Provost Buck: Consistent Freedom

Provost Paul Herman Buck is a great believer in consistency. But his is not a consistency limited to the narrow confines of a particular dogmatism nor capable of blanking out ideas contradictory to a chosen pattern. Quite the contrary, Buck maintains that "the surest cure for the ills of a free society is more freedom" and he has transposed this general belief to Harvard. "The only thing you really need in a University," he states, "is ideas, and an administrator's job is partly to see that a Faculty and student body capable of having ideas are selected and partly to create an environment in which ideas can flourish."

But his own definition is an oversimplification. As second in command of the College, his duties enmesh him in such non-academic matters as setting the Faculty's financial budget, scrutinizing athletic policy, and formulating admissions procedures. Even outside the academic world, he is consistent in his concept that the best policy provides equal facilities for all and permits the individual to have as much latitude and free will as possible. Thus he has been an earnest supporter of the intra-mural "athletics-for-all" plan despite the fact that it aids in plunging the Athletic Association deep in the red each year, and expeditiously sought a study hall for freshmen who felt discriminated against because they, unlike upperclassmen, had no studying facilities after Lamont closed. Buck found them a hall in Memorial Church. And, like the House libraries, it will be open until midnight.

His faith in freedom of thought has had broader implications. It is the dominating concept behind the General Education Report, and it has provided the necessary amunition to withstand the continued onslaughts against the very concept of academic freedom and the liberal University.

Value of the House System

A graduate of Ohio State University, Buck has worked in Cambridge since 1923, and until his administrative appointment in 1945, he has been a historian, specializing in the South of the Civil War. In his first year at Cambridge, President Lowell selected Buck to be resident tutor in Straus Hall. Buck became a precursor of the sweeping change that was yet to come--institution of House tutorial and Senior Tutors. Later Lowell appointed him librarian in Dunster House, and the future Provost immediately set to work stocking the new Dunster library. It was from his work in Dunster that Buck learned to appreciate the value of the Houses as centers of student life.

Throughout this period he continued his studies of Southern history. His efforts culminated in 1938 with the publication of "Road to Reunion" which received a Pulitzer Prize and an unrestrained lambasting from a College Marxist group., "Road to Reunion" looks benignly on Southern efforts during the post-bellum Reconstruction period, dimly on Northern contributions, and skeptically at the ultimate value of the Civil War. The Marxist group, however, judged him guilty of "maligning the struggle and achievements of the negroes" and went on to find him following "in the footsteps of the traditional approach to the period by asserting in his lectures that the negro had not sought freedom." Asked by the Boston Globe to comment on the charges, Buck replied: "I am grateful as a teacher to find students interested to do the extra work in the preparation of such a pamphlet (the Marxist attack ran five, closely-typed pages.) Then somewhat typically, he added: "I should like to go on record as a liberal in expressing honest pleasure that Harvard students feel perfectly free to differ with their instructors."

Gross Illogic

In 1939, he received a dual appointment: he became an associate professor of History and associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Three years later President Conant appointed him Dean of the Faculty. Until this time no one noticed the curious illogic about the University's hierachy: each of the major schools, like Law and Medicine, had a Dean subordinate only to the President and Governing Boards; the College has a Dean too, but only a Dean of the Faculty with no control whatsoever over the various College departments like the museums and libraries.

As the war thickened, President Conant found himself spending less and less time in Cambridge, and unable to handle the inevitable minuscule probles of finance and faculty. Gone were the days when President Eliot could fill out the University's budget by hand. In 1945 Conant decided to appoint Buck "Provost of the University and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences." Since Conant likens each University department to a tub--"every tub will stand on its own bottom"--Buck has almost complete autonomy in an extensive domain that includes the Collage, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. libraries, and research institutions. President Conant act as an appeal board and final judge of overall policy.

When Buck took over as Provost he had formulated a three-legged concept of Harvard education. "First there is concentration. It is to know something about something. Then there is distribution. Finally there is the concept of total life, brought out in the House system and extracurricular activities."

"These are the three things I've been trying to get into undergraduate life and I think I've been consistent." Both concentration and distribution were well-established by the time Buck took office. Despite this, one of the most significant changes in educational policy came during the early part of Buck's administration--the institution of the General Education program. Buck served as chairman of a 12-man committee which produced the 267-page report, General Education in a Free Society. The report noted that "education seeks to do two things: help young persons fulfill the unique, particular function of life which it is in them to fulfill, and fit them so far as it can for those common spheres which, as citizens and heirs of a joint culture, they will share with others. . .Democracy is a community of freedom. The quality of alert and aggresive individualism is essential to good citizenship; and the good society consists of individuals who are independent in outlooks and thing for themselves while also willing to subordinate their individual good to the common cause."

Democratic Knowledge

"Scholars who devote themselves exclusively to what they specialize in have good educations in their particular fields, but they will be unable to form ideas in other areas," Buck observes. "The General Education program is intended to enable students to integrate and understand the many things in democratic society."

Another major educational change was the inauguration of Joint Instruction for Radcliffe students. In a report to the Faculty, Buck stated that "this new plan grew out of a conviction that Harvard-Radcliffe relations at present are unsatisfactory." The merger, he believes, is a healthy compromise between complete divorce and outright coeducation.

