Is Pusey Too Busy?

"I think he's been a most effective president," mused White House Aide McGeorge Bundy--referring, for the moment, not to John F. Kennedy but to Harvard's Nathan Marsh Pusey. For to Bundy, the former dean of Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences, even the turmoil in Laos last week could not wholly eclipse the fuss in Cambridge--a fuss sparked by Bundy's own departure from Harvard 16 months ago, and the consequent pressure of work laid on President Pusey.

Contrary to the impression he often gave, dynamic Dean Bundy did not rule Harvard; that job is reserved for the god-king that Harvard expects its president to be. Bundy was simply the king's first minister--a freewheeling manipulator of some 28 departments, 38 faculty committees and 555 faculty members. The trouble now is that since Bundy left, Pusey has taken on the deanship himself, saying that he will surrender it "some time this side of the indefinite future." In Pusey's definite present, the burden is crushing.

A Crimson Snit. This has many professors in a snit, and they recently found a voice in the student-run Harvard Crimson. In six scathing editorials, the Crimson blamed Pusey for everything from this year's last-minute 10% hike in room rents to silence on such vital issues as whether Harvard College should expand, how it should revamp general education, and why the university has not exploited federal aid like "the rising stars of American education, such as Berkeley and Michigan." In the Crimson lens, Pusey emerged as aloof, inarticulate, unable to "make relevant decisions." In its most chilling criticism, the Crimson added: "Those who have watched men desert the ranks of the junior faculty are aware that, to some, Harvard seems to have little future." The harsh words--and overblown charges--called up a shocked reaction.

From the pulpit of Memorial Church, the Rev. R. Jerrold Gibson ('51) raked the Crimson for "a spirit of bitter denunciation." Psychiatrist Carl Binger fired off an angry letter: "Your six diatribes against Mr. Pusey betray not only bad taste, but also bad faith." A Saintly Dedication. Only a Crimson cub could say that mighty Harvard is foundering under Iowa-born Historian Pusey, 55, himself a Harvardman ('28), who was president of Wisconsin's little Lawrence College when he was named Harvard's 24th president in 1953. Pusey has shown, says one professor, "the dedication to Harvard of a saint to his monastery." Deeply religious, Episcopalian Pusey has revamped Harvard's divinity school. A stout defender of academic freedom, he stood up to Joe McCarthy when the Senator tried to pillory Harvard as a "hotbed of Communists." An able fund raiser, he brought off an $82.5 million drive for Harvard College.

Cambridge now boasts such additions as the Loeb Drama Center, new student housing, new facilities for East Asian and Middle Eastern studies. Faculty salaries are sharply up. If it is true that Berkeley seems to have a corner on Nobel-prize-winning scientists, Harvard draws scholars in the humanities, such as Theologians Paul Tillich and Christopher Dawson.

A Quiet Helmsman. And yet, Harvard misses Bundy--brisk, brilliant, articulate, available. One famed professor complains: "Pusey is not popular. He believes in God, in undergraduates, in coeducation.

He isn't, in that way, an old Harvard type." Says another: "You could call Bundy and say, 'Hey, Mac, you ought to do this.' You can't do that with the president of the university." By contrast, another professor extols Pusey's deliberation: "I think Kennedy would be well advised if he had a man like Pusey in Washington along with Mac Bundy. Maybe the Cuban affair would not have taken place then." All this boils down to the fact that Harvard really misses a dean of arts and sciences. Pusey will doubtless soon name one--it was he who picked Dean Bundy.

As one letter writer neatly summed up Pusey in the Crimson: "His great flaw--and this is what all the criticism reduces to--is that he is neither a politician nor a showman. President Pusey does not dramatize his actions; he is just an honest man trying to steer this university in the right direction."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.