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NATHAN MARSH PUSEY, who died in November 2001, led Harvard University during one of its most illustrious periods-the 1950s and 1960s. In Harvard lore, the official "golden age" of the university was the latter half of the presidency of Charles William Eliot, the Gay 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, culminating in the legendary class of 1910, which counted among its members two future Nobel Prize winners, including T.S. Eliot.1 It is important to recognize the 1950s and 1960s as a second golden age for the school, however, a unique chapter in the history of American higher education, when a top university clearly understood and dutifully fulfilled its mission to acquire, deposit, and propagate genuine knowledge. It is important to do so, in the first place, to appreciate the accomplishment of Nathan Pusey, and in the second place, to come to terms with the loss that resulted from the student agitations at Harvard in 1969.
Pusey first came to Harvard, as an undergraduate from Iowa, in 1924. His favorite professor was Irving Babbitt, the inimitable teacher of French and comparative literature who won fame as the Neohumanist exemplar of the conservative mind. Moreover, it was Babbitt who directed Pusey to the classics. Pusey took his A.B. and Ph.D., both from Harvard, in that field. Pusey was one of those classicists who found it inadequate merely to study the words and actions of the great men of Greece and Rome: the point was to emulate them in a sphere of action in the present day. Pusey also knew that, as scholarship, his dissertation was rather ordinary. He believed himself cut out for, of all things, university administration.
Pusey soon took up a position at Lawrence College in Wisconsin, where he put together a great books program in the humanities. In the Midwest, he discovered a kindred spirit and mentor in Robert Maynard Hutchins, father of the core curriculum at the University of Chicago. Pusey became a missionary for Hutchins's idea of enacting rigorous, bookish, classics-based curricula at Lawrence College. Through the offices of Hutchins, Pusey was installed as president of Lawrence in 1944. In terms of academic reforms, fundraising, and spokesmanship, Pusey's tenure at Lawrence was very successful. In 1953, at the age...