From Harvard, to Harvard

When Psychology Department Chair Susan E. Carey ’64 graduated from Radcliffe College, William James Hall was still under construction.

Forty-seven years later, she works on the 11th floor of that very building.

Carey is a part of a unique group of professors for whom Harvard is not only their employer—it’s their alma mater. With the perspective of a former undergraduate experience, these professors have helped shape the school that sent them on their own career paths.

“Harvard is the only college I applied to,” remembers Carey, who, after a lengthy hiatus as a professor at various other colleges, returned to Harvard in 2001.

Professor John E. Dowling ’57 says he still has his letter of admissions—saved in a scrapbook of Harvard memorabilia—which documents the beginning of his Crimson-infused career.

A PRETTY LIBERAL PLACE

The undergraduates of a past generation remember a very different Harvard.

“No one in my school had ever heard of Radcliffe—they had heard of Harvard, but they hadn’t heard of Radcliffe,” says Carey, who graduated six years before “The Great Experiment,” when Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates began to share housing.

Dowling recalls an early meeting his proctor held with his entryway.

“They told us that Harvard was a pretty liberal place, that if you had too much to drink, you wouldn’t get into too much trouble. But, there was one thing that if you did, you were gone, you’d be history. And we’re thinking, what heinous crime could this be?” Dowling says. “And he said, having a woman in your room after 8 o’clock at night.”

Carey remembers the Radcliffe perspective of that social scene, which she says was dominated by dating.

“I’ll tell you, I never didn’t have a date,” she says. “It wasn’t based on networks of friends hanging out. There were parties, but you went to parties with a date. It was fun!”

Having graduated from that world, Dowling has turned much of his attention back to student life on campus. Since he joined the faculty in 1961, he has been an active force in the evolution of Harvard undergraduate life over the years. He is the namesake of two separate commissions that evaluated the role of student governance on campus, in 1981 and most recently in 2009.

And even after serving as master of Leverett House for 17 years, Dowling fondly recalls those quirky incidents that only an undergraduate could experience.

“My freshman year, I was in Wigglesworth D-12,” Dowling says. “One day I forgot my key and since my room was on the first floor, I tried to climb through the window. Of course, a HUPD police officer came over right at that moment and questioned me for an hour until I could persuade him that I lived there.”

SIGN OF A GREAT TEACHER

Dowling says that his academic experience at the College would shape his approach as he crossed into the Faculty.

“I had one professor who made science fascinating—George Wald, who went on to win a Nobel Prize for discovering the role of vitamin A in vision,” Dowling says. “He made me interested in what I’ve spent my whole life working on. That’s the sign of a great teacher.”

But Dowling remembers rarely having access to such faculty as a result of his large, impersonal introductory science classes.

“They were really pretty terrible,” he says.

His contempt for introductory classes was part of the reason he returned to Harvard. Wald, by now his mentor, asked him to help design and teach a new undergraduate biology course at Harvard. Dowling, who had taken a leave of absence from Harvard Medical School to study biology, agreed—further deferring Harvard Medical School, from where he says he is still on leave.

Carey, too, considered introductory courses ineffective as an undergraduate, and found solace in the personalized environment of her sophomore tutorial. She recalls switching concentration three separate times—from math to biology, then to anthropology—until a tutorial leader sparked her interest in psychology.

As chair of the Psychology Department, Carey has overseen a push for greater interaction with students—including faculty dinners and more comprehensive advising.

For the last 15 years Carey has run an undergraduate internship program, and this summer she plans to host undergraduate student researchers in her lab.

“I would like to find that post-doc [tutorial leader] and tell him, ‘you did an amazing thing. You followed my interests instead of imposing yours.’”

THE BUG

Computer science professor Harry R. Lewis ’68 recalls the harsh reality of Harvard undergraduate life. He says he arrived at Harvard a math star, only to find that the College was full of stars.

“I took the equivalent of Math 25 or 55 today, and I figured out that being the best math student in my [high school] class of 24 did not translate into being the best math student at Harvard,” he remembers.

Lewis would eventually overcome this disappointment and become one of the most influential College deans in recent memory, serving from 1995 to 2003.

But his path back to Harvard began with a love for a budding field that he was exposed to through a part-time job in a psychology lab—computer science. Lewis would graduate in applied math, 16 years before the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences would offer a stand-alone computer science concentration.

“I then got bitten by the computer programming bug, and fell in love with it,” he says.

Lewis never strayed far from Harvard, finishing his graduate studies there in 1974 and joining the Faculty soon after. Since 1981, he has served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science—still several years before the creation of the concentration itself.

For Dowling, that bite of the Harvard bug was less predictable, but equally potent.

“My brother was surprised,” he says. “He recently told me that he never thought that 50 years later, I would still be at Harvard.”

—Staff writer Zachary Hamed can be reached at zhamed@college.harvard.edu.