Education: Unconquered Frontier

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"War in the Cave." Bluff Ohioan Bab bitt seemed a mart out of his time. Causes were bursting all about him, and the only kind of conscience that seemed fashion able was the social kind. Rolling a pencil between his hands, Babbitt spoke of the "inner obeisance" that man must have "to something higher than his ordinary self." He despised the new ethics that was based entirely on the assumption that the only "significant struggle between good and evil is not in the individual but in society." In one sense, Irving Babbitt almost blasted Nathan Pusey's academic career. His broad humanism gave his pupil such a contempt for narrow scholarship that Nate told his classmates after graduation, "If you ever catch me around here again, you can shoot me." He tried to get a job in publishing, but wound up teaching at the Riverdale Country School for boys, just outside Manhattan. There, during the long hours of dormitory duty, he taught himself Greek. He also talked philosophy, art and the classics with Fellow Teachers Victor Butterfield, now president of Wesley an University, and Sterling Callisen, now dean of education and museum extension of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The result of all the talking: all three decided to go back to the academic life as students.

Books & Men. Back at Harvard, Pusey eventually turned out a Ph.D. thesis on 4th century Athenian law. Meanwhile, he took two trips abroad, traveled in Greece, explored the cathedrals and palaces of Rome. In 1936 he married a trim Bryn Mawr graduate named Anne Woodward, whom he had once tutored in algebra back in Iowa. By that time he had begun "teaching my way across the country"—at Lawrence. Scripps College in California, and Wesleyan.

Wherever he went, he was a success. Though never a flashy lecturer, he had an enthusiasm for books and men, and his enthusiasm was contagious. Once at Riverdale, the pupils of the lower school suddenly broke into a commencement exercise to deliver an unprecedented tribute: "We of the eighth grade want to express our appreciation to Mr. Pusey for giving us our love of literature." "He was without question," says President Henry Wriston of Brown University, then president of Lawrence, "the most brilliant young teacher I have ever known."

Transforming Minds. In 1944 Pusey went back to Appleton as president of Lawrence College. By that time he had come to the conclusion that a whole dimension was missing from U.S. education. Like his old Professor Irving Babbitt, he felt that "too many modern teachers commit the error of teaching students to see the evils and shortcomings of society without at the same time pointing out the evils that exist in them [selves]." The purpose of liberal education was not merely to impart knowledge; it was also to "transform personality by transforming minds ... But they [cannot be] transformed ... by materials that do not peak directly to the human soul."

While the Harvard of President James Bryant Conant was placing the official tamp on general education, President Pusey of Lawrence was deepening his own curriculum in his own way. For one thing, ie started a freshman-studies course in which scientists, sociologists, economists, historians and men of the humanities studied and taught great books together.