Provost Buck

There have been Deans of the Faculty for ages, but before 1940 their main job was to serve as water boy for the President. President Lowell thrived on such a system, for it allowed him to dictate everything, from Concentration to planting saplings around the Houses. President Conant, though, didn't like it, and further, Harvard had grown too sprawling for one man to direct all its details. In six years, he went through three Deans of the Faculty, searching for one to whom he could delegate Faculty problems with full confidence.

During the bitter 1938-40 Faculty revolt over tenure rules he found the man he wanted in Associate Professor Paul H. Buck. So satisfied were the President and the Senior Fellows with Buck that they gave him responsibility for Harvard museums, herbariums, and so for the, creating the post of Provost for him, a sort of primus inter pares among Harvard's Deans. Provost Buck's resignation, effective this June will leave a gap as great as the President's, and in some respects perhaps greater.

The Provost's job, including ex officio that of Dean, is an arduous one. Ultimate authority for the College is shared by the Faculty and the Corporation, though the line between them is never quite clear and their responsibilities overlap. In addition, inside and outside the Faculty there are committees to be canvassed, people to be consulted, boards to be placated-so much so that the pie is practically hidden for all the fingers in it. All these groups, true to Harvard's most ancient convention, disagree continually. For thirteen years the Provost, with the President's cooperation and advice, has presided over this confusion, initiating and carrying out consistent policies, vigorous in their aptness to the present and striking in their maintenance of Harvard's best traditions. Thanks largely to his leadership, the College has retained its vitality despite war, inflation, peddlers of conformity, and expansion.

Leadership is basically a matter of confidence, and at Harvard, where authority is so diffuse, confidence is doubly required. There is a conflict here, though, for the prime minister of any such organization must be policitically adept and ruthless if he is to meet today's problem effectively, traits which endear one to nobody. A Provost must somehow secure confidence while playing politics, a feat which Mr. Buck accomplished with astonishing success.

It was not always so. At first, the Faculty did not particularly take to him. His policies and his manner were unpopular and personally he has always been shy and somewhat aloof. Nevertheless, by constantly encouraging the Faculty to participate in decisions-unheard of in Lowell's day-by heavy work and sheer competence, and by a warmth which could not long go undetected, he beat this hostility. Political acumen and cool craft have by necessity remained, but combined with tolerance, with sympathy and generosity-in short, with what one professor splay called "manners of the soul."

Enjoyment of power, once thought a vice, is now accounted a virtue among the Faculty, for in the Provost's case it is based on enjoyment of people and an appreciation of their problems and hopes. It is a rare combination, ruthlessness and warmth; but from this paradox of character have come most of the advances by which Harvard has retained its place as the foremost American college.

General Education, for example, through originally President Conant's idea, owes its form, content, and indeed its very existence to the Provost. He chaired the committee which recommended it, adding much to the plan from his own store of ideas, and skillfully combining the ideas of others, then nursed it through a highly critical Faculty with no crippling changes. The Bender Plan, an attempt to inject the educational intimacy of the past into the expanded College of today, is equally the product of his initiative and persistence.

This does not mean that General Education and the Bender Plan emerged Minerva-like from the Decanal forehead, unaided by members of the committees involved and the Faculty. Rather, it was a matter of the Provost's ability to bring up ideas, to appoint good men to committees and to secure the best from them and to allow fully play for the wisdom of the Faculty as a whole without relinquishing the essence of either program. This combination of initiative, tolerance, and determination has steadily characterized his thirteen years in office.

We must also credit the Provost with Harvard's admission program. It is true that he and the deans and the directors were late, and their dispatch, once work was begun, in no sense atones for the years of slumber. Yet, of greater long-range importance, the Provost has kept Harvard's program clean. He has not perverted it, as even many Ivy League colleges have done, into a vacuum pump, sucking at every high-school football field, swimming pool, and baseball diamond, specking to relieve athletic deficits by cheapening education. Now and again, there may be violations of the scholarship first policy, but whatever pressure exists for recruiting an athletic elite, one may be sure, does not come from University Hall. The result of the Provost's fabled drive for "mid-western virility" has thus been to broaden and improve the student body, to draw on the best and the most diverse elements of the nation, while still retaining balance and high standards of scholarship.

These achievements are clear-cut. Most of the provost's work, however, has been less dramatic. The yearly budget, for example, drab as it may seen, is an annual ordeal which combines all the problems of running the Faculty. As the Corporation's "servant," the Provost must prepare the budget, balancing the many and diverse needs of Faculty research, instruction, and so forth-to the satisfaction of not only the Faculty, but of one of the nation's most parsimonious trustee boards. This includes adjustments in the permanent tenure system, which is not wholly rigid, and in the number of promotions and new men allowed each department. Words can do little justice to the tension and delicacy of this job. Men's careers depend upon it, the Faculty's morale depends upon it. The educational and financial health of Harvard depends upon it. That the overwhelming majority of the Faculty, as well as the Corporation, have trusted Provost Buck in these matters and have been outspokenly grateful for his excellent handling of them bespeaks his ability far more than any single program.

There is a further important way in which he has served the College. "Striking freedom of the mind with the first of patriotism is an old and ugly subtlety," as a recent candidate for public office put it, but it has seldom been so widespread as now. Yet, a number of educators have responded by insisting on the automatic expulsion of men with permanent tenure (and of course those with temporary status, too) who refuse to testify before Congressional committees or who admit present membership in the Communist Party. Such advice if followed would surely vitiate the principle of permanent tenure. it could only increase the already alarming timidity of scholars to make known the fruits of their study, to teach and arrive at the truth as they find it, and to leaven the often smug hump of American complacency. It is insidious enough to deprive pedagogues unjustly of the nation's confidence; to annihilate them by destroying tenure, the foundation of academic freedom, is even worse.

Harvard has not jointed that group of educators, the provost's signature of the A.A.U. Pronouncement notwithstanding. Rather, Provost Buck reversed the expressed policy of President Conant-automatic expulsion-and the Corporation, much to its credit, backed him up in full. All cases have been and will be judged strictly on their individual merits, and no Harvard teacher need fear the stifling rigidity of a blanket rule.

It is difficult to describe the vacuum which provost Buck's departure will leave. The job of Provost, combining charge of numerous organizations like the Harvard Yenching Institute with the task of running the Faculty, involves more detail and more broad scope, more fiscal genius and more grasp of principles, then we can describe in a few paragraphs. Mr. Buck not only filled the job but made it, and through it impressed his ideas firmly on Harvard much to everyone's benefit. Like all posts whose first occupants made them what they are, that of Provost and Dean will be very difficult to fill anew. If the new President makes as good a choice as his predecessor, though, Harvard need not fear the future; for while President Conant made many excellent decisions, his happiest was the one that made Paul H. Buck Provost and Dean.