Bernard Bailyn, one of the top living historians; and Oscar Handlin, one of the premiere sociologists of all time; and Donald Fleming, remembered from his 41 years at Harvard for combining a rather traditional etiquette with a very sharp wit; and Stephen Thernstrom,one of the preeminent scholars of the history of race relations in America, combined to write/edit a thoroughly interesting (to a Harvard man at least) book. Harvard University Press, 1986.

1. Glimpses of the Harvard Past
Bernard Bailyn, Donald Fleming, Oscar
Handlin, Stephan Thernstrom
Harvard University Press, 1986
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2. Harvard Presidents
• Four truly notable presidents before the 20th century:
– Henry Dunster (1640 – 1654)
– John Leverett (1708 – 1724)
– John Thornton Kirkland (1810 – 1828)
– Charles William Eliot (1869 – 1909)
• And three consolidators:
– Charles Chauncy (1654 – 1672)
– Edward Holyoke (1737 – 1769)
– A. Lawrence Lowell (1909 – 1933)
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3. Curriculum (Through Kirkland’s Time)
• 12 terms, (3 each year), 33 subjects in prescribed sequence.
• Ancient languages, analytic
geometry, trigonometry, differential calculus, history, English
grammar, philosophy, physics, chemistry, astronomy, political
economy, and Bible.
• A few substitutes were allowed (3rd year on): math or another
language for Hebrew, a modern language for calculus, natural
history for “intellectual philosophy,” a language for the
chemistry, mineralogy, and geology requirements.
• All instruction was conducted in recitation form, with students
translating, disgorging, or otherwise discoursing on set
passages of assigned text when called upon by the teacher.
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4. • New academies: St. Paul’s (1856), Groton (1885), Middlesex
(1901) and others prepared the offspring of select families
specifically for Harvard.
• In 1870, the college enrolled 7 Catholics, 3 Jews, 0 women, 0
blacks.
• The “annex” (1879), later Radcliffe College (1894) was an
accommodation to give women an education equivalent to
Harvard’s, without disturbing the way of life that still aimed to
make men of boys by involvement in a male network of the
culture of learning.
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5. Charles W. Eliot
• "…the young man of 19 or 20 ought to know what he likes
best and is most fit for. The community does not owe
superior education to all children, but only to the élite….The
process of preparing to enter college under the difficulties
which poverty entails is just such a test of worthiness as is
needed.”
• “The poverty of scholars is of inestimable worth in this
money-getting nation.”
• “The world knows next to nothing about the natural mental
capacities of the female sex.”
• “Two kinds of men make good teachers – young men and men
who never grow old.”
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6. Charles W. Eliot (continued)
• “There are always old radicals and young conservatives.”
• “It is hard to find competent professors. Very few Americans
of eminent abilities are attracted to this profession.”
• “The inertia of a massive University is formidable. A good
past is positively dangerous, if it makes us content with the
present and so unprepared for the future.”
• “The University must accommodate itself promptly to
changes in the character of the people for whom it exists.”
• “The president cannot force his opinions on any body. A
University is the last place in the world for a dictator.”
• “The future of the University will not be unworthy of its past.”
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7. Irving Babbitt on “the Ph.D. Octopus”*
• Babbitt protested bitterly against the dogma that nobody
should be allowed to teach in a college without a Ph.D.
– But one may shine as a productive scholar, and yet have
little or nothing of that humane insight and reflection that
can alone give meaning to all subjects, and is especially
appropriate in a college teacher. The work that leads to a
doctor’s degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one’s
growth as a man to one’s growth as a specialist. We must
be men before being entomologists.
– Note: James, Wendell, Kittredge, Copeland, Babbitt were
not Ph.D.’s
*coined by William James
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8. Babbitt (continued)
• If, said Babbitt, instead of demanding original scholarship
from a college teacher in, for example, literature, he was
chosen for wide reading in the great books and the power to
relate these to life, two advantages would follow – the
undergraduate would get the instruction he needed to
become fully human; and the modern heresy would be
exploded that originality in research was the culminating ideal
of life, with the corollary that mere assimilation of what was
already known was contemptible .
