his fitness some 50 years later, he one day challenged Lord Bryce (The American Commonwealth) to climb a picket fence built around the Harvard athletic field. Bryce declined, but Lowell nimbly scrambled over.

After Harvard Law School, Lowell practiced law in Boston for 17 years, wrote several books on law and political theory. In 1899 he was made professor of government at Harvard. Ten years later he was chosen to succeed President Charles W. Eliot.

Away with Codfish. Lowell—who preferred being called "Mr." rather than "President"—began at once to remodel Eliot's Harvard. Eliot had built up a distinguished faculty but had let the undergraduate college slump. Under Eliot's famous system of free electives, many Harvard undergraduates chose snap courses, thought any grade higher than C ungentlemanly. Snorted Lowell: "The B.S. degree is a certificate not of a man's mastery of science but of his ignorance of Latin."

Lowell reined in the elective system so that students had to concentrate in one field after introductory courses. Said he: "The time has long passed when instruction can be given purely by lectures—as the Moors after the conquest of Granada were baptized by sprinkling in crowds." He pioneered Harvard's individual tutorial system, which has been widely copied. But he was never satisfied. Long after he grumbled: "No wonder there is so much knowledge in colleges. The freshmen always bring in a little, and the seniors never take any away." Said he of I.Q. tests: "No good, no good—like trying to measure Tremont Street with a codfish."

Convinced that college social as well as intellectual life had "disintegrated," Lowell conceived Harvard's system of "Houses," modeled after Oxford's colleges. In 1932, with a gift of $13,000,000 from Yaleman Edward Stephen Harkness,* Harvard finished its group of seven redbrick, white-spired Georgian social nuclei, each with its own library, tutors and dining-hall.

Lowell also built the Edward Mallinckrodt Laboratory, the huge Widener Memorial Library, the Fogg Art Museum. With $6,000,000 from the late First National Banker George F. Baker, he built the Graduate School of Business Administration on the south bank of the Charles. All told, Lowell raised Harvard's endowment by a cool $100,000,000—in spite of frequently outraging alumni by such proposals as the abolition of intercollegiate football (except with Yale).