Education: Unconquered Frontier

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Gain & Loss. Beyond Harvard, he has played senior defense counsel to the academic world, for "if there is anything education does not lack today it is critics." While at Appleton, he was a sponsor of a campaign pamphlet against his fellow townsman Joseph McCarthy. The junior Senator from Wisconsin has apparently never forgotten him. "Harvard's loss," said McCarthy of Pusey's election, "is Wisconsin's gain." Then he proceeded to paint a picture of the university as a "privileged sanctuary for Fifth Amendment Communists ... I cannot conceive of anyone sending their children anywhere where they might be open to indoctrination by Communist professors."

It was all an old story to Harvard—as old, indeed, as the whole university tradition. The concept of academic tenure is a delicate one that has grown up partly because the teacher has historically been a favorite target for attack. It is simply another way of saying that a man's mind cannot exist half slave and half free, that if a scholar is to operate effectively on the frontiers of his field, he must also be accorded the rights of any other citizen to differ and dissent outside that field. Harvard has refused to fire four teachers who invoked the Fifth Amendment because they are not now members of the party, have never been found guilty of espionage, and have never tried to indoctrinate their classes.

The New Note. During his own career, President Pusey has done more than play guard to a tradition. It was in another role that he took himself over to Harvard's languishing Divinity School one day last fall as the first president since Eliot to deliver a major address there. He severely criticized the old idea that society can be a substitute for God, that knowledge and good works are enough, that anything can be solved "by escaping into a formless empyrean of good will . . ." Said he: "This faith will no longer do ... Events of the 20th century have made its easy optimism unpalatable . . . It is leadership in religious knowledge, and even more, in religious experience ... of which we now have a most gaping need."

Those words have struck a note that has long been unfamiliar in the academic world. Today the U.S. university has fallen heir to much that once belonged to her peers in Europe. In the '30s, Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead was challenging it to "rise to its opportunity, and in the modern world repeat the brilliant leadership of medieval Paris." If the U.S. university does rise, says Nathan Pusey, it will not be by curtailing its pursuit of truth, "no matter how unpopular," but by carrying on the pursuit more fully.