• It was of a piece, Babbitt said, with “our small esteem for the
‘ancient and permanent sense of mankind’ as embodied in
tradition, our prejudice in favor of young men and new ideas.”
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9. Oscar Handlin on Harvard
• Scholarship had a realm unto itself, residing in the Public
Record Office and other archives, in libraries, in clinics, and in
laboratories. Scholars did what they did there, out of concern
with the 16th century or with medieval common law or with
the use of bismuth as a contrast medium in x-rays.
• They required no justification for what they did. But by doing
what they did for its own sake they also developed cultural
attributes and knowledge widely applicable in the society in
which they lived.
• And involvement in the same community with them enriched
the students – even those without direct contact with them.
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10. Oscar Handlin (continued)
• Hence the university devoted its resources to libraries and
laboratories which the undergraduates might or might not use
but which their scholar-teachers required.
• It was immensely significant for the freedom of learning in the
United States that Harvard absorbed those costs as part of the
price the community paid for educating its youth.
• The pursuit of knowledge also guaranteed the University’s
excellence. The young men and their teachers quietly
assumed that their Harvard was best – not only by virtue of its
age, certainly not only for its wealth, but for its
scholarship, however remote the share of any individual in it.
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11. Handlin on Eliot
• The great achievement of Eliot’s Harvard was to implicate a
significant sector of American society in support of its high
culture.
• By the end of Eliot’s administration Harvard had fused two
elements in the culture it defined and transmitted: the
inherited conception of a liberal gentlemanly education, now
however available to students of every degree, had merged
with that of scholarship, ever evolving as knowledge
accumulated.
• The professors became clergymen without churches.
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12. Handlin on Sedgwick on Values
• The editor, Ellery Sedgwick (class of 1894) asked: “What does
a boy carry away from college?” and answered: a set of
values. The boy had lived in a community free from the
grosser inequities of the world, a society of scholars to whom
learning was its own ample return, a republic where the
crown of olives was the unmaterial reward.
• And if the young graduate was wise as well as
knowledgeable, his diploma would tell him that in all this
world there was no such reward as learning to understand.
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13. Chronology
• When Eliot took office in 1869 the faculty numbered 21.
When he left office in 1909 it had expanded to 123. In
1963, it consisted of 452 permanent and associate
professors, and the count had risen to almost 700 in 1983.
Cambridge (a manufacturing city) grew from about 2,000 in
1800 to 52,000 in 1880 and 92,000 in 1900.
• Before the Civil War, Harvard was largely “a seminary and
academy for the inner circle of Bostonians.”* In the 20th
century, John Reed (class of 1910) noted that “all sorts of
strange characters of every race and
mind, poets, philosophers, cranks of every twist were in our
class….No matter what you were or what you did, at Harvard
you could find your kind.
* George Santayana
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14. Epilogue
• Often the University has been on the defensive, as if it could
no longer take its existence for granted, as if its activities were
not valuable in themselves but required justification by social
utility. There is a genuine concern that scholarship has to
prove its worth not on its own terms but by service to the
nation and the world.
• But the worldwide recognition of Harvard’s greatness already
marked in Conant’s years (1933-1953), indeed even in Eliot’s
years, has survived; and that recognition rests on the fruits of
scholarship. Concern with learning did not wither, and the
pilgrim people who erected the college would not have felt
themselves total strangers in the University 350 years later.
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15. 1656 – 1755
1656 Increase Mather
1678 Cotton Mather
1680 John Leverett
1728 Josiah Quincy I
1732 John Winthrop
1740 Samuel Adams
1748 Artemas Ward
1749 Robert Treat Paine
1754 John Hancock
1755 John Adams
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16. 1763 Josiah Quincy II (“The Patriot”)
1767 Increase Sumner
1768 George Cabot
1787 John Quincy Adams
1789 John Thornton Kirkland
1790 Josiah Quincy III
1793 Francis Cabot Lowell
1814 Thomas Bulfinch
1817 John Lowell
1821 Ralph Waldo Emerson
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1763 – 1821

