Education: Unconquered Frontier

(See Cover)

In a tidy office in Appleton, Wis. one autumn day, a lean, brown-haired man sat down at his desk to face an irksome task. Nathan Marsh Pusey was writing his biography for the 25th reunion of his class at Harvard, and it was with much of the agony that H. M. Pulham Esq. went through ("a good deal like something on a tombstone . . . never did like writing . . .") that he dutifully recorded his life. He noted that he had three chil dren, was president of Appleton's Lawrence College (enrollment: 800), that "liberal education is my chief concern." But by the time all that was published, Nathan Pusey's autobiography was hopelessly out of date.

At Harvard last spring, he put on a scarlet waistcoat and a red, white & blue tie as just one more old grad, 25 years out. But whenever he opened his mouth, reporters jotted down notes, and wherever he went, flashbulbs flared. Nathan Pusey had just been named the 24th president of Harvard University. He was an apparent nobody, plucked out of nowhere, who had never even written a book. His classmates managed to work him into their rhymes: "Nate" was "great," and so, of course, was " '28." But the rest of Harvard had another chant:

"Pusey? Pusey? Who's he? Who's he?"

By last week both Harvard and the nation had come to know him better. In his own quiet way, he had not only won over his faculty, he had also emerged, by virtue of his office and personality, as the eloquent defender of an ancient tradition. The university he heads, across the Charles from Boston in Cambridge, is the nation's oldest and foremost place of learning. Harvard is the direct descendant of the British college, heir apparent to the German university, an American mixture of both. It was Harvard that, in 1636, transplanted the seeds of liberal learning to the New World, and it has been Harvard more than any other institution that has nourished it and made it grow. Had its founders been lesser men, prey to some of the practical nonsense that plagues many a U.S. campus today, they might have set up a curriculum of Forest Clearing & House Building, with possible electives in Indian Affairs and Musketry. Instead, they made a decision that has set the tone of U.S. higher education ever since. The purpose of their college, they declared, was "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity."

Against Fundamentalism. Since the advance has never ceased, the modern Harvard and its peers in U.S. education have, in a sense, become the last of the pioneers, operating on a frontier that is never conquered. But as Nathan Pusey has already found out, pioneers are rarely popular. They are threatened from without by those who do not understand them; they are also hampered from within by those who are blind to all but a sliver of the path ahead. For the liberal tradition, therefore, Nathan Pusey has offered not only a defense but a definition. "We are," says he, "against fundamentalism of all kinds . . . and all kinds of mean-minded thinking that would make man less than he is." But to this he adds: "Most particularly, we are not ready to fall into the popular, new kind of secular fundamentalism which sees man as a kind of social animal without any religious or spiritual dimension whatsoever."