Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University

Abstract

Geiger reviews "Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University" by Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller.

Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University. By Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xiv, 578 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-514457-0.)

The contrast between Harvard University and America has been widely invoked by scholars and editorial writers. Harvard's history and traditions have always set it apart from the rest of higher education-its unique governing structure, coziness with the Boston elite, and current $18 billion endowment. But Harvard has also led U.S. universities in crucially important ways. This comprehensive and fully documented study by Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller captures both the parochial and the avant-garde character of Harvard since the 1930s.

In three parallel sections, the volume treats the "meritocratic university" of James B. Conant (1933-1953), the "affluent university" of Nathan Pusey (1953-1971), and the "worldly university" of Derek Bok and his successor, Neil Rudenstein (1971-2000). As Harvard became modern in these three successive waves, it blazed pathways, for good or ill, that other American universities have often followed.

The dominant themes of those three eras do not prevent the authors from depicting subtle countertrends. Conant's convictions were fiercely meritocratic, but his policies were tempered with realism. He sought to recruit outstanding students from throughout the country chiefly to top up Harvard's traditional clientele. He stumbled about before formulating a policy of "up or out" for junior faculty in 1940. The authors fail to note, however, that Princeton initiated such a policy in 1920 and that the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) was about to advocate that approach for all institutions (1941).

Nathan Pusey, a humanist with deep religious faith, was chosen as the anti-Conant, just as the latter had been selected as the antithesis of Abbott Lawrence Lowell. It was under Pusey, however, that meritocracy came to dominate the university. The spirit of Conant was preserved and extended, especially by Dean McGeorge Bundy, while Pusey focused his efforts outward and became a spectacularly successful fund raiser.

As the Kellers carry their narrative into the age of Bok, historical primary documents inevitably give way to published sources and interviews. Yet the narrative remains insightful. Worldly Harvard is distinguished from a past when academic matters were paramount. Bok's embrace of the social responsibilities of the university sought to reassert some semblance of university control over the inescapable involvement in worldly affairs. His tight-rope legal reasoning on those issues gave way to disillusionment by the end of his presidency. He charged that the university was too much involved with society-politicized, overextended, and commercialized-and still insufficiently attuned to its social, civic, and ethical responsibilities.

The Kellers' ambitious project inevitably invites comparison with Samuel Eliot Morison's Three Centuries of Harvard (1936), one of the best university histories ever written. It opens with the Harvard tercentenary celebration, which was the occasion for Morison's volume. Like Morison, the Kellers largely allow Harvard's greatness to be the unspoken premise, while the narrative describes events, accomplishments, and shortcomings with ironic detachment. Thoroughly researched and entertainingly written, the Kellers' "two-thirds century of Harvard" is a worthy successor to Morison's classic.