Through the Looking Glass: Pusey Recalls His Presidency

NEW YORK--When Nathan M. Pusey '28 became president of Harvard in 1953, he was a Republican from the Midwest, who did not own a television.

Now, 30 years after he left Cambridge for New York City, he is a Democrat, watches TV all the time and talks like he has lived here in the Big Apple all his life.

Pusey, who is 93, has eased out of his part-time charity work in the last few years and now spends his days in the modest Upper East Side apartment where he has lived since 1971.

He reads widely--Peter Gomes' sermons, The New Yorker, books by his son James on Chinese literature--follows current events intently and spends time with Anne, his wife of almost 65 years.

Lately much of their attention has been focused on coverage of the national presidential election, which Pusey and his wife read in The New York Times each morning and watch on television every afternoon.

Anne Pusey switched parties before her husband, shortly after the couple departed Cambridge. She gives modest donations to political campaigns; this year Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54-'56 got one dollar. Pusey became an Independent around the time his wife switched parties, but it was some years later that he became a Democrat.

"We're all for Gore and just think Bush is the end of the world and just think it would be sick if Bush won," Pusey says. "I wish I could tell you who's going to be the next president of the United States if I can't tell you who's going to be the next president of Harvard."

In the spring--once the identity of both new presidents has been resolved--Pusey hopes to come to Harvard so that all four living presidents can be photographed together. He has been back for a number of commencements--five of his grandchildren have graduated from Harvard--but did not think he would be able to see four generations of presidents.

The New Yorker

Since leaving Harvard in 1971, Pusey has spent most of his time working with New York non-profits, first in higher education, but later with religious and mental health groups.

He originally moved to New York to become president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the educational foundation where he was a member of the founding board of trustees.

When he left the foundation after four years, he intended to return to Cambridge, where he wanted to write a book about being a college president in the turbulent 1960s.

But his charity work in New York kept him in the Big Apple. His principle interest was Fountain House, a charity that counsels the mentally ill, providing employment and, sometimes, housing.

A post that he took in the mid-1970s on the Fountain House's Committee on Educational Research grew into a quarter century of work with the house, which he continued until recent years.

"We help them by never admitting they're sick--they're just as healthy as can be," Pusey says of the philosophy that guides the house in its work. "We get them doing some work; that work has to be in their own interest."

His other passion has been Christian education in the Far East. An invitation to get involved with the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia from a sister of Time Magazine founder Henry Luce led within two years to the presidency of its Board of Trustees. In his years with the foundation he took a number of trips to Asia and served as a member of the Foundation's executive committee and chair of its Development Committee.

Still Himself

While age has certainly not left Pusey behind--he digresses a little more in conversation than he would have 10 years ago--he still remains coherent and thoughtful in his comments.

In many of the most vital ways, Pusey is still his same old self: The old classicist still peppers his speech with analogies from antiquity--calling the Harvard Corporation the equivalent of the Roman Senate, and the Overseers a modern day "Tribune of Plebes."

And he is as frank--some might say a bit too frank--as ever. He admits that he has always looked down on people in professional schools and says he had it on good authority in 1953 that the candidates competing against him for Harvard's presidency were "undeserving and incompetent."

But more than half a century after he left his native Iowa, Pusey's speech is still folksy. Joe McCarthy was "a damn foolish" fellow who turned many a "name into mud." But Pusey is a city cat too. As he talks about the places where he has worked over the years, he instinctively provides their street address and cross streets, as a New Yorker would.

Although he can walk on his own for short distances, Pusey moves around his apartment with a walker, and around town on a motorized cart. He is clearly quite fond of the latter, offering more than once to get in it and pose for pictures, which his wife rejects as unnecessary.

These days, however, Pusey rarely leaves his fifth floor flat in a postwar building on East 66th St.

The apartment is small--living room, dining room and den are a single medium sized room--and decorated in a 1970s modern style. The coffee tables are glass and most of the art is Asian. Aside from a photograph of Pusey with John F. Kennedy '40 with some Neo-Georgian buildings in the background, there is not a hint of the old Harvard look that once characterized his home in the Yard.

Pusey did not choose the building, though he clearly likes its modern look: Deveraux C. Joseph, the head of New York Mutual Life and a member of the Board of Overseers, owned the building when Pusey moved to New York and secured the apartment for him.

Some years earlier Joseph had found an apartment in the same building for Pusey's Harvard predecessor, James B. Conant '14. Indeed, Pusey and Conant became great friends while living in the building from 1971 to 1977--a process facilitated, according to Pusey, by their shared fondness for bourbon.

