Man of First Principles

In picking its presidents, Harvard University abides by few conventional rules. Though it likes its candidates to be Harvardmen and scholars, it apparently cares little about how famous they may be. This week, to succeed James Bryant Conant, now U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, the Harvard Corporation picked a man who could boast even less national fame than Chemist Conant had when he got the job. Harvard's new president, the 28th in a line dating back more than 300 years, is Nathan Marsh Pusey, class of '28, now head of small (800 students) Lawrence College in Appleton, Wis.

Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa 46 years ago, Nathan Pusey (rhymes with newsy) went to Harvard after graduating from his home-town high school. At college, he became fascinated by ancient history, won a fellowship to study in Greece, wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Athenian law. Since then he has followed a scholar's career: at Lawrence, Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., Wesleyan University, and finally back to Lawrence as president in 1944.

In nine years he more than doubled Lawrence's endowment (to $2,500,000), raised faculty salaries, put up a new science building, arts building and a student union. But as president, Pusey was more than merely efficient. He was also something of an academic revolutionary. He believes that the search for truth involves more than a diet of facts or a catalogue of criticisms. "Lawrence College," he once declared, "was founded and is still really motivated on the principle that God is the central fact in our universe."

That being so, Historian Pusey set out to establish a curriculum based on the search for first principles. "The best teacher," said he. "is not life, but the crystallized and distilled experience of the most sensitive, reflective, and most observant of our human beings, and this experience you will find preserved in our great books and nowhere else." Today, Lawrence students read widely in the great books, starting right out with a Pusey-designed freshman-studies course that is concerned with the great ideas of civilization.

Pusey has had little experience with big universities. But last week, as he accepted the 'nation's top academic job, he seemed anything but ruffled. To him, the aims of Harvard should be not so very different from those of Lawrence. " 'Affairs,' " he once said, quoting Christopher Fry, " 'are now soul-size.' The American colleges must recognize that fact and remember again that the true business of liberal education is greatness."

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