Harvard’s administrative system was creaking in every joint, but Conant was too eager, and too inexperienced, to anticipate how controversial his attempts to revitalize the tradition-bound college would prove, especially when coupled with the tough measures necessitated by the financial pressures of the times. As the head of an institution with more than 8,000 students (including all the graduate schools) and 4,200 employees, of which approximately 1,000 were teachers, with an annual budget of $137 million and an endowment of $126 million, he had to manage a vast educational empire. Harvard was solvent, but if the newspaper reports and stock quotations were any indication, it could not continue to operate as it had in the past. The prospects for the future were grim: private giving to the university had plummeted from an average of $10 million a year in the prosperous 1920s to $3.8 million the previous year. A mounting deficit threatened to deplete Lowell’s contingency fund and eat into the capital as well. Not even Conant’s worst enemies envied him a major endowment drive in the depths of the Depression.
A thrifty New Englander, Conant began belt-tightening across the board. Budgets were slashed and many departments received deep cuts. Of paramount concern was the plight of the undergraduates. More and more families were unable to pay their sons’ bills and the number of available scholarships was woefully inadequate. Students were appearing in increasing numbers at the dean’s office for aid. Many had been forced to abandon their studies. He felt something had to be done to address the younger generation’s disillusionment and growing despair in those dismal Depression years.
In a speech outlining the gravity of the economic catastrophe that same spring, Walter Lippmann said, “There is a limit to the endurance of a democratic people.” The line resonated with Conant. The year he had spent in impoverished postwar Germany had convinced him “not to take for granted the continuation of a republic form of government and a prosperous free society.” Exploiting the spreading panic in his homeland, Hitler had seized power and imposed a ruthless Fascist regime. The situation in America was not without parallel dangers. The country was in an economic tailspin, with cascading business failures and mounting unemployment. Morale was at rock bottom. The government was divided. Desperate to find a solution, restless groups were urging radical expedients. Despite what Roosevelt had accomplished with his emergency bills, as the months went by and the economy did not get better, the future of democracy in America was also in doubt. “Whether one was a liberal or conservative, young or old,” Conant recalled, “one was worried.”
It was a disheartening outlook for the new head of the country’s oldest university. Despite his early assurances that he had no immediate plans, at his first meeting with the Corporation, Conant did not hesitate to state what he thought should be done. What they needed now, he told them emphatically, “were men, not buildings.” Any money raised in the near future should be used for scholarships and professorships. He made no criticism of his predecessor’s edifice complex, but it was implicit in his remarks.
What he was proposing represented a bold new departure for the college, and it immediately met with resistance. Given the state of the country, the Corporation was nervous about any appeal for funds. Was it wise to risk stirring up the prominent alumni, many of whom had seen their personal fortunes all but disappear? Brushing aside their fears, Conant pushed them to act quickly, suggesting they use Harvard’s upcoming tercentenary celebration to launch a three hundredth anniversary fund. The money would go to new merit-based National Scholarships to enable the most outstanding young men throughout the country to attend Harvard. “We should be able to say that any man with remarkable talents may obtain his education at Harvard,” he insisted in his first President’s Report, “whether he be rich or penniless, whether he comes from Boston or San Francisco.” If the Depression continued, he feared Harvard would end up a school for rich men’s sons. He was determined to remove any “artificial barriers”—economic or geographic—to receiving a first-class college education. It was the cause, he wrote later, “nearest my heart.”
Conant’s campaign for scholarships was also a way to begin addressing the age-old problem of Harvard’s “exclusivity,” which stemmed in no small part from its “exclusively eastern orientation”: the fact that 90 percent of the students came from states along the Atlantic Seaboard, and over one half from New England. There were few Catholics and Jews, and almost no students of color. While already thinking in terms of much more far-reaching reforms, his initial scheme for diversifying the student body called for establishing a set of “sliding-scale” scholarships—“the more brilliant the boy, the larger the sum of money”—for a handful of freshmen from a group of Midwestern states. He also advocated awarding much larger stipends. When Conant took office, no students received full scholarships. The average amount allotted—between $300 and $500—did not begin to cover the cost of tuition, room and board, and other expenses, which came to a minimum of $1,100 a year. There were also an array of smaller fellowships and grants beginning at $50 that barely made a dent. Lowell had supported the idea of student employment as a way of building character, but Conant felt many of the boys were working themselves to the point of exhaustion at after-school jobs. He pushed for scholarships paying as much as $1,200 a year to permit them to concentrate on their studies and place them on an equal footing with their peers.
He persuaded the Corporation to allow him to combine some of the meager little grants into a few fat scholarships and begin awarding them in the fall of 1934. It would be done on a trial basis, and in four years they would know if his faith in his ability to recruit gifted freshmen from modest backgrounds—future magna and summa cum laudes—was justified. If his hypothesis was proved correct, and appropriate candidates could be identified, the program would be expanded. In his search for a means of identifying unusually able students, Conant turned to Carl Brigham, a psychology professor at Princeton, who had been instrumental in developing the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which had been offered by the College Entrance Examination Board since 1926 and seemed “a promising device.” He met personally with Edward Lee Thorndike, professor of psychology at Columbia University, to learn about advances in intelligence testing and satisfy himself as to the scientific underpinnings of the research. The latter included three examples of entrance exams Thorndike had constructed for Columbia and Stanford universities, as well as the Army Alpha test used to evaluate recruits in World War I.