In the Yard

When Pusey suceeded Conant as Harvard President in 1953, he did not know he would be the last President to live in Loeb House, in what is now the headquarters of the Harvard Corporation.

The move to Loeb House, a three story mansion that came complete with three maids, a cook, a housekeeper and a chauffeur, was a big one for the head of a liberal arts college in rural Wisconsin with 700 students and 53 faculty members.

As president of Lawrence College, Pusey was an unlikely candidate for the Harvard presidency. He earned three Harvard degrees--a B.A. in English in 1928, and a Masters in 1932 and a 1937 Ph.D., both in classics--but his entire career had been spent outside of Harvard.

He was the first president born west of the Mississippi and, presaging the recent trend towards increased formal requirements for the university presidency, the first who had previously served as president of another institution.

At Harvard, Pusey's heart was in the College, which he wanted to use to instill the value of scholarship in young students. Liberal education meant broad reading in all of the humanities--which, in Pusey's ideal view, included a healthy dose of religion.

Pusey was praised during his tenure for his core beliefs about education, his fundraising, his defense of the University against McCarthyism, his strong support of an ailing Divinity School and his early calls for a merger between Harvard and Radcliffe.

Looking back, he is most proud of the work he did to give the University a strong financial foundation.

"It had a reputation as being in good financial shape when I was appointed," Pusey says. "But I saw that the University that was presumed to be the richest in the world was in desperate need of money."

In his remembrances of his time at Harvard, Pusey talks a lot about his work with the Corporation and the Overseers, with whom he was close personally.

"It couldn't have been a happier kind of government," he says. "All of the members of the corporation all enjoyed each other and their wives all enjoyed each other and we were it."

He worries that the members of the present Corporation lack academic backgrounds, especially in the context of the present presidential search. He cannot stop talking about how thankful he is that Hanna H. Gray, the former president of the University of Chicago, sits on the selection committee.

"I'm counting on Hanna Gray in being almost decisive in picking the new president," he says. "Out of her experience and sense and judgement will come a solid choice...Hanna is the kingmaker in recent years."

You Say You Want a Revolution?

When Pusey said in 1953 that he hoped the University would start a revolution in students' minds, he did not know what he was in for.

"Formal education has first to make young people see that the values they have absorbed almost automatically from their culture are not necessarily the highest values," Pusey told a reporter at the start of his presidency. "Young people must become dissatisfied with the culture they accept and this is why it is necessary first to start revolutions in their minds and spirits."

The revolution that came on April 9, 1969, was not what Pusey was expecting. Militant students stormed University Hall, ejected the deans and occupied the building for 17 hours before Pusey called in the police to kick them out. Four hundred police officers stormed the building in a raid that was criticized as excessive and bloody. The student body went on strike in protest.

Pusey left Harvard a little over a year after the tumult, citing a need for a new president from a younger generation to begin the "fresh chapter" that was starting in the University's history. He would not have reached the mandatory retirement age, until which many had expected him to serve, for another three years.

Looking back on the strike, Pusey is unapologetic.

"I take a full responsibility," he says of the decision to call the police on the protesters. "The students just talked about the brutality of that thing. But the cops were well behaved for the most part. Students jumped out of the windows. That wasn't the cops fault."

Anne Pusey interrupts her husband and says that she always thought that he was not sympathetic enough to students who opposed the Vietnam War. Pusey disagrees, saying even in hindsight the undergraduate who resigned from the University to join the army was the "undergraduate of real quality."

Pusey forgives students of 1969 for their involvement in the strike--but he still has no sympathy for the Faculty members that egged them on.

He and Anne Pusey struggle together to remember the name of Cogan University Professor emeritus Hilary Putnam, who they single out as an example of a rebellious member of the faculty. He views Putnam's present position as an elder stalwart of philosophy with some surprise.

"I didn't really ever have any animosity towards the students," he says. "I really was upset at certain members of the Faculty who should have helped guide the young people though a difficult and troubling time."

Aside from what he calls the "time of troubles" during the strike, however, Pusey remembers his tenure at Harvard happily.

"That was the best time to be a president almost in modern history. [I] had a constructive and happy presidency there of quite a few years," he says.

Staff writer Joshua E. Gewolb can be reached at gewolb@fas.harvard.edu. Catherine E. Stoichet and Warren S. Adler conducted research for this article.