In extra-curricular life he maintains that the best program should give experience--athletic or otherwise--to the largest number of students. "I worry about collegiatism. I don't like to see fraternities or the 'big-men-on-the-campus' stuff. They come only as a substitute for something better." To Buck the "something better" is the House plan or athletics for all. "Varsity competition should never go beyond the player's ability." Once athletic officials start clamoring for gate receipts, than tension mounts, alumni demand better teams, better teams involve higher expense, and the result is that "football is no longer in the hands of the students."

Buck does not believe in activity for activity's sake, but idealizes a "living and learning' environment where the student Partakes in activities on his own initiative. "Thus instead of a required music course, you have many musical activities available, or a library like Lamont where a student read when he wants."

In his remarks at the opening of Lamont Library he stressed this free access theme: "Harvard was synonymous with free minds openly browsing through all the orthodoxies and heresies of history, through good book, bad books, and mediocre books. Harvard deserved more than Virginia, the great inscription of Thomas Jefferson, 'Here we fear no heresy where truth is free to combat error.'" But he noted also contrary forces, "a clever subtile devil, appearing in devious ways." Sometimes his attack has been frontal, as "when a century age there was a restriction on anti-slavery discussion. . .or when he appeared in the guise of gentility to suggest that Dunster House students would not profit by reading Norman Douglas' South Wind. . .Here today we mark the opening of a Library built on a simple idea that books were made to be used. . .Here indeed it can be said that we believe in an aducation based upon free access to all."

For a man who is so intimately involved in University policy, Buck manages to keep remarkably aloof from the debates and conflicts of the Faculty, but still some Faculty antagonism has been periodically directed against the unruffled Provost; his critics feel he has power far greater than that of any other Dean, and he, with Conant, dominates the Faculty with absolute finality. But as is his way, Buck never attempts to refute such charges, merely chuckles scoffingly. Once to a group of freshmen, he said: "Harvard would be a more restful place for the denizens of University Hall were there less discord. But eliminate the discord and you dry up the source of Harvard greatness."

Seldom does have he venture outside of his spacious University Hall office. He is not, as one faculty member put, it the type of person "one collects anecdotes about." Every now and then, however, he does enter non-academic forays. In 1947, for example, a group of professors organized a committee to present a plaque to the state for erection on Boston Common as a memory of Sacco and Vanzentti, the Boston fishpeddler and shoemaker who were convicted of murder in a trial that had nasty political overtones.

Organizer requested such personages as Albert Einstein, Dean Sturgis of Yale Law School, and Eleanor Roosevelt to serve on a committee to present the plan to the Governor. But the plaque-backers were way of asking a Harvard official because President Lowell had been a member of a three-man board which reviewed and approved the sentences of Sacco and Vanzentti 1927. Presumably either in deference to Lowell or to alumni pressure, a Harvard official would decline to serve. Nevertheless someone approached Provost Buck, and to the Committee's surprise, he accepted. The proposal, however, never got any further than the Governor's office.

That same year, some letter-writing alumni became unhappy aroused when Henry Wallace was invited to make a speech at Harvard. At the time Wallace was busily attacking U.S. foreign policy, Wall Street, Defense Secretary Forrestal, and the Marshall Plan, and some alumni considered Wallace worse than a contagion carrier.

Buck ignored the quiverings. Instead he introduced Wallace to the throng of 7,000 gathered at the baseball field. Said Buck: "I do not know what Mr. Wallace will say tonight--whether it is heresy or truth. I have a notion that I am going to disagree vehemently with what he has to say because I personally am convinced that the program espoused by Mr. Marshall is the best practical method for the achievement of a just and lasting peace. But what Mr. Wallace or any man who at the moment may be in a minority-- popular or unpopular--has to say is not so important as that his right to express his views is respected--and that the right of Harvard students to hear these divergent views is also respected." Even the stuffy Alumni Bulletin was moved to praise, saying "the special significance of Mr. Buck's address was in his refusal to limit intellectual freedom to the classroom."

Recently Buck has spent much time working with "Commission on Financing Higher Education," and unaffiliated, non-profit group. In a chapter entitled "The Nature of Higher Education," contributed mainly by Buck, the Commission points out that "there is a danger that as a people we shall not understand the vital role of higher education in our society sufficiently well to support it adequately and in the right way. . . a free society should provide opportunity for higher education to every student so equipped and possessing such drive, regardless of economic and social background.

To Help the Most

This has been Buck's policy in admissions, and Dean of Admissions Bender presently is seeking such students, continually drawing on generous scholarship funds. Thus Provost Buck's consistency in following a policy that aids as many as possible starts even before the entering class his entered. Certainly not a naïve idealism, his faith in scholastic latitude perhaps formed first in the southern Ohio town where he remembers seeing one high school classmate working as a Hotel doorman and another directing the local bank. "It is difficult to maintain this valley of democracy," he admits, but the University can contribute greatly to its continuation. He believes that "Harvard, if it is to remain preeminent as a university, has a special responsibility to guard jealously its free market of ideas. By doing so it can contribute both to a nation built on free institutions and to the advancement of learning."