After studying the materials, Conant assigned two deans, William Bender and Henry Chauncey, to further investigate the feasibility of using the most successful testing procedures to create a new admissions policy to replace the fusty old college boards, which had a prep-school bias. He had gained entry into Roxbury Latin by competitive examination and wanted to be sure the college’s admissions policy assessed aptitude not upper crust advantage. Conant “burned with a fierce disapproval of the old ways at Harvard,” observed Nicholas Lemann in The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, a book about the groundbreaking educational experiment, “and his first goal as president was to loosen them.”
It was the beginning of his interest in a new type of objective examination that could reliably, and with reasonable accuracy, predict academic success, and would eventually lead to his playing a part in the establishment, in 1946, of the Educational Testing Service. He became convinced that standardized intelligence testing was a “science with limitless possibilities,” wrote Lemann, who identifies the young Harvard president as one of the founders of the modern American meritocracy. “Conant assumed, in fact, that picking a new elite in just the right way would enhance democracy and justice almost automatically. It was an audacious plan for engineering change in the leadership group and social structure of the country—a kind of quiet, planned coup d’état.”
Conant decided to use his first presidential report, a kind of “State of the University” message delivered in January each year, to announce his educational imperatives and make a case
for the necessity of his scholarship program. For Harvard to become “a truly national university,” he told a New York audience of six hundred alumni, it needed to cast a much wider net in order to bring in men of “exceptional talent,” in the form of the most brilliant faculty and the best and broadest student body that could be found. The demands of the present day—and not merely the financial crisis—required sweeping changes. The university had to revise its methods, hiring practices, and organization or risk ending up an antiquated gentleman’s club. “If we fail in this regard,” he warned, “there are no educational panaceas which will restore Harvard to its position of leadership.”
His speech was not a great success. His friends told him he was “too obviously scared.” His delivery was too dry. But, at least, it showed conviction. He received widespread publicity and was given good, if not glowing, marks for the first formal presentation of his ideas. In a cover story on him, Time magazine declared, “Under James Conant, Harvard is on a manhunt and intends to have the best, whether they have sprung from Boston’s Back Bay or Bulltown, W. Va.” Realizing the burden of selling his ideas to the public and to prospective donors fell squarely on him, Conant took great pains to improve his performance, aware he needed to do a better job of getting across his message.
In order to promote his new policy, he also had to learn how to publicly defend it, and in the process began to articulate his social and educational ideals. His initial, stumbling efforts to explain the educational and social justifications for his reforms often raised more questions than they answered. When he announced that one of his top priorities was to “swing an axe against the root of privilege” through the expansion of financial aid, Harvard Brahmins got their back up. His constant harping on the need to recruit the “best brains,” and insistence on “quality, not quantity,” so alarmed the old WASP alumni that he found himself having to soothe ruffled feathers and reassure families that at least 50 percent of the student body would continue to include their offspring. “High character”—an invidious Harvard euphemism long used to distinguish between different classes, religions, and races—would continue to be “essential”; the not so brilliant would not be neglected. When he told yet another reporter he would like to abolish phrases such as “the privilege of higher education” and the very adjective “higher,” Harvard historian Richard Norton Smith noted that many in the privileged groups to which Harvard graduates belonged began to harbor reservations about him: “Such fidelity to his own brand of Jeffersonian democracy neatly dovetailed with Roosevelt’s proclamation of a new estate for the forgotten man.”
His relentless drive for excellence also intimidated members of the faculty. Conant made it clear that hard times necessitated hard choices, stating that it would be “mistaken philanthropy to keep a mediocre man in a university during a time of depression.” Too many on the payroll were local boys, related to the Harvard family by blood or marriage. Those crowding the lower ranks of the college hierarchy—the instructors, lecturers, assistant and associate professors—were put on notice that those days were over. Mere teaching talent alone would not be sufficient “to ensure a permanent career at Harvard.” He then made good on his threat, gutting the English Department, denying more than a dozen junior instructors reappointment. He pressed Murdock to cull men who had no clear future, and commissioned a study to assess “inbreeding among tenured faculty.”
