City on a Hill: Heimert Keeps the Harvard Flame Ablaze

In a tucked-away corner of Eliot House, Cabot Professor of American Literature Alan E. Heimert '49 still holds court in his office, which-like the great scholar himself-hearkens back to an earlier era.

The great scholars with whom he studied-Perry Miller, Kenneth B. Murdock-have long since died, and many of his fellow colleagues have retired. And while Donald H. Fleming, Trumbull professor of American history, is older, Heimert has spent more years at Harvard.

In 1964, Heimert recalls a classmate referring to him as a "fixture" at their fifteenth reunion.

A fixture in 1964, an institution today, Heimert will be retiring at the end of the next academic year, after a life tied to Harvard where he mastered a House, a department and a scholarly life.

Heimert, who has devoted the majority of his academic career to the study of American religion and Puritanism, has seen the academic world transform itself. The "learned" individuals have been replaced by to "clever" men which he abhors.

"The clever ones have a gambit, a piece of theory that they can apply to everything as opposed to knowing everything," he says.

And Heimert has increasingly found himself in the minority as the generations shift and his colleagues become more distant.

"It's at the point that I only recognize the ones who are the faculty emeritii. Everybody is younger than I am," he says.

Yet, instead of merely fading into retirement, Heimert has reaffirmed his love for undergraduate teaching, describing the last five years as some of the most rewarding.

"I think the teaching has shown me really engaged students, more than at any other period in my teaching career," Heimert says.

He feels today's students are "serious," but in a different way than the career-minded students of the late '70s and early '80s.

"I think today's students are much more serious, much more intellectual than the late '70s and early '80s where they were serious about getting into medical and law school," he says.

"They're quite serious to understand the American past and do not say that history is bunk," he says.

And while Heimert has gained so much out of the last five years, a family legacy of diabetes has cast a shadow. Unable to work for two years for health reasons, he had surgery in an attempt to clear up his arteries in the February of 1997. He suffered a stroke and ultimately had to have his leg partially amputated.

Yet, as Heimert comes to the end of his academic odyssey through Harvard as he plans to retire at the end of the next academic year, he says his final stint at the University has perhaps been his most rewarding of his teaching experiences.

His teaching was most recently recognized in 1997 when he was a granted a Levenson award for teaching excellence, an award which he holds in higher esteem than the Lifetime Achievement Award he received from the Modern Literature Association in 1995.

Heimert was born in Oak Park, III. and soon moved to Chicago and finally to Elmhurst, III. where he attended York Community High School. Neither his mother nor his father received a college degree although his father completed two years of school before his father's death forced him to earn a living for his family.

Heimert was far from groomed to attend Harvard's fair grounds. He discovered Harvard's existence only with the encouragement of teachers.

"The only thing I had known about Harvard was that it had been founded earlier than any other college," he says.

"I came here not only as a wide-eyed lad, but as a wide-tied lad," Heimert says, referring to the difference in Eastern and Midwestern tie size that branded him a stranger to Cambridge.

Heimert quickly discovered his affinity for American history, but even as he completed his senior thesis on Abraham Lincoln he had not yet decided to enter the world of academia.

Intent on attending law school, Heimert applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School in the December of his senior year. After completing his thesis, he hopped over to the law school to see what lay ahead for him.

"Well, I discovered what was coming next, and I immediately started seeing if I could still apply to other law schools. There was less intellectual content-it was a trade school, not an intellectual enterprise."

Ulimately, however, Heimert's pessisism about the state of academic affairs moves beyond mere rhetorical gestures. He says now if he was faced with the same choice upon graduation, he would have attended the law school. And while he cannot retrace his steps, his daughter, Larisa, who attended Yale Law School for the "intellectual enterprise" it offered ultimately rejected the world of academia because it lacked the same freedom.

"She was responding to the entry of mere cleverness [into academia] that had taken over," Heimert says

Heimert feels that the lack of respect for the past was epitomized in the September, 1997 dedication of the Barker Center for the Humanities, which unified disparate humanities departments but divided the Great Hall of the Freshman Union.

Heimert says his fellow colleagues celebrated the dedication not only because of its unifying purpose, but rather because it relegated the Freshman Union, a Harvard institution, to the history books.

"It got rid of the symbol of the old Harvard. The old Harvard was not a bad place-it was very good to me," he said.

Heimert would also find his future wife through his love of academics. He met Arline I. Grimes '59 when she was still an undergraduate and they started dating after she graduated.

After a three-year romance, they were married in Harvard's Appleton Chapel on Oct. 20, 1962. Of Heimert's four groomsmen, three were Harvard graduates and one was the son of a Harvard graduate. Even in love, Heimert found that Harvard shaped his life.

And while Heimert still maintains a love for Harvard, he believes it was ultimately his involvement in its inner bureaucracy that limited the time he could devote to scholarship.

Heimert recalls English Professor Kenneth B. Murdock, one of his mentors, advising him to always appear to be an inept administrator.

"Don't ever at Harvard show administrative skills-you'll just be given another promotion," he said. When Heimert countered that wasn't that the American way of upward mobility, Murdock further explained his comment: "I didn't say a better job, but another job."

Murdock, who served as both Master of Leverett House and Dean of the Faculty, illustrated his point to Heimert by telling him about how he would write letters back and forth from the Leverett House Master to the Dean of the Faculty-addressed to and signed by Murdoc himself.

Most prominent among Heimert's administrative roles was his position as a committee chair on the Committee of Fifteen, which decided the fate of the most egregious offenders of the 1969 University Hall takeover.

It was this involvement which Heimert says marked him as too controversial to be selected as University president or Dean of the Faculty. Other committee members suffered the same fate, including James Q. Wilson, who ultimately left Harvard.

Heimert's administrative involvement along with the responsibilities of being the Master of Eliot House led people to question whether he was washed up or not.

Yet, Heimert, more than a typical Faculty member or administrator, had to deal with the real student effects of unrest on a very personal House level.

"When one was Master, one was closer to the student unrest as opposed to a Faculty member with a nice office in the distance," he says.

Heimert's tenure at Eliot coincided with the social changes of the postwar decades.

Parietals rules prohibiting students from entertaining members of the opposite sex in their dorm rooms at night were officialy loosened in the spring of 1970. In addition, Heimert's time at Harvard saw the abolition of official rules governing the tradition of wearing a coat and tie to all meals in the House dining halls.

Ultimately, there was no way to discipline what Heimert calls an increasing number of "wayward students" in the late '60s and early '70s. All students, not just card-carrying members of SDS, and even in the traditionally upper crust world of Eliot House were rebelling against Harvard-and its dress code.

"[A student asked about his attire] would have been more likely to say 'Fuck you.' Authority was desanctified," Heimert says.

Heimert, however, says he is resigned to the fact that Harvard will inevitably change over time. Although he marveled in 1995 on how different Harvard had become since he arrived in 1945, he said a member of the Class of 1895 would have similar thoughts if he saw Harvard in 1945.

Yet, Heimert still believes he has seen the most rapid change Harvard has gone through since it was a tiny divinity college in Newtowne-Cambridge's original name.

"The last 30 years have seen the most change in Harvard in its history, with the possible exception of its first 30 years," Heimert says.

For Heimert, even his impending retirement will not sever his connection with fair Harvard. He will continue to come in from his home in Winchester to teach history and literature tutorials and a class in the English department.

For a high school student who did not even know Harvard existed, the school has become an integral part of his existence over the last fifty-four years.

Roger Rosenblatt, who worked with Heimert on the Committee of Fifteen, described it best when he described Heimert in his 1997 book, Coming Apart. "A scholar of American religion, his was Harvard."