17. 1821 Josiah Quincy IV
1825 Charles Francis Adams Sr.
1829 Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
1837 Richard Henry Dana
1837 Henry David Thoreau
1838 James Russell Lowell
1839 Edward Everett Hale
1844 Francis Parkman
1845 Rutherford B. Hayes
1845 William Morris Hunt
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1821 – 1845

18. 1846 Charles Eliot Norton
1852 Horatio Alger
1853 Charles William Eliot
1854 Charles Russell Lowell
1855 Phillips Brooks
1855 Robert Treat Paine
1856 Charles Francis Adams Jr.
1857 William H. Fitzhugh “Rooney” Lee
1858 Henry Adams
1859 Charles Sanders Peirce
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1846 – 1859

19. 1859 Henry Hobson Richardson
1861 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
1863 William James
1863 Henry James
1864 Robert Todd Lincoln
1869 Francis Greenwood Peabody
1871 Henry Cabot Lodge I
1877 Louis D. Brandeis
1877 A. Lawrence Lowell
1880 Theodore Roosevelt
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1859 – 1880

20. 1885 William Randolph Hearst
1886 George Santayana
1888 George Herbert Mead
1889 J. Pierpont Morgan Jr.
1889 Henry L. Stimson
1890 W. E. B. DuBois
1893 Learned Hand
1894 Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.
1896 Sidney B. Fay
1897 Gertrude Stein
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1885 – 1897

21. 1899 Robert Frost
1900 Paul Sachs
1900 Wallace Stevens
1904 Helen Keller
1904 Franklin Delano Roosevelt
1906 Felix Frankfurter
1907 Maxwell Evarts Perkins
1907 Harry Elkins Widener
1908 Samuel Eliot Morison
1909 T. S. Eliot
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1899 – 1909

22. 1910 Walter Lippmann
1910 Alan Seeger
1912 Conrad Aiken
1912 Joseph Patrick Kennedy
1913 Robert A. Benchley
1913 James Bryant Conant
1913 Norbert Wiener
1914 John P. Marquand
1914 Leverett Saltonstall
1914 Sumner Welles
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1910 – 1914

23. 1915 E. E. Cummings
1915 R. Buckminster Fuller
1915 Christian Herter
1915 George Wilhelm Merck
1915 Henry A. Murray
1916 John Dos Passos
1918 Dean Acheson
1919 Gordon Allport
1919 Archibald MacLeish
1920 Malcolm Cowley
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1915 – 1920

24. 1920 Alfred C. Kinsey
1920 Susanne Langer (née Knauth)
1920 Isoroku Yamamoto
1921 Paul C. Cabot
1922 Thomas Wolfe
1923 Granville Hicks
1924 Adlai Stephenson
1924 Henry Cabot Lodge II
1924 James Gould Cozzens
1924 Walter Piston
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1920 – 1924

25. 1925 Stanley Marcus
1925 J. Robert Oppenheimer
1927 F. O. Matthiessen
1928 Edwin Land
1928 Nathan Marsh Pusey
1929 Harry Andrew Blackmun
1929 John King Fairbank
1929 Alger Hiss
1930 Elliott Carter
1930 Philip Johnson
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1925 – 1930

26. 1930 Lincoln Kirstein
1931 William Joseph Brennan
1931 Paul Freund
1931 David Riesman
1931 B. F. Skinner
1932 James Agee
1932 C. Douglas Dillon
1932 Willard Van Orman Quine
1933 Barbara Tuchman (née Wertheim)
1933 Wilbur Mills
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1930 – 1933

27. 1934 Ralph H. Bunche
1934 Archibald Cox
1935 Daniel Boorstin
1936 William Burroughs
1936 Robert K. Merton
1936 David Rockefeller
1937 Robert Lowell
1938 Pete Seeger
1938 Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
1938 Theodore White
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1934 – 1938

28. 1938 Caspar Weinberger
1938 Robert Burns Woodward
1939 Howard Aiken
1939 Leonard Bernstein
1939 Robert S. McNamara
1939 Edwin Reischauer
1940 Oscar Handlin
1940 John Fitzgerald Kennedy
1940 Alan Jay Lerner
1940 William Proxmire
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1938 – 1940

29. 1940 Donald Regan
1941 Jerome Bruner
1941 Elliot Richardson
1941 Paul Samuelson
1942 William French Smith
1943 Thomas S. Kuhn
1943 Norman Mailer
1945 Pierre Elliott Trudeau
1948 Kingman Brewster
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1940 – 1948

30. 1948 – 1951
1948 Robert Francis Kennedy
1948 An Wang
1949 John Hawkes
1949 William H. Rehnquist
1950 Robert Bly
1950 Henry Kissinger
1950 Richard Pipes
1950 James R. Schlesinger
1951 Adrienne Rich
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31. 1953 Bernard Bailyn
1953 Bernard F. Law
1954 Derek Curtis Bok
1954 John Updike
1955 Noam Chomsky
1955 E. O. Wilson
1956 J. Carter Brown
1956 Edward Moore Kennedy
1958 Aga Kahn
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1953 – 1958

32. 1958 Ralph Nader
1960 Elizabeth Dole (née Hanford)
1961 John Davison Rockefeller IV
1971 John Paul Gillis
1971 Yonatan Netanyahu (1967-68)
1976 Yo Yo Ma
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1958 – 1976

33. 8/30/2013 33jgillis767@aol.com
Veritas