Pusey's Resignation

LIKE SO MANY of his other actions during his first sixteen years at Harvard. President Pusey's resignation announcement will do little to cheer those who are seriously angry at this school. The soft spots in the gesture are obvious, waiting for the cynical poke: June of 1974 is, after all, still a long time off, and it is hard to know what Pusey will do between now and then. From a stylistic point of view. Pusey managed to conduct the whole affair without leaving the slightest trace of a mental truce between the forces who have opposed him. In his announcement, he lined himself squarely with "those great classes of graduates-largely from the 1920's and 1930's." and prepared to bow out with them.

Even admitting minor objections, however, it is still clear that Pusey has done the University a large favor. By putting a fixed limit on his time as President, he has opened an important door to those concerned with reforming the University's government. At the same time, he has saved himself from becoming what he would otherwise have been six month or a year from now: the plug-like symbol of everything that is inflexible and anachronistic in Harvard tradition. After a series of years in which he sometimes overlooked subtleties of tact or timing. Pusey showed outstanding sensitivity, taste, and good sense in his decision.

Any instant analyses of The Pusey Years is bound to be both famous and myopic-famous because. The Years are not over yet, and myopic because the late sixties have put disproportionate stress on one side of Pusey's personality. In the tumult of the last three years, it has been easy to see Pusey's shortcomings-his seeming inability to make either Faculty or students feel he was at all concerned with them-but much harder to see his strengths.

Before the University swirls off into talk of restructure and succession, it is important to remember that those strengths have definitely been there. One of Pusey's skills has been his ability as a fundraiser. That is a calling without great prestige these days, but it is more and more the University's main hope for financial independence. What freedom Harvard now has from government funding is mainly due to Pusey's success in attracting private donations.

He has also been able to attract human talent. Part of the President's job is to choose men to lead the various faculties and graduate schools as Deans. By this measure. Pusey may have been the best president Harvard has ever seen. The near-uniform excellence of the men he has appointed has been one of Harvard's greatest assets. Ironically, it may also have been part of Pusey's own undoing. Surrounded by a less glittering cast of supporters, his own difficulties may have been less apparent.

The part of Pusey's performance that is hardest for current students to appreciate is his deep, unbending faith in ideals of academic and liberal education. The generation of students that has seen Vietnam and Watts as symbols of the greatest threat to free education will probably never define those ideals in the same way as the men who cut their teeth on Joe McCarthy. But even while disagreeing with some of Pusey's standards, it is impossible to ignore the dedication and integrity with which he has clung to them. Harvard has owed him thanks before, and does now.