Education: Unconquered Frontier

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Of the university's professional schools, Medicine is first-rate; Business and Law are in a class by themselves. In wartime, the university as a whole has served as an arsenal. Under the deft management of former Provost Paul Buck, Harvard scientists combined with M.I.T. to make Cambridge the world center for radar research. Others developed the homing torpedo. Out of the psycho-acoustic laboratory came studies in everything from the proper soundproofing of planes to the carrying power of words under battle condition. Chemist Louis Fieser invented napalm for use in incendiary bombs; Physicist Kenneth Bainbridge pushed the button that set off the first A-bomb at Alamogordo.

All this accomplishment is partly due to Harvard's wealth and prestige. It is also the most obvious and dramatic result of its character. Throughout its entire history, Harvard has followed the pioneer's way: it is the most diversified, individualistic and nonconformist of U.S. universities. When Nathan Pusey became its president, he was charged with the task of keeping it so—"to pursue, with unremitting vigilance, inquiry into fundamental truths in every field of knowledge, no matter where the trail leads, no matter how unpopular the result."

"Vile Tendency." For Pusey's predecessors, the road has not always been easy. The "colledge" had barely started amid the cowyards of Newetowne (later Cambridge) when President Henry Dunster was forced to resign for holding the view that infant baptism is "unscriptural." By the time President John Leverett took office in 1708, the college press had come under fire for printing a "popish" book, Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ. Leverett himself came face to face with the formidable Cotton Mather, who fulminated at the reading of "plays, novels, empty and vicious pieces of poetry, and even Ovid's Epistles, which have a vile tendency to corrupt good manners."

Under President Edward Holyoke (1737-69), the Overseers demanded an investigation of tutors suspected of "holding dangerous tenets," and in 1747, citizens began agitating for an oath of loyalty to Calvinism. After Harvard turned towards Unitarianism, the Calvinist Boston Recorder threw up its hands in horror. "Can the pious parent," it demanded, in words that were to have their echo in the 1950s, "be willing to send a beloved son to a college where he will be exposed to the snare of these fatal errors?"

"Glass Hive." As the century wore on, the college became the very hub of a flowering New England. Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Dr. Holmes were all professors. Emerson was often on hand to lecture. Nevertheless, whatever the college did, it aroused howls of protest. In 1850, a committee of the General Court of Massachusetts, carried away by an enthusiasm for vocational courses ("specific learnings for a specific purpose"), denounced Harvard's curriculum for being too intellectual. "We work in a glass hive," moaned President Josiah Quincy. Nonetheless, he managed to keep the hive free of all "subserviency" and "above those [regions] in which the passions of the day struggle for ascendancy."