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2 JULY 1922 · 12 DECEMBER 2009
THE GENERATION of university presidents who saw their institutions through the tumultuous years of the Vietnam War is passing. None distinguished themselves in those times more than MIT president Howard W. Johnson, whom Fortune magazine once called "the best damn university president in the U.S.," referring to his leadership of the Institute during an extraordinary period in this country's history. It was a time that called not for referees, but for leaders who could reinforce core values while respecting many voices, who could foster serious dialogue, and who could help government and business leaders understand the seriousness and the value of the deep dissent in academic communities at that time. In an age that fostered disdain for authority, he was able not only to make tough decisions but to deftly hold the center of MIT while so many U.S. campuses were shattering and spinning apart in unprecedented ways.
He addressed these times and so much more of his rich, interesting, and highly accomplished life in his autobiography, Holding the Center. His title, of course, alludes to Yeats's poem "The Second Coming." Indeed, he used its most famous passage as the epigraph for his book:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Interestingly, Howard did not use the two lines that precede these:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
If MIT's twelfth president, Howard Wesley Johnson, was the falconer, in the end he was heard. And he was greatly recognized and appreciated, perhaps even more so with the passage of time. And beyond his gifted guiding of MIT through the shoals of political divisiveness and social upheaval, he was a master at shepherding, shaping, preserving, and transforming institutions - with his eye on the horizon and a firm yet quiet hand on the helm.
Howard Wesley Johnson was born in Chicago on 2 July 1922, and grew up in a steel-working neighborhood on that city's South Side. As a child of the Depression, he learned the importance of...