In recognition of this year's 350th anniversary of Harvard, Smith
has produced an engaging history with special emphasis on the
reigns of its last five presidents - Charles William Eliot, A.
Lawrence Lowell, James Bryant Conant, Nathan Pusey, and Derek Bok,
the current incumbent. Smith (Thomas E. Dewey: and His Times; An
Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover) approaches The Harvard
Century as a life and times that demonstrates the manner in which
Harvard has maintained a balancing act with the nation's culture -
ofttimes shaping it in its image; at other times, following the
culture in an effort to keep pace. After a brief discussion of
Harvard's first two centuries, when it "was little more than an
academy of manners for Boston's gentry," Smith shows how each
president from Eliot onwards (consider that in the same time
period, the US has had about 24 presidents) took off from its
predecessor and molded Harvard as they saw fit. From Eliot's strong
Emersonianism, Harvard shifted to Lowell's urge to run matters
himself. As Smith writes, "If Eliot combined Jay Gould and
Cambridge Common in roughly equal measures, Lowell was a perfect
coupling of State Street and Cecil Rhodes." Then came Conant, who
wanted nothing but to pursue the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but
instead ruled Harvard for 20 years in an informal manner - the
Herald Tribune pronounced that Harvard had "crowned a commoner."
Pusey had the dubious distinction of having to face down both
McCarthyism and student radicals during his reign. And to Bok has
been assigned the role of bringing peace back to Harvard and
reestablishing the Core Curriculum after some of the extremes of
the 60's had altered the face of Harvard's educational system. A
fitting update to Samuel Eliot Morison's Three Centuries of
Harvard, published 50 years ago, and worthy on its own
proliferating merits. (Kirkus Reviews)
"The Harvard Century" tells the story of how Harvard, America's
oldest and foremost institution of higher learning, has become
synonymous with the nation, their goals and standards reflecting
each other, each setting the other's agenda. It is also a colorful
and intimate narrative of the individual achievements of its
leaders and of the intense power struggles that have shaped Harvard
as it pioneered in setting the priorities that have served as
exemplars for the nation's educational establishment.
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