Education: Unconquered Frontier

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Last week, as President Pusey (pronounced Pewsey') went about his new routine—up at 7, in his office by 8:15—he hardly looked like even Harvard's idea of a Harvard president. A spare, soft-spoken man, frugal in word and gesture, he presents a front that nothing seems to ruffle, a calm sort of dignity that only now and then unbends for the friendly smile or the quiet flash of humor. Yet his face is scarcely lined, his hair has only a few flecks of grey, and his springy step is more like that of a sophomore late for class than that of a man in charge of nine separate faculties, more than 3,000 teachers and scholars, and 10,155 students, not counting a swarm of Radcliffe girls ("We are not coeducational in theory," said former President Conant, "only in practice"). He is the first non-New Englander and the second non-Bostonian* ever to achieve his position. More remarkable, he was born and bred in Iowa (a place that Boston dowagers have allegedly been calling "Ohio"). His present position therefore represents quite a leap, for Harvard can still remember the days when the movements of its presidents had an aura all their own. "The President is in Washington," ran one Harvard communique, "seeing Mr. Taft."

Blockheads & Sissies. In 318 years, there have been other aspects to the job. "If any man wishes to be humbled and mortified," said President Edward Hoiyoke on his deathbed in 1769. "let him become president of Harvard College." The mortification has come in part from the nation, which has always insisted on treating Harvard as a patch of alien soil. As far back as 1722, under the name of Silence Dogood. Ben Franklin was blasting it as a place where students learned little more than how to "enter a Room genteely . . . and from whence they return, after abundance of trouble and Charges, as great Blockheads as ever." Two centuries later the theme was still the same. "I want to go to Princeton," said F. Scott Fitzgerald's Amory Elaine (in This Side of Paradise). "I think of all Harvard men as sissies . . . and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes."

Actually, the typical Harvard man is a hard specimen to find—if he exists. A few, in the blues of Count Basie, do "wear Brooks clothes/ And white shoes all the time:/ Get three C's, a D,/ And think checks from home sublime." But of all U.S. campuses. Harvard is pre-eminently the land of paradox. It is the home of the Last Puritan and the first New Dealer. It has turned out Autocrats of the Breakfast Table (Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1829), the dinner table (Lucius Beebe, 1927), the atomic table (J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1926), and the timetable (President Walter Franklin of the Pennsylvania Railroad). One of its alumni, John Reed, 1910, was buried in the Kremlin; another was Horatio Alger, 1852, known to his classmates as "Holy"' ("I shall have to move," said he in his first year, "to where there is more respect for decency").