A "Schoale" and How It Grew

By Otto Friedrich

The bronze visage of John Harvard, long the presiding spirit in the leafy, weathered-brick Harvard Yard, stares out over a vast and flourishing arena that today ranks as one of the world's most distinguished centers of learning. Three and a half centuries ago, however, it was only a farmhouse surrounded by a one-acre cow pasture. For that matter, the original John Harvard was not the founder or even the head of Harvard College; his only contribution was a bequest of 400 books and half his estate, which amounted to no more than (pounds)779 and may have been only (pounds)375. Nor was Harvard actually founded 350 years ago. All that happened in 1636 was that the Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony authorized the expenditure of (pounds)400 "towards a schoale or colledge."

More than a year passed before the "schoale" 's appointed overseers bought the farmhouse, surrounded it with a six-foot fence, planted 30 apple trees and turned over the whole establishment to its first master and sole teacher, Nathaniel Eaton. A poor choice. Though Eaton was a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he had a vile temper, and his frugal wife apparently served the twelve students mackerel "with all their guts in them" and hasty pudding spiced with goat droppings. When Eaton finally attacked an assistant with a walnut club "big enough to have killed a horse," he was hauled into court, fined and fired. Harvard was shut down for a year.

Despite these inauspicious beginnings, the little school that Cotton Mather called a "college of divines" slowly grew. William Stoughton, '50, who grimly sentenced 20 people to death for witchcraft, was the first alumnus to donate a building. (By contrast, the Rev. George Burroughs, '70, duly became the only Harvard man to be hanged for consorting with Satan.)

During the Revolutionary War, Harvard was taken over by 1,500 of Washington's troops as a barracks. When the students returned from temporary exile in Concord, they found that all the brass doorknobs were missing, and much of the lead roof had been melted down for bullets. Harvard subsequently granted Washington its first honorary doctorate in 1776, and the President later transferred his step-grandson there from Princeton on the theory that Harvard, still largely a school for clerics, was "less prone to dissipation and debauchery."

After two full centuries of increasing growth, secularism and financial independence, Harvard remained a small and inadequate school. Its faculty in 1868 numbered scarcely 20, its student body fewer than 500. Its dormitories had no central heat or running water. Its narrow curriculum of required courses involved largely the recitation of memorized texts, many of them in Latin. "No one took Harvard College seriously," said Henry Adams, '58. "It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile."

The Harvard that is being celebrated this week was essentially the creation of Charles William Eliot about a century ago. An austere and high-minded man who suffered deeply from having a large, liver-colored birthmark across his right cheek, Eliot was a chemistry professor of such limited talents that when he applied for a vacant chair, the post was given to another man. Crushed, Eliot went to Europe, where he was deeply impressed by the German university system. America, he wrote, must develop "a system of education based chiefly upon the pure and applied sciences, the living European languages, and mathematics . . . The vulgar argument that the study of the classics is necessary to make a gentleman is beneath contempt."

Chosen president of Harvard over considerable conservative opposition, Eliot made sweeping changes. He abolished virtually all required courses. He canceled the stern Puritan rules of discipline: no more compulsory daily chapel, no more bans on smoking or theatergoing. He overhauled and greatly improved the medical and law schools, founded the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1872) and the business school (1908). He also presided over the establishment of a college for women, Radcliffe (1894), originally known mainly as "the Annex." He recruited a brilliant faculty, not only notable lecturers like Ralph Waldo Emerson (on philosophy) and William Dean Howells (Italian literature), but younger teachers like Adams, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James and George Santayana. (They had a sense of their own value too. Said Shakespeare Scholar George Lyman Kittredge, after falling off his dais: "At last, I find myself on the level of my audience.")

Overall, in his 40-year reign, Eliot raised the university's endowment from $2 million to $22 million, its faculty from 45 to 194, its student body from 500 to 2,000. And he brought Harvard such a quality of leadership that everything he did influenced other colleges. When the aging president strolled & across his Yard, said young Walter Lippmann, he looked "a little bit like God walking around."

Government Professor A. Lawrence Lowell, who took over in 1909, was a patrician, a conservative and a consolidator. He modified Eliot's total freedom of choice and insisted that each student must choose a field of concentration. "Every educated man should know a little of everything and something well," he said. The growth under Eliot had made little provision for where the swarms of students should live; Lowell discovered Edward S. Harkness. A Yale graduate, Harkness wanted to give his alma mater the funds for new student dormitories. Yale spent two years thinking it over. Nettled, Harkness made the same proposition to Lowell in 1928. Lowell, no hesitater, said thank you very much and began building seven handsome neo-Georgian houses near the banks of the Charles. Another huge donation from the mother of Harry Widener, '07, who had died in the sinking of the Titanic, enabled Lowell to build what would become the world's greatest university library.