As Conant formulated his agenda, he began to consciously fashion his public image as an educational reformer. Harvard’s new president “has a clear vision of what essentially needs doing and a strong will to do it,” announced the New York Times’s H. I. Brock in an admiring profile. “He learned in the laboratory to deal with facts and deal with them patiently, with the single object of producing results.” The particular results he was after, however, would require not only raising standards for tenure, and the “merciless elimination” of unproductive teachers, they would also necessitate “a degree of ruthlessness in the removal of cherished clutter—institutions, practices, and even amiable individuals entrenched in the clutter.” Comparing him with the seventeenth-century British statesman and general Oliver Cromwell, a strong leader Harvard’s young president especially admired, the Times’s writer speculated that Conant, too, might soon find himself labeled “an opportunist or strategist” by critics: “Cromwell had his aims—high ones—and the will to achieve those aims, but so fluid was his mind in regard to the real significance of passing events and current causes—determining which side he stood on at one time and another—that he has been roundly abused for inconsistency and worse.”
The parable was not lost on Conant. His prolonged study of Cromwell provided him with many examples of what a leader could expect in a turbulent period, and of “conduct under stress.” He knew he would face, soon enough, “the liar, the ‘double-crosser,’ and the intriguer,” he wrote in his memoir, noting that being forewarned was not the same as being well armed. As he waded into his first battles at Harvard, and made his first blunders, it might have been better if his deep reading of history had not taught him “to expect the worst when dealing with other people.” If anything, Conant was all too conscious of the fierce opposition he would encounter as he began his assault on the university’s incestuous hiring practices and Brahmin power structure. After only a few months of exposure to the constant personal attacks, petty jealousies, and turf wars, he was already regretting his decision to leave the laboratory for the corridors of power. “The presidency is an awful job,” he confessed to Miriam in a rare moment of vulnerability. “If you take it, you have got to be willing to knife your best friend.” Steeling himself for the fight ahead, he added that he might as well accept that it was part of the job and “stop feeling like a martyr.”
Conant missed chemistry more than he had thought possible. The burdens of his office meant he had little time to keep up with the advances in his field. Yet even while confined to Massachusetts Hall, he held weekend conferences with his former chemistry colleagues, encouraging George Kistiakowsky to undertake “a novel investigation of a key metabolic process of the liver.” On certain Saturday afternoons, when overcome by longing, Conant would steal away from the president’s office and return to his old laboratory to spend a few hours with his first love. Mallinckrodt Hall was locked on weekends, and legend has it that Conant would stand outside, tossing pebbles at the windows until someone let him in. He was eager to keep up with the progress of Emma Dietz, his chief research assistant, who was continuing his work on the chemical composition of chlorophyll, and was on the verge of an important breakthrough. The expected discovery would give the final and complete formulae for chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b, two plant materials of extremely complex nature whose exact composition had never been accurately ascertained. He had earned two medals for his theory as to its composition. It was his last hurrah as a chemist.
That first Christmas at 17 Quincy Street was a subdued affair. They were ten for dinner, including his mother and oldest sister, Esther, as well as Miriam, Bill, and Thayer and his bride to be, Betty. Patty’s younger brother, in a rush to be married, had come to ask for help in finding a teaching post at a New England prep school. He was, as usual, in need of financial help, which Miriam blamed on “the times.” Conant was exhausted and withdrawn. The economic crisis was growing more critical with each passing month. No one knew what was going to happen. The only thing that was certain, he would joke bleakly, was uncertainty itself.
All his grand plans were on hold. Instead of reconstructing the university, he was retrenching. As was true during the war, when he was worried he could not eat. His stomach was in knots. “He is tense inside although he seems calm,” Patty told her mother. “It is the responsibility.” She tried to be lively for the children’s sake, fussing over all the presents and playing Gilbert and Sullivan tunes on her new phonograph. The boys received enough track for their miniature train set to construct their own “transcontinental railroad,” their father observed dis
approvingly, though he spent hours on his knees helping to connect it up. But there was no shaking the air of gloom that hung over the holiday. “Jim is so pessimistic,” Patty confided. “He says we will only stay six months in this big house.”
CHAPTER 9
* * *
Unexpected Troubles
To begin with, what place has a scientist as the head of a university?
—Robert Frost
“This is an age of dictators,” declared the New York Times in March 1934, in a none-too-subtle jab at the current occupant of the White House. In Germany, Italy, and Russia, dictators had all been lifted to the top by revolution or political coup of one kind or another. “But at Harvard,” continued the Times, “it is different. At Harvard, for three long generations, the president of the university has been czar. He is still czar.”
Barely six months in office, the new head was making his presence felt, leading to a widespread acknowledgment both within and without the university that the Lowell era was over and they were living in the “Age of Conant.” Given the disintegrating state of the world, it was not a time for timid leaders. Gone was the genteel, leisurely atmosphere, replaced by a new urgency and un-Harvard-like anxiety about the university’s relevance in both national and international affairs. Increasingly, Conant found himself caught up in outside events and acrimonious politics, under fire for his handling of everything from Nazis, to New Dealers, to right-wing legislators. Almost everyone had a grievance about his autocratic administrative style. While debates raged in Congress and on campus, he continued to call for the application of reason over emotion in times of crisis, and to defend the importance of a “healthy clash of ideas” as part of the country’s—and the college’s—proud history. But passions were running high, and lines of division deepening. It got to the point, Conant recalled with chagrin, he could not take to the podium without “unexpected troubles.”
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