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Nathan Marsh Pusey, former president of Harvard University, who presided over the nation's most prestigious institution of higher education during a period when Harvard began to admit a significant number of black students, died this past November. He was 94 years old.
Nathan Pusey was president of Harvard from 1953 to 1971. In 1957, four years after he came to Harvard, there were two black students in the Harvard entering class. By 1971, when Pusey resigned from the Harvard presidency, there were 128 blacks in the freshman class at the university. Under Pusey's watch, Harvard University was transformed from a school that enrolled the upper-class graduates of New England preparatory schools into a world-class international university that accepted students on academic merit rather than on their blood-lines. Prior to the major civil rights protests of the 1960s, those few blacks who did win admission to Harvard were, for the most part, the children of America's black elite. But in 1966, the beginnings of...