By now Harvard loomed large in American society; the "Hahvahd man" entered the nation's lore as a figure to be, depending on one's point of view, admired or despised. J.P. Marquand observed somewhat ambiguously that "if you have ever been to Harvard, you will never be allowed to forget it." F. Scott Fitzgerald, a devoted Princetonian, was blunter. "I don't know why," said Amory Blaine, one of his heroes, "but I think of all Harvard men as sissies."

Increasingly, university life impinged on public affairs and vice versa. When prominent alumni were infuriated by young Lecturer Harold Laski's vocal support of a Boston police strike in 1919, Lowell said, "If the overseers ask for Laski's resignation, they will get mine."

Lowell's convictions, however, were those of his class (he was one of those Lowells who, via the Cabots, "talk only to God," and it was in his office that a visitor was told, "President Lowell has gone to Washington to call on Mr. Taft"). When the Governor of Massachusetts asked Lowell to head a committee to determine whether the patently unfair trial of Sacco and Vanzetti had in fact been fair, Lowell concluded that it had. And when bigoted alumni kept complaining about the number of Jews at Harvard (the proportion had reached 22% by 1922), Lowell publicly called for a quota system to limit it. That was formally rejected by both the overseers and the faculty, but Lowell ) got his way by indirection. He imposed a limit of 1,000 students in each incoming class and then urged his admissions officials to seek a broad geographical distribution -- that is, to accept more students from Southern and Western states where comparatively few Jews lived. By the time Lowell retired in 1933, the proportion of Jews had shrunk to 10%.

His successor, James Bryant Conant, was a chemist of somewhat more talent than Eliot, and he was to play an important part in the development of the atom bomb. He led Harvard through World War II, when the Yard swarmed with more soldiery than it had seen since the Revolutionary War. When it subsequently swarmed with veterans, Conant introduced the influential "general education" program that required all students to take survey courses in the humanities, sciences and social sciences.

Harvard claims a long tradition of defending dissenters. When Physics Professor Wendell Furry and Research Assistant Leon Kamin took the Fifth Amendment before Joseph McCarthy's Senate investigating committee in 1953-54, McCarthy demanded that they be fired, but Harvard's new president, Nathan Pusey, refused. "There is now an especially urgent obligation upon our universities to preserve freedom of inquiry and freedom of teaching," he said. Massachusetts Governor Christian Herter urged Pusey to fire anyone who took the Fifth Amendment, but Pusey stood firm. A decade later, however, he sacked Timothy Leary, then a lecturer in psychology, for not only singing the praises of LSD but experimentally feeding it to some of his students.

Like many other university presidents, Pusey was much concerned with fund raising. In 1956 he launched a successful campaign to raise the then unprecedented sum of $82.5 million for new professorships, faculty salaries and scholarships. By 1968 he had increased the university's endowment to $1 billion. But these were times of extreme discord, and many students paid little attention to Pusey's ambitions. In the fall of 1967 a band of about 250 leftist students trapped a recruiter for the Dow Chemical Co., chief manufacturer of the napalm being used in Viet Nam, and held him prisoner for seven hours. Pusey put 74 of them on probation and said their conduct was "simply unacceptable."

Still worse came in the spring of 1969, when the students seized University Hall, Harvard's administrative nerve center, vandalized the offices and spilled confidential files all over the floor. Crimson Editor James Fallows, | later a speech- writer for Jimmy Carter, reported encountering "the great stone-faced Nathan Pusey, (who) tried to conceal his utter astonishment at the passions tearing up his university." Pusey called in the police, plus 200 state troopers. With a four-foot battering ram, they smashed down the main door; chain cutters, sledgehammers and billy clubs did the rest.

Within half an hour, the building had been forcibly cleared and 184 students arrested; 45 were taken to the hospital. The students responded with a three-day protest strike, much argument, many furious demands and dire prophecies. "It's hard to believe," said one dismayed dean, "that something put together over a third of a millennium by Harvard men can be destroyed in a few days in April."

Well, nothing was really destroyed after all, except some illusions. Pusey, perhaps still "utterly astonished," retired two years later, two years before his expected departure, giving way to the earnestly optimistic Derek Bok. Fewer and fewer people now striding purposefully through the yard even remember the upheavals of nearly 20 years ago.

Besides, Harvard is not all a matter of social problems and cosmic issues. Some Harvard graduates with very long memories still recall the day when Lothrop Withington Jr., '42, swallowed a goldfish to win a $10 bet and set off a national fad that is better forgotten. Others will always remember the day in 1968 when mighty Yale was leading by 29-13 with only 42 seconds remaining in the Game, and then all kinds of incredible things began happening. The Crimson headline next day: HARVARD WINS, 29-29. Others remember less epic events: sculling on the Charles, drinking at Cronin's, the ludicrous vaudeville shows at the Hasty Pudding Club, the sun rising over the blue dome of Lowell House. And as with Oxford or the Sorbonne, the House of Commons or the Vatican or any other very long-lived institution, 3 1/2 cen- turies of history have probably taught Harvard that all things come and go. And this too -- whatever it may be -- shall pass.

With reporting by Nancy R. Gibbs/Cambridge