Free Spirit Bruzelius Finds Her Way Home

Eliot House Senior Tutor Margaret Bruzelius '74 was knitting on the floor of her New York City apartment in 1985 when she decided she was ready to go to graduate school.

She had been working for several years as a professional knitter and designer in New York's fashion industry--an enjoyable career, she says, though it forced her to think mostly in visual terms.

But for the woman who graduated from Harvard with a degree in English, the one hour each day on the subway spent reading Proust didn't quite quench her still-burning love for literature.

So at her husband Peter's gentle urging, Bruzelius took the plunge. She requested her college transcripts and tracked down copies of old Harvard course catalogs in the annex of the New York Public library to fill in the long since forgotten course titles by hand.

When her top choice Yale accepted her, she and her family moved to Connecticut. And when Harvard offered her a teaching position several years later, Bruzelius recalls, her friends "thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard" that she was returning to an alma mater that she remembered less than fondly.

A Stand-Out

But as she tells her life story from an armchair in front of the fireplace in her Eliot House office, her legs casually tucked underneath her, Bruzelius admits that she's never really done what's been expected of her.

Her clothing is not that of a typical Harvard administrator. Dressed in an orange blouse, a miniskirt and neon tights with orange and purple accents, Bruzelius is notorious for her bright outfits.

Conforming to the Harvard mold was never Bruzelius' style.

Indeed, instead of going directly to college after high school, Bruzelius took a year off to move to Denmark, where she apprenticed under her aunt, a famous Danish weaver.

That experience, she says, allowed her an opportunity to recoup from what she describes as an "unpleasant" high school experience in Redding, Conn.

"I spoke Danish, I ate all sorts of good pastry and I mellowed out," she says.

Even the decision to come to Harvard was never clear-cut--despite having a mother who was a Radcliffe alum.

Bruzelius recalls applying to four colleges: Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Harvard and Yale. At her interview for Yale, the female interviewer tried to impress upon the young Bruzelius how lucky she was to have a shot at being among the first women accepted to the college.

"My feeling was that the shoe was entirely on the other foot," Bruzelius jokes.

Ultimately, Harvard-Radcliffe won out and for the first time in her academic career, according to Bruzelius, she realized it wouldn't be alienating to be both female and intelligent.

"I was very excited to be in a place that was full of women who were just as smart as I was," she says.

Still, she says the novelty quickly wore off. With a "frustrating" English department that didn't yet offer the literature major that she hoped for and what she saw as relatively "blatant" discrimination against women students across the College, Bruzelius says she was unhappy with her undergraduate intellectual life at Harvard.

"What you had to do to be taken seriously was emulate some guy and I wasn't interested, so it was very alienating," she says.

In the meantime, Bruzelius, who was affiliated with Currier House, says she found her niche living in one of the Quad's Jordan dormitories.

It was there, amidst the "eccentric crew" of "hippie-ish" men and women, that Bruzelius says she learned to cook and bake bread and where she served as the informal housing chair, deciding each year's residents.

It was also there that she would meet her husband Peter W. Leight '73, a "scary" sight then, she remembers, with long hair and a thin build. Leight, now an assistant attorney general for Massachusetts, transferred into the House after a semester's leave of absence. The two moved off-campus for Bruzelius' junior and senior years. Now they have four children, ages 16, 12, 11 and 8.

After graduating magna cum laude, she and Leight traveled for a year in Europe, after which she began work at the Harvard-Radcliffe Parents Association while Leight attended Harvard Law School.

Her boss at the association, Thomas A. Dingman '67--now associate dean for human resources and the House system--says Bruzelius was well-regarded among the staff and largely overqualified for her position.

"People loved her bouncy spirit and knew she was enormously talented," he said.

But her work at the association didn't satisfy her artistic side, and once Leight had finished law school, Bruzelius turned to a field that would take advantage of her interest in clothing and color. (Indeed, Dingman remembers that even back then, Bruzelius was known for her colorful outfits.)

So at Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in Manhattan, Bruzelius trained as a fashion designer.

Along with a class that she says was largely composed of immigrants and older people looking to develop technical skills, Bruzelius there learned the basics of the industry and became proficient in knitting.

Trained on knitting machines, she began producing machine- and hand knit samples for producers, in addition to patterns for knitting magazines.

From there, Bruzelius progressed into the realm of private-label clothing--a niche she said proved to be out of her league.

"To do private label clothes you have to be an utterly ruthless producer and I wasn't good at the ruthless part," she jokes.

Returning to Campus

But she is good in her role as senior tutor, where ruthlessness is not required--at least for the most part.

The decision to make the leap from teaching, which she focused on for two years at the College, to that of administrating happened in part because she thought she could be an example of someone who had gone into an "eccentric" career, she says.

"My life has been dedicated to the proposition that you never quite know what you have to do and when you have to do it," she says. "One of the things I don't think people think of enough is having a good time in their intellectual work. If [a student is] just slogging through their ec classes, I think they should do something else."

As an instructor in literature, Bruzelius says she also enjoys the ability to bridge academics with her work in the House. In particular, when she talks to students in the House, Bruzelius says she is fascinated by the dramatic narratives she hears--the "metaphors of battle" that she hears as students discuss their academic problems.

It is the admiration for her senior tutor in Currier from the 1970s that also motivates Bruzelius.

She says she had always been impressed by her senior tutor--a unmarried woman by the name of Phoebe--who she saw as a model of competence, eccentricity and independence.

Now, three years into the position, Bruzelius says she hope she, too, can affect the lives of some of her students.

"Sometimes you give people a different language with which to think through what they're doing," she says.

For Dingman, who now oversees the House system, Bruzelius' message to students is encouraging.

"In student minds, it makes it feel more allowable to follow your passions. I think that's a wonderful message for our undergraduates," he says.